On this bright, warm autumn day I was in Sikeston, Missouri just before lunch time. I had no business reason to go to New Madrid 20 miles to the south, but I had wanted to go there for years. I decided to take a long lunch hour and spend it in New Madrid. A long time ago we used to say that New Madrid is in “Swamp-East” Missouri. Twenty minutes later I was there. I was surprised to find it all clean and neat, and nothing like I remembered from when my parents, my brother, and I had lived there nearly forty years before when I was six years old. I found my way past the cotton gin and some other farm businesses to downtown New Madrid. Main Street ends at the levee. I parked, got out, and walked up on the levee. The levee wasn’t as high as I remembered it. The Mississippi River wasn’t as wide as I remembered it. Tennessee and Kentucky over there on the other side looked to be a lot closer. There were no more shacks on the levee. Back in 1943 poor people lived in little shanties up there. We called those poor people “river rats.” I know now that was wrong, but I didn’t know that then.
A few blocks up the street I found where the apartment house we lived in had been. Sharp’s Flats it was called. It had a steel picket fence around the yard. One day Dad brought home a baby goat and staked it in the yard. My younger brother and I quickly got very fond of it, but then Dad took it somewhere to be butchered, and the next time we saw it, it was a big pan of meat. Mom cooked it for a long time, but it never got tender enough to eat. I think they gave it to some neighbors. I remember seeing a big Navy ship go by. The water was high then and the ship was quite visible above the levee. We could go over and walk on top of the levee. There were goats staked out up there. There were tumble bugs rolling balls of manure around. Some folks who that lived near there would go out and catch floating wood from the river, cut it up for firewood, and then deliver it to their customers in little horse-drawn carts. I remembered the city marshal imitating a lynch mob that had killed a black man in Sikeston the year before. He dragged stray dogs around behind his police car until they died. It goes to show you that the so-called good old days weren’t always good.
In the center of town the drug store with the stuffed bald eagle in the window was gone. The lumberyard my dad had come there to run was gone. The old courthouse was still standing and a new lumberyard had been built to replace that old one.
There was one familiar building a few blocks away that still stood, although it was no longer in use. It was the elementary school where I had gone the second half of the first grade. I looked in the windows of that old red brick building and old nightmarish memories came flooding back.
My first grade teacher, Miss Mabel, kept a tight rein on her first grade class. I don’t know if I should hate her or feel sorry for her. She had a big paddle with holes drilled in it and she never laid it down. She had to have been scared to death of the kids around her or she really hated us. Fear leads to hate, I guess. She only hit me with that paddle once; I was not sitting up straight in my chair. She paddled the so-called “river rat” kids often. They must have been who she was afraid of.
I called my dad from a pay phone on Main Street and shared what I was seeing with him. Then I headed out for my next sales call up in Sikeston.
