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Authors: Michael Bishop
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“Euclid’s my brother. Fo now, Danl, that’s bout aw you need to know.”
Danl, not Mr. Boles. A true-born white boy might have taken offense, but it never crossed my mind Darius had overstepped his place. Besides, nobody—black, white, or polka dot—had ever called me Mr. Boles.
Darius drove us away from the railway depot. Factories and cars floated by. Giant water oaks and live oaks lined some of the streets. Toward Highbridge’s eastern edge, glimpses of pancake-flat land flickered between mill houses and shanties. A few soldiers strolled by, but mostly I saw white civilians—until, at least, we reached a market area where colored women carried baskets of tomatoes, okra, beans, and squash on their heads. Close by, dusty lots had filled up with covered traps, mule-drawn wagons, even a couple of ox carts.
I felt like a visitor to Tanganyika. Darius didn’t act as a tour guide, though, and Euclid’s head had slumped out of sight. Anyway, everything about Highbridge—part city, part country crossroads—amazed me: the sights, the smells, the people. I was a foreigner.
Even in ’43, Highbridge had nearly 10,000 people, with another five or six thousand soldiers, WACs, and support personnel out to Camp Penticuff. The locals, with the war on, made a lot of their money off the doughboys. On Penticuff Strip, which angled southeast from the old business district, there were pawn shops, beer joints, dancehalls, tattoo parlors, even some two-buck-a-tussel cathouses. For jobs, the town had some holdover industries from prewar days: meat-packing plants, textile mills, foundries. The ironworks now made torpedoes, though, and a crate-making factory had started turning out duckboards for trenches and foxholes. Peanuts were the biggest local crop, but cattle, pecans, and cotton weighed in as old reliables too.
On a single ride from the railway depot, you couldn’t see everything in Highbridge. If you started regarding it as a sleepy burg, maybe even malaria-ridden, you began to feel superior to it—even if you hailed from a no-account town in Oklahoma. Tenkiller at least qualified as a frontier town, you figured, but Highbridge, even if more like an African colonial outpost, gave itself big-city airs, airs like trying to support a professional ball club.
In about fifteen minutes, Darius pulled the Brown Bomber into a parking lot at McKissic Field. The stadium reared up: tall wooden walls, bleachers like railway trestles, insect-eye lights on poles above the clubhouse and the outfield. Even on the bus, I could hear bats cracking, horsehide popping glove leather, players shouting. Looking at McKissic Field’s rickety outside, I figured not even the New York Yankees had a stadium as grand.
“Come see the end of Mister JayMac’s morning sweatout,” Darius said. I wanted to fetch my duffel from Euclid, thinking I might need my glove, but Darius shook his head. “Naw, naw. Jes you watch today, Danl. Jes be thanking God the obligation aint on you to huff it up wi them mens awready out there.”
Darius led me through an entrance near the bleachers on the third-base line. We ducked through a low concrete tunnel and broke into the ballpark’s summer dazzle.
Grass you wouldn’t believe, trim and green, the pride of an eager-beaver team of groundskeepers. Even the ads on the walls seemed magical: signs for local department stores, Octagon Laundry Soap, Obelisk Self-Rising Flour, War Bonds, Old Golds, Shelby Razor Blades, 666 Cold Medicine. Most touted stuff you can’t buy now, but, just then, they bamboozled me. I wanted to dash through the outfield grass (me, a shortstop), make leaping grabs against the Feen-A-Mint and the Moroline Petroleum Jelly signs. I wanted to play the caroms off their paint. And right after the game, I’d run downtown to stock up on chewing gum, cola, soap, smokes, you-name-it.
Lord among us, McKissic Field was Heaven!
Never mind no other park in the CVL, except maybe the one in LaGrange, could
Danl, not Mr. Boles. A true-born white boy might have taken offense, but it never crossed my mind Darius had overstepped his place. Besides, nobody—black, white, or polka dot—had ever called me Mr. Boles.
Darius drove us away from the railway depot. Factories and cars floated by. Giant water oaks and live oaks lined some of the streets. Toward Highbridge’s eastern edge, glimpses of pancake-flat land flickered between mill houses and shanties. A few soldiers strolled by, but mostly I saw white civilians—until, at least, we reached a market area where colored women carried baskets of tomatoes, okra, beans, and squash on their heads. Close by, dusty lots had filled up with covered traps, mule-drawn wagons, even a couple of ox carts.
I felt like a visitor to Tanganyika. Darius didn’t act as a tour guide, though, and Euclid’s head had slumped out of sight. Anyway, everything about Highbridge—part city, part country crossroads—amazed me: the sights, the smells, the people. I was a foreigner.
Even in ’43, Highbridge had nearly 10,000 people, with another five or six thousand soldiers, WACs, and support personnel out to Camp Penticuff. The locals, with the war on, made a lot of their money off the doughboys. On Penticuff Strip, which angled southeast from the old business district, there were pawn shops, beer joints, dancehalls, tattoo parlors, even some two-buck-a-tussel cathouses. For jobs, the town had some holdover industries from prewar days: meat-packing plants, textile mills, foundries. The ironworks now made torpedoes, though, and a crate-making factory had started turning out duckboards for trenches and foxholes. Peanuts were the biggest local crop, but cattle, pecans, and cotton weighed in as old reliables too.
On a single ride from the railway depot, you couldn’t see everything in Highbridge. If you started regarding it as a sleepy burg, maybe even malaria-ridden, you began to feel superior to it—even if you hailed from a no-account town in Oklahoma. Tenkiller at least qualified as a frontier town, you figured, but Highbridge, even if more like an African colonial outpost, gave itself big-city airs, airs like trying to support a professional ball club.
In about fifteen minutes, Darius pulled the Brown Bomber into a parking lot at McKissic Field. The stadium reared up: tall wooden walls, bleachers like railway trestles, insect-eye lights on poles above the clubhouse and the outfield. Even on the bus, I could hear bats cracking, horsehide popping glove leather, players shouting. Looking at McKissic Field’s rickety outside, I figured not even the New York Yankees had a stadium as grand.
“Come see the end of Mister JayMac’s morning sweatout,” Darius said. I wanted to fetch my duffel from Euclid, thinking I might need my glove, but Darius shook his head. “Naw, naw. Jes you watch today, Danl. Jes be thanking God the obligation aint on you to huff it up wi them mens awready out there.”
Darius led me through an entrance near the bleachers on the third-base line. We ducked through a low concrete tunnel and broke into the ballpark’s summer dazzle.
Grass you wouldn’t believe, trim and green, the pride of an eager-beaver team of groundskeepers. Even the ads on the walls seemed magical: signs for local department stores, Octagon Laundry Soap, Obelisk Self-Rising Flour, War Bonds, Old Golds, Shelby Razor Blades, 666 Cold Medicine. Most touted stuff you can’t buy now, but, just then, they bamboozled me. I wanted to dash through the outfield grass (me, a shortstop), make leaping grabs against the Feen-A-Mint and the Moroline Petroleum Jelly signs. I wanted to play the caroms off their paint. And right after the game, I’d run downtown to stock up on chewing gum, cola, soap, smokes, you-name-it.
Lord among us, McKissic Field was Heaven!
Never mind no other park in the CVL, except maybe the one in LaGrange, could
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