Lunch at Big Ed's
After I'd lain for a while on the lawn at Mount Carmel, I got my car to drive back to the hotel, aiming to decompress. It was then about twelve-thirty in the afternoon.
Around nine that morning, I'd stopped for gas, water and cash before heading to breakfast at I-Hop. While waiting to pay, I was taken aback by this guy in front of me in line with scraggly mouse-colored hair, cheap-looking tatoos, sun-raw white skin and a denim shirt with cut off sleeves. He smelled like cigarettes, lawnmowers and sweat. No mask and a cocky posture, his disposition toward the older woman behind the counter was impatient. Typical, I started to think. But then I was struck by the snap nature of my own bias. The guy might have just been hot and really have to pee after working all morning behind a lawnmower. True, he might have been in the aryan prison nation. But, he hadn't spoken a word to me. All this was in my head. I had mapped what part of me had wanted to see over his reality. That said, I wasn't down here to have a cop-meets-professor-for-beer moment with this dude. As I thought about it, I became grateful for this little corrective gut-check, reminding me that to follow this energy would be to follow a distraction. After all, I was on a trip to confront my own history, not his.
Back in the car, I needed to get my head right for the day, so I did what most people with a liberal arts education do in a rental. I searched the dial in the low ninety point something range until I found a classical music station. Good music for the drive out, it helped me dial back my reactive nature (thankfully) before my subsequent meeting with Sanders. Now that I was pulling away from Mount Carmel, the universe even handed me a little positive reinforcement for my restraint. The station was exploring the work of African-American Composers through performances by Damien Sneed. As I was driving past what looked like a parochial school (could have been a charter school), the kids outside all had on white shirts bright in the noon sun and dark uniform pants, my phone rang. It was Crowdus. Another cookie. Of course I was cautiously excited. He wanted to know if I'd like to meet him for lunch. He texted me the address for a place called Big Ed's on North Eighth street and said he'd meet me there around one-thirty. We'd eat and he'd show me around. Before hanging up, he asked a question: Had I noticed anything out at Mount Carmel?
I said I did notice some things.
What did you think about the angel garden? Where it was placed?
Yeah, I'd noticed that.
Okay, I will see you soon.
I was almost back to my hotel. 'Maps' said Big Ed's was about ten minutes away. Nothing in Paducah was more than ten minutes away. But first, I had to stop and touch base before going to lunch. I have this thing sometimes where if I am going some place, I have to actually go there. I have to touch base before I can change directions. Not all the time, but when I am in an airport for example, no matter how early I am, I have to go to the gate and touch it, see the actual number, see where it's located. I have to do this before I can go on to get dinner or have a drink. Even if I'm a full three hours early, I have to do this. So, this time, I had to go up to my room, touched the work desk and a few closet hangers, then I could go on to Big Ed's.
I got there a few minutes before one-thirty so I waited outside. Big Ed's wasn't fancy. It was a free-standing one-story brick building painted white with a green roof, with an adjacent parking lot. It looked like it might have been something else, like a Pizza Hut, before it was Big Ed's. There were a few empty lots near by, a gas station sat across the street and some neighborhood houses around it. You could definitely send one of your kids from one of those houses over to Big Ed's to pick you up a plate, or down to the gas station to get you some juice. Someplace else people might call Ed's a soul food place. My guess that down here people just called it a good place to eat. Clearly this situation wasn't fancy, but still, I figured it would be polite to let him pick the table. He might get uneasy if I had gone in first and decided where we were going to sit. I hadn't been there long before the white van pulled up and parked. Just as Crowdus was about usher me in, a woman came out. He introduced me in a way that I took to mean I could stand there and enjoy the conversation but not try to jump in. They had a playful but pointed back and forth. I gathered that she was a politican or community organizer of some sort. Perhaps both. She left. We went in. They gave us a table in the back room. He told me to sit on the side so as not to put my back to the door.
I think he was messing with me. You could see that staff and customers alike seemed to like him. The vibe about him reminded me so much of my grandfather. He leavened the air with a sense of humor that was a bit sarcasitic without being sardonic. When I was a boy, my Grand-daddy would poke you with an sideways comment like, whenever your grandmother gets mad and won't talk to me, I tighten all the jars in the house so she has to. Crowdus was using a similar stye with those around him right now. Since I was inside his halo, they treated me kindly. Big Ed himself brought over our plates. I'd ordered barbecued chicken with sides. Crowdus joked with Big Ed about how he'd never gotten chicken that looked this good. This slipped into a guessing game with Ed about which local family I favored. He called out several, but never mentioned anyone named Roberts. Anyway, Crowdus pulled me into the conversation by asking where my people had lived. I mentioned the address I had found in my research associated with the last place my grandfather had lived, plus the location of The Shoe Hospital, the business I think he ran with my great-grandfather. Crowdus grew wide-eyed. He stopped looking over my head and looked straight at me. Those addresses would be right around here, he said. I was really close, he said.
As we talked and ate I explained that I recall my grandfather saying he and my grandmother had left Paducah for Kansas City Missouri in the late 1930s. Before my mother was born in 1940, James Roberts Junior had established himself as a high school industrial arts teacher and set up shop as a shoemaker on K.C.'s Prospect Avenue. I hadn't realized until I'd started my research that his own father had been a shoemaker back here in Paducah, that some of my grandmother's people from nearby Reynoldsville had also been shoemakers. Crowdus looked puzzled.
You mean Russellville? He corrected.
Right! Reynoldsville is town outside Olkmogie, which is outside Muskogee, which is outside Tulsa and is where my step-father was born. My grandmother, my grandfather's wife, was from Russellville.
Maybe they left after the flood, my host speculated.
Now I looked staight at him. Grand-daddy had made sideways comments about the flood.
In the winter of 1937, Paducah had been hit by what is called the Great Ohio Valley Flood. Up until its time, this was the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. The Red Cross compares the devastation and displacement to the Great Dust Bowl with at least a million homeless and hundreds killed. Paducah, a small town today of about 28,000, sits where the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers meet to join the Ohio and where the Ohio flows on to join the Mississippi. It's where Kentucky has river borders with Illinois and Missouri.
Crowdus offered to drive me around the area once we'd finished eating, which he did. Hosting me in his white van, he showed me the area where most black folks lived during first half of twentieth century. The area was called Bronzeville, just like in Chicago. He showed me the street where my grandfather and his father had lived and where the business might have been. Lots of buildings and shotgun houses, he said.
Grand-daddy: You could shoot a gun straight through the front door and right out the back -- if you could shoot straight.
Everything around where we were would have been flooded, Crowdus explained. Black businesses, he speculated, weren't at the top of the list during the recovery. "They weren't handing out stimulus checks over here." To illustrate how high the water had gotten, he drove us a couple of blocks over to what had been a more affluent neighborhood. He pointed and called out the cow house. I smiled hard. Silly hard.
Grand-daddy: The water got so high, some people had walked a cow through the front door up the stairs to the second floor balcony of their home so it wouldn't drown.
Until this day, I had only half-believed some of my grandfather's tales about his younger life. This was the same man who warned my brothers and me not to swallow watermelon seeds because we'd grow a watermelon in our stomachs. Weeks later, we'd be out around Kansas City running errands with him and he'd spot a pregnant lady. See, swallowed a watermelon seed.
But here was the cow house.
We drove on away from the town center toward the Ohio to where a bridge crosses from the Paducah side into Illinois. Back at Mount Carmel, I'd mentioned that my grandfather had shared a story about his forefather who had crossed the river to work for pay so he could buy his family out of slavery. Sanders seemed disposed to sticking to the local party line that the parish priest around the time of the Civil War had seen fit to grant Jane and Henry Charles Roberts their freedom out of the goodness of his heart. Crowdus wanted to show me where there had been a ferry boat crossing from Slave Kentucky over to Free Illinois. Because of all the shipping and mining in the area, black labor had crossed back and forth to find paid work, even before the war between the states. So, what my grandfather had said, was possible. A least the georgraphy lent itself well.
Sticking by the river, Crowdus showed me where the Union army had built Fort Anderson and garrisoned the third largest regiment of black soliders formed after the Massachusetts 54th and the Louisiana Native Guards. The 8th Colored Artillery was comprised mostly of free black men and those who'd run from slavery from the surrounding counties. Inerestingly enough, I would learn that even though it is represented by the thirteenth star on the Confederate flag, the state of Kentucky was among the border states that never actually seceded from the Union. Its invasion by the Confederate army was bolstered by its large number of sympathetic slaveowners and others who profited from slavery, such as many of the good people of McKracken county. Eventually, the Union army re-invaded the home state of president Lincoln and gained control of Paducah's strategic location. Subsequently in the one major battle fought on the streets of this river town, the 8th Colored Artillery beat back the Confederate calvary, then led by Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. These black men helped keep Paducah and the river crossing in Union hands, perhaps killing some of their own former masters to do it.
My host showed me where the fort had been. There was no marker. Instead, the town had built a multimillion dollar parking lot and boat slip for bass fishing tournaments. By contrast, most of the landmarks in town commemorate Lloyd Tilghman, a local landed gentry who joined the Confederates and built a fort miles away along the Tennessee river. His fort eventually flooded, an event that forced him to surrender in shame to Ulysses S. Grant. Grant used Paducah as a staging point for launching the great Union Army of the Tennessee on its bloody victorious march across the western theater of war.
But the local high school is named after Tilgham. I'd learn more about this preservation of 'sacred heritage' on the next day.
But before this day ended, my friend wanted to tell me more about the Roberts.
Around nine that morning, I'd stopped for gas, water and cash before heading to breakfast at I-Hop. While waiting to pay, I was taken aback by this guy in front of me in line with scraggly mouse-colored hair, cheap-looking tatoos, sun-raw white skin and a denim shirt with cut off sleeves. He smelled like cigarettes, lawnmowers and sweat. No mask and a cocky posture, his disposition toward the older woman behind the counter was impatient. Typical, I started to think. But then I was struck by the snap nature of my own bias. The guy might have just been hot and really have to pee after working all morning behind a lawnmower. True, he might have been in the aryan prison nation. But, he hadn't spoken a word to me. All this was in my head. I had mapped what part of me had wanted to see over his reality. That said, I wasn't down here to have a cop-meets-professor-for-beer moment with this dude. As I thought about it, I became grateful for this little corrective gut-check, reminding me that to follow this energy would be to follow a distraction. After all, I was on a trip to confront my own history, not his.
Back in the car, I needed to get my head right for the day, so I did what most people with a liberal arts education do in a rental. I searched the dial in the low ninety point something range until I found a classical music station. Good music for the drive out, it helped me dial back my reactive nature (thankfully) before my subsequent meeting with Sanders. Now that I was pulling away from Mount Carmel, the universe even handed me a little positive reinforcement for my restraint. The station was exploring the work of African-American Composers through performances by Damien Sneed. As I was driving past what looked like a parochial school (could have been a charter school), the kids outside all had on white shirts bright in the noon sun and dark uniform pants, my phone rang. It was Crowdus. Another cookie. Of course I was cautiously excited. He wanted to know if I'd like to meet him for lunch. He texted me the address for a place called Big Ed's on North Eighth street and said he'd meet me there around one-thirty. We'd eat and he'd show me around. Before hanging up, he asked a question: Had I noticed anything out at Mount Carmel?
I said I did notice some things.
What did you think about the angel garden? Where it was placed?
Yeah, I'd noticed that.
Okay, I will see you soon.
I was almost back to my hotel. 'Maps' said Big Ed's was about ten minutes away. Nothing in Paducah was more than ten minutes away. But first, I had to stop and touch base before going to lunch. I have this thing sometimes where if I am going some place, I have to actually go there. I have to touch base before I can change directions. Not all the time, but when I am in an airport for example, no matter how early I am, I have to go to the gate and touch it, see the actual number, see where it's located. I have to do this before I can go on to get dinner or have a drink. Even if I'm a full three hours early, I have to do this. So, this time, I had to go up to my room, touched the work desk and a few closet hangers, then I could go on to Big Ed's.
I got there a few minutes before one-thirty so I waited outside. Big Ed's wasn't fancy. It was a free-standing one-story brick building painted white with a green roof, with an adjacent parking lot. It looked like it might have been something else, like a Pizza Hut, before it was Big Ed's. There were a few empty lots near by, a gas station sat across the street and some neighborhood houses around it. You could definitely send one of your kids from one of those houses over to Big Ed's to pick you up a plate, or down to the gas station to get you some juice. Someplace else people might call Ed's a soul food place. My guess that down here people just called it a good place to eat. Clearly this situation wasn't fancy, but still, I figured it would be polite to let him pick the table. He might get uneasy if I had gone in first and decided where we were going to sit. I hadn't been there long before the white van pulled up and parked. Just as Crowdus was about usher me in, a woman came out. He introduced me in a way that I took to mean I could stand there and enjoy the conversation but not try to jump in. They had a playful but pointed back and forth. I gathered that she was a politican or community organizer of some sort. Perhaps both. She left. We went in. They gave us a table in the back room. He told me to sit on the side so as not to put my back to the door.
I think he was messing with me. You could see that staff and customers alike seemed to like him. The vibe about him reminded me so much of my grandfather. He leavened the air with a sense of humor that was a bit sarcasitic without being sardonic. When I was a boy, my Grand-daddy would poke you with an sideways comment like, whenever your grandmother gets mad and won't talk to me, I tighten all the jars in the house so she has to. Crowdus was using a similar stye with those around him right now. Since I was inside his halo, they treated me kindly. Big Ed himself brought over our plates. I'd ordered barbecued chicken with sides. Crowdus joked with Big Ed about how he'd never gotten chicken that looked this good. This slipped into a guessing game with Ed about which local family I favored. He called out several, but never mentioned anyone named Roberts. Anyway, Crowdus pulled me into the conversation by asking where my people had lived. I mentioned the address I had found in my research associated with the last place my grandfather had lived, plus the location of The Shoe Hospital, the business I think he ran with my great-grandfather. Crowdus grew wide-eyed. He stopped looking over my head and looked straight at me. Those addresses would be right around here, he said. I was really close, he said.
As we talked and ate I explained that I recall my grandfather saying he and my grandmother had left Paducah for Kansas City Missouri in the late 1930s. Before my mother was born in 1940, James Roberts Junior had established himself as a high school industrial arts teacher and set up shop as a shoemaker on K.C.'s Prospect Avenue. I hadn't realized until I'd started my research that his own father had been a shoemaker back here in Paducah, that some of my grandmother's people from nearby Reynoldsville had also been shoemakers. Crowdus looked puzzled.
You mean Russellville? He corrected.
Right! Reynoldsville is town outside Olkmogie, which is outside Muskogee, which is outside Tulsa and is where my step-father was born. My grandmother, my grandfather's wife, was from Russellville.
Maybe they left after the flood, my host speculated.
Now I looked staight at him. Grand-daddy had made sideways comments about the flood.
In the winter of 1937, Paducah had been hit by what is called the Great Ohio Valley Flood. Up until its time, this was the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. The Red Cross compares the devastation and displacement to the Great Dust Bowl with at least a million homeless and hundreds killed. Paducah, a small town today of about 28,000, sits where the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers meet to join the Ohio and where the Ohio flows on to join the Mississippi. It's where Kentucky has river borders with Illinois and Missouri.
Crowdus offered to drive me around the area once we'd finished eating, which he did. Hosting me in his white van, he showed me the area where most black folks lived during first half of twentieth century. The area was called Bronzeville, just like in Chicago. He showed me the street where my grandfather and his father had lived and where the business might have been. Lots of buildings and shotgun houses, he said.
Grand-daddy: You could shoot a gun straight through the front door and right out the back -- if you could shoot straight.
Everything around where we were would have been flooded, Crowdus explained. Black businesses, he speculated, weren't at the top of the list during the recovery. "They weren't handing out stimulus checks over here." To illustrate how high the water had gotten, he drove us a couple of blocks over to what had been a more affluent neighborhood. He pointed and called out the cow house. I smiled hard. Silly hard.
Grand-daddy: The water got so high, some people had walked a cow through the front door up the stairs to the second floor balcony of their home so it wouldn't drown.
Until this day, I had only half-believed some of my grandfather's tales about his younger life. This was the same man who warned my brothers and me not to swallow watermelon seeds because we'd grow a watermelon in our stomachs. Weeks later, we'd be out around Kansas City running errands with him and he'd spot a pregnant lady. See, swallowed a watermelon seed.
But here was the cow house.
We drove on away from the town center toward the Ohio to where a bridge crosses from the Paducah side into Illinois. Back at Mount Carmel, I'd mentioned that my grandfather had shared a story about his forefather who had crossed the river to work for pay so he could buy his family out of slavery. Sanders seemed disposed to sticking to the local party line that the parish priest around the time of the Civil War had seen fit to grant Jane and Henry Charles Roberts their freedom out of the goodness of his heart. Crowdus wanted to show me where there had been a ferry boat crossing from Slave Kentucky over to Free Illinois. Because of all the shipping and mining in the area, black labor had crossed back and forth to find paid work, even before the war between the states. So, what my grandfather had said, was possible. A least the georgraphy lent itself well.
Sticking by the river, Crowdus showed me where the Union army had built Fort Anderson and garrisoned the third largest regiment of black soliders formed after the Massachusetts 54th and the Louisiana Native Guards. The 8th Colored Artillery was comprised mostly of free black men and those who'd run from slavery from the surrounding counties. Inerestingly enough, I would learn that even though it is represented by the thirteenth star on the Confederate flag, the state of Kentucky was among the border states that never actually seceded from the Union. Its invasion by the Confederate army was bolstered by its large number of sympathetic slaveowners and others who profited from slavery, such as many of the good people of McKracken county. Eventually, the Union army re-invaded the home state of president Lincoln and gained control of Paducah's strategic location. Subsequently in the one major battle fought on the streets of this river town, the 8th Colored Artillery beat back the Confederate calvary, then led by Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. These black men helped keep Paducah and the river crossing in Union hands, perhaps killing some of their own former masters to do it.
My host showed me where the fort had been. There was no marker. Instead, the town had built a multimillion dollar parking lot and boat slip for bass fishing tournaments. By contrast, most of the landmarks in town commemorate Lloyd Tilghman, a local landed gentry who joined the Confederates and built a fort miles away along the Tennessee river. His fort eventually flooded, an event that forced him to surrender in shame to Ulysses S. Grant. Grant used Paducah as a staging point for launching the great Union Army of the Tennessee on its bloody victorious march across the western theater of war.
But the local high school is named after Tilgham. I'd learn more about this preservation of 'sacred heritage' on the next day.
But before this day ended, my friend wanted to tell me more about the Roberts.
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