A father often reminisces about earlier times when they travel around the southeast each week. On one trip, the ancient dad discusses such things as tooth extraction in the 1920s, as well as carrying corn to the mill to be ground, and about the mistreatment of African-Americans in the segregated south.
Today, my elderly father had recuperated sufficiently enough, after consuming Ex-Lax and prune juice simultaneously the day before for a bowel issue, to accompany me on a 250-mile business trip to east-central Mississippi.
In the time I have been doing this job, one that often calls for travel to Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi, daddy has only missed riding with me two or three times.
As we whiled away the miles, he suddenly grinned. He spotted an Amish family near Pontotoc riding in a wagon pulled by two mules. ”We used to have one of those when I was a kid,” he fondly noted. Pressing him for details, he soon left the passenger seat of my comfortable car and was transported back into the dark ages – the era from which he had emerged! A time when five miles travel took over an hour, instead of five minutes…
“I used to spend the summers with Grandaddy and Grandmammy Segars.” His maternal grandparents were Randal Arthur Segars and Elizabeth Reynolds Segars, and they had moved to Mississippi in 1899 from Rome, Georgia. She already had a sister living at Myrtle – Martha Heaton. Family legend said they had traveled by wagon train from the Peach Tree state to the Magnolia state. Some 25 years later, the time daddy was now remembering, his grandparents apparently still had that wagon!
“As soon as school was out, they practically raised me,” he remembered, adding they lived halfway between Myrtle and New Albany. “Not many people had a car back then. But granddaddy’s wagon was a double-mule wagon, pulled by ‘Daisy’ and ‘Rodie’. Ours had a spring-seat and that was a big thing back then. It was ’stylish’!”
But it was not covered, daddy recalled. “If it was hot, grandmammy would hold her parasol over her head the whole trip to New Albany.” He said it took them well over an hour to make the five-mile trip. And he said the only thing west of the Tallahatchie River Bridge in those days was a dance hall at Glenfield called The Pines, which was operated by some of our relatives in the Farris family, and a few houses. Now, that area is covered with perhaps a hundred or more commercial establishments.
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