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I
NEVER HAD ANY DESIRE TO LEAVE
Cleta
Willis, and her husband Bobby, live in the Upper Laurel section
of Madison County where they were both born and raised. Cleta
has owned a home cleaning business for twenty-eight years
and does much of her work in the Wolf Laurel community. Bobby
has been disabled since the 1970s, but works actively with
Cleta, and his family at Builders Express. Cleta and Bobby
have recently been living with Cleta’s father, Jasper
Jenkins, who is eighty-seven years old. The following excerpts
are from a recent conversation with them.
Cleta:
I never had any desire to leave, I’ve always lived right
in this area and I’ve never wanted to live anywhere
else. This was home. You had good neighbors. You had a lot
of neighbors and it wasn’t like it is now just a house
here and yonder. You had neighbors you could holler at. I
could stand on the porch and I could see a dozen houses all
the way around me. Most families had three or four [children],
and there was somebody to play with all the time because you
had plenty of neighbors. We played in the creeks and made
mud pies, and made play houses in the woods. We played ball.
We just had a good time. Kids now don’t know how to
play. They know how to work a video game, and Nintendo, or
computer, but they don’t know how to play. They don’t
have any imagination. If they don’t have something to
entertain them, they’re bored. We had to entertain ourselves;
we found something to do.
Cleta. If there was somebody in the community
got sick or had a need, the other people in the community
always helped. Like if they had tobacco in the field the men
of the community would go in and put their tobacco in the
barn. People didn’t bother you, they wasn’t busy
bodies, but if you needed them they were there, and it seems
like its pretty much that way around here now. |
Cleta:
The first thing I ever canned, I would help mom do things, but
the first thing I ever canned on my own was grape juice and
we had a neighbor that lived up the road here that brought me
a half a bushel of grapes and I asked mom how to make grape
juice and she told me and I did it and it worked out good, so
that made me want to learn, so I’ve canned everything
I could get my hands on ever since. My brother in-law is all
the time telling me I’m living in the wrong century.
Bobby: Change doesn’t bother me that
much. I mean change is gonna happen, its gonna come. We can’t
stop it, and it’s not bothering me. It’s just some
things I don’t go along with morally or whatever, but
I’m not gonna criticize it. That’s not my place
to do it. I just want to get along with everybody, wherever
they’re from. I do my best. They can do their thing and
I do mine and we can still be neighbors. Change is gonna happen,
it always happens, but to me, I guess I just go with the flow.
I’m just proud to be here.
Cleta: I know that things can’t stay
like it was when I was growing up. This new road has been a
help to a lot of people. Every two or three months somebody
was getting killed on Murray Mountain, and its saved a lot of
lives, and I know its for the best, in that respect. But I just
hate that a lot of the people that lived here had to be moved
off, and the community broken up because of it. That’s
my only problem with it, and the noise. Every time a big truck
goes across it sounds like a clap of thunder, on both ends,
when it comes on it, and when it goes off of it.
Bobby: Now an empty trailer sounds like a tornado coming. I
mean those things bounce. It’s like that all night too.
It’s worse at times.
Cleta: About 5 o’clock in the morning,
it’s really bad. In the spring here you could hear the
peep frogs hollering and the birds singing. I used to love to
get out and walk in the woods, and there was trillium and bloodroot,
and all kinds of wild flowers blooming. You can’t do that
now; you don’t hear that stuff now. All you hear is the
noise. We have to go to our house [on Bear Branch] to hear that.
In fact we got to go home, our sister came and spent the night
with daddy a couple weeks ago, and we went home and spent the
night, and was laying there in the bed, and it was so quiet,
and I fell back and said, “listen.” He said, “I
don’t hear anything.” I said, ‘don’t
that sound good.’
Jasper: When I was just young we lived up the
road here about a little more than a mile, or maybe not that,
but there was quite a few people that’d hitchhike the
road up here. One time me and Maggie was in the store up there
and it come a terrible blizzard in this country and there was
a boy come in up there hitchhiking. He stayed a good bit and
I got him in the car and took him up to the top of the mountain.
That place stayed open all night. He stayed up there and he
decided he wasn’t going to catch a ride. Anyway he come
back here and stayed all night with us, I give him a bed and
a long time after that, just every little while I’d hear
from that boy, he was happy about me doin’ some good for
him.
Cleta: I can remember that happening when I was a teenager.
He spent the night here, and mom fixed breakfast the next morning.
Daddy took him back to the store, and he caught the bus, and
went off. His last name was Lawson, and for years after that,
for Christmas, he would send daddy a box of oranges. But now
you would be afraid if there was somebody walking up there.
You’d lock your door.
Jasper: I can remember every person that’s
up there maybe except two or three that’s been from out
of some other country. My daddy and mother and two of my bothers
and Jessie’s first husband, Little Johnny, and my wife
is all buried there. I go up there every morning. I get up and
most of the time I’ll eat breakfast, but I get in my old
car and drive up there, and say “good mornin’”
to everyone. I’ve got an uncle that’s up there and
his wife, and there’s an old man they call Prayin’
Ed English. I’ve heard him pray a many of a time. I drive
down by Maggie’s grave and I say, “good mornin’
honey, I love you,” and I do.
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