James H. Cagle
The first home I remember was the one in Bemiss, Georgia, just a little way down the road from Granny Jones. I was born in Chipley, Florida, but we lived in Bonifay, Florida when I was born. I was born in Chipley because Bonifay didn’t have a hospital, so my mother was taken to Chipley hospital where I was born.
There were other houses we lived in that I don’t remember. My older sisters told me we lived in the Projects in Atlanta, and in another house just down the road from this one I’m going to tell you about.
This house in Bemiss, just down the road from Granny, is the first place I remember living. The house was a small wooden house that sat off Old Pine Road, a dirt road that ran from the Bemiss highway to Skipper Bridge Road. It sat up several feet on brick or wooden piles. It had one bedroom. It had an open space across from the bedroom in which mother divided the room with a curtain she hung down the middle. On one side the four boys had a bed that they slept on laying across it. And on the other side the four girls did the same thing. I was five or six at the time, so my oldest sister was ten or eleven.
At the front of the house to the right as you walked in was the kitchen. It had a stove, a big green dinner table our daddy made, a fireplace, and a big sink that he had fastened to the wall and had a black drainpipe that went through the floor and out into the yard. It had a phone on the wall by the stove. Once grease on the stove caught fire and melted the phone.
There were benches on both sides of the table for us children and a chair at both ends for our parents. The fireplace was actually used. In front of it daddy would put a number twelve tub and fill it with water. When it got warm he would give us boys a bath in it.
To the left as you came in the front door was the living room. I don’t remember spending a lot of time in there. It had a sofa and a chair and a small gas heater. It was very small.
We had no porches. Steps went right up to the house in the front and the back. And the house had a tin roof. It was at this house that I fell in love with the sound that rain makes falling on a tin roof.
We had no indoor plumbing except for the sink in the kitchen. That meant we had an outhouse. Out in the back yard up next to the fence we had a two-seater. A sheet of burlap hung over the door of the outhouse. I believe this was by design. Many times, my sisters would go into the outhouse and come out screaming and running, tearing off the burlap sheet. A black snake that had been sitting up on the rafter all day, and waiting for this occasion, stuck his head over the edge to scare them.
On down the fence from the outhouse was an old crab apple tree. It was one just like the one Granny had out by her kitchen. We also had a pecan tree, a big pear tree, and a fig tree. My oldest sister climbed the pear tree once to knock down some pears and fell out of the tree.
My daddy raised rabbits at this house, the eating kind, along with some chickens. They were big rabbits and daddy would kill and dress them just as you would a chicken that you were going to eat. One day daddy and some of his friends got permission to hunt rabbits on a local farm. Come night fall we were loaded into trucks and were driving through the farmer’s field with a powerful spotlight and daddy and his friend’s shot rabbits. When they were done, they had shot thirty rabbits. And they were later cleaned and eaten over the next few months. It was called survival. We also hunted squirrels. I remember many times getting up early before light and sitting quietly in the woods waiting for the squirrels to start stirring about. If we shot any we ate them, too.
There was a well in front of the house. I remember looking down into the well and seeing the water at the bottom. Later we had a well drilled and an electric pump pumped water to our one spigot in the kitchen. Daddy later covered the mouth of the well. I had dreams of falling into the well. I would be falling down, down, down into the well and would always wake up just before I hit the bottom.
We were living at this house when I began school. I remember the school bus stopping and my older sisters and I riding the bus to Pine Grove elementary school. We all carried our lunch that mother made in a brown paper sack.
It was at this house that I remember running away from home. I don’t know where I got the idea of running away from home or my reason for running away. But as a six-year-old I ran away from home and ran to the bottom next to the creek and sat under a pecan tree, about three hundred yards from the house. Mother came and checked on me and I told her I had run away from home. She didn’t appear to be to upset. If she had been she would have sent daddy to get me. But come supper time I ran back home again.
My mother’s mother, Granny Jones, owned this house and the land it was on. It was a narrow strip of land that ran parallel to the land she owned across the road which was her farm. The road was mostly clay and ran downhill from Granny’s house. When it rained hard the road turned into a river and washed away a lot of the road. The banks on the sides of the road are high because of the road washing out.
Eventually Granny stopped renting this house and had the property completely fenced in for pasture and put a horse named Rebel in there.
