Alex,
Thanks a jillion for your kind offer re rafountain publishing but I don’t know how to compute. I tried clicking on the rafountain link when I got your emails but couldn’t figure it out, but about an hour ago I tried again and this time I clicked on “publishing” and then when I clicked on the icons it told me no dice, you gotta become a member and same with other two icons. Short answer, I appreciate your help and when I can find someone to help me sort out this new, to me, way of computing then maybe I can gain some traction. Is it possible to publish the whole bloomin Paradise piece?
And while I got you here I’m gonna tell you a few other things I’ve wanted to say for days and years. David Ayscue. First let me say David was a writer, sure enough. More on that later. One day I was talking with David on the phone and he was telling me some of what it was like living in half a crackhouse on Myrtle Avenue in Greenville.. He lived on one side of the shotgun house and the owner’s daughter, a crack dealer, lived in the other side, and david said she sold crack “all day and all night” and that there was gunfire (pistol) at night, and since the two tenants shared a front porch, sometimes an iirate crack customer would wind up outside David’s front door and window, and sometimes fire at people walking in the yard of the Club which was directly across the street from David’s house, and that whenever things got heated, he’d dive under his piano to hopefully escape the bullets. David rented the place because there was an old barn, complete with a silver-painted tin roof (I’m sure it was an old tobacco grading packhouse), but it was tight and David had it packed tight with books from floor to ceiling, rare books, some finely bound first editions, and it was a treat just walking around in the crowded place and seeing such wonderful books. Now when the great flood came it ripped the silver roof apart and flooded everything, and when FEMA told David they couldn[t compensate him for the books because they weren’t a “necessity” David went off. He argued that books are a necessity, and I agreed with him, pointing out the Alexandria library, as an example of history lost for evermore, but all to no avail. David was a good writer and he loved books. In fact he had books in library-like stacks with his sleeping mattress tucked in the middle of the stacks. One day on the telephone he asked me if there was any way I could help him get some books he wanted to buy at the annual Shepherd’s Library book sale, and I borrowed my cousin Connie’s car to help him, picked him up and drove down to a building along Tar River to where the book sale took place, and I found a comfortable corner to stand in while David browsed and bought shopping cart loads of books, and once he signaled me to come to where he was and he picked up a copy of the 1996 NCLR edition which you might have donated to the sale, and after carefully packing the books in the big Buick’s trunk and backseat and floorboard, we headed back, and after I helped him get the books in his house and was fixing to leave, he handed me a 1996 NCLR.
Just remembered I forgot to tell you above that I told David I’d be glad to come over to the crackhouse and attempt to help him if he wanted me to, but he declined.
Reading the rafountain website brought back memories. Though my people settled in Glasgow County I was brought up near Bell Arthur. In fact, I remember your big brick building from my childhood, it seemed like it was even bigger back then, and we always had friends in and around Fountain and Toddy (don’t know if Toddy is still on the map), and I remember going to Fountain with my grandfather to see his friend, Jimmy Sutton, and I know Jimmy Sutton was originally from Bell Arthur but believe he married a Fountain girl, but don’t know not sure. I remember he lived in the village of Fountain and that he had three daughters, all older than me. And I wanted to tell you this that came to me seeing the book covers on rafountain: When I was in grade school, a classmate, Sarah Sue Sutton, told our teacher and classmates that Bell Arthur was named after her grandfather Arthur and her grandmother Belle. And seeing the cover re Rocky Mount Tobacco Leafs minor league baseball, wanted to tell you that I used to try to pitch baseball for Bell Arthur school and tried to catch for the Bell Arthur Bluemold Boys (named for a mosaic virus which ruined tobacco leaves), a summer team for players of all ages, and when I was 13 or 14 and the team needed a catcher, my Uncle Parker, our main pitcher, chose me to catch (O happy days), and that was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me. He called the game from the mound and I just tried to follow the blazing baseball, even keep my eyes on it right into the mitt, you know, and always making sure we had our signals straight because I needed to know what the pitch should look like and try to get set for it, and one of our players was Sparky McKaskill, a tall and rangey shortstop, who married a Bell Arthur girl and Sparky played professionally for the Rocky Mount Tobacco Leafs, and one of the teams we played we always had to visit, the Pitt County Prison Unit, located on the Greenville-Belvoir highway, and there was always a prison guard there sitting in a chair way back by the bloodhound pen, always with a shotgun or rifle visible, and the manager of the team was the second baseman and one Sunday when we went to play them he wasn’t there and when we enquired we learned that he had escaped, that he told the guard he had to go to the woods and when he got to the woods he never stopped and that he had a woman waiting for him in a car, and every time we’d visit after that we’d learn that they hadn’t caught him. And that pleased me. I liked them all, they all seemed like nice people to me. I believe they were. They worked on chain gangs and some wore black and white striped uniforms and had to carry a big ball about the size of a cannonball chained to their leg near the ankle and pull or carry that along with them all day through the ditchbank briars and brambles while they shrubbed the ditchbanks with shrub blades. And a friend’s father had a country store and when the chaingang came by he’d give them all a pack of cigarettes. They liked that.
Glad to see you had the NCLR edition listed. On that note, long time ago you called about digitalizing Smoke and said you were going to gift me a coupla 1996 NCLRs but when I got the package they were wrong year, but right years, Spring 1993, Spring 1994, and I enjoyhed them and just remembering this it reminds me that I would enjoy reading them again.
Thanks for everything. Your needy friend,
Jake
