The Pecan Man by Selleck, Cassie Dandridge
Acknowledgements
Over the years, I have worked on this story with the invaluable help of the Gainesville Poets and Writers group. It would be impossible to name them all, but special thanks to the core members Charlotte, Christy, Gen, Dorothy, Eldon, Art, Mary, Stephanie, Donald, Jani and many others who poured their time and energy into this work, offering honest critique and tremendous encouragement over the years. To my dear friends Perky Granger, Teresa Renfrow Masters, Cheryl Pulliam, Rick Sgabellone and the wonderful women of the Mayo Woman’s Club, I thank you for your warm friendship, constant support and occasional kick in the behind. It has been a blessing to have people who believe in me and push me to sit down and write.
To my daughters Patti, Katie and Emily: You have been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement and I am so proud of the beautiful young women you have become.
To my parents, Patty and Frank Dandridge: Thank you for raising us in a home where all who entered were literally welcomed with open arms. You taught us the meaning of love and acceptance and I will always be grateful for that. I love you dearly.
To my siblings Petey, Bubba and Pat, step-daughter Kimie and countless cousins, nieces, nephews, and my beloved grandbabies, I love you all so much.
To my dear friend Julie Williams Sanon: You are my sister as if we were born of the same blood. Thank you for teaching me by example to love as Jesus loved.
And last as always, but first in my heart – my sweet, sweet husband: I will love you always.
For Nicholas
Lighter of candles and finder of lost things
One
In the summer of 1976, the year of our Bicentennial, preparations for the Fourth of July were in full force. Flags hung from the eaves of every house along this stretch of Main Street. The neighborhood women were even busier than usual. I watched them come and go from a rocking chair on my own front porch.
Every now and then a slight breeze moved the heavy, humid air and, if there was no traffic going by, I could hear the flags rustling along the row. I sat with a piece of cardboard in one hand and a glass of sweet tea in the other. The ice always melted before I emptied the glass. I used the cardboard to augment the gentle blowing of the ceiling fan, which I was sure put out more heat than cool with its low purring motor constantly going. I kept it on though. I liked the sound.
Back then, the streets of our small Florida town were not unlike the streets of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry, or Atticus Finch’s Maycomb. We even have a similar name, Mayville. I always like to say, “That May sure got around, now didn’t she?”
There’s no one here to laugh at my jokes anymore. I used to have a maid who came every day. Blanche was black as pitch and twice as heavy. I asked her once how she got her name, seeing as how Blanche is French for white and she wasn't even close. She said she was born as light-skinned as me and that her daddy had left soon afterwards saying no baby of his could be that pale.
Her mama waited a couple of days before naming her. Just held her and rocked her and sang her own tears dry. Seems she was more than positive she had never lain down with another man since the day she was born and she felt certain he would believe her and come home. When he didn’t, she carried the baby in her arms all the way to the public library just off Main Street. Libraries back then wouldn't check out books to Negroes, so she found a book of baby names and sat right down on the floor. Nestling her sleeping infant between her crossed legs, she started on the A’s. When she got to Blanche and saw what it meant, she reckoned it was as fitting and pretty a name as she had ever seen, so Blanche it was.
Had her daddy stuck around a bit, he’d have seen his baby girl turn darker and darker as the months rolled by. Blanche once told me she figured he was the one who lost out, not her, and I thought that was a right healthy way to look at it.
Blanche worked for me through birth and death, joy and sorrow, and Lord knows we had a lot of sorrow in all the time we spent under this roof. Most people figured she was crazy to put up with me all those years, but Blanche and I had an understanding. It was a vow we made those long years ago. Neither of us spoke of it afterwards, but it hung between us like a spider web, fragile and easy to break, but danged hard to get shed of once the threads took hold.
It’s been a quarter of a century since fate sealed the two of us together. Blanche got fatter, but never looked a day older than she did back then. I, on the other hand, have managed to get thinner and more fragile, if that’s possible. I’m eighty-two years old. I was fifty-seven then, and recently widowed. I’d tell you about my husband, Walter, but he doesn’t really play a part in this story so I reckon there’s not much point. Funny, I don’t remember what color Walter’s eyes were. I’ll chalk that up to what age does to an already feeble mind. But I remember every single detail about what happened with the Pecan Man.
Though mostly vacant these days, the buildings on Main Street once housed dress shops and jewelry stores with diamonds and gemstones glistening on oceans of blue velvet in the front windows. Ezell’s Department store survived the arrival of J.C. Penney, with its shiny tile floors and ornate marble staircase, but they went to mostly rugged men’s wear for years afterward. Penney’s could never compete with the smell of denim and leather and the creak of wooden floors when it came to the male populace.
In 1976, the bank was building its new home out on the highway and their old four-story relic downtown was sold to a company that provided counseling and other services to alcoholics, drug addicts and the like. They called it Lifeways, but that was just a euphemism for nuthouse and most of the residents weren’t going to stand for that kind of element in our neighborhood. Dovey Kincaid got up a petition to keep them out and we all signed it, but we lost in the end. Frank Perley was head of the city commission and he made sure his wife’s cousin’s company got in. After that our neighborhood went downhill fast. People moved out by the truckload and practically gave their family homes away.
It’s still a beautiful, if somewhat ragged, neighborhood and I do what I can to keep my own house looking stately and neat. Our streets are lined with pecan trees so large that two men could wrap their arms around their trunks and only barely touch fingertips. The trees used to look majestic, but now they just look tired. Their limbs droop miserably and the Spanish moss that once served as regal attire now hangs limp and shaggy like the beards of the homeless old men who pass by daily on their way downtown.
Several blocks from there, the opposite direction of my neighborhood, is what we call colored town. Oh, I know it’s not right to call it that these days, but that was what we called it then and I’m too old to relearn the etiquette I had drilled into my head from the time I could hold a spoon.
Blanche raised five children of her own there, plus the two grandchildren she took in when her youngest daughter ran off with a drug dealer. She might have been mad at that child if she hadn’t known what she did about the whole situation. As it was, Blanche couldn’t find it in her heart to blame her daughter for any of the bad choices she made, considering the role she played in this story.
The events of that year were the real driving force behind the mass exodus from the neighborhood. It was the year of the Pecan Man. None of us knew how much impact one skinny old colored man could have in our lives, but we found out soon enough.
There is a wooded area not far from downtown that has sat neglected for as long as I can remember, although it was not nearly so grown over with weeds when I was a child and played there. It is widely known now to shelter several homeless men, one of whom is blatantly crazy and should be an inpatient, if you ask me. Back then, only one man was known to inhabit the place and that was the Pecan Man. Whoever first gave the man the name pronounced it Pee-can and it stuck.
The Pecan Man took up residence there in the summer of 1975, but it took a while before anyone ever figured out he actually lived there. Maybe it was his gaunt frame or the ghostly way he just seemed to appear from those woods riding a bicycle as old as he was and every bit as thin and rumpled. Whatever it was about him that struck people as frightful, it didn’t take long before parents took to calling their children in whenever he appeared.
They called him the Pecan Man because he always had a sack full of pecans tied to the handlebars of his rickety old bike. Turns out he got most of his sustenance from the nuts of those prolific trees. He’d stop all along his route to who-knows-where, picking up any pecans that had rolled onto the sidewalk or street, but leaving alone any that so much as touched the yard of the tree’s owner. This was the widely accepted rule and I never saw anyone break it, not even the children, and I’ve spent many an hour on this porch watching.
The neighborhood children made up a song that they sang as they jumped rope in their yards. I heard it enough times to know it by heart and I still wake up some nights in a cold sweat with the rhyme pounding over and over in my head.
Mama call the po-lice
Catch him if you can
Everybody scared of the Pecan Man
Then they’d launch into a list as long as they could make it by filling in the names of every man, woman and child they knew. The winner was the one who called out the most names without missing a jump.
David scared of the Pecan Man
Jimbo scared of the Pecan Man
Mary Beth scared of the Pecan Man
Rita Gail scared of the Pecan Man
Miss Abernathy scared of the Pecan Man
and so on.