The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

Besides, as Lizzy often reminded herself, she didn’t really need to own a car. She could always borrow Grady’s blue Ford or Myra May’s old Chevy touring car when she had to drive over to Monroeville or (less often) down to Mobile. And Darling was a small town. She lived close enough to walk to the office, and she could ride her bicycle anywhere else she wanted to go.

“We never sit down to supper before eight in the summer, so you just come on out whenever you get off work,” Mildred had said over the phone. So after Lizzy closed the law office for the afternoon, she hurried home, grabbed a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and changed into a pair of khaki slacks and a green plaid blouse. Then she climbed on the old blue Elgin bicycle she had ridden since her sophomore year in high school and biked all the way south on Robert E. Lee to Cypress Avenue, then turned off Cypress onto Country Club Drive.

The evening was warm and humid and the air was as heavy as a hot, wet blanket. But Lizzy was riding through a pretty part of town so she was distracted from the heat by the summer flowers blooming in people’s front yards. In Lizzy’s opinion, all of Darling was pretty. Some of it wasn’t, of course, but Lizzy understood that not everybody had the time, the money, or the inclination to keep a place looking good—and pretty wasn’t everything. In her view, her little town was a fine place to live, with friendly residents, mild winters, and a long gardening season. She smiled a little as she rode down the shady streets lined with beautiful magnolias and live oaks. She thought back over Darling’s history and reflected that the original settlers—Mr. Darling and his wife and children—would be utterly amazed if they could see the town today, with its impressive brick courthouse, its well-kept streets, and its up-to-the-minute electrical and telephone systems.

The town had come a long way since it was established (more or less accidentally) by Joseph P. Darling. Some 125 years before, he was on his way from Virginia with his wife, five children, two slaves, two milk cows, three old hens and a rooster, a team of oxen, and a horse. He was aiming to start a plantation somewhere along the Mississippi River and make a lot of money growing cotton.

But Mrs. Darling had had enough. She put her foot down. “I am not ridin’ another mile in this blessed wagon, Mr. Darling,” she declared resolutely. “If you want your cookin’ and your washin’ done reg’lar, this is where you’ll find it. You can go on if you want, but the lit’le uns and me are not stirrin’ another step.” She is said to have added, “And we are keepin’ the chickens and the red cow—you can take the old black cow. She’s dry, anyway.”

Mr. Darling looked around and saw that the gently rolling hills were covered with longleaf and loblolly pines, and that there were sweet gum and tulip trees growing in the creek and river bottoms, along with sycamore and magnolia and sassafras and pecan. There was wild game on the land and fish in the nearby Alabama River, and Andrew Jackson had already evicted the Creek Nation (which Lizzy had always thought was very cruel and unjust) so there was nobody to tell him that the land already belonged to somebody else. All told, Mr. Darling figured, this was a pretty good place—as good as he was likely to find anywhere. And anyway, he liked to eat every day and wear a clean shirt on Sundays and was mightily fond of Mrs. Darling and their little Darlings.

So he built a big log cabin for his family and a very little log cabin for his slaves and a fair-sized log barn for the milk cows. Then he built a log hut and nailed a painted sign over the door: Darling General Store. Mr. Darling’s cousin followed him out from Virginia and built the Darling saw mill on Pine Creek. Another Darling cousin built the Darling grist mill just upstream, so that people could get their corn ground for corn pone. Then they planted cotton, and when their cotton fields began producing, they built a cotton gin and a cottonseed oil mill. Traffic on the nearby Alabama River began to build, with steamboats plying a weekly route between Montgomery and Mobile, stopping at plantations along the way to drop off supplies and pick up bales of cotton and other produce.

But things began to change. The War (always spoken of in Darling with a capital W) put an end to slavery, thereby putting an end to the plantation system and substituting sharecropping instead. The Louisville & Nashville railroad, which by the 1800s ran from Kentucky all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, put an end to the steamboats, since trains were cheaper to operate than paddle wheelers, ran on time, and almost never blew up or hit a snag. Then the boll weevil came along and put a crimp in cotton.