The author in Fairmont, in Robeson County, North Carolina, in the nineteen-fifties. Courtesy Estate of Joseph Mitchell

J_oseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was planned as the second chapter but was never finished._

It is odd, to begin with, that I ever had any connection with New York City at all. The great majority of my ancestors have been farmers or mixed up in some way with farming, and I come from a part of the country—Robeson County, North Carolina—where the people tend to stay put. One day recently I was in the Local History Room of the Public Library. While waiting for a book to be delivered from the stacks, I dawdled along the open shelves that line one side of the room, killing time by reading titles, and I came across a set of volumes on each of whose spines was lettered: “CENSUS 1790 / HEADS OF FAMILIES.” I opened the first volume and saw that the full title was “Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790.” I got down the volume for North Carolina and took it over to a reading table and looked up Robeson County and found it, and then I looked up the section in the lower part of the county in which I was born and grew up and in which most of the people in my family still live and found it, and then I started going down the columns of names. The names were not listed alphabetically but evidently in the order that they were taken down by the census taker as he made his rounds. I had not gone far before I began to smile with the pleasure of recognition, for many of the old names suddenly and unexpectedly come upon were very familiar and dear and magical to me, and I soon saw that a much higher proportion than I had ever realized of the names that are around in my section of Robeson County today were also around as far back as 1790. 1790 names are, in fact, with a few newer ones, the most numerous and the most characteristic names of the countryside today—Pitman, for example, although now generally spelled Pittman, and Lewis and Inman and Grimsley and Musslewhight or Musslewhite (now spelled Musselwhite) and Hedgepath (now spelled Hedgepeth) and Griffin and Grantham and Thompson and Mitchell and Ashley and Townsend and Atkinson and Bullock and Purvis and Leggett and Jenkins and Page and Oliver and Barnes and Gaddy and Rogers and Strickland and Harding (now spelled Hardin) and McMillen (now spelled McMillan) and Ivey and Watson and Hunt and Hill and Stephens and Oxendine and Stone and Davis and Britt and Lockileer (now spelled Locklear) and Taylor and Turner and Lee and Lowry. When I go down to Robeson County for a visit, and ride around the countryside with my father or one of my brothers or sisters or brothers-in-law or sisters-in-law or nephews or nieces or cousins, these are the names that I see most frequently on the fronts of stores and filling stations and sawmills and cotton gins and tobacco warehouses and on the sides of trucks and on roadside mailboxes and on miscellaneous roadside signs.

There is a newspaper published in Lumberton, which is the largest town in Robeson County and the county seat, named the Robesonian. It is an old paper—it was a hundred years old several years ago—that prints news from all over the county. Shortly after I came to New York City, I subscribed to the Robesonian, out of homesickness, and I still subscribe to it; it is as necessary to me and as much a part of my life as the New York Times. It is a daily paper, but owing to some peculiarity in the delivery of second-class mail in New York City it arrives at my apartment house every third or fourth day in batches of two or three or four issues, each issue tightly rolled and tightly wrapped in a brown-paper wrapper, and when I open my mailbox and find a batch waiting for me I am almost as glad to see it as I was during my first year or so in the city, when every now and then something I saw or heard or tasted or smelled or touched would remind me sometimes unaccountably of something at home and I would have a spasm of homesickness so sudden and so startlingly painful that I would have trouble breathing and would feel as if my insides were caving in and would have to take a deep breath and keep on taking deep breaths until I got over it. Reading the Robesonian has long since become one of the rituals of my life. I tear the wrappers off, and then I arrange the issues in the order of their day of publication, and then I sit down and read them in that order. I seldom spend much time with the front page of an issue of the Robesonian. The front page is devoted to important international, national, state, and county-seat news, and that isn’t what I am looking for. I am looking for scraps and crumbs and odds and ends and bits and pieces of news about people down in my section of the county—people for the most part bearing the family names that I have just mentioned, people that I am linked to by blood or marriage or old associations, people that I know in fact and people that I know only by hearsay (that is, by hearing my relatives at home and my old friends at home speak of them through the years), and people that I don’t know from Adam (after all, I have been away for over forty years) but whose names, both family and given (a great many given names are repeated generation after generation down there), put together with the names of the communities they live in, tell me beyond any doubt exactly who they are. I glance over the front page, and then I turn to page 2 and look through the “Deaths and Funerals” department, which is a countywide department, and see if there are any names in it that mean anything to me. And then I look through the district-court news, which is usually on the same page, and see if there are any cases from Fairmont and Rowland, the only towns in my part of the county that have district courts. And then I turn to the “Social Activities” department, which is another countywide department and often covers a couple of pages, and look through the announcements of engagements and accounts of weddings and the announcements of births and the accounts of bridge-club meetings and garden-club meetings and book-club meetings and P.T.A. meetings and W.C.T.U. meetings and Daughters of the American Revolution meetings and United Daughters of the Confederacy meetings. Scattered through several pages in the back of the paper are columns and parts of columns of news items of purely local interest sent in by correspondents in the majority of the towns, crossroads villages, and rural communities in the county, and I look for those from my section of the county and go through them—“News Items from Around Fairmont,” “News Items from Around McDonald,” “News Items from Around Rowland,” “News Items from Around Marietta,” “News Items from Around Barnesville,” and “News Items from Around White Pond.” Lumped in under these headings, as “Around” indicates, are items about people who live in even smaller rural communities, such as the Ivey’s Crossroads community and the Bethesda community and the Baltimore community and the Black Ankle community. The items tell, in a very few words, who visited who, who is home sick, who entered the hospital for observation, who underwent surgery, who went on a business trip (or a shopping trip or a sightseeing trip or a fishing trip or a hunting trip), who left for college, who had a surprise birthday party, who moved into a new house, who had a golden-wedding anniversary, who left to attend the graduation of a son or daughter, who left to attend the funeral of a relative, and so on. I enjoy reading the news items. I look upon the items in each issue of the Robesonian as a few more paragraphs or pages or even chapters in a novel that I have been reading for a long time now and that I expect to keep on reading as long as I live, a sort of never-ending to-be-continued serial about the ups and downs of a group of interrelated rural and small-town families in the South, a sort of ever-flowing roman-fleuve. Because I know the person or persons mentioned in an item, and know or knew their fathers and their mothers, and in some cases their grandfathers and their grandmothers, and in a few cases, for that matter, their great-grandfathers and their great-grandmothers, I can sense the inner significance and the inner importance of the occurrence that the item tells about; it lurks between the lines. Quite often, what is between the lines of an item is far more interesting than the item itself. I always look for a department called “Realty Transfers” and go through the entries in it, such as “Asberry Pittman Ivey et als to Macduff Griffin Bullock et ux, Fairmont, 26.9 acres.” And I always go through the legal notices, most of which have to do with the appointments of executors of estates or with the sale of farmland or timberland or other property to settle estates. And I always read the advertisements of auction sales of used farm machinery and equipment. To me, the lists in these advertisements are lyric, they are suitable to be sung to the lyre: “one Roanoke Tobacco Looper, one Subsoiler, one Gang Disk, one Bush and Bog Disk Like New, one Leveling Harrow, one I H C Super-H Four-Row Cotton Sprayer, one Stalk Cutter, one Lime Spreader, one Ditch Bank Scoop, one Middle Buster, one Blue Duster, one High Drum Picker Head, one Water Rank Mounted on a Trailer.” I don’t know why, but I long ago got in the habit of waiting until the last to read one thing; I seem to save it until the last as one sometimes saves a morsel of meat on one’s plate until the last. After I have gone through the entire paper, I turn back to the front page and look down to the bottom of the page, where, over in the left corner, there is a two-paragraph department headed “Weather.” A beautiful and fairly good-sized and fairly swift black-water river named the Lumber River flows through Lumberton—it is the county’s principal watercourse—and in the “Weather” department the Robesonian customarily prints a single sentence giving the depth of the river as measured that morning at a measuring station beside the Cutlar Moore Bridge, which is one of six bridges, counting the railroad bridge, that span the river inside Lumberton or on its edges; the sentence is usually the last one in the second paragraph. “The level of Lumber River was measured at 6.55 feet this morning at the Moore Bridge checkpoint, a slight rise over yesterday,” the sentence might say, or “The Lumber River level was 8.10 feet this morning and steady,” or “The Lumber River level was 10.28 feet this morning and falling.” This scrap of obscure information always interests me very much; in fact, it is almost always the most interesting thing in the paper to me. Although the Lumber River is snakelike to a phenomenal degree and winds in and out and around and about and wanders though a lot of territory, it never at any point gets nearer than ten miles to my home. Even so, I have found that its depth is a rough index to the depth of scores of streams in the swamps and in the branches of swamps all over the lower part of the county, and once I know its depth at the Moore Bridge I can estimate the depth and visualize the general condition of several streams near my home, and of one in particular, the stream in Pittman Mill Branch, which is a branch of Old Field Swamp.

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On its way to join Old Field Swamp, Pittman Mill Branch runs in back of my home—or, to be more exact, in back of the gardens and orchards and pastures in back of my home—and a stretch of about a quarter of a mile of it is owned by my father and has been since my childhood. Several years ago, the Army Engineers, in a flood-control project, cut a canal through the branch, and in the process a considerable section of the old stream was straightened out and incorporated into the canal. Also, little by little, over the years, the old bottoms and bogs and sinks and sloughs on both sides of the stream have been drained by a network of ditches designed by my father, and now, in most seasons, if you keep to the ditch banks, you can walk across the branch without getting your shoes wet. Also, although there are a great many old trees still standing in the branch, most of the very old ones that used to grow in the bottoms have been cut for timber and most of the vines that used to hang between the trees have been chopped down and most of the underbrush has been thinned out. My father has sown grass seed here and there, and places that used to be under water most of the time or knee-deep in mud are now as green as lawns. Nevertheless, some wildness is still left in the branch, some of the old, old original wildness. Taking a walk in it, I always come across tracks of wild animals on the ditch banks and on the canal bank, and I always see at least one wild animal of some kind. Early one morning last summer, around daybreak, going for a walk to the farther side of the branch, I saw a raccoon on the canal bank. It was eating a frog. A few minutes later, I saw a diamondback water snake. And then I saw an old and obese opossum crawl out of one of the ditches. It waddled along the ditch bank for a short distance and then abruptly darted through some bushes and into a hole in the base of the trunk of a dead tree. And then I saw a box turtle. And I saw a pair of muskrats. And then, passing through a grove of hickory trees, I sensed something moving along a limb far up above me, and glancing upward I saw fleetingly and out of the corner of an eye what I am sure was a wildcat or, as we call it, a bobcat. It is still possible to see a wide variety of birds in the branch, and a wide variety of insects, and a wide variety of wild flowers. When I think about the changes that the branch has undergone in the years that I have known it, however, my heart sinks. When I first knew it, as a child, and I sometimes marvel at this, it had hardly been touched by the axe and the crosscut saw and the ditchdigger’s spade and the stump-digger’s dynamite—it was still quite wild. Parts of it, in fact, were still primeval. The stream still ran in the same bed it had run in since time immemorial, and growing in sloughs along the banks of the stream and out in the wettest of the bottoms were scores of giant old virgin-growth bald cypresses, a majestic tree with snuff-brown bark and ferny pale-green needles that rises out of the mud and the muddy water and goes straight up a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five feet and that sometimes lives to be a thousand years old or more and whose wood is so resistant to rot that boards sawed from it used to be used for coffins (up until my grandfather’s generation, most country people in my part of the South were buried in family cemeteries in homemade cypress coffins) and for such things as shingles and gutters and rain pipes and watering troughs and for the sluices underneath water mills and for the water gates on rice plantations, and are even now used for such things as the kind of water tanks that sit unpainted and naked to the weather on stilts on the roofs of office buildings and apartment houses and hotels in New York City. In among the cypresses, but in drier locations, were giant old virgin black gums and giant old virgin tulip poplars. On the slopes rising gently upward from the banks of the stream on both sides of the branch were old longleaf pines and old water oaks and old swamp maples and old sweet gum and old hollies and old magnolias and old sweet bays and old swamp hickories and old black walnuts and old wild persimmons and old wild cherries and old dogwoods. At the feet of many of these trees, ferns grew. On the trunks of many of them, mosses grew. On the upper limbs of many of them, mistletoe grew. The underbrush was dense. In it were clumps of huckleberry bushes and clumps of cattails and thickets of wild-plum trees and thickets of the kind of reeds that are used for fishing poles and thickets of blackberry canes and patches of wild strawberries and patches of wild roses and patches of wild violets, and clumps and thickets and patches of many other kinds of herbs, shrubs, and small trees. Vines overran the ground and overran the underbrush and overran the trees. Every tree no matter how young and spindly supported at least one vine, and running this way and that between the large trees were great briery ropes and nets and webs of intertwined vines of a dozen kinds. Wild-grape vines and bullbrier vines were the most prolific. In July and August, in some parts of the branch, you could reach up almost anyplace and pick a handful of wild grapes—small, musky-flavored, not very juicy, blue-black ones that we called fox grapes, and plump, honey-sweet, juicy brown-speckled amber-green ones that we called scuppernongs.

I spent a large part of my childhood and youth in Pittman Mill Branch. From the time I was old enough to wander around by myself—old enough, that is, to be trusted to shut gates and to watch out for snakes—until I went away to college, I spent every moment in it that I possibly could. Quite often, in the winter, I went into the branch as soon as I got home from school and stayed in it the rest of the day. Quite often, in the summer, if I had no work to do for my father, I went into it early in the morning, right after breakfast, and stayed in it until dinner, which we had in the middle of the day, and then I went back and stayed in it until supper. Some days, I kept pretty close to the stream. I would walk beside it, climbing over the fence that marked the western boundary line of my father’s land when I reached it and following the stream across other people’s lands for several miles. I would walk slowly and keep looking into the water, studying it. The water mesmerized me; everything in it interested me, still or moving, dead or alive; I was just as interested in a streak of a kind of algae known locally as frog snot or in a cluster of old dead cypress roots covered with snails as I was in the fish and the crawfish and the water bugs and the water snakes. The water was the color of whiskey or tea—from some substance in the leaves and pine needles and cypress needles rotting in it, I was always told. You weren’t supposed to drink it—people said you could get chills and fevers, by which they meant malaria, from drinking branch water—but it looked clean enough to drink. Sometimes I would cut a reed and tie a line that I carried around in my watch pocket to the whip end of the reed and bait the hook with a worm or a grub or a mayfly or a June bug or a grasshopper and fish for a while. Sometimes, on very hot days, I would stop at a wide place in the stream, what we called a pool, and beat on the water with a stick to scare away the bullfrogs and the salamanders and the leeches and then go in swimming. I loved the smell of the stream—a smell of fish emanated from it, a smell that has always been pleasurable and even exciting to me, and underneath this there was often a smell that reminded me of leaf mold and of root cellars and, by some odd link or association, of chrysanthemums—and I loved the smells, ranging from clovery to delicately aromatic to pungent to rank, of the vegetation that grew on its banks. There were no well-defined paths in the branch and, walking along beside the stream not watching where I was going, I would brush against some of the plants with my pants legs or step on them, bruising them, whereupon their various and sometimes quite surprising fragrances would suddenly fill the air. And occasionally I would reach down and pull a handful of leaves from some aromatic plant—a kind that I especially liked, such as wild ginger or wax myrtle or dog fennel, or a kind that might be unfamiliar to me and, for all I knew, poisonous—and crush them in my hand and smell them. Hours later, sometimes, the smell would still be on my fingers. And quite often, at night, taking off my clothes and hanging them up before going to bed, I would smell the fragrances of aromatic plants on my pants legs.