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Flight
from ghosts
helps stomp some berry juiceBy
W. T. Block | |
NEDERLAND --
In
1926 brother Broomtail and I were two little tykes, growing up amidst the pin
oak thickets and sea cane marsh, which lined the sides of Block’s Bayou at Port
Neches. Today’s Oak Bluff Cemetery had not advanced very much beyond a family
cemetery as of that year, covering perhaps two acres. And outside its east or
river side fence were about two acres of dense dewberry and blackberry brambles.
As children, Broomtail and I had grown up, listening to our sisters’ tales on
Halloween nights, about the ghosts that wandered around the cemetery. And to augment
their stories, a river man named Old Rob, who worked on our farm, had bottomless
pits full of ghost stories of his own.
One of his tales was about the ghost
of a Karankawa Indian chief with a tomahawk, who chased Old Rob a half-mile along
the Neches River bank one night. Another of his stories noted that once, when
Old Rob’s shovel got too close to one of Jean Lafitte’s buried treasures, a pirate
skeleton chased him back to Gray’s Bayou, hacking at him all the way with his
cutlass.
Because of his hatchet-faced visage and pirate-like demeanor,
Old Rob resembled a buccaneer himself. His raspy voice accentuated his tales also;
and I suppose our spellbound faces and upended hair reacted on him as well. And
Old Rob always had an eagle feather or a scar on his head to "prove" his tales.
Having
no radio or TV to watch or listen to in those days, Broomtail and I had to originate
our own playtime activities, and one of them was to hide out among the blackberry
vines near the cemetery on Sunday afternoons, if a funeral were in progress. One
afternoon, we heard some twigs crackle in back of us, and our faces froze rigid
when we beheld about twenty "ghosts," replete in white bedsheets and tall, pointed
hats, walking toward us.
Well, Broomtail and I tore up an acre of berry
briars as we flew home posthaste, our little legs hitting the ground about every
fifteen feet or so while en route. And perhaps worse, our eyeballs were raining
buckets of tears about the size of ice cubes. It took our mother about twenty
minutes to quieten us down and end our bawling.
Mama explained that it
was not really ghosts that we had seen, but rather a number of Ku Klux Klansmen,
preparing to hold Klan rites over the grave of one of their dead members. She
did not explain to us what the Ku Klux Klan was; perhaps she thought that that
was far beyond our childhood comprehension, and it was.
I might add that
I did not like the Ku Klux Klan in 1926, and during the seventy-year time span
in between, my attitude toward them has not changed a bit. | | |
