My Grandfather's Finger, a memoir

My Grandfather’s Finger

A memoir

Published by University of Georgia Press, 1999

The Big Thicket

I was born in a small corner of East Texas that has come to be known as the Big Thicket, sometimes called the biological crossroads of American. To be technical, the Thicket is an ecotone, a transitional area between two adjacent ecological communities.

No more than a stone’s throw northeast of Houston, the Thicket is an area of about two hundred square miles where the coastal plain and the timberline meet and overlap, creating a variety of soils and a climate that ranges from temperate to subtropical. It is not uncommon to find cactus growing in patches of arid sandy land that border and bisect swamps, pine savannas and hardwood forests where around fifty species of orchids have been collected and four carnivorous plants grow in abundance. It’s an area of sharp contrast, not only in landscape but in the character of its inhabitants. The early settlers called it No Man’s Land, a hiding place for ne’er-do-wells of all descriptions.

During the Civil War, the Thicket was a well-known refuge for pacifists and jayhawkers, those who refused to fight for the South. It was also a haven for renegades, recluses, and religious fanatics, but today the Big Thicket is primarily known as a national biological preserve. Five separate tracks of land and several stream corridors have been set aside for recreation and scientific research. No Man’s Land is now overrun with bird watchers, herpetologists, and hikers. Botanists are forever collecting samples there, while old-time evangelists still preach doomsday on street corners and crossroads. It is not surprising that fishermen, hunters and retirees have found their way to the Thicket is great numbers. Outside the biological preserve, the countryside is spotted with new homes hugging streams and rivers or clustered round man-made lakes. There’s hardly a place where a car horn or a television set cannot be heard.

  Unfortunately, the Thicket of my childhood no longer exists. Much of the forest has been cut down, and my grandparents, along with most of their children and closest friends, are no longer living. They were an imaginative lot, and I was most fortunate to have spent my formative years around them. They were the wildest of dreamers and the maddest of madmen. And although they were rabid individualists, they were similarly marked with loose tongues and poetic speech. Not only did they live their lives as if they were characters springing from the pages of a book they were front porch storytellers of the highest order. They knew instinctively how to tell as well as how to enlarge a story while keeping it rooted in truth. They understood that an oral story is a living thing and should grow with each telling. Furthermore, they seem to have no interest in writing about themselves no need to record their imaginative ramblings on paper. That they left to another generation, a far more troubled one.

Grandfather Isaac Brown

  My grandfather was a man of God on one hand, a gospel singer with a high tenor voice, and on the other, an addict of Creo-Mulsions, an old-time cough remedy the ingredients of which were extremely questionable, especially since Grandfather died in a state of sublime hallucination. While he was at himself, he spent most of this time in the woods supervising a team of log cutters. In that day and time a forest was never clear cut. Only a few trees were cut and the rest were allowed to grow. After cutting only the marked timber, the loggers would then move on to another location and cut a few trees there before moving on again. It was something of a nomadic life that suited my grandfather just fine.

  I can’t say he was reticent, not exactly, but when he wasn’t singing he hardly uttered a word to anyone except himself. I remember him saying only two sentences, both of them directed to me. “Look out for that snake,” was one. The snake was already dead, flattened by a log truck, but Grandfather, what with his poor eyesight, had no way of knowing that. The other thing he said was, “Nowadays, a man’s got to get himself a good education, I don’t care how much it costs. If he don’t he’ll turn out like me.”

  But turning out like Grandfather wouldn’t be so bad. He was a handsome man with a generous heart. He created jobs during a time when there were few jobs to be had, and he rode a black stallion with a white star on its forehead. All the ladies called him a fine catch, in spite of the fact that no one – not even my grandmother – was very comfortable in his presence. He was tall and gaunt with jet-black hair, a dark complexion, and glassy eyes focused on the far away. Some people said, “that’s just Isaac. He’s always straddled two worlds.” Others said that he was behaving under the influence of cough medicine combined with bourbon whiskey and gospel music. This was a favorite song:

  This world is not my home, I just a-passing through.

  My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

  The angels beckon me to Heaven’s open door,

  And I can’t feel at home in this world any more.

Grandfather loved this old song, especially toward the end of his life. He sang it anywhere and everywhere. Suddenly in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night, or in the middle of dinner something would come over him and he’d be possessed to sing. Gospel music was in his heart, but I don’t remember him ever going to church. I don’t believe he was much interested in church, only church music chased with cough medicine and whiskey. That combination of intoxicants really got him going and may have caused the accident we continue to discuss at family gatherings.

  The accident happened one day in the early 1930s. Grandfather was hacking his way though the Thicket with a machete when he accidentally cut off the first finger of his left hand. It was a clean cut. The knife sliced right through the second knuckle, and Grandfather swore that he suffered no pain. Cousin Clinton was with him at the time, but he did not witness the accident, only the result of it, and to this day no one knows exactly what happened. As far as I know, Grandfather never offered much of an explanation, but Aunt Coleta always said, “Daddy fell down on his knife, I guess.”

  One thing is certain: Grandfather came home with the severed finger in his pocket, and Aunt Coleta pickled it in a little green jar that she insisted upon calling a bottle.

  For years Grandmother kept the preserved finger in her kitchen cupboard, and when we moved to Woodville she left the finger behind. After we were gone, Aunt Coleta went rummaging through our empty house to make sure we had not forgotten anything. In the cupboard she found the finger and took it home. Some years later, she said to me, “I just don’t know why Mama left Daddy’s ole finger behind. I couldn’t leave it there all by itself. It didn’t seem right somehow.”

  For many years Aunt Coleta kept Grandfather’s finger in her bathroom behind a stack of towels, and there it stayed until she needed it to discipline her two children, her nieces and nephews, or anybody else’s children who were in her way. All day long kids were running in and out of her house. There wasn’t a child in the area who didn’t love her. She was an adult, but she was also one of us.

  Not only did she entertain us with scary stories, she was something of a spook herself. She wore store-bought glasses that magnified her eyes to an ungodly size. Her complexion was quite dark due to our Indian blood, and her arms and hands were covered with white pigmentation spots. Her front teeth were then edged in gold. Her hair was rarely combed, and, like her father, she seemed to be in touch with the unseen world. She was always telling us about a wild man, naked as a jaybird, who roamed the Big Thicket screaming like a woman with her head cut off. “How does a woman with her head cut off sound when she screams, Aunt Coleta?” we would ask, and she would throw back her head to let out a blood-curdling scream that could be heard a mile away.

  There were days when Aunt Coleta had no time to fool around with us kids, and on those days she ran us off with Grandfather’s pickled finger. “If you children don’t behave and get out of my way, I’ll get Daddy’s old finger after you,” she would say. “No!” we would scream, “don’t get the finger! Aunt Coleta whatever you do, don’t get the finger!” Then Aunt Coleta would threaten us further, “Yes sir, Daddy’s old finger’s about to crawl out of that bottle and get you if you don’t be good.” And again we would scream with a mixture of terror and delight until finally she would go into the bathroom and return with the green bottle in her hands. Waving the bottle over her head she would chase us through the house and down the dirt roads and lanes. “Bloody bones is about to get the bad little children!” she’d scream, and we would run for our lives.

  Aunt Coleta was a good runner, and she usually caught one of us. She would hold her captive to the hot sand and press the cold green jar against his neck. “Bloody bones has got you,” she’d say in a quivering voice. “I guess you’ll remember to be good from now on. And if you don’t, I’ll put daddy’s old bloody finger on you again.” We lived in terror that she would actually take the finger out of the bottle and touch us with it, but that she never did.

  “What are you going to do with that finger?” everyone wanted to know.

  “Bury it with Daddy when he goes, I guess.” That was her only answer.

But in 1952, when Grandfather died, Aunt Coleta could not bring herself to part with his finger. A few days after the funeral, however, she had second thoughts. She returned to the cemetery, and with her bare hands she scratched a hole about two feet deep and buried the green jar directly over Grandfather’s head. But that didn’t satisfy her either, and within a few days she went back to the graveyard and dug the finger up. Without explaining herself, she returned it to its proper place in her bathroom behind the towels.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she said many years later, “but I just couldn’t leave Daddy’s ole finger buried there. I couldn’t sleep a wink knowing I’d never see it again.”

  Before too many years had passed she started worrying about the finger’s future in our family. “Eddie Jr.,” she said to me one day, “What’s going to happen to Daddy’s poor finger when I die? Nobody seems to love it as much as I do.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I promised. And she replied, “That makes me feel so good. I’m going right now to put your name on it.” She went into the bathroom and wrote my name on the green bottle. It was very much like writing a last will and testament.

  Then a year of two later, and for what reason I never knew, she decided that she had kept Grandfather’s finger long enough. The next time I was home she left the green bottle on my mother’s breakfast table. When I sat down for coffee, the finger was staring me in the face. Under the bottle there was a little note from Aunt Coleta:

  “Eddie Jr., this is yours.”