Memories of the Eastabuchie McLemores in the 1930s and 1940s

Last week I drove to a trailer park in Petal, Mississippi to speak with Bill, a cousin of my father's. Bill is 84 years old and lives with his wife, both of them ailing but managing. Like most of the Eastabuchie McLemores, Bill stayed on the margins after leaving the Old Place.

Bill's father was one of the McLemore brothers who ran the still. Bill's parents and their six children lived in two rooms on the left side of the dogtrot cabin originally built in the 1830s by Major Amos McLemore's father, John. My grandmother Elma, her sister Lessie lived in two rooms on the right side with their collective children, seven or eight in all, and their mother Mary Etta Lee McLemore. Leroy McLemore, Elma's and Lessie's brother, lived in a back room. The kitchen was also in the back. The dogtrot had no front door, allowing air to cool the two halves of the cabin.  During the rural electrification campaign in the late 1930s, two rooms got wired for electricity.

Bill remembers Major McLemore's Confederate sword hanging beside the cabin's mantlepiece (my father remembered it atop the mantlepiece).

Bill knew about the McLemore brothers' still, which moved to four or five different locations over the years. They had eight to ten barrels of mash ready at a given time. "Distributors" would buy about five gallons at a time from the McLemores, then sell the whiskey out of their houses. Bill said he "helped sample some of it." According to a cousin of mine, my aunt and the other children stood lookout for the distilling operation; if someone unfamiliar showed up, they were to ring a bell.

The McLemore brothers ended the whiskey operation at some point in the 1940s when Leroy and Howard opened cafes/beer joints (each of them had his own). Ed Payne did not find my great-uncles' names on any lists of inmates at the state penitentiary at Parchman at any time during the 1930s and 1940s. As Ed observed, those omissions raise questions. The McLemores had been sentencied in the late 1930s to hard time in the state penitentiary for Possessing a Still and Possessing Liquor offenses. Did the McLemore brothers agree to shut down the still permanently in exchange for some sort of reprieve? Rough justice like that would be more or less unthinkable today, but it certainly would have been a common-sensical proposition, one I surely would have accepted had I been Howard or Leroy McLemore.

Bill's memory of my grandmother, Elma Rose McLemore, was very scant, or so he let on. He did say that Elma was close to a particular female McLemore living at the Old Place. I know that my own aunt, Dad's sister, forbade her kids from associating with several of her and Dad's female cousins in this line for their reputed laissez faire dealings with men, and my mother recalls my father's recounting that "the women" -- meaning these particular women, his mother Elma, and possibly others -- went to New Orleans to "go bad."

Bill did remember that the land that my father's father's family tenant-farmed adjoined the McLemore property near the cemetery and that Elma would hop the fence to talk to my father's father, Rudis, as he worked. Rudis's family grew watermelons according to Dad's sister. She told me Rudis was big and handsome and played the guitar. "This was all too much for Mother," according to my aunt, and before long Elma married Rudis and moved him into the Old Place. He stayed there only sixteen days. My September 16, 2009 post quotes my aunt's recounting of the night Rudis slipped out. The McLemore brothers gathered in the wide hallway of the dogtrot with kerosene lamps and shotguns before going out after him, without success. Elma kept fainting and being brought back around. Rudis's family left the area soon after that. By all accounts when Rudis left, Elma lost whatever innocence she had left.

Bill remembered the death several years later, on December 17, 1937, of Shirley, my father's eight-year-old sister. Bill didn't witness it, but he learned Shirley had run off the school bus towards the house across the road because Uncle Leroy was supposed to have bought a radio that day and she was eager to see it. A drunk was at the wheel of the car that struck her, which didn't immediately stop. Shirley's sister, my aunt, then thirteen years old, accompanied Shirley's dead body to the hospital, where she waited for hours alone for a familiar adult. Elma was eventually found in a bar.

If Elma was an alcoholic, the condition seems to have been predetermined. According to Bill, two of her sons and at least one of her brothers all had drinking problems, and by the time Elma was thirty she had had five children by five different men, had been abandoned by two, one of whom she adored, had lost one child to a tragedy and, with her large extended family, including about thirteen children, was living in an unplumbed dogtrot cabin in the Piney Woods firmly in the Great Depression's maw.

Maybe not surprisingly given what reality had dealt the family, Elma's mother, Mary Etta Lee McLemore, was not a religious person, despite being a charter member of the Eastabuchie Baptist Church. In fact, Mary knew about her sons' still and even mixed the whiskey with camphor and used the mixture for -- Bill didn't know what. Possibly a salve that Dad remembered "Grandma" would continually rub onto her legs. She'd also use the moonshine to make herself a "toddy" before bed.  Bill knew about the leg problem but didn't know what it was. Grandma used to sit on the porch a lot. She would make switches out of gallberry bushes and switch the children for "fussing." Still, Bill somehow remembers her as a kind person.