Elizabeth Kell Tells How it Was Growing up during the Early 1900’s in Madison Parish

From the August 14, 1975 Centennial Edition Madison Journal

Madison Parish seems to have managed somehow to have weathered floods, boll weevils, low cost cotton, wars —.

Tallulah is a beautiful little town with its well-kept bayou, and azaleas (which didn't used to grow here), the well-painted homes, paved streets and sidewalks.

Once the danger of floods kept many from exerting much effort on flower gardens. The streets were muddy. There were no sidewalks, and I seem to remember a plank road near the depot.

Electric lights were turned off by the town at 10 o'clock at night . The town's water was so hard that we used rainwater from our big outdoor tank tor shampoos. There weren't any beauty parlors. (Who remembers the curling tongs smoking over lamp chimneys when you dressed for a dance?)

We moved to Tallulah from Point Clear Plantation, where we were born, in about 1919. My memories go back to steamboats, until 1918, the deep blowing of the "America", blowing for Carthage, our landing. As a little girl I was once placed in charge of the America's Captain Cooley, to travel to the Burn to visit my uncle and aunt, Dr. and Mrs. Kirk McMillan. I liked the long white saloon, the tin wash basins in the cabins, the songs and racket of the rouster bouts.

Carthage, once a flourishing town, is no longer on the river. Our landing had a warehouse kept by a Norwegian we called Mr. Frank. He lived there for years and died in a small house near our gin. His past was mysterious, his life lonely. At Christmas we children took him gifts. Oysters, fruit, great sacks of ice for our long, wooden icebox on the back gallery, and barrels of supplies for the store and house were unloaded.

Carriages and buggies were used, and we rode our horses the six miles to little Afton School, the only school in the community. As very small children we had to have a governess. At noon at the little school the teacher would play the organ and we gathered about to sing "Nita-Juanita", "Ole Black Joe", and other favorites. The little school house often did double‑duty for dances, when young and old gathered to dance by Rufus' music. Ice cream freezers and cakes were unloaded and everyone enjoyed it.

The first automobile was bought by my indulgent father shortly after 1912, an EMF (he called it Every Mechanical Fault). This was used only when the dirt roads dried up enough to be dragged. Erin, one of our many beautiful horses, never got used to automobiles and would rear and snort when one appeared.

One day word came from the store that an airplane (wonder of wonders!) had passed over. Soon after we moved to Tallulah, air dusting planes were a common sight. Tallulah was the center for pioneer crop dusting for boll weevils. Each summer crowds of college boys came to work at the station. We called them "the bug boys." They enlivened our dances.

There was the 1912 flood, the break at Alsatia. My father was president of the 5th District Levee Board, and we all shared his anxiety. We watched the water creep up in the ditches from the woods back of the house, covering orchard, vegetable garden until the house was an island. Little rabbits and deer fled to the levee. Negroes came in "dugouts" to the store for provisions. Our whole family was rowed in a long skiff by two strong black oarsmen in the turbulent Mississippi, past Davis Island to the Burn to see how our relatives had faired.

They told of the 1897 flood when my father went out alone to search for stranded Negroes on Cholula. His skiff was caught in a current and he was left in a tree. After some time searchers found him.

Just before the 1927 flood, Madison Parish looked like a flower garden. "But the levees can't hold. They have to give somewhere," they said. When the crevasse came at Cabin Teele, near Milliken’s Bend, railroad cars were waiting to carry people out. My always brave mother was at the phone saying, "Don't worry. Everything is scaffold up. I will be leaving for New Orleans." The town soon became a sea.

Few people were left in town. My brother Mandeville and other men grew beards. He and I lived upstairs in our home. Dear, faithful Sam Summers, our cook for many years, was with us. Emma Sevier Nadler and I rowed about town, bumping into trees and submerged fences. The young had a care-free feeling while waiting for the water to go down. When it left the lower floors of our house my brother and I scraped away the debris. The streets were left red with crawfish, which Tallulahians did not eat in those days. Fishing in the bayou was a wonderful sport. As fast as you put in a hook, you pulled out a fish.

Point Clear was like a small community with the big house behind a grove on a bluff above Bayou Vidal, the store and behind it a cottage for clerks, bookkeeper and manager. These men took their meals at the Big House as often did the drummers Mr. Skinner, Mr. Carson and others from Vicksburg and Natchez wholesalers. Near the store was a gin, the Italians' fruit and meat market, the blacksmith shop. All gone now. The levee went through the spot. Only the poor, old house is left.

There were always guests welcomed. Major Rigard, an aristocratic old gentleman would drive up whenever he wished, throw his reins to the hostler and settle for a visit of a week, a month. "We were glad to see him go if he stayed too long." they said. He was the model for Sam James' novel, "The Prince of Good Fellows."

Young people today imagine that our lives were dull without TV and radios. Our great joy came with dances. The Opera House in Tallulah, (now a vacant lot) was filled with jazz and gaiety when the young men of the town would hire "name" Negro bands to play." There was the long "stag line" breaking on girls at every step, moonlight waltzes and "no break specials" the walls lined with young and old, mothers often with flashlights to keep an eye on daughters. We danced "cheek to cheek". We went to dances in Newellton where shelves of a store held sleeping children and to pavilions over Lake Bruin where Bud Scott's band from Natchez played "It's Three O’clock in the Morning" and "He's A Jelly Bean" for the two step, Castle Walk.

The railroad trains were convenient. We drove eight miles to Quimby to catch the Missouri Pacific to Tallulah, Newellton and Natchez. We changed in Tallulah to the VS and P for Jackson. The memories of the aroma of sizzling steak in the diners and; of the comfort of sleepers tended by fine porters is still with us.

It was shortly after 1912 that we drove the 17 miles to Tallulah in our new EMF to see our first movie, "Neptune's Daughter", with Annette Kellerman at the Opera House. Soon after we joined our Newell cousins of Lake Place and journeyed to Natchez to see the Birth of the Nation. The Confederate Veterans, rose up in their seats and cave a terrifying Rebel Yell. They let us know that they were still around.

As children we had malaria, although the house was screened, and in the spring were dosed with quinine, Groves Chill Tonic, a horrible sweetish concoction, and calomel.

Point Clear usually had a doctor. Plantation owners paid him a salary to care for black and whites. I have a faint memory of the last yellow fever epidemic when I was four in 1905. The entire family and aunts and cousins escaped by train from Vicksburg to North Carolina. Windows of the train were locked for fear we would spread contagion. So many died in Tallulah that they buried them at night. Now you never hear of a case of malaria or yellow fever.

And then there were the plantations' names, which designated where everyone lived—Waverly, next to Point Clear, lone, Cholula, Lost Ball, Pinchemeasy (named when the buyer asked the seller to pinch him easy), Trinidad, Goodhope, Laclede, Huron, Squeedunk. Lovely names. Much better than the name of ranch, Bob Jones farm, Smith's place they use now sometimes.

Gone are the cabins, the plantation stores or commissaries, the wonderful Negro bands.

Madison Parish—a good place to be born in, to live in because of its people and its land. May God always bless it.