It is one of the
world’s dreadful, dreary places reminiscent of a third-world village stricken
by a natural disaster. But its aged inhabitants, descendants of the brave, strong
souls who conquered the wilderness there, still remember the beauty, the glory,
the sadness that was Glendora, Mississippi. Come now, O Muse, and tell how Biker Guy endured
cold, battled dogs, rode over pavement, pushed through gravel, inexorably drawn
to the Oracle of Tallahatchie where he received the story of Glendora, a story
that left him stunned, silent, and sleepless.
I, Biker Guy, was
in my own home and minding my own business when something like the hand of God
touched me. Immediately I became restless, pacing the floors of my house like a
leopard paces inside a cage. When coffee failed, my hand found a familiar
volume of county maps. Hastily and seemingly without purpose, I flipped from
page to page until my eyes gazed over the well-worn, personally annotated
Tallahatchie County Road Map. My fingers traced a line that peeled off of
Teasdale Road to the east just on the outskirts of Charleston. I have never
ridden that one, I said to myself. But that wasn’t it; my eyes shifted left, to
the western part of the county. Glendora. I’ve been there, an ugly place of poverty
and hopelessness.
I used to think I
rode to find stories. Now I know that I ride and stories find me. I have to
make myself available, but the stories come from the outside. Was there a story
at Glendora? How could there be in such a place as that? Why was I drawn to
ride there? I didn’t know; sometimes the ride answers the questions. Sometimes the
ride doesn’t.
Having friends,
church members, in Tutwiler, I thought maybe I could make it a two-fer — I
could ride through Glendora and then go up and see my people in Tutwiler. By
golly, that was a plan and it got me excited, so excited in fact that I didn’t
even go to the DSU Masters Swim practice that Thursday night. I have swum 307
miles this year, so obviously swimming means a lot to me. But sometimes a ride
just takes over; I was taken over. I spent the evening of Thursday November 11,
2010, getting my clothes together, washing my water bottles, charging the
batteries on my camera, retiring early to bed. Friday morning I would ride.
Jaybirds were scolding
squirrels and the sun was breaking the eastern horizon when I pedaled my recently
tuned up Trek over the Tallahatchie Bridge and onto Money Road. The air was
cold but the sky was blue and the forecast was for high seventies by
mid-afternoon. Thirteen miles out, a
pack of six angry hounds gave me severe chase. This had happened before, and I
had to sprint hard to keep their snapping teeth out of my skinny calves. At the
end of Money Road, still breathing hard from my sprint, I had the fortitude to
turn west instead of east where a cup of hot coffee and a soft chair awaited me
in the hamlet of Phillipp barely two miles away.
Not far west from
where Money Road joins Highway 8 is a small, nondescript road that connects to
another road that leads to Minter City. At Minter City, another untraveled-by-strangers
road heads north towards Glendora. The catch here is that the road turns gravel
and makes a large circle. But somewhere on the left is a small gravel road that
connects to Glendora. At the gravel, I dismounted my bike, took off my CamelBak
Mule, and unpacked my running shoes. A quick change of footwear and I was
pushing my bicycle on the gravel traveling to my destined fate. But after a
mile and a half, I had the terrible feeling that something was wrong. And it
was.
Someone stole the
road. Really. It ain’t there. There is absolutely no way I could have walked
past and not have seen it. So I made the big loop and came all the way back to
Minter City, frustrated, confused, and late. My friends in Tutwiler were
expecting me in just a little while, and I had made absolutely no progress in
getting there.
So then I did what I
really didn’t want to do: I rode up Highway 49. With the rumble-strip and the
huge eighteen-wheelers roaring north and south, riding the five miles from
Minter City to Glendora was like dodging dragons over and over again. With the
approach of each monster, I would cross the rumble strip, dismount the bike,
and prepare to hurl my body into the ditch if necessary.
But battling dogs
and facing eighteen-wheelers made riding into Glendora a relief. Although I
felt pressed for time, I rode east to see if the bridge and the road I had
tried to come in on from Minter City were still there. The bridge was there but
no longer in use. A pile of dirt had been bulldozed in front blocking the road
for traffic. Vines grew over the rusting but once magnificent structure. I got
off the bike and walked over, the cleats on my biking shoes clicking like the
hoofs of a horse.
On the other side of the bridge, the gravel road I had sought
led south through the delta farmland. While I gazed to the south tracing the
road with my eyes as far as I could see, an ancient woman standing on the porch
of a sprawling, decaying house to my left caught my attention and motioned for me
the come to her. I pushed my bike into her yard, wondering what she wanted.
“It doesn’t go
through anymore,” she said.
I eyed her
suspiciously. Her hair was white and her face looked like firecrackers had gone
off under the skin and then the damage had been pressed back down by a hot
waffle iron. She looked, at best, like a very old version of The Wizard of Oz’s wicked witch of the
west. A very old version.
 |
| I took a picture of the old woman on her porch. |
“The road,” she
added, obviously seeing my confusion.
“The road?”
“The one you wanted
to push through from Minter City.”
“Oh, yeah. I
noticed. How did you . . .?”
“I have coffee
ready,” she said interrupting me and going inside. I leaned my bike against the
porch, took off my biking shoes, and climbed the steps.
“Come on in,” she
yelled from behind a screen door.
I walked in and the wood
door closed behind me. Going inside was like entering a cave and I half
expected bats to be hanging from the ceiling. I found her seated at a small kitchen
table that joined her living room. The room was dark and the house was
oppressively hot with a gas heater on a nearby wall burning fiercely. A black
cat hissed at me and went slinking off into the shadows. I began at once to
sweat. She was a frightful looking thing maybe a hundred years old, and immediately
I felt uneasy, nervous, afraid.
“The county cut
that road off three years ago. Sit,” she said pointing with a long arthritic
finger to a cup of coffee she had already poured.
“How did you know .
. .?”
“He came walking
into town in 1866. Spring time,” she said interrupting me again.
“Who?” I asked
noticing a demonic-looking figurine peeking at me from a little shelf on the
wall.
“This place was
called Cain’s Landing after Peter Cain who was one of the first whites to
settle here before the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Cain was the one who had
the vision to leave room for the railroad tracks, and to make the main street
wide enough. By the time of the Civil War, a three-story hotel stood on the
south side of Main Street. It was a magnificent structure with all sorts of
decorative woodwork and a blank sign over the front door because big John Jones
couldn’t make up his mind what to call the place. He walked down Main Street
and into the hotel . . . .”
“Who? Who walked
into town and down Main Street and into the hotel?”
“Him,” she said
pointing that painful looking finger at an ancient photograph she laid on the
table. “Glen.”
 |
| My great, great uncle, W. S. Krebbs. |
“Hey. He looks familiar,”
I said straining my eyes in the darkness of the room. “I’ve seen that
photograph. I have it!”
“That,” she said, “is
Stephen Krebbs’ brother.”
“Stephen Krebbs! He’s
my . . .”
“Great, great
grandfather,” she said finishing my sentence.
“How do you know
all this? And you called him Glen. His name,” I said pointing at the picture, “was
W. S.”
“You’re right. His
name was W. S. But when he came here after the War, he went by Glen.”
“After the War? The
information my momma gave me says he died at Shiloh.”
“He did fight at
Shiloh and was wounded in the battle, but he didn’t die there. He had a friend
write home and say he had passed.”
“What? You mean he
let his family think he was dead? Why?”
“His brother, Stephen,
could and did pass for white. He married a white woman and went on with his
life after the War. But Glen, he looked like a full-blooded Indian, and he knew
what life would be like for him if he went back to Louisville, Mississippi. So
after the war he wanted a new start and he began wandering around Tennessee and
northern Mississippi and eventually he wound up here. He had a restless spirit
of wanderlust, the desire to see, to know his world. You have his spirit.”
The coffee was good
but my head was spinning as I tried to understand what was happening. I didn’t
even know this woman’s name, but when she spoke again, her voice lassoed me
like a cowboy ropes a steer, and I was as captive as if I had been placed in
handcuffs and leg irons and locked behind bars.
“He came walking up
Main Street in his Confederate uniform on a sunny spring day and everything
female fell in love. The old women wanted to be his mother, and the young women
wanted to marry him. He walked right into the hotel, slapped down a twenty
dollar gold piece and rented a room. ‘Anything else?’ John Jones asked him.
‘Yeah, a job,’ was his reply. Jacob Coleman, who was standing nearby having
come into the hotel to pick up his mail, asked ‘What can you do?’ All the swarthy stranger said in return was
‘Work.’ Coleman hired him on the spot.”
I think she gave me
something to eat at this point, maybe a sausage and biscuit, but I’m not even
sure. It was like the room just kept getting darker and the only reality was
her voice and my hearing it, a voice that drew me ever deeper into her story.
“Jacob Coleman
owned 160 acres on the edge of town, right over there” she said pointing but I’m
not sure where. “Most of his land, almost everything around here then was
covered in the delta’s primeval forest. Coleman had a milk cow, raised pigs and
chickens, grew a garden, and cultivated about one acre of cotton. Like most of
the farmers here, he would clear a little bit of land every year, ringing the
trees with an axe, and then after they died, chop them down the next year when
the wood was softer. The third year he would remove the stumps by burning,
chopping, digging, or pulling them up with mules. Each spring he would add one
or two rows to his cotton patch. He set Glen to chopping which Glen proved to
be very good at. With shirt off and perspiration dripping from bronzed body, he
became the main attraction for all the ladies and lasses of Cain’s Landing.
The
women even formed a bird-watching society, which was nothing more than an
excuse to wander in the countryside and watch Glen Krebbs chop wood. Coleman
thought that was amusing until he noticed his own daughter gazing upon Krebbs’
dark torso. When he caught the two chatting familiarly one day while Glen ate
his lunch in the back yard, Coleman fired him on the spot. This was a huge blow
to Glen who, though he had no money, did have energy and intelligence. And
since he was half-white and had fought for and shed blood for the Confederacy,
he felt qualified to court a white girl. Little did he know of the Delta
mentality.”
“What did he do
then?”
“He walked back to
Main Street and got another job. He worked some for the hotel, sweeping,
painting, patching; he worked some for the blacksmith shop; he did odd jobs for
several people who lived in or near town. But those with daughters always fired
him. No need though; Glen had eyes for only one girl: Coleman’s daughter.”
“How did Coleman
keep them apart?”
“How? For awhile,
they saw each other only at church, although they were forbidden to speak to
one another. Still, it was obvious to anyone with a pulse that they were madly
in love. Then it became common to hear a shotgun blast late in the night once
or twice a week out near the Coleman farm. Glen came in to work one morning at
the hotel with a wrapped up right arm. Seems that somehow he got shot, grazed
by a buckshot pellet, there,” she said touching me on the elbow.
I startled and
thoughtlessly pulled down my arm warmer revealing a ragged scar on my right
elbow. “I, uh, I fell on a sling blade when I was a boy,” I stammered.
“This went on for
three years,” she started back. In the room I could see only her eyes now. It
was like I drifted, bodiless, right through her blues eyes and into the world of
Glen Krebbs. “Although they didn’t approve, everyone in town wondered why they
didn’t run off and marry. But Jacob Coleman died and then, despite Mrs.
Coleman’s embarrassment, her daughter and Glen courted openly. When they
married in the Presbyterian Church, the only person to attend, besides Mrs.
Coleman, was John Jones.”
“He never won the
town people over?”
“People liked Glen,
they admired him even, but the color line was too strong for them to cross.
Still he achieved a certain amount of respectability. He moved in with the
Colemans and took over the farm. They had two children and Glen kept expanding
the cotton patch until it was a five acre field, enough in that day to make a
decent living and even to save a bit. Then some long hunters came through.”
“Long hunters?”
“They called them
long hunters because they left home for long periods of time, up to two years,
and hunted and trapped. This was a mangy, dangerous bunch, five of them, out of
Tennessee. They stayed around the saloon for a few days and having seen Glen’s
wife, they became enamored of her. Since she was married to an Indian, they
presumed her to be a woman of ill-repute. Catching her walking from town one
night, they pounced upon her and when she resisted, they violated and murdered
her right out there not a couple of hundred yards from her own front door.”
“What? They killed
my uncle’s wife!!”
“Brutally and
without mercy. The next morning Glen walked out of town the opposite direction
from which he had walked in seven years earlier. Only this time his face was
covered in war paint. He tracked down the long hunters and killed them, brutally
and without mercy, one by one. When word got out that an Indian had killed four white men a couple of months later, a posse of a dozen men showed up looking
for Glen who was living back at the farm then. Glen took to the run and for ten
months they tracked him like a wounded deer always a step behind him. Then on
April 15, 1874, exactly one year to the day after the murder of his wife, Glen
Krebbs was found hanging from the porch of the hotel.”
“Hanging? They caught
him?”
“They would have
never caught him. He did it himself. He could live no longer without her.”
The darkness was
now complete. I hung my head and silently but forcefully wept. A paper towel
found my hand in the dark, and I wiped my face, blew my nose, sighed deeply.
“What happened to
his children?” I asked after regaining a measure of composure.
“Who knows? Mrs.
Coleman died soon after and the kids just disappeared. Some said the Indians
got them. There was a light-skinned strain in the last bunch of them that was
in this country.”
We sat in silence
for at least a dozen minutes. Then I realized, “Her name? You never even told
me her name.”
“Dora,” she
answered. “Her name was Dora.”
There was another
span of silence while the light slowly came back into the room. Then she arose
and spoke: “You must go now. Your friends in Tutwiler wait for you.”
And with that I,
Biker Guy, left. I got on my bike, and made my way out of town and up the old
Highway 49. I rode away, far far away from the glory, but not one inch and not
one second from the sadness that was and is Glendora, Mississippi.
