Glendora

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.