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Follow the fresh scent of pine trees down a winding, shaded dirt road off Louisiana’s Highway 6 in Natchitoches Parish, deep in the southwestern part of the state. You’ll pass a random spatter of tin-roof shacks and a swath of wildflowers on both sides of the road. Up a slight incline is the Shady Grove Missionary Baptist Church, a white wooden structure with a beat-up old swing set in the churchyard. Surveying all from the top of the swing set is a scary-looking wooden clown face in need of paint, surely the subject of nightmares for several generations of children. The cemetery is across the street. There is no traffic on the road, and the only people you see are a couple of stooped black women in calf-length, faded dresses printed with tiny flowers, walking slowly through their yards. Just down the hill from the church, set back a little from the road, is a long, mustard-colored trailer with a tired-looking pickup of the same dull hue parked in front. In the yard are azalea bushes and a spreading oak tree with a wooden bench hanging lazily beneath it. You’ll want to sit in the swing.
This is the Robeline, Louisiana, address of George Bush, born in 1937. His eighty-seven-year-old mother lives in a small house on the adjacent property, the family home since the early 1950s, when the forests were producing plenty of work for anyone who wanted it. One of those workers was the senior George Bush, now buried in Shady Grove Cemetery. The family’s eight children (four girls, four boys) played in the woods and attended a little school that used to stand next to the Shady Grove church. George still worships there. But the school and George’s siblings have been gone a long time.
“Everybody left,” he says. “Gone to Texas, California, and other states huntin’ work because there’s nothin’ to do down here. They had sawmill work until they used up all the timber. That was all they had to depend on for so long. But all the timber just run out. Ain’t no more timber, so the sawmills had to go. If you want a job, you gotta go somewhere else.” George and his siblings went to Houston. But he was one of the few lucky ones who could return to his childhood home after the city wore on him. He could live anywhere with his job as a truck driver.
The truck-driving job disappeared when a stroke left him partially paralyzed. Now, leaning on his cane, curling his left arm close to his body, he squints his eyes and takes in the quiet setting. He looks older than a man in his mid-sixties. He smiles slowly, creasing the bottom of his face like a broad ripple on a dark lake. “I feel blessed,” he says. For him, it seems a little is enough.
Inside the trailer, he’ll open his Bible. He’ll pull out a picture of his thirteen-year-old daughter, who lives nearby with her mother. “This is daddy’s spoiled little brat,” he says proudly. More pictures of her, as well as photos of his grown children from a previous marriage plus a handful of grandchildren, cover the walls of the trailer. He seems to have some difficulty with dates and numbers, so he is not sure of their ages.
With the family photos on his walls, his mother next door, and his church down the lane, George has surrounded himself with a loving cocoon. He spends his time reading the Bible, going to church and working in his yard. Events beyond Shady Grove Lane don’t occupy much of his time. He rarely reads a newspaper or watches television —“I’d rather be outside.” However, he does have opinions, albeit gently held and spoken slowly. On George W. Bush, for example: “Well, I didn’t care for him too much because of the way it went down in Florida. The Supreme Court put him in there. I didn’t like that but there was nothing I could do about it; he was president and you just had to accept it.” On Iraq: “He started that war. I knew a lot of people was gon’ lose their lives, and I didn’t want it to be that way, but I couldn’t do nothin’ about it. I understood his reasons. I didn’t like it, but I could understand where he was comin’ from. He explained the threat to the nation. He did what he said he was gon’ do. And I admired him for doin’ what he said. But it’s not a good war.”
George is glad to be an American, but not overwhelmingly patriotic. “I guess we are kinda free,” he says. “We’re a lot more freer than some people in other nations, and I like that. You’re just about free to do what you want, within the boundaries of the law. As far as I’m concerned, America is a beautiful place to be.” The America that George has seen encompasses parts of Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, mostly viewed from the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. He loves to travel, but doesn’t do so for pleasure. He has never gone away on vacation. He was married twice, but never went on a honeymoon.
The neighborhood around Shady Grove Baptist Church is his real country, a place where, if you ask George, racism has never been a big issue. Poverty, maybe, but not racism. “Of course, racism’s everywhere, and some places it’s a little worse than it is in others. But black and white get along pretty fair down here in this area. Racism didn’t bother us too much down here in the country. White and black grew up together. Everybody’s been around everybody for years. Not a whole lotta fightin’ and feudin’ all the time. White gotta do like black gotta do: if you want a job, you gotta go somewhere else to get one. All of us in the same boat.”
George’s father worked in the sawmills, his mother stayed home, and their marriage endured until his father died. There weren’t many frills (George can’t recall any particular Christmas presents, although he is certain there were small gifts). “They’s a lot you want, and they’s a lot you ain’t gon’ get, but we always had a good time,” he recalls. “My mom and dad was doin’ all they could just to feed us and give us clothes and a place to stay. They never had a lot of money for toys and gifts and stuff like that. They doin’ they best to try to keep us alive."
In a small village in the woods where everyone knew everyone, parents could let their children run freely. “There wadn’t nowhere for us to go, comin’ up,” George recalls. “We’d go from yard to yard, playin’ with kinfolk and friends. There was no trouble to get into. If you at a friend’s house and you go out of line, they’ll straighten you out. And then when you get back home you get straightened out again.”
George and his seven siblings all graduated from high school, but none went on to college. All three of his brothers spent time in the service. “I wanted to go, too,” George says. “When I was seventeen I tried to get my mom to sign for me to volunteer for the army, but she wouldn’t. When I got eighteen, I volunteered. And during that time they just didn’t need nobody in the army. ’Cause I volunteered and they still didn’t take me and send me nowhere. Kept putting me off. They kept sayin’, two weeks more, two weeks more, and I got tired of listenin’ to that two weeks more. I wasn’t goin’ to the army so I went to Houston. That’s when I started work driving a truck.”
Ever since I was big enough to think of what I wanted to be, it was a truck driver. And I made it to that. That was about all that was in my head comin’ up. I wanted to drive a tractor and trailer, and I went on out there and done that. I loved every bit of it. Every year of it. Every day of it. That was one thing that I loved to do. Drive trucks. I loved a truck. I just learned, I just taught myself. I was a good driver from the time I was small. When my friends started driving cars and pickups and things like that, I’d say, “Uh-uhh.” I say, “Cars too little. I don’t like drivin’ nothing that small. I love a tractor and trailer.” I say, “Gimme something long.” It started with my father when I was real small. I’d always want to go with him to the sawmills around in the neighborhood. I would watch him drive and he’d tell me, do this and do that. He got where he could trust me with the truck. I’d say, “Dad, can I keep the truck today?” And he’d say, “Yeah, be careful!” And I’d drive all the way back through the woods. That’s how I got to be a good driver. When I was in high school, everybody would get me to drive for ’em for odd jobs around the country, hauling wood or whatever. I would drive for any and ever body around the community. When I was eighteen, soon as I was old enough, I got a commercial license. And I drove until I had a stroke in ’99 . That was the end of my truck driving career. That was all I knew to do, drive a truck, ’cause that’s all I had ever done. Tractor and trailer, that’s what I loved, tractor and trailer.
I can hear it in your voice. What did you love about it?
What I loved about it was just going, I believe. Going different places. I’d go in and out of Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, states surrounding Louisiana. So many places, so many things you could see up and down the highways. While I was drivin’, I was listenin’ to those blues and jazz. Blues, mostly. I gotta have me some music. I love music. I love those down-home blues. I was just up and down the road working, listenin’ to those blues and jazz. |
