Honoring a Life Well Spent

When recording Mr. Arlie O’Bryant’s stories, John Coykendall documented his unique expressions and regional speech patterns. Some of the quoted conversations below have been edited for clarity and ease of reading.

Last week, one of my greatest teachers died. Mr. Arlie O’Bryant, who was in his 105^th year, departed this life.

When Mr. Arlie was born in 1920, Woodrow Wilson was president and rural Washington Parish, Louisiana, was still living the ways of life dating back to the last century. Mr. Arlie spent his early years on the family farm, where at the age of 10, his father taught him how to plow various patches with a mule.

“When I first learned to plow, I was too short to reach the plow handles, so my ole daddy made me a cross piece lower on the plow handles so I could guide the plow between the rows,” Mr. Arlie told me.

Stories such as that were the beginning of stories that I would record for over 30 years. Mr. Arlie once stated that their life was on the farm, and that there were no other jobs to be had.

“In terms of the crops that were raised, the main two were corn and cotton, and all of our food came from the farm. We had pigs, chickens, geese, sweet potatoes, okra, tomatoes and all such as that.”

Over the years, I was fortunate enough to fill numerous moleskin notebooks with stories, legends, tales, history and detailed accounts of daily life on the farm. Then there were stories about syrup making in the late Fall.

“We never pressed cane till after a heavy frost came. The frost brought the sugar up in the cane. Law, I fed that cane to the press on many a cold mornin’, filling up barrels of cane juice to be cooked off in the evaporator pan that set on top of the woodfired oven.”

Mr. Arlie only went to the third grade in school. After that, he was needed for work on the farm.

“Come cotton pickin’ time, Daddy made me a little cotton pickin’ sack. I was too short to reach the higher up cotton, so I picked the lower cotton bolls.”

Over the years, I always recorded Mr. Arlie’s stories using his unique language, which contained a rich mixture of backwoods English along with some words and phrases dating back to our early history, when a good amount of Elizabethan English was still in use.

If I had recorded Mr. Arlie’s stories using the English that is spoken today, all of the stories would have none of the character and old ways of expression that he used in his everyday speech. In rural isolated areas, the old ways and speech were handed down from generation to generation and remained intact, free from modern influence.

Over 20 years ago, when I was on one of my visits to Mr. Arlie’s, we were seated on his front porch. As usual, I had my book and pencil in hand. I was busy recording one of his stories when another man joined us on the front porch. As was always the case, when someone would arrive, Mr. Arlie would say, “Come on ’round, sit down and take a load off.”

When the man sat down, he asked Mr. Arlie, “What’s that man writin’ in that book?” Mr. Arlie replied, “That’s Uncle John from Tennessee, what comes down here and writes them books on me.”

There were many stories about strong family and community ties. During those early years, there was no welfare, social security or other means of acquiring financial relief. Mr. Arlie told me a good number of stories that related to the community coming together when a person or family was in need of assistance.

When a member of the community died, the church bell would toll out the number of years the individual had lived. As soon as the bells sounded, the men in the community would leave whatever work they were doing, load up picks and shovels, and head to the graveyard where they would set in to digging the grave.

There was no mortuary that was close to the community, so the old traditions were still in place. In the living room of the deceased person’s home, two sawhorses with a door were placed on top. Over this structure a quilt was placed, and the deceased, which had been dressed for burial, was “laid out.” Then, the practice of “settin’ up with the dead” was a part of the ceremony.

One or more persons would sit through the night until the following morning, when the body would be placed in a wooden casket for burial, then placed on a mule-drawn wagon. From there, the procession would travel from the home to the cemetery, followed by family members and friends from the community. After the ceremony was delivered by the preacher, the casket was then lowered down.

I am now in the process of going through my many years worth of books and bringing all recorded material into one book. My most difficult task will be coming up with a good title for the book. There are so many possibilities.

I want to list a few of the old words and sayings that Mr. Arlie used in his daily speech: his’n, her’n, yorn, ourn, ther’n, atter dark, fore daylight and tote-tot’n.

Mr. Arlie was a man of deep faith. He once recalled a time when he and his father, Mr. Cornellius O’Bryant, were plowing out their cotton field, and the preacher dismounted from his horse and walked down to where they were plowing.

“The preacher come up to us and said, ‘Boys, let’s have us a prayer right here in this cotton patch,’ and we stopped plowin’ and done just that. We held prayer right there in that cotton patch.”

When I first met Mr. Arlie, I recall asking him where his ancestors came from. He replied, “Uncle John, my people come from that island across the great water.” He was referring to Ireland.

One of my favorite stories that he told me was about the time when some of his father’s fishing traps “come up missin’.” After Mr. Cornellius discovered that several of his fish traps were missing, he decided to lay in wait behind the cover of tall weeds so that he could discover who the thief was.

“After a little while, there come ole man Henson walkin’ along the riverbank. Directly he took his britches off and went to wadin’ out to where them traps was set. Soon as ole man Henson bent over, my daddy cut loose with both barrels of that shotgun. Daddy had both barrels loaded with peas and tamped down with cotton. Ole man Henson jumped plum outta that river, and my daddy said, ‘Don’t you never touch one of my traps again.’ They said ole man Henson was picking peas outta his bottom for four days.”

Over the years dating back to 1973, I was fortunate enough to have known and recorded the stories of a number of other older people from Washington Parish. All of them are gone now, including Mr. Arlie O’Bryant, who was the last man standing.

Besides losing Mr. Arlie and others over the years, gone are the voices and the times that I spent recording their stories. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there is always that nagging question: “How many stories and how much knowledge was left unrecorded?” I am reminded of the old saying that states, “When an old person dies, it’s like a library that has burned to the ground.”

Mr. Arlie, we will miss your stories and knowledge that you passed on to all of us. My pledge to you is that your stories will live on and be inspiration to us and future generations.

– John Coykendall, Blackberry Farm Master Gardener