Charles Carter-Farmer/Deacon/Guru

Charles Carter was many things.

Certainly, the local white community of that small country town viewed him as little more than a poor farm hand. A second-generation free slave, living and working for the man.

To his own community in town, he was a much-respected deacon at his church, and a teacher in the ramshackle black school. He was seen as a successful man, after all, he owned a house, 25 acres, and a pick-up truck.

Charles’s family roots ran as deep in local history as Jefferson’s serpentine walls.

For me, he was a good friend and all-around life guru. We were buds.

I would walk the old stagecoach road through deep woods, flanked by parallel scars that would never fully heal. They lead me to "Charles's Farm", land that Grandpa Maverick had signed over to him.

God knows he earned it.

Given to my ancient maiden aunts when he was only 12, his family believed that he would have a better life in their care, and they needed a “man” to do the manly things a farm demanded.

Those two old sisters wore long white dresses, faded yellow and smelling like a musty hamper. When I met them in 1955 the oldest one was 101, her kid sister 97. Their big house had been falling apart for years, the upper two floors closed down by the many leaks in the roof that fed the mildewed walls. The girls lived in what had once been a dining room off the kitchen. A bed unchanged since Truman first took office sat in the middle.

My grandparents inherited Charles when they bought those 325 acres of rolling hills that had been in our own family since the early 1800’s. He simply came with the land.

After the dehydrated Apple dolls that he served finally died, Charles lived in the ruins of the big Victorian house. It had been cut in half when route 29 South moved its path 275 feet North. Those ruins were his shelter until Grandpa built him a new cinder-block palace capped with a roof covered by real shingles.

A 20’ by 30’ rectangle of molded concrete and coal cinder. One room for living, one bedroom for sleeping.

He loved it.

Charles would drop whatever he was doing when I came over, he was never doing much anyway.

 We both needed time to talk and play.

Charles never stopped talking, it’s how I would find him, stand real still where the woods opened up and listen to the quiet of the valley. If he was home, I could hear him laughing, engaged in animated conversation, with himself. Charles locator GPS. I knew that on Saturday afternoons and evenings he was probably in town. “Spooning” he called it.

A square wooden table with two ladder-back chairs took up most of the space in his main room. The door- less entry to his bedroom offering a view of the metal frame bed and his “Sunday-go-to meeting” suit hung on one wall.

During one of the periodic releases that my Uncle George got from the Western State Mental Hospital where he was a long-term patient, he, my brother Kenny, Charles and I stole an outhouse for Charles. Chain smoking unfiltered Camels, George managed to squeeze his 348 pounds behind the wheel and to back his pickup to the outhouse. We threw a rope around it and pulled it up into the truck-bed. Hauled ass down the road. Charles had never had a toilet other than God’s open woods. He didn't mind that, but it bothered Grandpa. He thought Charles should have his own shithouse.

Uncle George had gotten a brief release for keeping his pain-in-the-ass ness at a minimum and was staying in the guest cottage on the East side of the property, next to the main house. He was there with "Aunt" Connie who he met in the asylum. The buttons on her blouse were never aligned. She looked like a broken zipper and rocked silently throughout dinners, grinning at some unknown joke. George held his plate high up above his bulk, near his mouth, a burning cigarette between fingers of his left hand. Smoke, shovel, smoke, shovel. Connie grinned manically at the saltshaker and rocked.  

Not long after that, Uncle George finally managed to kill himself with Thorazine and beer, but before he did, we snatched that outhouse for Charles.

I would walk over to Charles place to sit at his table, hugged by the comforting familiarity of the smoky air from his pot of beans and ham hocks that simmered eternally on the wood stove. He added beans, meat and water from the springhouse throughout the week, months and years. Like the old bottles I would pull out of what had once been a cistern over next to the ruins of the big house, there must have been things in that pot that went back too many years to count.

There were no screens on his open windows so in warm weather that bean splattered dining table was a very busy airport of landings and takeoffs. Large bottle-flies circled overhead, just below the fly strips filled with the dried exoskeletons of their ancestors. A flyswatter hanging from the back of a chair, Charles would occasionally tire of the traffic and smash ten or fifteen fatties into table goo. When the layer of dried fly guts got too thick, Charles broke out another flower-patterned plastic tablecloth. Done! At least 8 such tablecloths were in service at any given time. He owned the only three-foot square octuple decker fly sandwich in existence.

I was missing that man last night, now gone some 50 years, so I fixed a meal in his honor. Black-eyed peas with ham hocks with a side of collard greens. This morning I’ll bake fresh buttermilk biscuits from scratch. Charles did the same in a cast iron Dutch oven on top of the stove. His biscuits were crispy black on the bottom, releasing a puff of deliciously moist promise when torn apart.

Charles taught me that a little can be more than enough, a smile and an eager approach, like that old stagecoach road, the best path to get to where I want to be.

He was a very wealthy man, and he celebrated that fact all day, every day.

hmh