The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  This thick document, prefaced with letters of support from President John F. Kennedy, Governor Orval Faubus, and the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior, focuses all its words, and its graphs and charts, on the expenditure of less than a million dollars to control the Red River for one mile upstream from the bridges at Garland City by stabilizing the banks with “pile dikes, rock groins, board revetment, and channel excavation.” The exact purpose of this work, other than the protection of the bridge approaches, is not clear.

  Like all Corps of Engineer projects, which have become a joke or bugbear for environmentally conscious Arkansawyers, it was over-zealous meddling and bureaucratic make-work, and did little for the town of Garland City, which actually lost a little of its population in the decade following. In contrast to most of these lost cities, Garland City has had a relatively stable population through several censuses, though “stable” may just mean “stagnant” here: the town numbered 325 in 1940, 351 in 1950, 377 in 1960 at its peak, and back down to 321 in 1970. Through annexation of outlying “suburbs” in the 1970s, the official census of 1980 doubled the population to 660, but that was not evident in the appearance of human activity in the town.

  Among our lost cities, this is the only one named for a man rather than for a substance, tribe, geographic feature, state, animal, or location. But of Rufus Garland, who set up that mercantile store at Lost Prairie in 1833 and died the same year, very little is known other than the coincidence of his given name, which means “red” like the river. Much more is known about his son, Augustus Hill Garland, born the year before and only one year old when his father died and his mother moved a few miles away from the river, into Hempstead County. He is the Garland for whom Garland County (which comes next) is named, and, elsewhere in Arkansas, Garland Creek, Garland Lake, Garland Mountain, Garland Springs, Garland School, and a Garland Street in every large town.

  Augustus Garland gave his name to the legal case known as Ex parte Garland, in which he challenged before the Supreme Court the right of the re-United States to deny him the right to challenge the Supreme Court in matters of law because he had been on the Confederate side during the unpleasantries of 1861—65. After winning that case, he went on to become governor of Arkansas and U.S. senator from Arkansas, and, more important, the first and only Arkansawyer ever given a Cabinet post, when President Cleveland appointed him attorney general to balance his Cabinet with a Southern and Western point of view. In our judicious year of 1886, the legal affairs of the nation were handled by Attorney General Garland.

  He was a legend in Washington because of his refusal to wear dress suits, a personal quirk of fashion of which he had warned President Cleveland before his appointment, and which the president condoned by the simple expedient of not inviting him to any dress functions. He also favored corncob pipes years before they became a trademark of another Arkansawyer, General Douglas MacArthur, and kept a demijohn jug of corn liquor handy until one day he simply decided that “I have had my share” and remained a teetotaler for the rest of his life. His tenure as attorney general was tarnished by a scandal involving the telephone company in those early, predivestiture days before Bell’s monopoly, when he owned stock in Bell’s competitor; a congressional investigation lasting for a year kept him nervous.

  Returned to private life and law, Garland sought, like Peter Mankins, to watch the new century come in, but, also like Mankins, he fell short, dying in 1899.

  More Garlands around the country have been named for Hamlin Garland than for (no relation) Augustus. The Son of the Middle Border who Travelled Main Roads in search of Prairie Folks discovered that rural life is not so idyllic and pastoral as it was cut out to be in the popular mind of the 1890s, and dispelled that image at the cost of exaggerating the poverty of the peasant. Rural poverty is as mythic as pastorality, and both are relative, subjective, and alien to the true city-dweller. Hamlin Garland spent too much time in Boston before returning to the Middle Border.

  No one in Garland City has read Hamlin Garland, but no one there can tell you anything about Augustus Garland, either. The place has no sense of history and knows little of its own past. There is not one local historian who can tell, let alone publish, the chronicles of the town’s long, slow transformation from Lost Prairie into Garland City. Except for those two government-printed documents 130 years apart, there is no literature of Garland City. Kim will have to start from scratch, and she decides, because of her luck with the mayor at Lake City and the mayor’s wife at Arkansas City, to scratch first at the mayor’s door. This isn’t too hard to find: separated by a vacant lot from the newish, official-looking U.S. Post Office building is a row of nonofficial but utilitarian-looking buildings, or sheds, metal and brick, that might be part of a construction site’s temporary offices but are marked with an official sign on metal, “CITY HALL,” and a less official echo on plywood, “City HaLL.” The former lists NEW information on dumping hours, but there is no town dump in sight—unless, as a local wag suggests, it refers to “dumping on” the mayor additional problems. A large late-model automobile is parked out front.

  Martha Franklin owns the car. Her salary as mayor is only $200 a month, but she gets a lot more than that moonlighting mornings as a postal-route driver for the post office, which she has done for thirty-seven years. Unlike Pat Quails of Lake City and Judy Bixler of Arkansas City, Mrs. Franklin is no forty-three-year-old beauty; she is “getting up there in years,” a matriarchal figure who does not simply govern the town but rules it, upheld by the town marshal, who just happens to be her husband.

  Kim opens the door of City Hall and finds herself at once in the main meeting room, where two women, one young, the other old, are sitting at a table, painting ceramic figurines. They look up from their work as she enters.

  “I’m looking for the mayor,” Kim says.

  “I am she,” declares Martha Franklin, with a note of authority in a Southwestern drawl that is all business and no nonsense. Her dress and makeup, like her speech, are smart and neat.

  When Kim had introduced herself and explained her mission, she is offered a chair and introduced to the younger woman, who is Mrs. Franklin’s secretary, Peggy Mauldin, age twenty-nine, like Mrs. Franklin a native of Miller County. Her official title is “assistant mayor,” but that includes a lot of things, like helping the mayor paint these figurines.

  Kim finds it unusual that the ladies are engaged in such work during official hours, and she indicates a row of the compote ceramics and inquires, “Is this part of your regular duties?” Both ladies laugh, and Mrs. Franklin explains that it is just part of a fund-raising campaign. They are always doing things to raise money for the fire department. The pottery will not be sold directly, but used as prizes in Bingo games.

  During her time in office Mayor Martha has seen to the installation of twenty-two fire plugs around the village, where there were none before; the training of twenty-eight firefighters; and the purchase of a $55,000 fire truck. She explains to Kim that she first got into politics, back in the late sixties, because of the town’s lack of fire protection, the “extortionist rates” that fire-insurance companies were charging because Garland City’s water system was so substandard. She ran for mayor with a promise to get the water system overhauled in 1970, at a time when there wasn’t a single woman mayor in the state of Arkansas (today there are forty of them). She also promised to put blacks on the city council and to schedule regular council meetings. As a final fillip, she offered to install road signs marking the city limits of Garland City. “Nobody even knew where the city limits were,” she tells Kim, and adds that she has extended the city limits twice during her fifteen years in office.

  Although she defeated the incumbent mayor by a two-to-one margin, her first term wasn’t easy. “I tell you right now,” she tells Kim, “the first four years I was a mayor no one knew if I had any sense, ’cause I was working carrying the mail, working on the farm, I just worked, worked, worked, and went to church, and people must h
ave thought, ‘Now she’s been elected, she’ll get everything in such a mess we’ll have to come in and straighten it out.’ I really had to prove myself for the first four years.”

  She kept her promises: fire-insurance rates dropped not once but twice, the annexations doubled the population of the town, and she learned how to apply for (and receive) federal grants, which have really pumped new life into the town, helped pave the streets, install a sewer system, improve the drainage system, and rehabilitate housing, a slow process of eliminating the worst eyesores (there are many such dwellings) and sprucing up those that are worth saving.

  There are a disproportionate number of the elderly in Garland City, more even than in Cave City or Lake City, and Martha Franklin, who isn’t getting any younger herself, is very concerned for them. She has arranged for a van to transport them for shopping trips and health care to Texarkana, the county seat, which gets its name from its inability to decide whether it is in Texas or in Arkansas (it is about half in each).

  There is also a hot-meals program for senior citizens; if Kim hangs around long enough, she will see how it works. Her interview is interrupted by two black youths who want to talk to Mrs. Franklin about their involvement in some upcoming fund-raising event. While she has them in her office, Kim chats with Assistant Mayor Peggy Mauldin.

  “As a young person, how do you feel about the future of Garland City?”

  “I hope it continues to progress the way it’s going now,” Peggy says. “Mrs. Franklin has really done wonders, and I’m not saying this just because she’s my boss. I’ve said a hundred times she ought to be on ‘That’s Incredible.’”

  “Do you ever want to go away to a larger town?”

  “Not really,” Peggy says. But she thinks about the question and adds, “There used to be a lot more to entertain people here.”

  From the other room, Mrs. Franklin hollers to her assistant, “Why don’t you get Smead to come talk to her?”

  Peggy makes a quick phone call, then returns to Kim. “Mr. Franklin’s gonna stop by. He’s the marshal, but he does a lot of things besides just patrol. He takes care of our banking, and he makes repairs, takes care of breakdowns. We’ve never had a murder, at any time. He was in the hospital recently, and we had a shooting—a couple of young boys got after an older man’s daughter, picking on her, and they got into a gunfight. No one was hurt, but if Mr. Franklin hadn’t been in the hospital I don’t think it would have happened. We don’t even have a jail in town any more.”

  Marshal Smead Franklin comes ambling in, looking just like an elderly marshal in a Southwestern town, complete with the silver star pinned to his shirt. He removes his cowboy hat, sits down, and tells Kim he’s at her service.

  “What is it people like so much about you?” she asks him.

  He smiles modestly. “Aw, I guess I’m just fair to everybody. I don’t pick on people. The big’s the big, and the little’s the little, but they’re all the same to me. Whether you’re black, white, pink, or yellow, I just go by the book.”

  Smead Franklin has been the town’s marshal for twenty-eight of his seventy-three years, and in all that time things have been pretty peaceful. If there’s any trouble, what is it usually about? “Oh, family troubles, man and his wife, you know. Very little theft, people stealin things like batteries off of cars.” Robberies? “Let me tell you, we got three whiskey stores here that handles a lot of money every day. They never been robbed. Never. I don’t know the reason why, unless this place would be so hard to get away from—you’re covered both ways out of town, to Lewisville east, to Texarkana west.”

  The Franklins themselves used to have a liquor store, along with the several other occupations that both of them had to make money to raise six children. Most liquor dealing in the county is legitimate, with very little moonshine trade out in the country, although it wasn’t always that way….

  During the 1920s, Garland City was the liquor capital of a large area of the Southwest, home of a special amber-colored whiskey called Garland City Pride that was consumed in large quantities in Shreveport, Little Rock, Dallas, and other cities. Prohibition had nothing directly to do with it (although the author of the Eighteenth Amendment was a senator from Texarkana—the Texas side), because Arkansas had been nominally bone dry for years before Prohibition, but Prohibition boosted the economy of moonshining to the price of $15 a quart, until price wars and liquor feuds gradually whittled that cost down to $4 or $5 a gallon in the 1930s. The untold story of these liquor feuds, which, like Civil War bushwhacking and jayhawking, divided whole neighborhoods and even families, may have had something to do with the dynamiting of that bridge.

  Bootlegging (the name derives from the colonial smuggler’s concealment of liquor flasks in the legs of his tall boots) came to Garland City at a most opportune time: after World War I the price of cotton plunged, and the local cotton economy, already battered by a disastrous flood of the Red in 1915, collapsed, leaving farmers and their tenants impoverished. Oil had not yet been discovered here. From the time when Goodspeed described Garland City in 1890 as a mere hamlet of “two or three stores and a station,” until national journalism in the 1930s investigated the gangland liquor wars here and described it as a sleepy village where “peaceful merchants keep two or three stores open for supplying fat salt pork and cornmeal to the colored folk,” Garland City had not changed, not grown or declined; the one hundred whites and two hundred blacks had lived and bred and died, becoming increasingly pauperized by national economic trends, until the only way a white man could feed and clothe his kids was to start a hidden distillery, and the only way a black man could feed his kids was to do the dangerous work of tending the still fires for the white man, and answering, for the white man, to any agents of the Federal Revenue who came along.

  All along the Red River bottoms, among the cypress trees of the alligator-infested swamps, black men fueled the copper boilers, not with telltale smoky wood fires but with gasoline, which leaves no smoke though it is tricky to burn. From wholesale houses in Texarkana came the carloads of charred kegs (made from oak staves barreled at Henry Thane’s mills on the other side of the state) to give some semblance of “aging” to the stuff, enough to turn it amber, and glass fruit jars to bottle it in. The “two or three” ever-blooming stores in Garland City did a land-office business in corn sugar and cracked corn for the mash, since corn will not grow in cotton fields.

  Garland City Pride was no better or worse than any other moonshine; that is to say, it was potable, bald-faced, popskull swamp-root, but it acquired its own mystique, just as Perrier is no better or worse than ordinary H2O. Transient roughnecks of the southern Arkansas oil fields, moving on to Texas or Louisiana, carried with them many memories of blissful drunks they had tied on with the help of the Garland City booze, and motivated the demand for bootleggers to travel out of their way to acquire supplies of the stuff. Like any product whose reputation is based on mystique alone, Garland City Pride (traditionally mixed half-and-half with “Co-Cola”) gave to its drinkers not only the usual euphoria or stupor achieved by any alcohol, but also a fraternal sense of he-manliness, bravado, and good-ole-boyhood (even to the rare female who tried it). Those who swore by it but had never seen the “city” of its origin began to dream up mythologized visions of the sort of special place that Garland City was, just as today Lynchburg, Tennessee, has acquired (partly through expensive advertising by Jack Daniel’s Distillery) the image of the archetypal downhome country village. The few drinkers of Garland City Pride who ever actually stumbled upon the town, or slowed down enough on U.S. 82 to observe it, must have been disappointed to see nothing but those “two or three stores.”

  Profit breeds corruption the way tainted meat breeds flies. The “gangs” who took over Garland City and fought to dominate its liquor traffic were not your Chicago mobsters with machine guns, but local rednecks, backwoods entrepreneurs who had the power to determine who could set up a still and who could not, who could distribute the produ
ct and who could not, and were ready to enforce their decisions not with machine guns but with their own rustic weapons. The heart knows no difference between the sting of a machine-gun bullet and a buckshot pellet. No man was blasted in his barber’s chair on the streets of Garland City (there were no barber’s chairs), but out in the hinterland, once a month at least, some would-be distiller not authorized by the “family” would be put to death. In 1929, two farmboys were found at the bottom of a deserted well, badly decomposing, when their mother missed them after several days, and at the inquest evidence came forth that the boys had attempted to operate their own still without permission from the local ganglord. No one was convicted.

  The “pride” part of the whiskey’s name may have been partly a jape. Unquestionably the manufacturers took pride in their beverage, especially in contrast to the more poisonous hooch on the market, but there is something ironic or sarcastic, or both, in the concept of Garland City pride as it applies both to a corn juice and to a down-at-the-heel municipality. Pride of place is a characteristic of any sense of home, perhaps not so much pride as simple identification with the familiar, yet it has nothing to do with any effort to improve the familiar or even keep it looking presentable. Arkansas City’s Front Avenue contains the derelicts of a past commercial glory, but Garland City has a Front Street that fronts not upon the Red River, but upon the railway, running, for most of its passage through the town, along the top of the levee before braving the rickety iron of the 1881 bridge across the Red. Though this Front Street was never much of a shopping district, it had a few storefronts, including a brick “block” of twin stores, illustrated here. One of these housed the old post office, behind big glass windows now vacant beneath their frail porch roof next door to the even greater emptiness of its sister, a store gutted not just of its glass front but of its whole interior. With all the signs removed, the post-office sign and whatever shop sign this store once had, the block is not just faceless but nameless. Thus it takes on the essential identification of any ruin, from a semiotic point of view: the absence of any sign except the overall appearance of its abandonment. Maybe someone should finish tearing it down, and maybe it is already gone even as these words are written, but it might be better for it to remain even in half-decay, bigeminally whole and lame, as a silent monument to the death of the American downtown.