After my first mother died my father was the only authority in my life and he was gone most of the time, leaving home early in the morning, getting back late at night, strip mining coal in Altoona, Alabama.
I was eight when my brother, Dave, who is two and a half years older, and I started smoking cigarettes.
Dad had a syrup factory at our farm near Gadsden, Alabama, where he manufactured Dixie Dew Syrup. The slogan printed on the label he said he made up himself: “Gives a Biscuit a College Education.”
To get money for cigarettes Dave and I began stealing jars of syrup. Then we would ride our bikes to Green Pasture Road, a black neighborhood a mile or two away, and sell or trade the syrup for whatever we could get. Money if we could get it, something else to sell, like turnip greens, if we couldn’t.
And when we had enough money, we would peddle to a store we called the “E-Light Club,” on Highway 74, and tell the man our Daddy had sent us to buy cigarettes. Lucky Strikes or Camels, either one.
Many years later I was visiting relatives in Gadsden and I rode out to the old farm place to see what I could see, past the club where Dave and I bought cigarettes when we were children. The club had been closed for years but the weather beaten sign was still hanging there, by a thread.
“Elite Club,” it said.
Coming Monday: The Germ Inspector
