Summer in South Mississippi can mean only one thing — it’s hot!
When I was growing up, that Hattiesburg heat sure didn't stop us from getting outdoors for a day of fun. You can't say the same for today's kids. I guess they're all locked up in air-conditioned homes playing on their smartphones. They're not as tough as we were.
I grew up in the Goula, the East Hattiesburg neighborhood sandwiched between Bouie Street and Chain Park at the Leaf River. To beat the heat, you'd spot box fans in the windows of just about everybody's house. It was the closest thing we had to air conditioning. Some folks splurged on one of those 5,000 BTU room air conditioners from Western Auto, with its drip-drip-drip of water coming out the back of that magical cooling machine that hung outside of the window. Those were the houses you wanted to visit on a hot day in July.
As for us kids during the summer in Hattiesburg? Ha! We defied the heat with our own "summer uniforms." The only thing Goula boys needed for the day was a pair of shorts. Shirts weren’t necessary. We were good to go, spending the whole day outside topless.
And, shoes? Not much need for them, either. We spent most of our summer afternoons barefoot, though it wasn't the safest thing to do. In fact, cutting your foot on a discarded broken Barq's Root Beer bottle was almost a summer right of passage. Worse was having your foot land on a nail sticking from a stray piece of wood left in someone's yard. Thankfully, our guardian angels were always on duty. None of us ever got tetanus.
And we really didn’t have to worry about the hot asphalt burning our naked feet. In Hattiesburg's African American neighborhoods, many of the streets were unpaved. Fairley Street, where I lived, was covered in a mixture of Mississippi red clay and gravel. When someone drove down our street during one of those summertime dry spells, a cloud of smoky reddish dust filled the air and coated the shine on that just-washed Oldsmobile.
Plenty of larger rocks would be mixed with the dirt that covered our streets. We might use the rocks as projectiles for a friendly competition of target practice on a can or bottle. And, on occasion, it was not unusual for a rock-throwing skirmish to break out between some of the boys. That's the closest we'd get to a "neighborhood shooting." My, how times have changed.
Kids today are distracted by electronic gadgets everywhere they turn. When we were young, we’d be lucky if someone’s family had a 21-inch black-and-white television. Left to our own — non-electronic — devices, we used our imaginations to occupy our time. And I’ll contend we had as much fun or more than the kids today.
Hide-and-seek was a neighborhood favorite. Or a softball game might get started just about any place there was a vacant lot big enough to play. And on some hot summer days, our parents would let us turn on an outside faucet, using the water hose to create our own version of what today is called a splash pad.
Not many kids in the Goula were lucky enough to get an allowance, but we found our own honest ways to make money. We'd collect empty soft drink bottles and earn a few cents each selling them back to the shopkeeper for the deposit. If your folks had a lawn mower — and mine did — we'd push them up and down Miller, Main, or Fourth streets, knocking on doors of the older white women who lived there. We might get a dollar or two for mowing a yard, depending on how large it was, and a dollar was a lot of money back then.
In the 1960s, a single quarter went a long way. It'd get you a Hershey bar, a bag of Rice's Potato Chips, and an ice-cold Nehi strawberry soda, with change to spare. When it was 95 degrees outside, nothing quenched your thirst like a fruit-flavored Nehi. Bottled was the best.
And if a kid didn't have money for a summertime snack? Mother Nature filled the gap. Blackberry bushes grew wild just about everywhere. They weren't planted by anyone that we knew of. I only remember that blackberry bushes could be found growing all over the Goula. They were the thorny variety, and we had to be careful picking them to avoid getting pricked. If we could resist the temptation of eating every one of them and brought enough home, we might be rewarded with our moms' homemade blackberry pie. Yum!
Then there were the plum trees. My grandfather had a garden just across the street from where we lived filled with them. But, like blackberries, you'd spot plum trees growing all over the Goula. There was an especially large grove that grew over where Gordon's Creek empties into the Leaf River, a favorite plum-picking spot for me and my friends during the summer.
Gordon's Creek formed a pond where it met the Leaf River and, for some reason, we called it the "Creek Mud." The pond doubled as a swimming hole and was a popular spot for teenage boys from the Goula and nearby East Jerusalem Quarters to go swimming. I was never brave enough to go in, imagining there might be snakes nearby.
Oh, the things we Goula kids got into during those long hot summer days. Looking back, ours was only a tiny piece of Hattiesburg geography but it seemed so big to us. Today's kids might not be impressed by our summer adventures but, hey, that's OK. We still had plenty of fun.
Driving through the Goula today, sadly, you see a lot more vacant lots, and no kids playing baseball on them either. Many of the homes of my youth are long gone, including the house where I grew up on Fairley Street.
On the bright side, Chain Park, barely a block from where I used to live, is a welcomed addition, bringing a spark of new life to the Goula. Along with other family-friendly events, the park hosted the recent July 4th fireworks display shared by the cities of Hattiesburg and Petal. Plenty of 21st-century kids were there enjoying the fireworks, creating their own childhood memories in my old neighborhood. I like that.
The only thing missing were a few plum trees and blackberry bushes for them to pick.
Elijah Jones is a proud Hattiesburg native who enjoys writing. Email him at edjhubtown@aol.com.
