4. Memories of a merry Christmas, however, were marred by an unfortunate accident. According to family historian, Candida Isbell Loring, it is unlikely that the story is true. Given the personality profile she has pieced together of Jonathan’s Great Aunt Harriet, it is doubtful that the old woman would have simply lain without complaint beneath the fallen Christmas tree and waited patiently for her presence there to be detected. She would, in all likelihood, have bellowed without recess until rescue became assured. One can only subscribe to the truth of the prevailing account by accepting the theory that the ornament lodged in her mouth made the broadcasting of her whereabouts a futile endeavor.
Incidentally, Jonathan was blessed with eleven aunts and twenty-one great-aunts from both sides of the family, almost all still alive at this point in his life. I have made no effort to catalog them or to gauge the degree to which he was close to each. Some, Harriet Blashette being a good representative, were nearly daily fixtures. Others he hardly had the chance to meet. For example, Jonathan did not see his mother’s sister Nydia for nearly thirty years, the result of her banishment to the wilds of Alaska for bearing a child out of wedlock and for attempting to assign paternity to successful local confectioner Henry Bellamy when it was clearly his deficient twin brother Benry whom the baby favored.
5. “Your pomade has soiled my antimacassar.” Jonathan was fond of Aunt Lindy in spite of her eccentricities. However, this particular trait — the tendency to assail houseguests upon their leave-taking with charges of having done damage to her furniture and other household items — even Jonathan found a little irritating. Jonathan Blashette, Early Memories, JBP.
6. “You put sticky wicky on my stereopticon.” Jonathan had been eating jam and bread but his hands had been tidily wiped, so the accusation was unfounded. Ibid.
7. “That smelly stethoscope has been up someone’s ass.” Even Aunt Lindy’s last days were colored by baseless allegations against her doctor and the hospital nursing staff. Ibid.
8. Spring brought a number of visitors. Others who visited the boy during his sixth spring was Opton Van der Schoop, an itinerant “purveyor of wares exotic,” who taught Jonathan to play the spoons; Lucy Smythe, a suffragist with whom Emmaline had been corresponding for many months and who angered Addicus in one particular heated dinner table exchange by insisting that women not only had the God-given right to vote but should do so wearing men’s work clothes and theatrical beards; and Anne Maye Powell, a beautiful teacher of the blind and deaf whom Emmaline had offered to put up for the night when the young woman missed her connecting train. Anne Maye, convinced that Jonathan was not only deformed but a blind and deaf mute when he knocked a glass of water from the dinner table and didn’t respond quickly enough to a request by his mother to help her clean it up, snatched the boy from the table, delivered him to the farmyard well pump and began spelling the word “water” in his hand. As Jonathan stared blankly at her, uncomprehending, his brain slightly fuzzed from having sneaked several potent swallows of Addicus’s stash of corn liquor thirty minutes earlier, Anne Maye tired of teaching the boy the word for water and instead delivered into his hand all five verses of Sidney Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoochee.” Odger Blashette, interview
9. Jonathan spent part of his summer at the home of his Aunt Gracelyn in Clume. The towns of Clume and Pettiville were as different as two communities could be. I wanted to find out more about the former, which is located fifteen miles north of the town of Jonathan’s birth. Early attempts were unfruitful. The official town website is composed of a single unlinked page offering a picture of a little pigtailed girl with two missing front teeth who tells us to “come to Clume. There’s lots of room!” I wrote to the town historian and chief librarian of the Clume Library and Discovery Center, Ada Demion, and received the following letter — a disturbing whitewash of the town’s dark and controversial past.
Dear Mr. Dunn,
Thank you so much for your kind letter. Historical information on Clume is rather hard to come by, you are right. There has been no town history written (although I am in the process of gathering material for one). Generally, genealogists come here and proceed to pull their hair out.
I will give you a thumbnail sketch of Clume. First I should say that Jonathan Blashette was one of our most illustrious residents even though we have been obligated to share him with Pettiville. It has been said that he got his idea for male deodorants while living with his Aunt Gracelyn Boosier whose third husband Cully was a real stinker! Ha ha!
Clume was founded in 1837 by retired beggars. During the War of Northern Aggression, some of our slaves did not want to be free. They were happy right where they were and made up a little song that schoolchildren sing to this day: “Lincoln Sminken. Rinky Dinken. Fudgin’ Mudgin’. We Ain’t Budgin’!” Meaning they had no desire to join the ranks of their northern cousins who were “free” but hungry and destitute as you know most Negroes are.
Some say that during the Years of Carpetbagging Pillage which followed the War of Northern Aggression, we held the world record for lynchings. Now, this simply is not true. There were only a handful of lynchings and the rest were trick lynchings in which the rope would break in just the nick of time and everybody would go home chuckling at the cleverness of it all. The real lynchings were not funny, of course, and I am not defending them, but remember also that the intendees weren’t always Negroes, to be sure. There were two Chinamen, an Italian who was mistaken for a Negro, a parrot who wouldn’t stop saying the dirty words no matter what anyone did, and a Romanist (which is different from an Italian in that Romanists display Catholic arrogance), and then after a while we started to lynch the ones who had done all the lynching because we began to feel that the whole thing was wrong and the wrongdoers needed to be appropriately punished. And in so doing, the town of Clume demonstrated that it had a conscience after all and this truly warms me as you can imagine. So that there would not be an endless spiral of lynching, the sheriff decided that the guilty parties should lynch each other and this pretty much cleared up the problem. By 1891 when a law was passed by the Arkansas Legislature outlawing lynching except in exceptional cases, we had already put an end to it in this town, even though people still said our record was a formidable one to beat.
In the 1930s, Mr. Ripley wanted to put us in his newspaper feature, but the townspeople squeezed their eyes into little slits and said, “You better not.”
The Twentieth Century was generally uneventful except that Main Street burned down in 1918 caused by an incident of self-combustion that was recently featured on the television program, “Fire From Within.” In 1924, Babe Ruth came to town and played some sandlot baseball with some of our boys until he found out that the uncle of one of his Yankee teammates had been lynched here when some of the townspeople thought that he was an anarchist. There isn’t a lot of evidence that he was an anarchist, but he did look like one of those Italian Negroes who had always given us so much trouble.
When the hostages were taken in Iran, we held a young Iranian man against his will in the basement of the hardware store to show him what it was like. It was a lesson he would never forget!
I hope this information has been of some use to you. Let me know if you ever decide to spend some time in Clume. There’s lot’s of room!
Yours sincerely,