Linda Rochester - A Love Affair with Place: An excerpt from her story Pattersonville
Patterson's Store (Burned down in 2008)
My daddy always said, "The best and the worst people live in Bluff Springs," but he never got around to saying who the best and worst were. I wish he had. I didn't think to ask, and I probably would have resented it if he tried to tell me. I fully expected to know more than he did by the time I got his age.
I heard Daddy talk about the Pattersons many times, but not one single word of what he said comes back to me. I still have Toy to ask and that's like having Daddy in a way. I heard every single tale the two of them ever told twice: once from Daddy and once from Toy. They vary mostly on who the hero of the tale was. When Daddy told it, he was the hero; when Toy told it, Toy was. When the story was about someone else, though, there was no hero. There was simply a man, always a man, there battling for something he would never understand. Sometimes the tale was funny. Sometimes it was not. There was always a twist. Something you weren't expecting. Something they wanted you to think about. They were slick, those two.
And then there is Pattersonville. Pattersonville is not a place that you can locate on a map. It's not even a community. Not really. It is a place in my mind. One that I dream of sometimes when I'm worried or troubled about something, and it disappears completely when everything is going right for me. While I'm thinking of it, it simply invades me: Pattersonville is all around me. And then it recedes and disappears. That's not to say that Pattersonville is not a real place, because it surely is. It is situated between the communities of Bluff Springs, in Clay County, and Goldville, in Tallapoosa County.
Inside Patterson's Store
All there is to it is a small grocery like those my daddy used to own. Pattersons live on both sides of the store and they do most of the business that gets done there. Not many people go through Pattersonville, but there's plenty of people that live out there and they are all kin.
Daddy never owned Patterson's store, but he did deliver gasoline there. One time Toy and Alec Pruitt, another black man, were delivering gas down there about dusk when someone tried to rob the store. Mr. Patterson kept a gun over by the cash register in a drawer. He reached his hand gently into the drawer and said quietly, "You get out of here." That was all there was to it. Toy didn't remember if the robber was a Patterson or not, but Mr. Patterson went on about his business like nothing had happened.
My daddy owned an independent gasoline distributorship, and he and Toy delivered gas weekly to Patterson's Grocery and a string of country stores like it. Some Daddy owned and some he just furnished with gasoline. Later I learned that Triangle Refineries was an independent that caused the big guys stomach problems for a while. Independents made money by doing business in the tough spots and there were lots of those across the rural South. Once when Daddy and Toy stopped to collect at one of the stations, Daddy found a man and his two idiot sons waiting. Toy had gone down to put his measuring stick in the tank while Daddy went in the store. The store owner didn't want to pay that week. He said, "We been a wait'n on you. You ain't leaving here."
Daddy reached around behind him and picked up an unopened Coke bottle that sat on the table behind him. He thought he was a dead man when Toy appeared in the front door. Daddy said, "Well, it was three against one, now it's two against three." Daddy broke the Coke bottle on the side of the counter and reached across and sliced the old man's face. Blood spurted out everywhere and caused enough confusion for a getaway.
"He'd have been gone from here if I hadn't walked through that door." Toy shook his head and still does when he tells that tale.
Daddy was the hero of his version, "Toy looked like a giant standin' there. I don't know if he'd have raised his hand to a white man or not. Didn't wait around to find out."
Toy Ballard was at Daddy's side for years. Toy said to me one day, "There were years when your daddy and I were together every single day. I knew everything about him and he knew everything about me. I sure do miss him. That's why I've always been so partial to you. Everyone's gone now who remembered. Buck, Romie, Ole Mask, Roy Watts. They are all gone now."
"Well, I remember and what I don't you'll tell me. I'm writing it all down. Y'all two were a pair. It's a thousand wonders that you lived as long as you did."
Toy was some presence back then. He was tall and lean. His black skin was tight and slick so much so that his cheeks shined when he smiled, which was often. I never found him troubled or angry. He was always the same. Toy took his time with people. He listened to them. He was always listening. Toy took his time with everything. It was his philosophy, actually.
"Take your time with it," he would tell me. "Take time to think through it, Lin. Don't get in a hurry. You've got to be easy when you've got a snake cornered."
From "Pattersonville", 2002
