At long last it seems that my memoir called “Growing Up in Mississippi Poor and White But Not Quite Trash” is going to find a home. At least my agent thinks so. In the process of putting the manuscript together, I continue to run across pieces I wrote and published years ago. The following is an example.



A friend of mine asked the other day whether I was exaggerating about having to bathe in a washtub — I’m talking about round galvanized tin tubs maybe three feet in diameter and sixteen inches deep — until I was in junior high, when we got running water in the house, and I told him that it was pretty much the truth, except that I left out one thing, since I was saving it for this week.

About two years before we got water piped in from the well, I had my first shower: in one of the dressing rooms at Magnolia Bowl in downtown Columbus, and I reckoned that that was the way I wanted to get clean from that point on.

When I brought the matter up with my father, though, he said hell no, he was not going to put a shower in that bathroom, that it would have a regular bathtub.

We were sitting on the back steps, looking out toward the wellhouse, and he seemed to be in a fairly peaceful mood, so I pushed a little.

“But, Daddy, when you take a tub bath, you are settin’ in dirt and sweat and bugs, all that stuff that come off of you, and off of the people who bathed in there before you, and there ain’t no way you can come out of a tub as clean as when you come out of a shower.

“In a shower the dirt and stuff just goes right down the drain, and you always got clean water running on you. And you gotta heat water on the stove for the tub . . . .”

The arguments made absolutely no impression on him: When water did come into the house in anything other than buckets or through roof leaks, there was not going to be a shower in that bathroom. Meanwhile, it was the washtub. God, I hated that damned tub!

It was time, then, to start thinking of alternatives, so I walked around a little outside studying the matter until I came up with a solution. I went in and got a piece of paper and a pencil and drew a little derrick with an oil drum sitting on top of it; from the bottom of it ran a pipe with a shut-off valve and shower head. It was one of my early attempts at engineering. Then I went and showed Daddy and told him I’d like to build my own shower.

“See, I’ll build the tower, then get a rusty barrel and paint it with dull black paint and the sun will heat the water all day, and then we can take a shower late in the day, and it will be just like a regular shower. If we are careful, everbody can get a shower.”

I knew from science classes that the fuzzy rusty surface coated with dull black paint would absorb the heat of that Mississippi sun and warm the water pretty fast, even in May and September.

“And put it where at?”

“Well sir, I was thinking that behind the wellhouse might be a good place. The building will shield us on one side and the fence on the other, and all I’ll have to do is nail up a couple of pieces of tin.”

“Way too much trouble. You talkin’ white trash stuff here —pieces of tin tacked up all over the place. And you gonna have to haul water up there ever day and fill that thang, and there won’t be no way to regalate the temperture of the water. You gon’ freeze to death or scald. It ain’t like the tub, to where you can pour in just enough hot water to make it right. That is a dumb idea.”

So I tucked tail and forgot about my shower and resigned myself to washtub baths. Daddy was not a man to argue with.

One late Sunday afternoon in mid-July, I returned from a week-long visit with my grandparents in Millport, just across the Alabama line.

I had hitchhiked back and walked quite a lot between the two rides I caught, so I was hot and dirty and wanting nothing as much as I wanted to get to the Cold Hole, a mile and a half or so up Sand Road, and swim and wash away the grime and dodge the washtub bath that I knew Mother would make me take.

I went in the house and threw my dirty clothes in a corner of the kitchen and had just started back out when I heard Daddy call me from their bedroom. He was sitting on the bed fiddling with his shotgun, as he did a lot during the summer, just dying for hunting season to come.

“Yessir?”

“Whur you goin’?”

“To the Cold Hole. Gonna take a bath.”

He got up and leaned the gun in a corner, then motioned for me to follow him.

I didn’t even get through the screen door before I noticed it: behind the wellhouse a big black oil drum sat atop a derrick—he had followed my plans precisely--and pipe came out the bottom and elbowed toward the back of the little building.

He led me into the wellhouse and pointed to the galvanized pipe that came through the back wall and angled down a couple of inches, at the end of it a shower head. There was a little red shut-off wheel just behind the elbow.

Then he motioned to the floor, where he had torn up a big section of the concrete and installed a drain, and repoured it, making a depression so that the water would gather and run through the pipe and out onto the ground. While I’d been off in Millport he’d worked three or four days building that shower. It was one of the few times in my life with him that I really appreciated something he had done.

I forgot about the Cold Hole that afternoon and had myself a shower right there at home, like the uptown folks. The water was plenty hot, since he’d filled the barrel early that morning and it had been heating all day.

OK, maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal to y’all, and I doubt that my kids would believe a word of it, but it was a super big deal to me: I had entered the Space Age.

Some days the water was too hot, some days too cold, and sometimes Daddy would insist on showering before me and my brother and use up most of the water.

The water always came at the same slow rate, and to conserve it, I’d have to wet myself, spin the valve shut, lather, then turn the valve back on and rinse off. When we all did it that way, everybody got to shower.

Lord, I did get tired of lugging buckets of water up that flimsy ladder on the derrick to fill the barrel. Do the math yourself: a 2- or 3-gallon bucket, which at least a third of the water would slosh out of before you could get it up there, and a yawning 55-gallon drum. Twenty or twenty-five trips for sure.

But the shower was my idea, after all . . . . After Daddy put an electric pump on the well, we used a hose to fill it, another technological leap.

Yeah, there are times when I look up at the big shower head in our bathroom and think about how nice it is to be able to turn a couple of knobs and get water precisely the temperature I want and plenty of volume and not have to make twenty-five trips with a heavy, sloshing galvanized bucket for the pleasure of it.



Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, may be reached c/o English Department, Box 2146, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas 77341-2146, e-mail eng_pdr@shsu.edu.