Y’all ladies cooking crockpot chili with the door locked.
They’ve took prayers out of school and our girls get themselves pregnant and then this ACLU crowd wants us to teach kids how to avoid the consequences with what they call sex ed.
LAW AND LITERACY IN LULANOCCA BY PAMELA SUMNERS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 98
After the opening prayer—which they’d gone to court to preserve—Edna Grund gaveled the meeting of the Lulanocca City Council to order. She liked the feel of the gavel in her hand, partly because she’d worked so hard to hold onto it against the constant backstabbing of Adam Guise, Valva Chiffron, and Dawn Childers. Edna called them the Gang of Three.
Adam Guise simply didn’t think a woman should be running anything and stood on firm Scriptural ground: “For I suffer not a woman to teach,” he recited. “Gospel of St Paul,” he’d always add, squinching his eyes and stiffening his back so that his chest and belly puffed forward like a strutting gamecock.
Valva Chiffron was a Chiffron, and as the locals always said, “Chiffron is as Chiffron does,” which was pretty much exactly as they pleased.
The Chiffrons never left Long County and rarely moved farther out than Jesup, the next town down Highway 301. Jesup had four gas stations at last count, all owned by Chiffrons.
These days some of the town boys had a little whispered fun with Valva’s first name in a way they’d never dared do when Big Buddy was alive. Of course people were more civil and less vulgar generally in those days. Edna was a little wistful for them.
The Chiffrons were the biggest “informal clients” of Big Buddy Taliaferro, pronounced “Tolliver”, for generations now to avoid any unwanted association with Booker Taliaferro Washington. It wasn’t that Booker T Washington was disreputable, just that he was black and from Alabama, and you didn’t want to bring up those kind of questions because the Lulanocca Taliaferros are white and never did talk to Alabamians except when strictly necessary.
Big Buddy was a rumpled, stogey-lipping, porkpie hat-sporting lawyer with sweat and tobacco stains on his short-sleeved shirts. His sausage fingers flashed two pinky rings, one Masonic and one University of Georgia, that were designed for other fingers. He always wore a red and gray striped tie for his beloved Georgia Bulldogs, with a little Rotary Club tie clip. The tie accentuated his gherkin-like shape, like an exclamation point to the shirt’s straining buttons.
Big Buddy was famous for his catfish frying contest held every Fourth of July, which he always won unless he pronounced a Chiffron the winner, because that’s just the way it was.
If you wanted anything, even way back to the 50s, Big Buddy was the gatekeeper. Everybody knew you buttered Big Buddy’s butt and called him a biscuit if you wanted anything done. If you were pining for a seat in the legislature, a civil service job, or even to run a booth at the Christmas Market, you went through Big Buddy. The whole town owed Big Buddy something, one fixed pothole or one fixed business license at a time, and Big Buddy never forgot a favor he’d done.
Sheriff Billy Oldham in particular owed Big Buddy plenty. It was Buddy who’d come up with the idea to cash in on Lulanocca’s fortuitous location on the highway headed south to Florida. The idea of distracting Yankee snowbirds from the sudden 30-mile drop in the speed limit by placing a double-decker billboard just before the speed limit sign was Big Buddy’s, and speeding tickets reliably accounted for 15 per cent of the town’s budget. In addition to Buddy’s “cut” of the ticket haul, he’d worked a side deal with some local farmers to let hogs, cows, and chickens loose at a strategic spot in the road. When the snowbirds hit them, the ticket charges were upgraded for property damage, and old hogs, cows with brucellosis, and arthritic roosters became “prize-winning”, “4-H Club best-in-shows”, or “sires”, entitling their owners (and their lawyer Big Buddy) to more compensation. Big Buddy was happy not to file suit if he could talk the speeders into paying up at Dawgs Diner over acrid coffee. It all seemed fair enough to Lulanoccers since everybody knew the Yankees were snickering at the pecan divinity and pickled pigs’ feet and boiled eggs looking like lab specimens on the gas station’s counter, not to mention what they thought about the canvas ribbon hand towel canister in the bathroom. The traffic scam didn’t make up for Reconstruction, but it knocked them down a peg.
It was all a sweet racket until the American Automobile Association wrote a warning squib about the speed trap and started working on an investigative expose for a future magazine issue. When the Georgia Bureau of Investigation also got involved, so did Sheriff Oldham’s wife, Vassar Shepard Oldham. Vassar was the town clerk, who owed her job to her marriage and how convenient that marriage was for Big Buddy. She had “always” stored the records of all the tickets and payments in the trunk of her Lincoln town car since a previous fire in the clerk’s office had destroyed all the property records in the 1940s. Vassar’s car, sadly, was stolen by the Haskell twins and their Chester cousins from Jesup for joyriding. A few carbons were found in fields along the highway, but most of the ticket books and receipts were burned in the trunk. The boys pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 100 hours community service apiece—as vouched for by their lawyer Big Buddy.
The speed trap was shut down in 1975 when the new interstate was built, but Big Buddy’s legacy continued through his son, predictably called Little Buddy. Little Buddy lacked his father’s legal panache but had inherited his methods. Though he was less formidable than his father, the majority of the city council nonetheless owed their positions to him.
Edna was an exception. A middle-of-the-roader, she had inherited her deceased husband’s term and earned a reputation as someone who could broker the occasional tensions between the hot-headed Guise and a Chiffron.
Lately, though, a reform-minded mayor, who had sneaked in when Little Buddy was distracted by repeated bouts of kidney stones, was forcing Edna into taking sides more often than she was used to. Mayor Archie Parker was in his late 30s with sandy hair and muttonchop sideburns, a wide, guileless grin, and an expression of earnest goodwill in his light eyes. He wore suits even though he rode a bicycle around town. When walking, he wore those Birkenstock sandals that weren’t standard issue in Lulanocca. He’d come home to take over his family’s farm after getting an MBA at some school up north, but he never lorded it over people.
“Do I have a motion to waive the reading of the Minutes from last time?” A tumble of “ayes”. Thank goodness Adam Guise could agree to that at least, Edna thought, and called for New Business.
“First item is the letter from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) about our letterhead with the Latin Cross and our motto ‘Jesus is Lord in Lulanocca’. The floor is open for discussion.”