Talking Southern  — Attributes of Wash Pots

     Wash pots, those once ubiquitous cast iron Southern backyard icons, are still occasionally seen today.  Often, they have been reincarnated as planters.  A friend of your compiler’s has one painted a glossy, fire-engine red and uses it outside her front door to hold umbrellas.  The one your compiler inherited from his Brooks, Georgia, ancestors reposes in his barn holding literd, the subject of an impending wintertime “Talking Southern” topic, and keeping it dry.

     What reminded your compiler of wash pots are two separate and unrelated remembrances from long ago, which flashed across his consciousness a week or so ago like comets, just days apart.  One was the birthday of his maternal grandmother, who would be 106 if she were still living.  Having grown up and lived her whole life just outside Fayetteville, she remembered as a young woman, before the REA brought electricity to the area, having to get up early of a Monday morning and build fires both in the kitchen stove and under the wash pot before going to her “public job” at Alford’s Department Store in downtown Fayetteville.  “After cooking breakfast for the family from scratch on that old wood-burning stove, and then having to wash and rinse a few loads of clothes over that hot fire, I’d be plumb worn out by when it was time to clock-in at  Alford’s,” your compiler heard her say many times.

     The other was an expression he heard at some point in the distant past, but had quite forgotten until it somehow dislodged from his storehouse of memories.   He will spare readers the raucous story that prompted the expression in the interest of family reading, but suffice it to say that a male friend of his, who was a sure-enough character in his own right and who was many years your compiler’s senior, told him once of trying to shock a crusty old woman they both had once known.   In this quest to shock the old woman, your compiler’s friend had said something that would never have been repeated in mixed company in the polite South.  In fact, it was something so stunningly concupiscent that it would have been of dubious taste if it had been said in totally male company.

     Not only was the old crone not shocked by the scandalous comment, she did not even blink or cringe slightly at it.  In relaying this story to your compiler some years ago, the friend shook his head and said, ‘Dan, I’m telling God’s sanction: what it would have taken to embarrass that impossible old woman would’ve raised a blister on a wash pot!”

    If that’s not a terrifically vivid metaphor for an impossible task, your compiler doesn’t know what might be.  And his friend’s particular usage of it still makes him laugh all these years later.