Talking Southern No. 89 : Parts to Spare?

     Your compiler had a great-uncle he never knew, but dearly wishes he had.  His name was Hugh Henderson and he lived in Brooks his entire life, which was from late 1889 until early 1961.   Serving as postmaster of Brooks for thirty-seven years (1922-59), he was First World War veteran and a well-known man around town.   

     Uncle Hugh was an extrovert of the first water, a drinker who was sober as a church warden till Saturday night, but who would then cut loose with an exuberance that was not tamable.  He was a raucous old galoot who used the return address “I. P. Rainwater, Brooks, Georgia,” on lots of personal correspondence, who could cuss like somebody was handing out money for it, who always had the latest “Little Moron” joke to share, and who once took a small bag of cracked corn to a chitlin’ supper and surreptitiously sprinkled it on the table so participants would think the chitterlings hadn’t been cleaned and stripped properly.  To paraphrase the late country singer, Johnny Paycheck (1938-2003), Uncle Hugh was the only hell his mama ever raised. 

     One Saturday night around 1930, Uncle Hugh found his way to a shine shack somewhere out the McIntosh Road in Brooks, where he drank till he could hardly walk.  He made his way back along the dark road home, mostly by ditch and gulley, not to mention one firmly-planted fence post he staggered into and busted his nose upon, singing Barney Google (with the goo-goo-googly eyes) the whole way.  

     Uncle Hugh’s singing got the attention of his brother-in-law, Norman, as he lurched by Norman’s house on the unpaved road, and Norman ran out of his house to see if he could follow Hugh home and help Hugh’s wife, Lillian, to get the rascal into bed.   But by the time Norman could find his housecoat, throw it over his pajamas, and get across the road and into Hugh’s house, Lillian had the situation under control — mostly.

     She was helping her husband to undress for bed, and he hollered out, “LILLIAN!  PRAY FOR ME.  I SWEAR I’M DYIN’!”  

     Aunt Lillian, a saint on this earth whom your compiler recalls quite well, bowed her head and quietly prayed, “Dear Lord, please let my poor husband settle down and get a good night’s rest.”   

     Uncle Hugh protested, “LILLIAN, THAT LIL PRAYER WON’T DO AT ALL – SAY A LONGER ONE FOR ME.  I’M REALLY DYIN’,  I TELL YOU.”   

Aunt Lillian bowed again and intoned, “Dear Lord, please have mercy on my poor, intoxicated husb…”

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, LIL,” Uncle Hugh interrupted in panicked sotto voce, eyes darting around the room frantically,  “DON’T TELL HIM I’M DRUNK!

     Fifteen or twenty years later, Uncle Hugh angered his niece, Kathryn, so badly with a late 1940s Halloween prank that involved your compiler’s young father that she never spoke kindly of him again.  Kathryn, your compiler’s grandmother, was a character much like “Miss Daisy” in the eponymous movie – stately, dignified, and ladylike, but with a will of steel and the ability to unleash zingers capable of cutting one off at the knees at  five hundred yards.  

     Uncle Hugh had been a favorite of your compiler’s father and grandfather, who loved his unfettered and audacious sense of humor, but Kathryn despised him as totally vulgar and uncouth.   If he somehow came up in conversation, Kathryn would wait until whoever was telling the Uncle Hugh story/joke finished, and then would declare quietly but firmly, “My grandmother Henderson was not a B”  (Kathryn would NEVER have said the word that initial stood for), “ but Uncle Hugh, her only son, was a fourteen-carat son-of-one with parts to spare.”

     “A fourteen-carat son-of-a-b%$#@ with spare parts” – now there’s a colorful Southern phrase for you!  And a couple of colorful Southern characters, as well.