Grits and bootleg whiskey

I was born and raised in Northeast Texas, but I never had grits until in the Army. I guess my father didn’t like grits. That’s the only reason I can figure for my mother never serving grits. She was from a farm family, sharecroppers for a time until her father saved enough and bought his own place northwest of Maud, Texas. Her family raised most of their own food – vegetables and a hog a year. They had a smokehouse, too.

Before joining the Army at age 18, I had been out of Texas one time, and that not by much. One Saturday while visiting my father’s parents in New Boston, Daddy asked me if I wanted to go to Texarkana with him and Grandpa. You bet, I said, and got in the back seat of the car. Texarkana was a city, must have had 25,000 people then. I was about 12 at the time and had never been to a town bigger than New Boston, so a 15-mile trip to Texarkana was a big deal.

Here is what I remember from the trip: Daddy drove, Grandpa was in the passenger seat. We got in Texarkana, and Daddy drove to a liquor store on the Arkansas-side of State Line Avenue. Grandpa went into the store and returned a couple minutes later with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Daddy drove back to New Boston.

From later conversation by my father, I decided the Texarkana trip was unusual for Grandpa’s whiskey buying. Most of the time, he got his whiskey from local bootleggers. All of Texas was dry then – no alcohol sold legally – which gave additional income to legal sales in Arkansas and illegal whiskey in Texas and Oklahoma. What some people did, other than operate stills in the woods, was go to Texarkana, Arkansas, and buy many bottles and sell the whiskey from home.

Daddy said he did that one time. He got a couple dozen pints of whiskey in Arkansas, then drove home to Maud. He said he was exceptionally nervous and wondering when he would be stopped by the highway patrol or alcohol bureau. Had that happened, it is quite possible he would have spent time in jail, lost his job, and Momma and us kids living on handouts from relatives, none of whom had anything to spare.

Before September 1964, that whiskey run to Texarkana, Arkansas, was my one and only trip outside Texas, a few hundred feet. When enlisting in the Army, I went from Rocky Branch to Texarkana and then by bus to Shreveport to Fort Polk, Louisiana. A long way beyond a short trip for Grandpa’s whiskey, a bus ride that eventually led to Korea, Maryland, Vietnam and Maryland again.