As I SEE It
By
Thom Gossom Jr.
Daddy
From the moment I asked, his eyes lit up. I waited to ask until I was sure I wouldn’t have some business conflict on my short visit to Birmingham. I didn’t.
“Do you want to go to the country,” I quizzed?
“The country” he repeated?
“Yes, where you grew up.” I said.
From that second on, I knew I’d brightened his day.
My Dad is from Elmore County, Alabama and he loves to tell my siblings and me about it. He grew up there sharecropping with his Dad and his eleven brothers and sisters. When he turned eighteen he followed his older brother Sonny into the army to better his life. After the Army he moved to “the big city” of Birmingham, and he and his brothers who had all gone to the service, briefly attended school on the G.I. Bill and took jobs cutting trees for the City. They took half of every check they received and put their younger sisters through college.
He never moved back to “the country,” but he and his one remaining brother love to go back and visit the old home site, (the house is no longer there), the theatre in the city of Wetumpka where they had to enter through the back door and the cemetery where his parents are buried.
Our one-hundred-mile trip began with our breakfast staple of sausage and biscuits at the Hardees on Birmingham’s Airport Highway. Daddy likes to buy and I let him. He always speaks to the other retired men who share breakfast and morning talk over coffee. We choose a table near the window and talk or rather he talks and I listen. Oftentimes he tells me the same stories he’s told me before, sometimes only moments before.
Breakfast done we head south on I-65 and exit on the Wetumpka/Prattville exit which Daddy insists is the wrong exit until we pass the white country church, Mt Zion Baptist Church, with the cemetery behind it and I say, “That looks like the church. I remember the last time you brought me here when I was little.”
His budding funk gives way to a big smile when he realizes it is the church and I’ve found it despite his pouting over his thinking I’d taken the wrong exit. We turn behind the church and the stories start to tumble from his memory.
First it’s his parent’s graves, my grandparents. His Dad, George “Papa” Gossom, he remembers fondly, but Papa squandered the reputation and fortune in land his own father had left behind. I vaguely remember Papa as an older man living in a small shack in Birmingham, when I was a child.
I never knew my grandmother, Mabel Gossom, whose grave lies next to Papa’s. She died at age 48. My Dad says she died from bearing thirteen children, one of whom was stillborn. Daddy loved her dearly, I can tell.
Daddy points out the many people whose names are represented in the cemetery. He smiles at one belonging to a woman that he says is the first girl he ever kissed. I smile. He likes sharing with me.
We head down the five miles of road with speeding cars that lead into Wetumpka. He points out the site of the old house.
“Boy we used to walk this road to go to the movies and get a piece of hard candy for a nickel,” he tells me. “On Saturdays there would be mules, and wagons and people walking, all heading into town.”
At the movie theatre in Wetumpka his thoughts deepen. “The black people had to go in through the back door and sit upstairs,” he says pointing at the door. “You bought your ticket around front but then walked to the back. Going to the movies for us was a rare treat.”
We talk about his eight and a half decades in Alabama and the things he’s seen. One story, involves a trip as an adult to Atlanta to see the Atlanta Braves baseball team play what was at the time his favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. “There was a bus full of us and the bus driver stopped to get gas. Many of us had to use the restroom. We couldn’t. Black people couldn’t use the restroom. So everyone who had to go, men, women and children had to go into the woods. His voice turned angry, “They made the women use the bathroom in the woods.”
The accompanying silence takes us both back to the absurdity and dehumanization of that time.
We visit the Wetumpka museum. The helpful elderly white woman there tells us there is a black museum but we were welcome to visit this the city museum. We start to browse when she pulls out a huge book with notables of Wetumpka and Elmore County and there he is, in black and white my great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Gossom.
I’d always heard from my Dad about my great grandfather and the community Gossom Switch that was named after him. In the 1960’s we discovered my great grandfather had purchased 1,000 acres of land in 1909 in Elmore for $1000.00. I had heard stories about his owning a cotton gin and a dance hall. I’d heard about Gossom Switch, but to read about him in a museum is quite a treat. Daddy grins as the woman reads aloud all of great granddaddy’s accomplishments. He is described as “a notable citizen, and a man of means willing to help all the citizens of his time both black and white.”
There are more cherished stories, and beloved memories. Many are repeats from before but neither of us seems to mind. As father and son, we relive the lives of my Great Granddaddy Thomas Jefferson Gossom, my Grandfather George Gossom, my dad Tom Gossom and mine as Thomas Gossom, Jr.
It’s a day I’ll never forget.
