Most of us have heard the story about the G.I. Joe who was refused admittance to the swank supper club in wartime. It was for officers only, he was told.
Joe was so outdone by this discrimination that he telephoned his old man back east, the latter caught a plane Immediately to Join his disconcerted son, whereupon the two of them purchased the night-club and converted it into a rendezvous for enlisted men.
Then there is the yarn about the convivial soul who was whooping it up aboard the streamliner. He became so exuberant that the conductor had to insist upon more dignity and less noise. The passenger refused to be suppressed, quote: —
"How much do you want for your train? I'll just buy it!"
Another, and similar anecdote has been going the rounds for a hundred years about how the Hon. Daniel Webster took the lecture platform to discuss the public debt. Old Dan'l must have been feeling no pain whatsoever when he reached for his hip pocket and the purse which was notoriously thin, and asserted, quote: —
"The public debt? How much is it anyhow? I'll pay it myself!"
It's always a little difficult to trace the line between fact and folk-lore. We seriously doubt that any father was so moved by an affront to his son that he bought a night-club. The man on the train had no intention to buy the same and, if he had, the conductor could not have made title. Ditto for Daniel Webster and the Public Debt. But there's a story from Drew, Mississippi, which is every bit as good as those three and, furthermore, it's true. And it's legend by now since it took place thirty- three years ago.
Young Ephraim Smith brother of Greenville's J.0. Smith was tired of boarding school at Mathiston, Miss. (Was it Woods Junior College, Eph?) So he quit and came home to Drew and to the mother who disapproved of his giving up the chance of an education. He vowed to make his own way, and sought employment immediately. But it was 1921, and the dollar cotton bubble had not long since burst, and jobs were scarce. Finally, Ephraim got the promise of a position in Clarksdale, some two months hence, but meanwhile he must eat and his purse was flatter than Daniel Webster's. So he walked into a bank in Clarksdale, and asked for a small loan until such time as he could get on the payroll. The bank's answer was no.
Now the bank in question was and is one of the mid-south's great financial institutions. It stayed that way because it could say no, particularly in the days of dollar cotton and five-hundred-dollar land. So' there was no discrimination involved, merely continuation of sound policy, in its refusal of accommodation to an as yet unemployed stranger named Smith, who was trying to borrow a hundred dollars "on his face".
This must have seemed like a body blow to Ephraim Smith, who made his way back to his mother and spilled his troubles, just as he should have done in the first place. What did Mrs. Nora Shaw Smith do about it? Well, she didn't kill the fatted calf exactly for, after all, Eph wasn't the prodigal son. He was just a little damp back of his ears. But she knew a young man needed his self-confidence, so she set about its restoration.
Business had been brisk at Mother Smith's plantation store, even as the weather had been bad, and the dirt-roads worse. So she hadn't been to Clarksdale to bank her cash receipts in some time. (Maybe the road was so bad that she had to ride the Yellow Dog train.) Any how, she made her way to Clarksdale, with seven thousand dollars for deposit, which she carried, so the legend goes, in a brown paper bag.
We don't know who put two and Iwo together in the bank that day. Mrs. Smith was never a person to show off, or throw her weight around, so we know she didn't offer to buy the Bank. But she wouldn't have been human, or a mother, had she not hinted at her son's acceptability as a credit-risk in view of his mother's unquestioned solvency. And the bank took the hint.
When Mrs. Nora Smith died, a few days ago, in Drew, her loved 'ones found a letter written a third of a century ago, by the president of a great delta banking institution, who regretted his failure to connect the two Smiths as mother and son, and concluded with the suggestion that young man comes back to see him.
And we sympathize with J. O. Smith, his wife Hortense, and their children. Kitty Louise, Melanie, J. O. Jr., and the second Ephraim, in the loss of their mother and grandmother respectively. She must have been Quite a person.
B.C.
