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| George Buster Singleton |
Uncle Tony was an old man who didn’t have a family to look
after him in his old age. So my father, who had known him for many years, took
the old man under his wing, so to speak, and looked out for his well-being.
A small house was built nearby, and Uncle Tony took up
housekeeping. The food that he ate came from our table. There was always plenty
prepared, so there wasn’t any bother when two or three extra were around at mealtime.
There was a small table out on the back porch for the unexpected guests.
My darling mother was an outstanding cook and supervisor of
the kitchen. When mealtime came around, there were almost always an extra guest
or two. Many wanderers and vagabonds who came that way knew this and when they
were in the area, they always showed up around mealtime. My dear mother never
turned anyone away hungry.
Uncle Tony was born a child of slave parents. As close as
anyone could calculate, he was born around 1850, give or take a year or so. He
was in excellent physical condition despite his advanced age.
He could walk with the best of them. Ten or 12 miles at one
time didn’t phase Uncle Tony. He had a special church that he liked to attend.
The church was around four miles one way from where we lived.
He didn’t think anything about walking to this church each
Sunday and return. My father insisted that the old man ride one of the horses
that we had there on the farm. He refused, because he said that he didn’t want
to be bothered with the animal.
One year for Christmas, Uncle Tony became the proud owner of
a new blue serge suit. This suit came complete with a white shirt, necktie and
a new pair of shoes. Giving him the new shoes was thought to be a waste of
money by all who knew him. No one ever saw the old man ever wearing shoes.
Winter or summer, the old man would walk around barefoot;
ice or snow didn’t phase Uncle Tony. So he would dress up in his new suit, complete
with necktie, and to walk barefoot the distance to the church he enjoyed going
to.
To please my father, who had raised a considerable amount of
heck because the old man wouldn’t wear his new shoes he had bought him, Uncle
Tony would put on his new shoes and wear them a short distance from the house.
Here, he would pull them off and hide the shoes until his return trip home that
afternoon. He would put them on and come walking proudly up the road as though
he had worn them all day long.
This went on for several weeks until my father got wind of
what the old man was doing. My father proceeded to follow Uncle Tony to the
place where he would always hide his shoes. My father took the shoes and hid
them in the barn for several weeks. Uncle Tony searched far and wide for his
lost Sunday shoes, only to find out later that my father had them all the time.
During the time he had the shoes hidden, my father would
question the old man about how his shoes were wearing. The answer was always: “They
wear so good. I hardly know I got them on.”
As a small boy of five years of age, I learned much from
this gentle old man. I tasted my first tobacco in a corncob pipe the old man had
secretly made for me. Each time I smoked the crude pipe, my dear friend would
tell me that I should swallow the smoke.
I would get terribly sick, and I suppose this is why I never
cultivated the habit of smoking. Looking back, I believe the old man knew what
he was doing; he stopped the habit before it started.
I would spend many hours in the evenings after the work day
was completed and after the supper meal had been eaten with the old man. I
would sit and listen to the many tall tales that Uncle Tony retrieved from his
outstanding memory.
As a younger man, he had worked for the Ringling Bros.
Circus as a laborer. During this time, he had picked up several small magic
tricks that he would entertain me with for hours on end. Always, he would tell
me that one day when I grew older; he was going to teach these tricks to me.
The magic tricks and the many tall tales from his circus experience kept a
small farm boy spellbound and wide-eyed for hours on end.
My father, out of necessity, was a self-trained blacksmith.
He did all the work that he had to do to keep the farm equipment going in a
small shed out near the barn. Many times, during the cold days of the winter
months, he would sharpen his plows and repair his farm equipment and that of
the neighbors, for spring planting and the farm year ahead.
On one of these old winter days, everyone was huddled around
the small fire in the blacksmith forge to try and keep warm, all the while
keeping a good bull session going also. Uncle Tony was there, barefoot as
usual. My father had just heated a piece of iron to be used in the repair of a
plow point. He had heated the iron red hot and had cut a small piece off the
larger piece. The small piece of the red hot iron had fallen to the dirt floor
of the shop almost unnoticed.
Everyone there began to notice the burning odor of what
appeared to be skin or leather burning. To everyone’s amazement, Uncle Tony had
stepped backward on the piece of red hot iron. The burning odor was from the
burning skin of the old man’s foot. Uncle Tony’s foot was so tough that he hadn’t
really noticed that his foot was on the red hot piece of iron.
This tale was told and retold many times by those present
that cold day there in the small blacksmith shop. During the remaining years of
the old man’s life, hardly a day passed that Uncle Tony wasn’t reminded and
kidded about him standing on the red hot piece of iron.
(Singleton, the author
of the 1991 book “Of Foxfire and Phantom Soldiers,” passed away at the age of
79 on July 19, 2007. A longtime resident of Monroeville, he was born on Dec.
14, 1927 in Marengo County, graduated from Sweet Water High School, served in
the Korean War, lived for a time among Apache Indians, moved to Monroe County
in June 1964 (some sources say 1961) and served as the administrator of the
Monroeville National Guard unit from 1964 to 1987. For years, Singleton’s
column “Somewhere in Time” appeared in The Monroe Journal, and he wrote a
lengthy series of articles about Monroe County that appeared in Alabama Life
magazine. Some of his earlier columns also appeared under the heading of
“Monroe County History: Did You Know?” He is buried in Pineville Cemetery in
Monroeville. The column above and all of Singleton’s other columns are
available to the public through the microfilm records at the Monroe County
Public Library in Monroeville. Singleton’s columns are presented here each week
for research and scholarship purposes and as part of an effort to keep his work
and memory alive.)
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