The drive felt like it might never end, but I didn’t mind. Trips with Pop Pop were like that.
Whatever the destination, it would have been thoroughly researched and selected as the absolute best in Pop Pop’s eyes. It didn’t matter that we lived less than fifteen miles from Six Flags, Largo. Pop insisted we were driving to the one in New Jersey; the one with a new rollercoaster. The best or nothing.
We once drove to Connecticut to buy a very particular type of flower to add to The Garden. After hours and several close calls (Pop Pop cut some lane changes a little too close) we parked. Since I was the only kid on the trip that day, I got to hit the fancy button that opened the side van door with no arguments. I remember stretching my gangly legs and surveying the floral designs. There was a concrete frog fountain spitting water across from hibiscus in every color. Pop Pop was walking the opposite direction and tentatively. His cowboy boots and wooden cane did not appreciate the graveled paths, and he took the opportunity to educate me on the merits of the superior stones back at his Garden.
By this time, an employee correctly assumed we were the party who had drove up from Maryland and skipped over with a wide grin. He directed us over to the previously discussed roses. The ones we drove from Maryland to buy even though I knew there was no shortage of supply in our own home state. Things quickly went downhill. The employee didn’t know Pop’s long slide-whistle and the following chuckle were his tell, and not of approval.
Whatever was wrong with those particular flowers, we were on the road again within the hour. Pop Pop didn’t want to look at other varieties, he didn’t want to shop other nurseries on the way back. The flowers were wrong and that meant heading back empty handed.
We continued our tradition of Cracker Barrel lunch on road trips; I believe to fill us up with so many carbs I wouldn’t scream as loud the next time we nearly sideswipe a bus.
This trip was long also, but Pop Pop listened to the best sixties and seventies music and I had an entire bench seat to myself. Besides the possible death by van accident, staring out the wide tinted window was the safest place to be.
No matter the destination, the departure time was 3am. Analog numbers displayed the current temperature and cast a red light that was not quite bright enough for me to read my latest Nancy Drew. Instead, I watched the built-in compass flicker between south and south/east. I don’t know why it was mesmerizing, but it was the only vehicle I had ever seen with a compass display feature. Pop Pop taught me interstates with odd numbers, like 95, went north and south but ones with even numbers like 70 went east and west. Soon it was bright enough to read my book, and I was complacent to ride to the ends of the earth listening to Pop Pop hum along with the music.
My mother told me when she was a child, she always thought Pop Pop was the smartest person in the world because he knew EVERY song there was. He hummed a harmony to any song on the radio, any genre. She was several years older when she realized he hummed along whether he knew the tune or not. He just “liked to join in on the music”, he said. It always made us laugh.
On this trip, we were headed to Carolina. I don’t know if it was North Carolina or South Carolina. Whenever Pop Pop talked about where he came from, he said “down in Carolina” so that’s where we were headed. Eventually my eyes hurt from reading and I resumed staring out the window. The landscape had changed. I lived on and around farmland as a kid but didn’t recognize the tall crops whizzing by. Too tall for soybeans and definitely not corn. After systematically ruling out every food I could think of, I asked Pop Pop. I knew he’d know. My grandmother and Pop Pop laughed from the front seats and pulled the van over.
“Go ahead and see,” he told me. He valued my curiosity and answered my questions like I was an adult, not some dumb kid. “Pick off a bit of that one by the road here, tell me what you think.”
After assuring me the farmer wouldn’t mind my tiny theft, I gently pulled a bunch of leaves off the stalk close to the base. I climbed into the van still puzzled, expecting a simple identification. Instead, we pulled back on the road, Pop Pop mumbling about the mystery on our hands. Rows of it filled mile after mile until another new plant took over where the leaves left off.
“Look!” I pointed and we again pulled over. This plant was more branchy and had circular nubs. I picked a piece and returned. This time we didn’t pull back onto the road. It was a solid minute and a half before my grandparents could look me in the eye. They were shaking with belly laughter. The more my serious face asked why, the harder they laughed until Pop Pop eventually caught his breath.
My Pop Pop Rogers is black. He met my grandmother, who is white at work. They fell in love, and Pop loved her daughter, my mother, as well. Years later, when a quiet bookish granddaughter with a love of music, space and stories came along, he loved her too.
I jumped at any opportunity to be with Pop Pop, and he didn’t seem to find me a bother. I can hear his laugh in my head, a series of extended high-pitched “heee heee”s and long exhaled sighs. But he was near tears laughing this time.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day! My white granddaughter! Out here picking cotton and tobacco!” My grandparents fell into another fit. The remainder of the trip back, Pop would remember again and start laughing all over. He tried to coax me into singing a few spirituals, which I only fell for once and resulted in yet another unscheduled pit stop. One verse of Amazing Grace and we had to find restrooms quick.
I kept that tobacco leaf and cotton twig wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of my long-sleeved shirt drawer for many years. It was a memory of laughter and road trips, but I never forgot the underlying punchline from the fields in Carolina.
The bitter Punch – my Pop Pop was only a few generations removed from the slaves that picked that cotton and tobacco with much less novelty.
The customary Line – “Say, do you remember that time, on the way back from Carolina, when my, hee hee! When my little granddaughter in her dress and frills and all that wanted to know…hee hee hee… there she was, my granddaughter as white as a sheet of paper picking tobacco and cotton……if they’d lived to see the day!”
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