I do know that Little Man was real. Intensely real. We would talk of things going on, things important to a person in his first ten years of life. The 1950's in Sopchoppy were those of a page from Mayberry. We lived directly across from the town swimming hole on the Sopchoppy River, a tannin dark and twisting creek that snakes its slow flow to the Gulf of Mexico at Panacea. I stayed next door during the day with Mr Emory and Mrs Mary Rudd, two kindly people on a little farm right on Rose Street, the main road that ran through town with an occasional vehicle passing. I would lay on the front porch swing under the magnolia and listen to Mr Birch and the band practicing up at the School where my mother was teaching. My father was busy in his first pastoral duties at the Methodist Church since moving from Vicco, Kentucky, his first church out of Asbury Seminary.
Little Man played a lesser role in the earlier times with the Rudd's, as Mr Emory kept my imagination busy with the rats the traps caught from the night before, the matchboxes and Prince Albert Tins, his fiddle playing and his rocking me on his knee. Mrs Mary provided bread pudding made from the eggs we gathered around the yard.
Mrs Mary passed away and it was the first taste of death for me as the following evening we visited her lying in her bed in the front bedroom in a wake. It was soon after that the black maid Angeline came from Buckhorn to keep me at home. By this time, a year or two before entering first grade, I was able to roam the town with Robert Strickland and Little Man. He was always there, though we never talked much as Robert and I had so much territory to cover in a day. Eating kumquats in the tree in front of Roberts, forming a club in their barn, baseball at the Carraway's, soft drinks at Langston's Grocery, always the Sopchoppy river and the fishing and swimming, out to Maxi Lawhorn's past the bridge, with Robert's father to right the bee hives in Grimes Bay from a black bear and on it went.
It was the only home I remembered and I did not have the concept of moving. It came though after my second grade year. John Lloyd cried loudly when Miss Townsend announced that I would not be returning next year for third grade. It was at this point in the packing and the moving that somehow I misplaced Little Man. I do not know if it was an imagination shift of reality, or if he actually was lost. I do recall looking throughout the house and yard. Perhaps he was in the old haunted two story house next door. I did not savor going up the creaking stairs in search.
I never found Little Man. We moved to Monticello that June and it was awhile later, over at Hunter Dobson's, that he too I learned, had a little man. His I think was a German Officer. He offered me one of is little men, for he had an entire platoon. I chose a little gray soldier, probably German as well, standing at attention. We talked for awhile, but soon, our conversations grew less as this new town filled my days. The painting classes, the drawing with Wayne Lassiter during recess, the new found sports abilities in basketball and running, and a girl named Deborah, erasing my heart ache for Helen Roussey of Panacea, who I imagined sitting in her home, married with children at the age of seven, back in Sopchoppy. Little man beside me. Little Man never lost. Inside me all these years.
Someday I will return to Sopchoppy and see how Little Man, Helen and his family are getting along.
