Growing up in the country, you can almost taste the changing of the seasons. Especially from spring to summer. All the fragrances seem to blend together. As the nights get warmer, they have a liquefying effect on your senses. June starts off tasting like honeysuckle cider and transcends to watermelon wine by late July.
As summer approached, there were things you could count on happening in the little Middle Tennessee country town in which I lived in my childhood years. Corn gets cut. Catfish start biting. And a legendary bootlegger was open for business. He cooked and sold the best “goes down smooth” moonshine ever chugged by mankind. He was black and blind. They called him Blind Remus. I called him Mr. Remus.
As soon as school let out for the summer, I worked weekends for Mr. Remus. I was his one and only employee. He trusted me. Back then, in the 1950s, it took a lot for a black person to trust white people. Even white children.
Remus wasn’t his real name. Everybody called him that because he looked so much like the Uncle Remus in the Disney movie “Song of the South.” He was short and stocky, bald on top with curly white hair around the sides and a stubble of a beard, like he hadn’t shaved for a week. He wore green, frost-lensed glasses. His voice was husky, and his laugh was big and genuinely jovial until you started talking about money.
That’s when his serious side kicked in. All odds were stacked against Mr. Remus making the money that he did. But he did. Blind and black were tough obstacles to overcome, especially in those days. That, and him living not more than 12 miles down the road from the little town where the Ku Klux Klan originated.