What did it mean, growing up as a Handsboro girl?
Handsboro meant Pass Road, and looking at old faded family photographs of it as an oyster shell drive. It meant a huge holly tree with your grandfather’s initials carved in it, the letters even then warped and twisted by time and the growth of the bark. It meant we had photographs of our Martinolich neighbor’s horse-drawn ice wagon, but none of our own great-grandfather’s horse-drawn bread wagon. We knew the name of every person that walked down the street, from Son Dominic who lived on the bayou, to Crazy Willie from the back streets, to old Merrill getting away from Det so he could smoke a cigarette.
And as Handsboro girls, we knew better than to tell on him.
We looked through our grandmother’s now famous “scrap books”. She cut clippings from The Daily Herald for years, of the local social events, of the natural disasters, of movies stars and world events. She pasted them into thick-page oversize newsprint books- the original scrapbooker. We read the names she had pasted there- the death of our great grandfather in an explosion in the Gulfport courthouse in the 1930’s; the minute social details of our mother’s and aunt’s tenth birthday galas; VE and VJ Day, the 47 Hurricane, the death of Marilyn Monroe. She kept it all- along with 20 years worth of brown paper A&P bags and every mayonnaise jar she had ever emptied.
As full grown women now, I guess she taught us to value and preserve our heritage.
Handsboro meant Bayou Bernard, from a photo of grandparents as a very young, good looking couple in a skiff framed by cattails and reeds, to finally being old enough for daddy to let us take the boat with the outboard motor out on our own. No one then could ever imagine a jet ski. To go from oars to something you could start by pulling a rope was a big deal.
Handsboro meant instant access to Ship Island, and it did not matter if we paid our way there on the Pan American Clipper or got there on a 14 foot boat owned by a brother or a cousin. Some of us got our first kiss from a boy, at the tender age of 14, in the shade of Fort Massachusetts. Sun burnt and salt-crusted, after a long day out, we knew Ship Island was ours- a legacy- just as surely as the old oaks and Spanish Moss at Handsboro Elementary School belonged to us.
Ah, The Blow Fly Inn! Burgers, shuttle board, and an alligator named Rufus who would put in an appearance right around dark. Mullet schooled hungry in the shallows then, we could catch a hundred with nothing more than a tiny hook and a loaf of bread and an entire day to lay on the pier. Look to the huge old oak on the property next door, and try to read the writing in the concrete that stopped the rotting of its heart. Another Handsboro girl lives on in that scribbling.
Handsboro meant we grew up as much boy as girl—scooping crawfish out of the ditches, floundering at low tide at the end of Courthouse Road, running barefoot from place to place. But it also meant that our momma or our aunt or the spinster lady down the street jerked us up from time to time for a talk about those scrubby knees or the short dresses or the need to respect your elders. Being a Handsboro girl meant we got the best of both worlds- the freedom to run free but the hard lessons on how to be a lady. Thank-you notes were a must, as was church on Sunday.
Growing up in Handsboro meant we just took Camille in stride, because we grew up on stories of the 47 Hurricane, and we sat outside with our dad for most of Betsy. We knew how bad a storm was going to be long before the TV station said, because we could see the tide rise down at Kremer’s Marine before the winds ever came.
Handsboro meant trick or treating, and getting half an apple, twisted up in a baggie, and not thinking twice about eating it, and our folks never thinking twice about letting us eat it. They were more concerned that the old lady that gave it out might be short on cash, so she had to halve apples for the trick-or-treaters, instead of giving a whole one, or store bought candy.
Being a Handsboro girl meant that when we finally got out of Handsboro Elementary and went to Bayou View Junior High School, we found that the kids there were not near as interesting as the ones we grew up with. They knew very little about low tide, had never tumbled outside at midnight to watch an eclipse of the moon, never found an Indian arrowhead on the ground, or knew the various uses for Spanish Moss, or caught an eel on a hook down at Lakeview Inn on Bayou Bernard. But they sure did have cute brothers. Being a Handsboro girl also meant finally getting old enough to buy a beer for yourself at Lakeview, and finding it wasn’t quite the same place as when Aaron and Phoebe ran it.
Gulfport annexed Handsboro, but the die-hards kept addressing their envelopes with the Handsboro name. The tiny little mom-and-pop gas station closed, the old store building at the corner of Pass and Cowan was torn down. The small neighborhood stores, Bates and Rosetti’s, began to struggle, but we still bought sliced bologna and Barq’s root beer and Stage Plank gingerbread there. They widened Pass Road to four lanes, but we could still hear the Illinois Central train horn blow as it moved from east to west down crossing Teagarden Road close to the beach.
Girls still rode horses on the back streets, just a block off of busy Pass Road. Small boats put in at Kremer’s, and boatless folks—black and white, still fished with cane poles on the banks of the bayou. We still gathered in sorrow at the old cemetery across the bayou from time to time, or joined in a wedding celebration shaded by the oaks and steeple of the Handsboro Presbyterian Church. Though K-Mart and McDonald’s and bankers and realtors established themselves and their big offices on Pass Road, they still shared the same oak-tree-framed neighborhood as the century-old Masonic Lodge.
Despite progress, we girls knew where we came from, and we took the best of what our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunts, and our assorted extended-family females taught us, and we went forth. Some still in Handsboro, some out into the world now life-years away. But I bet we all keep a piece of the Handsboro legacy with us. Whether it be by the grace with which we entertain, the way we gather our family history, how we teach our children their values, or the way we can still be ladies, even when covered by mosquitoes or horse sweat or work BS. But most of all, it shows in the way we recover from utter disaster, and we move on
We are Handsboro girls. From the moss-draped oak and the low tide of Brickyard Bayou- to the bright new future forced upon us by the cataclysm of Katrina, we are still strong. We are the few, who, left with nothing now but a legacy and some nice memories, can take what the women before us taught us and left us with, and in the face of catastrophe, make it once again, what it once was. Our goal is to not only overcome for ourselves this situation, but to be able to stride forth and have our own daughters look back one day.
To be able to also say with pride, "I am a Handsboro girl."
Jean Streiff
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