"The Cane and The Maypop"
Author's Note
A true tale retold.
One summer when I was 10 ¾ going on 11 years of age, I went to visit my cousins on Uncle Law and Aunt Lois’ small South Carolina farm near Laurens.
Life on the farm, for a young city visitor like me, was a very happy experience. Uncle Law would drive the Model T Ford into town and would allow me to ride on one of the front fenders.
Sometimes Law, Junior, Berts, and I would go swimming in the water holes, that is, after we threw rocks at chased out all of the water moccasins. Or we would go “minnowing” in the little streams, putting a little ball of bread on the bent hook made from a straight pin, typing it to a length of thread and attaching that to a stick for a fishing pole. You could jerk your little pole, just barely hook a minnow, flip it out of the water, grab it, and put it in a can and take them back to the cats. The cats enjoyed that meal enormously.
There was a time, too, and it seems cruel now as I remember it, when, on the fourth of July, we would take our small firecrackers down to the creek, catch crawfish there (like little lobsters they looked), light a firecracker under a crawdad, pretending it was a murdering redcoat in the Revolutionary War, AND BLOW THE SPINY LOBSTER TO PIECES!
But the incident I remember best had to do with my walking stick. Like many boys, maybe most boys who like to hike about the forests and fields, I carried a stick. I carried it to beat a path through thorny bushes, to swat small branches off the trees and out of the way of the paths, but mainly I carried the stick because it was fun to carry, like a swagger stick, and fun to swing around in the air, or to lambast weeds, uprooting them and digging divots out of the earth. A stick is a very useful thing with which to walk, steadying yourself as you do downhill to cross a brook, and a good companion, because of its heft and “feel” and accompanying sense of security.
For me, the particular stick of which I speak was a very very special one. I already liked wood carving, having copied the way Uncle Law would whittle on a stick late in the day after the chores were done, and I had decided to carve the handle of this walking cane or short staff. For two or three days, I carved, with a penknife, little heads of animals and people, in a manner of a totem pole, and a number of intricate designs, whirls and circles … leaving the bark on some rings, and stripping it from the rest of the cane. The result, I thought, was a work of art, a thing of beauty, and a source of pride. I carried my newly carved “cane” with me everywhere I went.
I used to pop the maypops in the fields with it, or toss them up, one at a time, and smack away at them like they were baseballs. What we called the “maypop” was the egg-sized fruit of a flowering vine found wild in the fields of the southern states. Actually its flower, the passion flower, is the state flower of Tennessee. But they were all over the place in South Carolina, too. It was great fun for youngsters to take the fruit – the maypops – and hurl them against a wall or a tree or a hard clearing on the ground to see and hear them smash and “pop.”
Well, here is what happened with my cane and a maypop. One day, Uncle Law was going hunting, and I begged him to take me along. We had gotten up before daybreak as usual, and I had helped with little assignments like carrying in wood for the wood cooking stove in the kitchen, digging weeds, and bringing in some water from the well outside. After a couple of hours up, we sat down to a breakfast of fried chicken, iced tea, and apple pie. Now, my uncle said it was time to take a break for hunting.
I think perhaps this was not his usual time for hunting. I think he just wanted me to have an experience. And I did. He took me along, and off we started through fields of tall grass. We were gone for quite a spell, searching the sky, looking through cattails, walking through gullies, stalking shadows in the woods. We did not find any game – nothing worth shooting at. We had started home again and reached the tall grasses in one of the fields, when Uncle Law asked if I would like to fire the shotgun.
“Oh, yes … yes … oh, yes!” I replied, excited about the whole thing. I had never fired a shotgun before … only BB guns and, two or three times, when someone was watching over me, a .22 rifle. BUT A SHOTGUN! Great Day in the Morning! I’ll bet it has a kick to bruise your shoulder. I could not wait.
There was one problem. There was no target – nothing to shoot at in this big field of tall grass. BUT SHOOT I WOULD! I spied some maypops on vines that climbed the grass … but they were pretty well hidden – low in the grass – too low to aim well enough.
But I had a brainstorm. I needed something on which to place the small fruit in order to pick it out from a distance. I stuck my carved cane up in the dirt, the top of it showing above the grass. Then I plucked a maypop and carefully – very carefully – balanced it on the very top of my stick. I stepped back several paces, raised my uncle’s shotgun, and, all excited, aimed, pulled the trigger, fired with a jolt to my shoulder, and … BLEW MY WALKING CANE TO PIECES!!! None of the shot, not one little bitty piece of lead, even touched the maypop. GROAN …
It was much later that I learned the real name of the maypop, that it was the fruit of the Passiflora or passion flower (flos passionis). It is called that, I learned, because, supposedly, the corona is said to resemble the crown of thorns placed on the head of Jesus at the time of the “passion” (or suffering) of Christ at the crucifixion. Other parts of this beautiful flower represent the nails or wounds. Three crosses, the crosses of Jesus and the two thieves at Golgotha outside Jerusalem are imagined as part of the flower, while the five sepals and the five petals are taken to be symbols of the ten apostles – all but Judas, who betrayed Jesus, the Christ, and Peter, who denied him three times.
In later years, as I thought about this incident from my childhood I came to see it as a kind of allegory or symbol for what happened at one point in my religious life.
Having studied Bible in graduate school and for the Christian ministry at the seminary, I had been taught that (as the song suggests), “the things that you’re liable – to read in the Bible – they ain’t necessarily so …"
No, Jesus was not born of a virgin.
No, he did not get up and walk around after he died.
These are mythic stories. Much of the Jesus story is metaphor: “poetry believed in,” according to Santayana.
These learnings had disillusioned me something awful. I was dismayed that some “grand hoax” had been perpetrated upon me. I was sick that the things I had learned in Sunday School as a child simply were not true. I was angry that people believed these things or pretended that they did (I was not sure which). In any case, I was going to let others know that “the greatest story every told” was just a “story” and was not be taken as an article of faith! I was having some pretty anti-Christian feelings back then – to say the least!
So what of the cane and maypop?
We might think of the carved walking cane as representing youthful creativity – the creation of a bit of reality, of something new and meaningful, the bringing into being of something “real” and “solid,” happy and tactile in a world of sometimes fleeting and false dreams. The walking stick could be said to stand for my developing philosophy of nature and life … a believable theology, if you will. And let us suppose that the maypop or passion flower represents orthodox Christianity.
Now, you have seen that in shooting at the maypop – Christianity – I missed, and destroyed the carved cane – the creative foundation upon which this orthodox Christianity had been placed.
Some of us, and I was one for a time, in attempting to shoot holes in that which we were trying to discard, MISS THE MARK, and succeed mainly in being destructive toward what was once new and alive and positive in our own searching and creative religious experience.
Chagrined, I took what was left of the little staff with its shattered totems up to the farmhouse and rested it there against the steps. Then, in two or three days, I whittled the splintered end off of the stick and kept the smooth shorter staff. I didn't know why.
The reason presented itself when Aunt Lois asked Berts and me to “slop the hogs.” We had to carry big buckets of milk and pot likker and corn and cobs and carrot ends and pieces of turnip and Heaven knows what (it looked like garbage to me) all down to the pig pen and dump it in the trough.
I picked up what was left of my walking cane, thrust it under the handle of the heavy bucket, and with Berts on one side and me on the other, we carried the slop down to the hogs.
Not much, perhaps, but it was a beginning.
I would have to find a new way to create meaning and serve a purpose now that naïve ways and beliefs were gone.
Always – even if in small ways at first – always start over.
jake wrote
I love the metaphor, but, as much as I usually love Bob's presentation, I'm going to talk to him about making some adjustments to this one. Am I crazy?
Posted on Mon, Jun 02, 2008