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October 16, 2001 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I suppose the skeptical Northerner in me was expecting something different.<\/p>\n
I was stranded in a small town in the Deep South. Bad things were bound to happen.<\/p>\n
For every act of kindness, I expected a catch. Sure, someone would patch up our broken-down pickup truck. We’d eventually leave Mississippi, and again be bound for that bumper pool table awaiting us in Baton Rouge, La.<\/p>\n
But it would come at a cost.<\/p>\n
“So, how much do we owe you?” we would ask our makeshift mechanic.<\/p>\n
“Well,” he’d say through a shoe-shined sneer, “how much y’all got?”<\/p>\n
In tiny Toomsuba, however, it wasn’t like that at all. Fellow road-tripper Richmond Eustis and I were met with acts of such genuine generosity that I found myself scanning our surroundings for television cameras, Rod Serling, Allen Funt.<\/p>\n
Surely this was some sort of hoax. But it wasn’t. It was real.<\/p>\n
I needed this. Just four days earlier, I had watched the Twin Towers turn to fire and fall to the ground. I had seen the evil that man could do. My belief in benevolence had taken a beating.<\/p>\n
But little Toomsuba took me in its arms and consoled me, told me everything was going to be OK. At times, it seemed Toomsuba would never let go.<\/p>\n
The Toomsuba I experienced was not seething with racism or ignorance, like small towns in Mississippi are often depicted. Of course, I didn’t experience much more of the town than its Food Mart Texaco, just off I-59. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s much more of the town to experience than that.<\/p>\n
Every Toomsuban — if that, indeed, is what a person from Toomsuba is called — stopped by the Texaco at some point during the day, it seemed. Some filled their trucks with gas. Many ate a meal — prepared by Pee Wees Nos. 1 and 2 — at the Chester Fried Chicken. Several simply stood outside and shot the breeze.<\/p>\n
It was my observation that everybody in Toomsuba knew everybody in Toomsuba. No one walked through the doors of that Texaco without being recognized. As far as I could tell, people in Toomsuba liked one another, and were long accustomed to each other’s peculiarities.<\/p>\n
Before long, I was made to feel like one of the gang.<\/p>\n
It was not yet noon on a Saturday. I was a white thru-traveler standing next to a truck with out-of-state plates. They were middle-aged black men going through their daily routine. None of that appeared to matter.<\/p>\n
I was simply a person in need of help. And they were willing — no, anxious — to give me some. A truck on the blink is a beacon for this bunch.<\/p>\n
It was their day off, but they all wore work clothes. The oldest of the group had few teeth and carried a cane wrapped in duct tape.<\/p>\n
“What’s the matter with it?” asked a man with “Terrell” embroidered on his shirt. He had a riding lawnmower in the back of his pickup truck.<\/p>\n
I figured “It’s broke” wouldn’t work as an answer here, but I was easily the most mechanically-challenged man in Toomsuba on this day. Richmond was on his way to the Autozone with Pee Wee No. 2, so I pieced together a series of phrases that had been bandied about earlier.<\/p>\n
Clutch problems. Bleeding the line. Slave cylinder. Late for Louisiana. (I didn’t say anything about a bumper pool table.)<\/p>\n
Terrell stared eagerly at the truck. So did his six friends. For them, fixing a stranger’s truck was a fine way to fill a Saturday.<\/p>\n
“Do you mind?” Terrell asked.<\/p>\n
“Not at all,” I said. “But my friend’s got the keys.”<\/p>\n
Terrell sat in the driver’s seat and pumped the clutch. He retrieved some tools from his truck, and clanked around under the hood for a few minutes. Then he got on his back and slid underneath the Chevy S-10.<\/p>\n
The rest of us watched and talked — about everything from weather to war.<\/p>\n
“So how big of a town is Toomsuba?” I asked one of the guys. He had large sunglasses, a long goatee and graying jheri curls that stuck out the back of his baseball cap.<\/p>\n
“Well, there ain’t no red light,” he said. “You’ve got to stop to cross the railroad tracks right over there, but that’s it.”<\/p>\n
Terrell had some doubts that a new slave cylinder was going to solve our problems. But he couldn’t know for sure until he started the car. And he couldn’t do that without the keys.<\/p>\n
The men waited more than 30 minutes for Richmond to return, but he didn’t. They had to get going, and seemed rather upset that they weren’t going to be able to help us get on our way.<\/p>\n
“Well, all right, partner. Good luck,” the man with the jheri curls said. “We may be back through here later on.”<\/p>\n
I continued to stand by the truck, hood up. All passers-by expressed concern and offered an opinion on the root of the problem. “I hope y’all have luck,” several said.<\/p>\n
Was Toomsuba a mecca for mechanics, I wondered? Are gearheads to Toomsuba what poultry is to Gainesville? If Toomsuba did indeed have a center of town, would I find a marble monument topped with a bronze wrench there?<\/p>\n
I went inside to Pee Wee No. 1, behind the counter at Chester Fried, and asked.<\/p>\n
“Everybody in this town has to learn how to make a living,” Pee Wee No. 1 said. “We work. We’re mechanics. You do what you can when you’re poor.”<\/p>\n
Richmond returned after 1 p.m., more than 2.5 hours since we first turned off at Toomsuba for gas. He had with him a new slave cylinder for his truck, and stories of Pee Wee No. 2’s celebrity in the Meridian metro area.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Pee Wee No. 2, also known as Eddie Ruttley, was Spike Lee’s inspiration for the Mookie character in “Do The Right Thing.” Pee Wee No. 2 knew everybody along the way to the Autozone.<\/p>\n
“Pee Wee!” folks would call out to his truck. “What are you cookin’ today?”<\/p>\n
Richmond gave Pee Wee No. 2 $20 for playing the role of chauffeur, but Pee Wee wasn’t expecting a thing.<\/p>\n
“I’m a friendly guy,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll be broken down some day and need your help.”<\/p>\n
Al Folks actually apologized for not arriving sooner. Al, mechanic at Bunyard’s Transmission and husband of the girl behind the counter at the Texaco station, was there to put the new slave cylinder on Richmond’s truck. He carried a cardboard box full of tools.<\/p>\n
“You’re sorry?” Richmond said to Al, who wore blue jeans, a blue cap and a single gold earring. “We’re just happy we could get someone to work on such short notice on a Saturday.”<\/p>\n
“Ah,” Al said with a shrug of his shoulders, “I just had to close up my shop. We weren’t doing anything that couldn’t wait until Monday. I didn’t mind closing up and coming out here.”<\/p>\n
Pee Wee No. 1’s grand plan looked as though it was going to come to pass. Richmond and I sat down and enjoyed lunch at Chester Fried. It looked as though we’d be bound for Baton Rouge, after all. Life was good.<\/p>\n
But 45 minutes later, we learned that Al was going to have to open up his shop again. To run again, Richmond’s truck needed a new manual transmission — “tran-mission,” according to Al.<\/p>\n
I enjoyed my first three hours in Toomsuba, I really did. It was charming. It was refreshing. Still, I felt as though three hours were enough. I really like ice cream, too, but too much of it can make me sick.<\/p>\n
Besides, there was a bumper pool table down the road that I really wanted to buy.<\/p>\n
As Al loaded Richmond’s truck onto his wrecker, I offered Pee Wee No. 1 $20 for his troubles.<\/p>\n
“No,” he refused. “Absolutely not.”<\/p>\n
I offered it again, and he took it.<\/p>\n
Bunyard’s Transmission is a small garage at the end of a curvy dirt driveway behind a cluster of mobile homes. A landscape of abandoned cars, and their many abandoned parts, gave the surrounding yard a certain Mad Max appeal.<\/p>\n
We squeezed into Al’s truck and drove to Meridian to buy a new clutch. He was quite talkative, tackling the topic of terrorism before settling on local auto racing.<\/p>\n
“Now, I know you guys are in a hurry,” he said. “But you should really check the races out some time. Next Saturday night you’re through here, pull up to any gas station and ask for directions to the Queen City Speedway. They’ll know where it is.”<\/p>\n
“Al, what’s the population of Toomsuba,” I asked.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know,” Al replied. “But I do know that it was named after an Indian and his horse.”<\/p>\n
“Which one was ‘Toom’ and which one was ‘Suba’?” I pressed.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know,” Al said. “I’ve been wondering that for years.”<\/p>\n
When we returned, Al smoked cigarettes, sang country songs and worked on Richmond’s car. Occasionally, he’d emit a lengthy groan, making Richmond and I wonder whether we should start making calls about a hotel room.<\/p>\n
We passed some of the time by playing gin rummy. For about an hour, I rested my head in my hands and concentrated on forming a large puddle of spit on the ground below me, just like I used to do on the bench during baseball games back in high school.<\/p>\n
I was somewhat bored.<\/p>\n
“Is that a horse?” I asked.<\/p>\n
It was obviously a horse, but the fact that a horse was milling about the junkyard caught me off guard. It was brown and fed upon a random tuft of grass between two stranded sedans.<\/p>\n
“Sorry it’s taking so long,” Al said. “But we’re not charging you no more than we would if it were normal business hours. With everything that’s going on, I’d like to help out anybody. But we’re like that anyway.”<\/p>\n
Roughly five hours and $375 worth of parts and labor later, Al was finished and the truck appeared to be back in working order. We thanked Al profusely and bid a fond farewell to Toomsuba.<\/p>\n
It was nearly 7 p.m. Original plans were long lost. We decided to head straight for New Orleans, and pick up the bumper pool table in Baton Rouge on Sunday.<\/p>\n
A few miles down the road, Richmond’s “Service Engine Soon” light lit up, but Richmond assured me that it was a common occurrence. Once we merged onto the interstate, the truck began to vibrate — loudly. Again and again.<\/p>\n
We looked at each other and laughed. Then we turned the truck around and headed back to Bunyard’s Transmission. Perhaps, I wondered, we should begin looking into time-shares in Toomsuba.<\/p>\n
But another hour with good ol’ Al had us saying our good-byes again. We turned the radio up loud this time, and ignored all noises. Nothing was going to stop us now.<\/p>\n
And nothing did.<\/p>\n
We arrived in New Orleans at 12:30 a.m. We spent most of our 10 hours there sleeping. And on Sunday afternoon in Baton Rouge, Jennifer Tonguis was just as eager to get rid of her husband’s bumper pool table as she would have been on Saturday. She finally had room for a dining table in her dining room.<\/p>\n
The bumper pool table’s heavy slate playing surface made Richmond’s Chevy sag a bit as we headed home to Georgia. We were tired, and our rural route didn’t offer much incentive to stay awake. It was easy for highway hypnosis to set in. From state to state, the road rarely changed.<\/p>\n
When there were exits, it looked as though they led to nowhere. We likely would have thought as much about the off-ramp marked “Toomsuba,” had we not known different. But Toomsuba is somewhere, somewhere special. When I have doubts about humanity, I now think of the people I met there.<\/p>\n
Richmond and I shared a smile — but kept on driving. We didn’t want to push our luck.<\/p>\n
It was 2:30 a.m. on Monday when we pulled into Gainesville with a $100 bumper pool table that, by my calculations, ended up costing Richmond and me more than $700.<\/p>\n
It was 4:30 a.m. by the time we figured out how to get it into my house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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