Courtesy of Terry Jones.
Aunt Jane and Uncle Alce
The historian in me has always found it interesting that during our lifetime, we Baby Boomers will have known people whose lives, collectively, span four centuries. In our youth, we knew elderly folks who were born in the nineteenth century, and by the time we die we will have known people who will live into the twenty-second century.
I think the earliest-born person I knew well was my Great-Great Uncle Alson Jones, whom we called Uncle Alce. Born in 1882, he was the son of my Great-Great Grandfather Elisha Jones, a Confederate veteran of the 28th (Gray’s) Louisiana Volunteers who was badly wounded at the Battle of Mansfield, Louisiana.
Uncle Alce, and his wife, Jane Hutto Jones (b. 1888), had a small farm next door to us in the Hog Hair community of Winn Parish and were a beloved couple of my youth. I can still recall the snuff stains on their chins, Aunt Jane’s colorful country bonnet she wore when outside, and Uncle Alce slowly ploughing behind an old mule when he was about eighty years old.
One interesting thing I learned from our neighbor, J.M. Green, was that Uncle Alce didn’t learn how to drive until he was well up into his sixties. J.M. offered to teach him, and, while Uncle Alce had some trouble getting the hang of it, he finally got a license and bought a green and white Ford car.
It became a running joke in my family that we always knew if Uncle Alce and Aunt Jane were going to town, because early in the morning, he would park the car at his front gate. We could tell if they were going to Winnfield or Jonesboro by which direction he had it pointed.
One day Uncle Alce complained to Daddy that they could only go to town on warm days because the car’s heater didn’t work. Pop asked if he let the car warm up before turning it on, and Uncle Alce said no. Knowing that there was a simple fix, Daddy advised him to wait until he got a couple of miles down the road to Big Creek before turning it on. The next time Daddy saw him, Uncle Alce said it worked and that Jane was thrilled to discover they had heat!
One day, Aunt Jane called to say that Uncle Alce was going to pick me up to go fishing with them on Dugdemona. When he pulled out of our driveway onto the highway, he cut it too quickly and drove the car right off the end of a concrete culvert. There was a loud crunching noise and the car jerked badly, but he gunned it and kept going. Uncle Alce just muttered, “Dang old car!” like it was the car’s fault. The big scrape he made in the culvert is still there and reminds me of that wonderful old man every time I see it.
There are so many great memories of Uncle Alce and Aunt Jane. There was the time my brother Larry and I spent the night on the roof of their barn to try to shoot a fox that had been killing their chickens (we never saw it). Another time, we went over to see a big rattlesnake Uncle Alce had killed in his yard, and I got to keep the rattles (which I still have).
Two of my fondest memories are of helping Uncle Alce with some chores. One day when I was about thirteen, I helped him take down a wire fence around his house. It turned out to be quite a job, and he wanted to pay me a little money, but I refused. So, he went into the house and brought out a brown paper bag containing several pairs of brightly colored polka-dotted boxer shorts, which he offered as payment. He explained that they were Jane’s idea, but he didn’t like them. Mom and I laughed about it for years. We didn’t know which was funnier, the fact that he paid me in underwear or that Aunt Jane had picked out colorful polka dotted boxers for an eighty-year-old man.
Another task I helped with was to expand the Cypress Creek Baptist Church cemetery, where six generations of my family are buried. The cemetery was getting crowded, so Uncle Alce donated some adjacent land for expansion and asked me to help measure it off. It was a simple job of using a surveyor’s tape, stakes, and flagging to measure off the property, but it was neat to play a part in the church’s history. Decades later, we buried my parents in the very back of the cemetery, right next to the land line I helped Uncle Alce measure.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. An autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, costs $25. Contact him at tljones505@gmail.com
