Haggis' AH Vignette: Bearfish

Japhy

Banned
Bearfish
An AH Vignette by Haggis​

YOUNG: Hello, this is Alice Young. It is January 3, 1962, in Lincoln, Alabama. We're here talking to Hiram Lee. Mr. Lee, if you could introduce yourself so people know what your voice sounds like.

LEE: Do I, do I just talk?

YOUNG: Yes.

LEE: My name is Hiram Lee and I worked at the Alabama Polytechnic School for 34 years. In 1922 I became the first professor of Amphibious Livestock Maintenance and I did that until I retired about six years ago.

YOUNG: And when you say Alabama Polytechnic, you mean Auburn University?

LEE: Yes. They renamed it a few years ago but that don't really bother me much. I'm going to call it what we always called it, the polytechnic school. I'm too old to go remembering new things.

YOUNG: Right, and could you tell us a little bit about how you started there?

LEE: Well, I actually went to Polytechnic when it opened its school of veterinary medicine. First class. I started in 1907, umm, the year they started doing veterinary medicine up there. I guess they do all sorts of stuff now. There's a school for math and one for education, you know – training teachers, and just all sorts, but I went into veterinary medicine.

YOUNG: And why did you pursue that?

LEE: Well, I grew up in Eufala, and my father owned a large number of cattle and they were always sick, because of the tropical diseases that plague animals down here, and he said to me “do something good with yourself,” and then gave me tuition money. See, he had some timber land and he sold all of it off to some outfit out of Atlanta. We had the money and he decided that because I was the oldest I should go to college. So, because of them sick cows I went into veterinary sciences and spent the rest of my life taking care of animals for farmers all over the state.

YOUNG: Speaking of animals, there's one in particular we wanted to talk to you about.

LEE: Hahaha! Bearfish. Yup, I know a few things about them. If you'd like I can show you some tusks later. I always liked the tusks. There was a bull named Hondo, and this must have been 1937 or 38, but he went crazy over in Mississippi. Well, Hondo started killing people at this one creek. I went out with a team to track him. It took us almost a week of chasing him up and down his section before we found him. He had a really wide range for a bull, larger territory than they usually got in Africa. Well, you know, I've got his tusks now and he doesn't.

YOUNG: Yes, exactly. Uh, could you clarify for people that might listen to this from other parts of the country?

LEE: Hippopotamus amphibius. The bearfish, the river cow, whatever you call 'em. You probably ate some recently. They're an important part of the landscape now, of course, I remember before we got 'em. But you know, not many people do anymore I guess. They're everywhere.

YOUNG: I understand that you actually saw the 1911 Herd, the first introduction of hippos, on the Calcasieu River.

LEE: Oh yeah, I'd just graduated and this one old professor, his name was Mr. Reed, he'd been a surgeon in the war and he said “boys, this is a historic day for livestock,” so he took his favorite students on a trip to Vernon Parish to see the introduction to the Americas. It was a big deal, I always thought it was funny.

YOUNG: Why's that?

LEE: Oh well, because we were out there in overalls; it was me and Mr. Reed and Robert Slocomb and Henry Garza and maybe one or two other people that I can't recall, but we were wearing overalls because we thought maybe we'd have to jump in and help wrangle these hippopotamuses that were getting released. So, there's us and some senators from Louisiana and a reporter from the New York Times and they're all wearing these big suits that cost more than all the clothes I ever owned and we just thought it was funny. People thought we were locals until we opened our mouths.

YOUNG: Oh?

LEE: Yes, the reporter from the New York Times came over to talk to us for a minute. He'd just got done interviewing the bearfish experts, which were these big angry looking white Africans that spoke some kind of German. So he comes over and starts talking to us and Mr. Reed is telling him the story of how five or six veterinarians from Alabama all ended up at this event and he's nodding along but as soon as we showed ourselves to be men of science he put down his pencil and moved on to a group of local people that looked pretty uneducated.

YOUNG: Put down his pencil?

LEE: Mhm, yes ma'am, he wanted to write a story about all these coonasses getting worked up over the state dumping African animals in their river. But I don't remember anyone really being worked up, they just all seemed so excited to see this new thing. I think the local Temperance League even tried to institute a Hippopotamus Day Parade. It was a big deal. I really enjoyed seeing everyone rallying around the idea. Of course, nowadays, states cull herds when they get too big, hehehehe, I remember reading about the first cull they had in Florida. I think they killed close to forty of them but they breed like wildfire down here.

YOUNG: Very true. Now, do you remember about their introduction to Alabama?

LEE: Well, I actually went to work for Polytechnic after I graduated. I did education programs for cattlemen. At the time we were pushing for tick eradication, there were some vats in every county all over the state, so I was supervising a vat in Geneva county when they introduced the first herd in Alabama. Now, some people say that the first herd was dumped into the Mobile River but that's not true, they introduced them to the Black Warrior River first. They just, well, they just spread south naturally. In fact, I was working with a professor from Florida State and he claimed that the Florida herds all originated from bearfish migrating east and contaminating the Apalachicola River. Now, I know there's a lot of creeks and gullies and things like that but I never understood how they'd do that much walking.

*****************************************​

YOUNG: This is Alice Young. Today is April 27, 1962, and we're in Arkansas City, Arkansas speaking with Eugenia Hoffman. Mrs. Hoffman if you could speak into the microphone for me.

HOFFMAN: It's kind of big ain't it?

YOUNG: The microphone?

HOFFMAN: Mhm. Big machine you got here. How much did you pay for it?

YOUNG: Hahaha. About two hundred dollars.

HOFFMAN: Oh wow. That's a lot of money to spend on a microphone.

YOUNG: Yes ma'am. Now, I was wondering if you could tell us about your family's soap company.

HOFFMAN: Haha! I like you girl. Right down to business. I like that. We're both busy women.

YOUNG: Yes ma'am.

HOFFMAN: Well, the Desha Soap Company was founded by my mother, Mabel Byrd, on December 22, 1927. It started a few years after the first big culls that Arkansas had. All these bearfish came out of the Mississippi River, now mind you, at the time nobody knew how they got there. It upset a lot of people because none of the states introduced the animals directly onto the Mississippi, there was some big law or something about that and Arkansas never introduced its own herd. All the states south of us did; Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and I think Georgia, but Arkansas never did.

HOFFMAN: Of course, that didn't stop them. They eventually got in the big river and started spreading northwards. I think my favorite story about that is the time they found one that froze to death in Minnesota, people up there didn't know what to do with it, so they stuffed it and put it in a museum. Hahahaha.

HOFFMAN: Well, anyhow, all these bearfish came out of the river and started walking on land and they just ate up all the rice fields that we had around here. Miles and miles in every direction just stripped down to the mud. Must have been a hundred or more, that's how mother always told it. She said that one day her and my father had rice and the next day they didn't. Now, I was only 12 when this happened so my exact memory is pretty small. However, I do remember all the men in the county getting really angry about it and saying they were going to kill all the bearfish that ever lived. It was a hard time.

YOUNG: How did the rice farmers cope?

HOFFMAN: Well, to be honest with you, a lot of them left. You had to take out big loans to get started on rice and most of these people were in debt to the banks or owed their landlord so much of a crop. It seemed like half the town left to go live with a cousin in Missouri or find work doing oil jobs in Texas. Like I said it was a hard time. Of course, we didn't leave.

YOUNG: Why is that?

HOFFMAN: We didn't know anybody! My mother and father were cousins when they married and we didn't have any family in Missouri and my little brother was too sick to move anywhere. So we stayed and prayed a lot and my father went out with the other men in the town and started killing bearfish. It was easy work. They're just big and lumbering creatures, really fast when they want to be but for the most part the men would hide in bushes and shoot them.

YOUNG: How did your family get into the soap trade then?

HOFFMAN: I'm getting to that. See, most of the men realized that these bearfish they were shooting had a lot of meat on them. Hundreds of pounds just rotting the sun. So they started butchering them and passing the meat out to the poorest families, which was everybody that stayed. It seemed like almost half the town left at that point. We'd go to church and get some meat. You wouldn't believe how many sinners got saved that way.

HOFFMAN: Anyhow, the men got used to being around the bearfish and hunting them and they got careless and real, real dumb. Mind you this was about July of 1925, which was the first time we'd seen the animals around here. So, I'm sorry this still upsets me, so one day my father, George Byrd, and my uncle James were out by themselves and they were gutting a bearfish on the edge of the river. You know we all just thought they were dumb things but one came up out of the water and dragged my uncle in after it. The tusks cut him right in half. I think he may have been the first person to perish from bearfish in Arkansas. Well, my father is just so angry and he tries to load the rifle to kill the thing but it came at him then too and put a big gash going all the way up his left leg. He passed away at the hospital a few hours later.

YOUNG: Who found him?

HOFFMAN: Mmm, some colored men were going down to the river to do some fishing and they took him to the doctor. So now it was just me and my mother and three brothers. We didn't know what color the sky was through all our tears.

HOFFMAN: We tried to get by just taking in boarders but there weren't many people coming around there at that time so the eldest of my brothers, Jefferson, he must have been 19 at the time, he went out to look for work saying that he'd send money home. Eventually mama started butchering and drying the meat alongside the men because you could pick better cuts that way. So, one day we run out of kerosene and she took an idea to go and cut a slab of fat off one of the bearfish and brought that home and melted it down into tallow and made a whole bunch of candles from it. Nobody else in town was doing anything like that at the time and she could sell the candles for a little bit of money and between all of that and the meat we had stored we managed to keep a house.

YOUNG: And when did she expand her operations?

HOFFMAN: Oh it must have been not even a year later. She got the idea one day that we'd all make a bunch of candles and go to Greenville over in Mississippi to try and sell them. It was the biggest town around, so we all loaded in the back of this truck that hauled cotton and hitched a ride there. Me and my two brothers just holding on tight to this crate full of candles. She was real clever because we didn't try to sell to any stores or nothing, no, mama took us to the colored part of town and we sold cheap candles door to door. Then we made enough money to go home. After she did this a time or two, well, women over in Greenville started buying candle subscriptions. They'd pay up front and we'd come out and deliver maybe a hundred or so candles to these poor neighborhoods.

YOUNG: How did you get the supplies to do this?

HOFFMAN: Well, a lot of people didn't trust bearfish fat to cook with or anything like that. So, they just brought us the slabs when they were butchering one or me and one of my brothers might go down to the river and haul up a bunch of it. We always, always smelled like grease. Now, eventually one of the department stores in Greenville started selling our candles, in addition to these subscriptions, so we got our start as “Mabel's Fancy Candles” of course we eventually had more fat than we could make candles with, so one she said “why not make soap too?” She didn't think that anyone would buy soap named after a person, so we just named it after the county we lived in. We didn't expect much of it but by 1935, we were selling Desha Soap in Memphis, north Mississippi, and all over Arkansas. I think by the time the war came that people washed with our soap all the way in Atlanta.

YOUNG: How did you manage to keep up with the demand?

HOFFMAN: Oh we hired a bunch of people as soon as we could afford to do that. Our house eventually became a little soap and candle factory with women from all over the county just melting and grinding down bearfish fat. Well, you know, eventually they'd just move into town to be closer to work. It was a miracle, we saved Arkansas City.

YOUNG: And now you're the largest soap manufacturer in the south?

HOFFMAN: No.

YOUNG: Oh?

HOFFMAN: We're the largest soap manufacturer in the United States.


Japhy: Some of the older hands in the community might remember Haggis, one of the more creative, experimental and entertaining authors to have ever graced this and the other websites that once made up AH online. For those of you who don't, I hope this is a pleasant introduction. I talked him into letting me post this here, because its crazy, interesting, and entirely based on something that actually happened.

I hope you all enjoy this, discussion and comments are welcome, I'll pass on what I can.
 
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Japhy

Banned
I'll kick it off then. Haggis' writing was always a treat. Wonderful framing mechanisms, wonderful developments, and a daring sense of pushing things outside of our site's traditional parameters. It was a pleasure to read the piece.

Its also an inspired Point of Divergence, based on a story that truly is "Stranger than Fiction". And it doesn't deal with the mechanizations of Roosevelt and Taft, Senators and War Heroes. Its nice to see a piece that just gives us the interesting look at how it changes peoples lives, and local economies.
 
I love it. I've been turning this particular POD over and over in my head trying to figure out a way to work with it since I first stumbled upon the story myself.

Hoorah to Haggis for spinning this tale!
 
This was delightful. I had a vision of the world's biggest cane toads, at first.

I often wonder about alternative cuisine- a lot of AH doesn't deal with the tactile, but I like to think how different alternate timelines would be just in terms of the senses. So this very much tickled my fancy.

Congratulations to Haggis!
 

Japhy

Banned
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE

Haggis decided to continue this project, and the continued awesome will be posted for your enjoyment and stuff.
 
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