COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 3: COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

“The South has got some sins on its soul that it will never be able to get clear of. But so has the nation. And quite often the attempt to correct these sins leads into still greater sins through the method in which they were corrected.” – esteemed Civil War historian, Shelby Foote (1916-2005)

When Grandma died in 2001, she was to be buried in the same cemetery in Aberdeen, Mississippi that interred Nathan Bedford Forrest’s brother. Before her burial, I left the Episcopalian Church where she lay in state and I gathered my cousin to accompany me on a tour of Aberdeen (a town I lived in briefly as a youth — and as a teenage rebel, one I couldn’t get away from fast enough) … We walked through the downtown area to see what was left of it – to see what hadn’t been usurped by the local Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town. Beyond the machinations of market forces, I also wondered how much of the so-called “New South” and its enlightenment about racial co-existence had taken root there – had rural Mississippi finally followed the societal vicissitudes most of the country had taken for granted a long time ago? During our walk many things were as gothic and languid as they had been twenty years earlier, the last I had visited the place: For example, the diner was still there – the same lunch counter one of my spinster Aunts had picketed in the 1970s when the restaurateurs had belatedly acknowledged the 1965 Civil Rights Act and finally started seating and serving blacks. The local walk-in movie house was still there – the same bijou that as a teenager in the 70s I patronized and watched Joe Don Baker portray Sheriff Buford Pusser in “Walking Tall”; back then what struck me as curious was that the theater owners made negroes sit in the balcony.

Nowadays the theatre is shuttered. My guess is that videotape rentals at Blockbuster had taken care of the actual movie-going experience and had rendered discussions about segregated seating in the local nickelodeon moot.

After marching up and down the Main Street with my cousin, we take a wider orbit into residential area that surrounded downtown. This is not the richest section of town nor the poorest, but here blue and white-collar blacks and white co-exist on streets where antebellum mansions can be scored for $70,000 or so. Encountering sundry slices of life sipping soda pop and swinging on porches or walking down the street, my cousin and I acknowledge that everything seems peaceful if not simpatico.

In our travels, I see a sort of Quonset hut turned into a store. The sign outside reads “Coontail Collectibles” and its iconography featured a raccoon.

I cannot figure out if the semiotics and semantics of the sign are harmless enough or are an outrageous racist caricature. Do folks actually collect coontails around here? Is that a euphemism?

“C’mon, man,” I tell my cousin, pointing at the smiling ‘coon. “We have to deal with this place.” -30-