“He’s good people.”
Maybe it’s not the best English, but you’ve heard it said this way if you grew up in almost any small town in the South. And you know what it means.
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Terry Toole is owner and publisher of my weekly hometown newspaper, The Miller County Liberal. He graciously publishes my Weakly Post along with all the other news of the good and not so good people of Colquitt and Miller County, Georgia.
Now don’t let the word ‘Liberal’ fool you. The paper leans about as far to the right as a pine sapling after an encounter with a tornado. It’s the kind of paper that will step on your toes, look you in the eye and say it to your face: “Pull for Colquitt or pull out.” Straight talk.
Terry also writes a weekly column, Up the Creek without a Paddle, and we share opposite pages of the paper. He’s on 6, I’m on 7. We’re sandwiched in after the obituaries and the fishing report. Our respective positions are sort of like sitting across the aisle from one another in the Colquitt United Methodist Church. Separate but equally committed to newsworthy journalism.
Metaphorical aisles of separation are everywhere in small towns. Opinions differ in matters of religion as well as ideology of any sort. In small towns, politics will separate friends and families as surely as Jesus separates sheep from goats, and county lines will guarantee there’s no consensus on which high school has the best football team.
A couple of weeks ago Terry wrote an article about his frantic weekend schedule of balancing his time between attending birthdays of the aged and the funerals of others. He went to all of them. Why? Because he’s ‘good people’ and lives among the ‘good people’ crowd.
Think about it…just two words describe the essence of folks. Make no mistake, South Georgia folks are born talkers, never at a loss of words. In spite of the brevity of the description, it’s quite adequate. Like hearing, “He’s a character.” Now, just what is a ‘character?’ Clearly it’s a catch-all word used when someone defies description…it says everything and nothing at the same time.
The ‘good people,’ who are they? They’re like my aunt. She was ‘good people,’ born that way. Not a mean bone in her body. Helped everybody. Unlike some others in our family, and maybe yours, who might have started with ‘good people’ genes, just maybe not all over, but surely in spots if you look close enough.
Except one of my distant cousins who tainted the family name. He wasn’t ‘bad people,’ just bad to cuss, especially when the subject of his third ex-wife’s name came up. And he was prone to prevaricate with flair and hyperbole when reciting fishing exploits with his best friend, Jim Beam. He was ‘good people,’ just slid a little sideways.
In small towns you won’t hear much about ‘bad people,’ just degrees of ‘good people.’ And if you do, it will be whispered. But if you were a fly on the pound cake in somebody’s house after Sunday night’s prayer meeting, you might hear of who was really bad. But come Monday, they will have miraculously become ‘good people’ once again, bless their hearts.
At a certain age funerals tend to replace baby showers. You go, pay your respects to the deceased’s family and cast a last look at the departed. You find yourself saying, like others, “They did a good job, looks just like him.” And you keep the cliché going, “He was good people.”
Personally, I’m glad to have grown up in a small town where the middle line between good and bad is not even gray, but razor thin. Nobody gets away with much very long. Small towns are the sole arbiters of their own truths, values and traditions. You walk a straight line and often on egg shells.
But in the end it really won’t matter which side of the aisle we sat on, or which pew we occupied. For when the eulogies are said, the last tears fallen, and the first clod of red clay hits the lid, what could be a more appropriate closure of the procession than hearing folks say, “He was good people.”
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While not elaborate, it pretty much sums it all up without saying too much, or too little, but just enough.
Bud Hearn
September 21, 2018