The Wood Splitter

The barbeque place was little more than a falling down shack at an intersection in an area of town where poverty is in charge. The signs were lettered by hand with little care for spelling or grammar and the lot was littered with cast off
machinery and trash. A rickety picnic table sat off to one side along with the huge smoker and a haphazard woodpile. White smoke rose from the chimney and I could hear the sounds of wood being chopped. On the far side, a tall, powerfully built black man in ragged jeans, heavy workboots and no shirt stood over a stump with an axe. Though it was early in the morning, sweat ran over his shoulders and down his back from the effort of wielding the axe and he paused often to wipe sweat from his eyes with a faded bandana he wore 'round his neck. He worked gracefully, moving with the axe as if they were one and in a steady, flowing motion. Once split, he easily moved on to the next piece of wood, split it in one or two fluid movements, and moved on to the next. I felt as if I had slipped back in time and been unexpectedly transported to The Whistlestop Cafe and I half-imagined that Idgie Threadgoode might suddenly appear with a plate of fried green tomatoes for the wood splitter's breakfast. On the other side of the intersection, rundown shotgun houses lined the street for almost as far as I could see and in a vacant lot just behind me, a group of seven or eight men had gathered under a shade tree. They were playing cards on shabby makeshift card tables and drinking from the comfort of battered lawn chairs.

The light changed and a little reluctantly I returned to the present day although the images stayed with me, perhaps because they were so stereotypically old south. I remembered Boston's hate wars and race riots vividly - they were limited to the inner city and dealt with harshly. Racism is not defined or limited by geography but at times the way it's expressed seems to reflect the culture in which it lives. Tolerance is not always what it appears to be on the surface and racism can be as equally well taught by genteel, well bred voices as by shouting, illiterate ones. A cross burning in Mississippi is not so very different than setting a school bus on fire in Massachusetts - emotions born of hatred and fear cannot help but be destructive.

Later in the day I passed the same way again and realized I'd likely driven by the little place hundreds of times and never given it a glance. It had caught my attention that morning only because of the wood splitter and the images that his labor had evoked. It was now almost dusk and his work had been done. The little barbeque place had returned to being no more than it was, a broken down rib shack in a broken down, poor section of town. The woodpile was now neatly stacked, the card players were gone, and the sun was setting over the row of shotgun houses.