Looking back down a long road

By Guest Columnist Billy Johnson

I got to spend an afternoon with one of my favorite people, Albert Bassi. His son, James Bassi, and his nephew, Frankie Cascio, were classmates of mine. We grew up hunting and fishing together. The Bassis lived north of Elizabeth in the heart of our hunting and fishing territory.

Mr. Bassi sat down and told me the whole story of his family coming to this area from Rosedale. He was 98 the afternoon we talked and has had a birthday since then. He was a young teenager when they moved near Napanee.

“They called that place Buzzard Roost,” he said. “My uncle rented papa some land, and he made four good crops there. Then Mr. Cook, who worked for the railroad, sold us this place, and we moved here.”

“That land at Buzzard Roost was buckshot land that hadn’t long been cleared, but this place is sandy land. Papa planted fruit trees and grafted pecan trees along this ditch bank. He and my mother had a country store here,” said Mr. Bassi. “The whole countryside was full of people back then. Papa grew all kinds of vegetables that he sold to stores in Leland and Greenville.”

“Leo Frankel was our neighbor, and he let us use his big tractor and planter to plant our cotton. He, Albert Bouler and Maurice Brown came by the store most every day to see my parents, Odoni and Mina Bassi. They were good friends and neighbors of ours,” he went on to say.

James, Frankie, Mack Gower and I hunted all over that part of the country. The Bassis’ house was the jumping off point for most all of our adventures. Louise Bassi, James’ mother, would fix us sandwiches to take with us, and she would tell us what time to come back. Bud Tate went with us a lot, too, when he wasn’t driving tractors or combines. His dad, Buddy Tate, let us hunt and fish on his pond. A lot of ducks came into that pond in the winter.

Weather forecasts weren’t as accurate then as they are now. One day, James and I went fishing on Tate’s pond, and a big storm caught us late that afternoon. We got under a raggedy old bridge to get out of the rain. Harold Brown’s tractors came down that road and over the bridge. That old bridge creaked and shook, and dirt and gravel was falling down on us through cracks in the bridge.

Finally, in the middle of all that lightning, thunder, wind and rain, we heard a car horn honking. When Mr. Bassi came home from work, Mrs. Bassi sent him to come get us. We were as glad to see him as he was us. It was one of the many times we came back to the Bassi house wet and muddy.

We were fishing at Tate’s pond one day and weren’t having much luck bass fishing. Bud’s grandfather, Mr. C.A. Tate, and John Marion Dean showed up and started bass fishing with live minnows. They would ease those minnows down slow and quiet between the lily pads, and they caught a bunch of nice bass. Those big bass were plastering those live minnows; it sounded like a hospital commode flushing in those lily pads. Needless to say, there was nothing slow or quiet about the way we fished.

James’ older brother, Bobby, was good to us. He was old enough to drive, and we weren’t. He would take us back and forth to the pond in his grandfather’s truck. Frog gigging was another of our pastimes, and Bobby would go with us to make sure we came back safely.

Mrs. Bassi did so much for us that we always minded her. She ruled that house with a warm smile and a sweet voice. She never had to raise her voice to get us to stop doing things that we shouldn’t. Her daughter Ann followed around behind her, helping cook for us and washing our clothes.

We would get up early in the morning and help James’ grandfather pick his vegetables; then he’d go to town to sell them. James’ grandmother helped run the store and worked in their big garden, too. She taught me how to grow lettuce. She would chop the dirt up into a bed and sprinkle the lettuce seed on top. She’d spread wet croker sacks on the top of the lettuce bed. She would take a bucket with a sprinkler head and wet those sacks every day. A few days later, she would ease those sacks off of the beds, and there would be a perfect stand of young lettuce under them. She always wore an apron in the store and in the garden. James, Bobby and I would pick beans or peas and put them in her apron. She would go back to the store and shell them and cook them for us that night.

The Bassis were in a bad storm one night when they lived outside of Rosedale. It tore up a lot of houses in that area. James’ grandfather never forgot that storm. If a storm came up at night, he would wake up everybody in his house and Albert’s house. We’d play cards or dominoes until the storm passed. One hot August night, a big rain blew up, and Mr. Bassi was walking around singing “A million dollar rain! A million dollar rain!”

There was a big magnolia tree in James’ parent’s front yard. I told Mr. Bassi that I was glad to see that it was still alive after all those years.
He told me, “Billy, let me tell you about that tree. A man had a flat in front of Papa’s store. His truck was loaded down with trees from a nursery. Papa helped him jack the truck up, and he patched the tire for him, and he put it back on. The man tried to pay Papa, but he wouldn’t take any money, so he gave him that young magnolia tree. My mother planted it in their front yard and kept it watered – and it’s still here long after they are gone.”

In the fall of the year, James’ grandmother would pick those big pretty bottom bolls of cotton and sell them to Lonnie Willis at Little Bales of Cotton. He would make cotton corsages with them and ship them all over the country.

The Bassi family is as fine a family and as good a people as I’ve ever known. James’ parents and my mother, Ellen Ann Johnson, worked together over fifty years helping at the St. James Catholic Church spaghetti suppers and Parrish Fair.

Odoni Bassi was a positive influence on anybody that knew him. I went to Mississippi State and got a degree in horticulture – majoring in fruits and vegetables. Bobby Bassi was up there getting a degree in horticulture, as well. He took care of me there just like he did at their house when I was younger.

My afternoon with Albert Bassi brought back a lot of memories. Those delicious meals Mrs. Bassi and her daughter Ann cooked us were mighty good after a long day of hunting and fishing. Those sweet cantaloupe Mr. Bassi grew and those big juicy peaches will be forever etched in my mind. It’s been over sixty years since I first went to the Bassis’ house. I don’t know where all the years went; but they’re gone.