Bopeep Shines

Jun 1, 2016 | People

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Johnathon Williams”][/title]

For two summers, while Thomas Cochran was on his yearly break from teaching English and creative writing at Fayetteville High, he worked on a novel about a nine-year-old boy and his mysterious eighty-eight-year-old neighbor in Oil Camp, Louisiana.

 

When Thomas wrote the last line of Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger, he felt the satisfaction that comes from finishing something important. He’d written two books before, and the first, Roughnecks, also set in Oil Camp and published in 1999, was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People. That book, about high school football, remains popular, and just weeks ago Thomas received an email from a reader in Chicago, who wanted the author’s opinion on a certain passage he couldn’t quit thinking about, a fact that makes Thomas both awed and grateful.

 

Thomas is telling this story while sitting in Arsaga’s coffee shop inside the Fayetteville library. On the way in, he passed the rows of books for sale, and even now, he’s thinking about taking at least one of them home. At his house, off a dirt road between West Fork and Greenland, Arkansas, there are stacks of books waiting for Thomas’s attention. His whole life he’s been drawn to words, beginning in early childhood when he’d asked his mother, who read the newspaper cover to cover every day, to read it aloud. “I loved the language, the rhythm of her reading,” Thomas says.

 

Once in school, he read Boy’s Life sports stories, that entertained and always taught a morality lesson. In the fifth grade, his teacher read the class Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “I was turned around, and I hear Mrs. Waller yell, ‘Tom!’ which is the first line of the book, and I thought she was talking to me. I thought I was in trouble.”

 

Thomas laughs. That one word opened the door to a story he’ll never forget. In high school, a second Mrs. Waller, a relative of his fifth-grade teacher, read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens aloud. These two women in his small town of Haynesville, Louisiana made books come alive. And at some point, Thomas realized he wanted to be part of the world of literature.

 

For a writer of Southern stories, Haynesville was the perfect stomping ground. The town of approximately 2,400, sits just south of the Arkansas border. Designer Geoffrey Beene grew up there, as did Demetric Evans of the San Francisco 49ers, and Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, musician and civil rights activist and associate of Dr. Martin Luther King. Haynesville was built on the 1920s oil boom and in its heyday had as many as 20,000 residents.

 

The voices Thomas grew up hearing were filled with the cadence and melody of southern speech. The characters he met seemed destined for the page. And because of the particular timing of Thomas’ birth, he was coming of age during the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

 

When he left Haynesville, it was to attend the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. There, his dream of writing started to take form. After graduating, he worked for a time on his MFA, but eventually took a job as a sports reporter for the Northwest Arkansas Times and later the Springdale News. “I figured out that working in journalism had the hours of a doctor and the pay of a pauper,” Thomas says.

 

That’s when he started teaching at Fayetteville High, a job that lasted twenty-five years until he retired in 2015.

 

For two summers, while he was still teaching, he lived with the story that became Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger. His life experience, along with a good deal of research shored him up to tell an epic story. When the book opens, we meet Teddy Caldwell, a nine-year-old with a keen sense of justice who gets in trouble when he accidentally pegs his principal with an overripe peach. On the heels of that incident, he hits a baseball through his new neighbor’s window, an event that will set the course for his young life.

 

When he gets to know his neighbor, Uncle Drew Weems, he discovers the old man has a story that runs like quicksilver through the Great Depression, through southern towns at the peak of Jim Crow Laws that forced segregation. As Teddy and Uncle Drew form a friendship, the old man seems to want to unburden himself of this story that needs a new home to survive. He seems to need an unbiased listener who will walk with him through those days of his youth when he met Cantrell “Bopeep” Shines, the best pitcher ever to step on a mound, just as he was leaving the Negro Leagues.

 

Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger sends a message thats still needed today. It reminds us that no one person is better than another. And hate can be stopped if good people make
the decision to be brave.

 

The chance meeting shaped Uncle Drew’s life. Poor, white, and fifteen years of age, with little hope that things could get better, he walks away from his home in Oil Camp and hits the road with Bopeep. The two jump freight trains, and sleep in hobo camps, and dodge a heap of trouble, mainly because Bopeep can sweet talk just about anybody.

 

Bopeep, who hails from New Orleans and has a way with the ladies, figures out how to make money by gambling on his ability to strike out any player he comes across. In small towns throughout the south and all the way to the edge of Mexico, the two find men who believe they can outplay Bopeep. But when Bopeep throws a ball, he can make it do anything he wants, and nobody can overcome that pitch.

 

As Uncle Drew is recounting this story to Teddy, he is weaving a tale of devotion that is at times funny and touching and endearing. But he is also telling the truth about a time when racism took center stage. Bopeep was often treated poorly, and when the two rode the train, Uncle Drew sat in the front section reserved for whites and Bopeep sat in the back section reserved for blacks. Hotels turned them away. They faced ridicule just for being together.

 

While Teddy is taking this in, he is growing closer and closer to Uncle Drew. At the same time, Teddy is facing tests of his own, as he hears a man he respects use the “n” word, and then a boy his own age.

 

In each case, Teddy has a decision to make. Uncle Drew has set a good example since he always rushed in to defend Bopeep. And Teddy finds that his moral compass is just as true.

 

There are passages that are hard but important to read, to understand the magnitude of what happened in our not so distant past. And there are passages that transcend, that take you to a higher plain where the human spirit and kindness turn the world into a softer place.

 

No one could tell this story like Thomas Cochran. His voice is as easy as a church supper. His ear for the southern voice is pitch perfect. His careful approach to serving up a lesson about living an upright life is flawless.

 

It could be that he learned his own lessons while growing up white in Haynesville during the days of desegregation. “It was in 1970 when the Supreme Court said all you laggers have to integrate now, and I graduated in 1973. Our town split right down the middle in those years of 1968, ’69, ’70. Like a lot of small towns in the Deep South at that time, you had the group that just wasn’t going to go to school with black people. And then you had the real serious ones who were taking a stand, and that was my parents. My dad was a dentist who basically started his practice in the black community. He was one hundred percent for equality. I got called names. I got pushed down on the ground. My dad wrote a few letters to the Shreveport Times. My sister said, ‘There’s a lot of daddy in Uncle Drew.’ I also think Uncle Drew speaks for me.

 

“And I played football. Football was a big deal in my town. My coach borrowed the saying from Bo Schembechler, the Michigan coach, that said, ‘Those who stay will be champions.’ And he wrote it on the ceiling of the dressing room the spring of our last year as an all-white school. Summer comes, and two-a-days start and some of the white guys aren’t there. But we have new black players, and one of them was Johnnie Meadors who went on to play as a defensive end for the Razorbacks. (Meadors played from 1973 to 1976 and was an All-Southwest Conference player for the 1975 Cotton Bowl championship team.) That first year my high school integrated, our football team went fourteen and zero and won the state championship.”

 

For Thomas, winning was more than getting a trophy. Good won out in a public and symbolic way. After his freshman year in college, Thomas hung up his cleats. By then, he knew he wanted to be a writer. When he started writing about Bopeep Shines, these stories that populated his youth surfaced again, as stark and heavy as they ever were.

 

Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger sends a message that’s still needed today. It reminds us that no one person is better than another. And hate can be stopped if good people make the decision to be brave.

 

Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger is published by Pelican Publishing and costs $14.95.  

 

Do South Magazine

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