I was nearing school age the first time I remember being afraid. World War II was raging, and I had picked up bits and pieces about the havoc it was causing.
There was news on our console radio every day from the war, and my parents and neighbors discussed it when they had coffee in the kitchen or on the front porch.
The nearby paper mill where my dad worked started doing air raid drills. The screaming sirens and horns from the mill would warn people if enemy planes ever became a threat. The drills were to prepare for real attacks.
Those blaring mill signals were commonplace. The mammoth machinery across the acres of mill property created such a roar that whistles and horns had to be used for communication.
There were different signals for breaks on paper machines, fire threats, injuries and even phone calls for supervisors in separate parts of the plant.
As kids, we heard the alerts continually during baseball and marble games, gatherings to swap comic books and at bedtime when windows were open to let the attic fan pull in fresh air.
Then they started the nighttime air raid drills. Lights were turned off in the mill village where we lived and other surrounding homes and neighborhoods.
Even the dim streetlights along our roads went off. It was pitch black and scary. My mother saw how alarmed I was, so she came up with a plan for us to cope with the darkness and howling signals.
There was a little hallway in our frame house that had doors to other rooms. We would gather there as the sirens screeched. She closed the hall doors and put towels along openings at the bottom to keep light from escaping.
The light was from candles and dim flashlights she kept in the hall closet. My folks were calm because they knew these were just training exercises, but my young mind saw bombers coming.
As we waited for an all-clear signal, my mother would pray and read in a soft voice from her Bible with the black leather cover. These were real scriptures and not the ones she made up over the years to frighten my brother and me into behaving.
When we got too boisterous, she quoted us some bogus verses like, “Children who putteth their mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown by not minding and creating a commotion will suffer the wrath of the good lord upon them.”
Some other things created anxiety when I was growing up. There was a polio epidemic in the 1950s, and we were warned not to swim or mingle with other kids. Recreation and entertainment areas closed to slow the spread of polio. I remember the fear.
Those same mill signals that scared me during the air raid drills also warned communities around the mill of tornadoes and other threatening weather.
I recall those sounds from a dark day when I was 10-years-old. They were followed by the incessant squeal of sirens as police cars and ambulances raced to a catastrophe in Cotton Valley 12 miles away. A tornado demolished the town and killed 24 people.
During wartime air raids, polio epidemics and deadly tornadoes, my mother and other neighborhood ladies found comfort in church services on Sundays and home prayer meetings in between.
They ran us kids out of our houses where they prayed, read the Bible, sang old hymns and had coffee and cookies, but we could hear them through the screen doors and open windows.
There were prayers to deal with storms, wars, epidemics and other things that exceeded our understanding and more prayers for people and things we knew about.
Like Mr. Barber’s wife when he moved a wire fishing after a storm at the mill pond and was electrocuted, and Mrs. Haynes whose sister died young in some place far away, and Mrs. Pool who had a son that was in trouble with the law.
There have not been any mill whistles or sirens alerting us to the coronavirus pandemic, but the ceaseless warnings on social media, radio and television are as grim and alarming as war news.
It is sad that churches are closed now when we need to hear reassuring sermons and good gospel music. And it bothers me that my mother and her Calvary Baptist friends are not here for those living room prayer meetings that got us through so many hard times.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES