I wonder what ever happened to chinaberry trees that were so rampant where I was raised. They grew in nearly every yard with limbs crawling onto housetops and one car garages.
My dad cooled off after mowing and gardening in the shade of our big chinaberry. He mopped his face with a red bandana and fanned with an old straw hat that had a green visor.
Neighborhood ladies sat under the trees to shell purple hull peas and snap their string beans. Even our old collie Rip had the good sense to lie under the chinaberry out of the sun on hot days.
But nobody enjoyed chinaberry trees more than the boys in that little mill village. We climbed in them to hide from each other and see houses on the next street and filled buckets with the berries that spilled from the trees into our back yards.
The marble-size berries were hard as granite and perfect ammunition for our slingshots. We put some bumps and bruises on one another with the berries and broke a few windows, but I don’t think anybody ever ended up in a hospital.
Our parents told us the chinaberries were poisonous and not to eat them, which seemed unnecessary. We had a few kids who tasted acorns, but none of them ever bit into a chinaberry that I know of.
Chinaberries were for slingshots, and we all had one of those homemade weapons. Mr. Polk sat on his porch and whittled most of the time after he retired from the paper mill, and he kept us supplied with wooden slingshot handles.
Car tires had innertubes in those days, and the rubber from those discarded tubes provided bands to attach to the y-shaped handles. Pouches for the rocks and berries usually came from the leather tongues of worn out shoes.
Slingshots are mass produced now and sold in stores. I found some in a shop in Branson last summer and picked up four of them for the granddaughters. Regina made me put them back.
That’s probably a good thing because ammunition is getting hard to find. There was gravel along the roads where I grew up, and we used the rocks for slingshots when we were not shooting chinaberries.
There is not much gravel on roads now, and I don’t remember the last time I saw a chinaberry tree. All those chinaberries that used to be in yards and along roadways seem to have disappeared like a berry fired into the night sky with a slingshot.
Other trees from my youth have grown scarce too. Persimmon trees grew wild where we lived. We picked persimmons when they were just starting to ripen, put them on the window sill in the sun and ate them whole like apples when they were orange and soft.
Fig trees were plentiful then. Some folks who had them let the figs just fall to the ground for the birds to eat. We gathered all of them we could get for my mother’s fig preserves and to put in homemade ice cream.
There were trees full of green pears at the edge of the woods by the ballpark. It was public property, we thought, so we helped ourselves to them, ate them straight from the trees and endured the bellyaches.
Black walnut and hickory nut trees were harder to find. We called them hicker nuts. They grew deeper in the woods where my dad and his friends hunted squirrels.
We gathered them off the ground, smashed the hard shells with hammers and picked out the meat with metal hooks for my mother’s Christmas candy and cookies.
In the springtime, the whole family went to the sloughs and creek bottoms past the millponds where mayhaw trees were loaded with berries. We shook the trees and scooped the berries off the water.
My folks cooked the berries down and used the juice to make jars of sweet red mayhaw jelly that lasted us all year even after they gave a lot of it away to neighbors.
I have not spotted mayhaw, persimmon, black walnut or hickory nut trees in all these years since interstate highways took us away from back roads.
There are rare sightings of fig and green pear trees, but I have not seen a chinaberry in a long time. Regina was right. The grandkids didn’t need those slingshots.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES