DEMOPOLIS, Ala. — The setting for Bill Boling’s childhood in Aliceville, Alabama, was a cotton mill house across the road from the German prisoner of war camp.
Well actually, it was much more than that. Like most kids growing up mid-century in the rural South, young Bill’s world was as big as all outdoors.
The streets of his small town, the surrounding woods, the Sipsey, Tombigbee and Black Warrior rivers and Lublub and Coal Fire creeks, all were playgrounds. So was the WWII POW camp* where the guards knew him and would wave to the 12-year-old through the gate. One of the German prisoners even tried to buy Bill’s pet possum.
He was a little king and Aliceville and its environs were his kingdom.
Boling’s son, Bill Jr. describes his father’s childhood: “He was free and easy in a world that was secure and loving. Everybody looked out for everybody.”
Bill Sr. was a tall, strapping kid, who would play end for Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg. Football ran in the family. Uncle Bob from his mother’s, the Sullivan side of the family, would attain legendary status coaching at a nearby junior college in Scooba, Mississippi.
Bill had another side, one his richly textured childhood fueled. He wrote poems. He’s not sure where they came from, but they have flowed from him for most of his life, often arriving at odd hours.
“Do you ever get up at night (and write poetry)?” Bill asked me. We were sitting in a small office in the Demopolis, Alabama, public library (which, incidentally, is lovely) Friday before last. Bill, 86, and his son, Bill Jr., had driven up from Mobile where Bill lives.
Our interview was the excuse for a father/son day trip. Bill Jr. is an attorney in Atlanta and an old friend. He also is the founder of Fall Line Press, a publisher of photographic monographs and, occasionally, poetry.
Fall Line has just published a book of Bill Sr.’s poems, titled “The Boy from Aliceville.”
Here’s one:
When I Was King
Skip a stone, bite a nail
Hit a blackbird on the tail
Smell a sweet shrub; It’s spring.
That’s what I did when I
Was King
I knew a place where fishes hid
And another where I did.
I walked the fields of sage
Barefoot.
This I did
When I was King.
Winter long I knew my friends
They slept in caves in heated rooms.
But summer long brought forth the boy
That was King
In all his joy.
It’s unclear exactly when the poems started. Bill would write while in school in Aliceville. Later, when he was a young high school math teacher in Rome, Georgia, or Glen Allan, Mississippi, he would get up in the middle of the night to satisfy his muse.
He would write poems and his wife, Johnnie Lea, another educator, would type them. During their seven years in Glen Allan, Bill found literary fellowship in the small but lively literary scene in Greenville about 30 miles north.
There he shared his poetry with the likes of Hodding Carter and Frankie and Bern Keating. Occasionally he would mail the poems to literary journals and occasionally they would get published.
“I’ve always just written, just an impulse,” Bill said.
About two or three years ago, Bill Jr. started pestering (his word) his dad to send him the poems. He and his daughter Megan Fowler, a designer for the press, made the selections for the book. (For more of Bill Boling’s poetry, use the link with this column.)
After our interview, father, son and I walked the four or five blocks to Stacy’s Cafe in the Demopolis Inn, once a downtown hotel, now an apartment building and an Airbnb. The place was near full and the blackboard menu brimmed with tantalizing options.
We all ordered plate lunches with catfish. The cornbread was close to perfect, the greens were fresh and the field peas delicious.
On the walk back to the library, our conversation meandered, taking its own twists and turns. We talked about dreams and memories and the relationship between the two, about growing up in the small-town South. The day was sunny and warm, and we went slowly, savoring our bit of time in the fading river town.
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For more on Fall Line Press: http://www.falllinepress.com/
*Camp Aliceville, as it was known, existed between 1943 and 1945 and housed between 3,000 and 6,000 German POWs, most of who came from Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. For more on the camp: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/nazi-summer-camp
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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