A Reminiscence of Redwings

Red-winged blackbirds are sitting high in the tops of the trees in our 1940s-built suburban neighborhood. Their trills cascade through the air like waterfalls, and I remember why the red-winged blackbird is one of my favorite birds. I love the territorial song of the males in spring, what's called the "okalee" song, when it's combined with the other songs of the species. The combined chorus is beautiful to me.

When I hear red-winged blackbirds, memories rush in as well as feelings associated with those memories. Where I grew up near the Texas Gulf coast, red-winged blackbirds descended in huge flocks on the flat birdfeeder (a wooden post with a metal cookie sheet nailed on top) that my father placed in our front yard. As a child, I loved gazing out into the cold from the warmth of our space-heater-warmed house. Huge flocks of blackbirds would wing across the sky and settle into the rice fields that once dominated the Gulf Coast landscape in Chambers County, Texas. The sky would be black with birds. Now those rice fields are covered with McMansions, suburbia, or acres of invasive flora such as Chinese tallow trees.

Later, as an adult with a young family, I moved to northern Minnesota, where red-winged blackbirds nested in the spring and summer. I loved seeing red-wings perch on tall grasses in the bogs and mosses of north-central Minnesota. The birds' presence reminded me that although I was far away from my place of birth, the natural world spanned that physical distance, closing the gap between home and heart.

The birds also remind me of the sugar cane fields of Louisiana. My best friend and her husband lived for years in a house on the edge of sugar cane fields, on the west bank of the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge. Many times I sat in my friend's pecan-tree and oak-tree shaded yard listening to the songs of blackbirds rise up like smoky memories from the alluvial soil of those fertile fields.

But those red-wings remind me of far more than the natural world. They remind me of a man whom I loved more than words can express, my maternal grandfather, Leonard Everett Benton. Papa Benton was a Texas cowboy. His schooling didn't go past the eighth grade, and he made a living over his lifetime by working in the oil fields and for Humble Oil, raising cattle, breaking horses, and, in his old age, working for Liberty County doing odd jobs such as mowing roadsides. One of my favorite childhood memories is that of listening to Papa play "Redwing" on his harmonica. He would stomp around my grandparents' wooden farmhouse, his cowboy boots keeping time with the music, his old, rough, calloused hands cradling the harmonica against his lips. He was a kind and gentle man, always "hoorahing" his grandchildren, hugging us, teasing us, offering us chewing tobacco and then disgusting us with the tobacco juice he spit into a coffee can. One of his favorite teasing pastimes when we were very young was to show us how "a cow ate corn": he would squeeze our legs just above our knees until we would squeal for him to quit.

The only times I saw him angry--and I can count those times on one hand--was once when he felt that my grandmother had been treated unfairly by her grandchildren and those rare times when he would come home drunk. However, in his drunkenness, his anger was muted, turned mainly toward my grandmother, a faithful Southern Baptist, when she would criticize him for drinking, and occasionally toward nothing in particular, when he was trying to work around the house and was less than sober. Even then, his anger was never violent or scary. I look back on those times as rather times tinged with sadness, the regrets of a man who never reached his potential or his dreams yet who remained open-minded and willing to learn until the end of his life. Despite his shortened schooling, my grandfather was an avid reader. Of course, being the lover of all things western, my grandfather loved to read the novels of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. But once when I was visiting from college, Papa had evidently been reading about dinosaurs, for he asked me if I believed that the world was that old and that dinosaurs had existed.

Papa was also an agnostic. He attended church very occasionally, but he told me he didn't believe everything that the church taught. He was my early introduction to agnosticism in a family of very faithful church-goers--Pentecostals, Catholics, and Southern Baptists--and now, as an agnostic myself, an agnosticism that has developed in me in recent years (the last eight years of the Bush administration put the final nail in the coffin of belief in organized religion for me), I take comfort in my grandfather's agnosticism: God might be present, the stories might suggest truths, but the whole truth is not to be found in religion, and particularly not in one branch of one religion.

When I think of red-winged blackbirds, I think of Papa, and I think of a song by Nanci Griffith, another daughter of Texas. That song is "Gulf Coast Highway," and when I hear those words, my eyes well up with tears. I see my grandfather's face; I hear his voice; I feel his arms around my shoulders. I see a heaven that might exist, that might take in even old agnostics:

And when he dies he says he'll catch some blackbird's wing
And he will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.