"The Catfish Hole"

DATELINE: 4/30/2011
"The Catfish Hole"


One day I was down at my catfish hole tryin to catch me some supper, and while I was fishin, I was dreamin up what I was havin for my supper. Fried catfish, fresh pole beans cooked with side-meat, sliced home grown tomatoes, grits and hoecakes. (Now some of you already know how I feel about hoecakes) I was fishin for supper, which is our evening meal, since we have our dinner at noon time.

Well this catfish hole had been in the Biggers family for several generations, and we took good care of it too. The hole was up against the deep side of the river bank where there is a big bend in the stream, with lots of tree roots stickin out in the water. Once a week we would go down to this catfish hole and toss in some cotton seed cakes and the water would just churn up with all those catfish gettin a free meal. This meant that just about any time we wanted some catfish for supper, all we had to do was wet a hook, cause there was always plenty of them around.

As I was waitin for one of those big cats to come up and suck up the chicken liver baited on my hook, I remembered the time my daddy caught one of those town folk down there at our hole, catchin our catfish. It was old Leroy Stubbs who had never had a job for more than three days, since about all he could hold onto was that old mason jug he had got from his daddy. When he saw Leroy, my daddy fetched him a lick upside his head with and old sweet gum branch. Leroy give out a holler, and said "what are you hittin me for, I was only fishin!"

Now Leroy knew this was our hole, and that we spent a lot of time, and a little money fattenin up those catfish for our skillet, but he saw the chance to take advantage of our work to fattenin up his own belly. This was not the first time we had ever caught someone goin after our catfish, and of course me and daddy knew it would not be the last either.

You know it seems that no matter how hard you work, there is always somebody, who does not want to work for what they get , but they want to live just as good as those who do work for what's theirs. The good old USA has got a lot of those folks, and you had better believe they vote for the "Skunks" and "Polecats" up in DC who are willin to give them some of your catfish, and maybe some of your silver dollars too!


"Now, that's the way I see it, and you can tell'um I said so!"

Bascomb Biggers