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| George 'Buster' Singleton |
(For decades, local historian and paranormal investigator
George “Buster” Singleton published a weekly newspaper column called “Somewhere
in Time.” The column below, which was titled “Uncle Tony, an old man
remembered” was originally published in the Oct. 13, 1988 edition of The Monroe
Journal in Monroeville, Ala.)
Uncle Tony was an old man who didn’t have a family to look
after him in his old age. So my father, who had known him for many, many years,
took the old man under his wing, so to speak, and looked out for his
well-being.
A small house was built nearby, and Uncle Tony took up
housekeeping. The food that he ate came from our table; there was always plenty
prepared, so there wasn’t any bother when three or four extra were around at
mealtime. My mother was an outstanding cook and supervisor of the kitchen. When
mealtime came around, there were always extra guests.
As a child, Uncle Tony had been a slave. As close as anyone
could calculate, he was born in 1848, give or take a year or so.
A long walk to church
He was in excellent physical condition despite his advanced
age. He could walk with the best of them. Ten or 12 miles at one time didn’t
phase Uncle Tony. He had a special church that he liked to attend. The church
was 10 or 11 miles one way from where we lived. He would walk to church and
return, every Sunday.
My father insisted that he ride one of the horses that we
kept around the farm. He refused because he said that he didn’t want to be
bothered with the animal.
For Christmas one year, Uncle Tony became the proud owner of
a new blue serge suit. This suit came complete with a white shirt, necktie and
new shoes.
Giving him the shoes was a waste of money, because no one
had ever known Uncle Tony to wear shoes. Winter and summer, he would walk
around barefoot. Ice or snow didn’t phase Uncle Tony.
So he would put on his new blue serge suit, complete with
necktie and white shirt, and proceed to walk barefoot the distance to and from
church.
Hiding the shoes
To please my father, who had raised a considerable amount of
heck because he wouldn’t wear the shoes that had been bought for him, Uncle
Tony would put his new shoes on and wear them a short distance from the house.
Here, he would pull them off and hide them until the return trip home that evening.
He would then put on his shoes and come walking proudly up the road as though
he had worn them all day long.
This went on for several weeks until my father got wind of
what was going on. Papa proceeded to follow Uncle Tony to the place where he would
always hide his shoes. Papa took the shoes and hid them himself for several
weeks. Uncle Tony searched far and wide for his lost Sunday shoes, only to find
out later that Papa had them all the time.
As a small boy of 10, I learned much from this gentle old
man. I tasted my first tobacco in a corncob pipe that was secretly made for me.
Each time that I smoked the crude pipe, I would get terribly sick. I suppose
that this may be one of the main reasons I never took up smoking.
I would spend many hours in the evenings after the work was
done and the supper meal had been eaten, listening to the many tall tales that
Uncle Tony retrieved from his outstanding memory.
Magic tricks
As a young man, he traveled around the country with Ringling
Bros. Circus. He picked up several small magic tricks that would entertain me
for hours on end. And to keep my interest up, he would tell me that he was
going to teach me all the tricks he knew, always at a later date. The magic
tricks and the many tales from his circus experience kept a 10-year-old boy
spellbound.
My father, out of necessity, was a self-trained blacksmith.
He did all the work that he had to do to keep the farm going, in a small shed
out near the barn. Many times during the cold days of winter, he would sharpen
his plows and repair his farm equipment for the spring planting and the farm
year ahead.
On one of these days, everyone was huddled around the small
fire in the blacksmith forge to kind of keep warm, all the while keeping a good
bull session going also.
Uncle Tony was there, barefoot as usual. Papa had just
heated a piece of iron to be used in the repair of a plow point. He had heated
the iron red hot, and had cut a small piece of the iron off the larger piece.
The small piece of the red hot iron fell almost unnoticed to the earthen floor
of the blacksmith shop.
Everyone present began to notice the burning odor of what
appeared to be skin or leather burning. To their amazement, Uncle Tony had
stepped back on the piece of the red hot iron. The odor was from the tough skin
of his foot that was burning when it came in contact with the red hot iron.
Uncle Tony’s foot was so tough that he hadn’t really noticed that his foot was
burning.
This tale was to be retold many, many times by those present
that cold day there in the small blacksmith shop. During the remaining years of
his life, a day hardly passed that he wasn’t reminded and kidded about him
standing on the red-hot piece of iron.
(Singleton, the
author of the 1991 book “Of Foxfire and Phantom Soldiers,” passed away at the
age of 79 on July 19, 2007. A longtime resident of Monroeville, he was born on
Dec. 14, 1927 in Marengo County and served as the administrator of the
Monroeville National Guard unit from 1964 to 1987. He is buried in Pineville Cemetery
in Monroeville. The column above and all of Singleton’s other columns are
available to the public through the microfilm records at the Monroe County
Public Library in Monroeville. Singleton’s columns are presented here each week
for research and scholarship purposes and as part of an effort to keep his work
and memory alive.)
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