George, a Possum and a Sweet ‘tater

Sorry I didn't get to know you better, George.

The year would have been around 1962 or 3. I was a botany student at the University of Miami and spent my time between sleeps either in the botany department, old WWII barracks, in the Everglades or fishing. In those days, the department, long since collapsed into the Zoology Dept., had an arboretum, greenhouses, ponds for aquatic plants and a caretaker for all of that and the surrounding grounds. His name was George. Just George. Or some professors called him "Old George". If he had a last name I never knew it, but probably saw it on his paycheck once when he showed it to me. Thirty five dollars a week. That’s 85.5 cents a hour. I was making $160 a month, or nominally a buck an hour. I wasn’t worth that much, and George was worth more. He lived in Kendall with his wife and other family members, I don’t know how many or who. The family had a wood stove that cooked all the meals, summer and winter, and also was the only heat for those cold winter mornings.

George was always good for a conversation while he pruned trees or raked leaves or cut grass or did other maintenance, and considered the fruit the trees produced, prodigiously usually, his by right. He didn’t mind sharing when a good crop of lemons or mangosteens came in, or when the various mangos were dropping. I liked to talk to him about all kinds of things and was one of the few people there who knew him at all. One day I told him I had a possum living in the walls of my house and needed to trap it, and asked him for help. He dug out an old Hav-a-Heart trap from the storeroom, showed me how to set it up  and bait it with peanut butter and asked only that I give him the  possum when, not if, I trapped it.

Well, trap it I did, that very night, and in the cold Miami morning delivered it to George. He lit up like a kid on Christmas when he saw it, saying only “it’s a big’un”. And it was. I asked if he was going to eat it and he said yes, but would have to clean it out and fatten it up for 2 or 3 weeks first. Curious, I asked how he was going to do that. “Feed it chicken” was the answer. I didn’t find out the source of the chicken.

Sometime later, on another cold morning, I was walking in the citrus section of the arboretum, and heard George, his deep and gravelly voice instantly recognizable, call me. I walked over to where he was piling leaves around a trunk, and he asked me if I had anything to eat that morning. I didn’t. He reached in his pocket, not a particularly clean one, and pulled out a big sweet potato, charred on the outside. He broke off a chunk and handed it to me and said something like “I cooked it in the stove this morning. It’s sweet and just right.”  I took a tentative bite and it was just right. Sweet, not soggy and a little salty from the ashes. Even the charred skin was good. I said “thanks George” and finished it then and there. I didn’t realize until after noon when I saw him eating his piece that he had shared his whole day’s food with me. No reason given, none required.

When I left Miami, he was about to “retire” and shortly after that the department was annexed by the zoology crew. I never knew what happened to “Old George”, but here is one man who still remembers him. Based on time elapsed and his age, I reckon that he died some time back. A harder working man would be hard to find. Quiet, even taciturn, but wise in the ways of what he knew. I wish that I had thought to talk to him of race and where that was going, but never did. Of course the Brown decision was already history, and the Civil Rights Act wasn’t around yet. I think that he would have been philosophical about race relations, and counseled patience. That’s what I think.

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