lookout

Little boy blue

Come blow your horn

The sheep’s in the meadow

The cow’s in the corn

Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?

He’s under a haystack, fast asleep

This one I typed from memory, suprising myself. I’ve been crabby, and I’m away from home, a place of horns (historically), primarily Charlie Parker (though he hated it).

Emotional arc of travel: anxiety packing and leaving, cheer at getting going, boredom at are we there yet, nerves at appearing, settling as greeting companions.

Yesterday I arrived in Boonville, Missouri, about two hours from home. I met my writing colleagues, got a pear and basil cocktail, and we chatted.

The drink was strong, but I felt unsettled, and the vodka didn’t help. Usually conversation with other teachers and writers settles and encourages me.

After dinner, I set off on flip flops to see the town. I enjoyed this more. All that matters is you are Someplace Else (Mr. Rogers is right).

Boonville has a main drag rather than a square. I prefer main drags. They’re more narrative.

I took photos of a great falling apart old door with a weak turquoise paint still showing up here and there. I met a couple with a sleeping baby in a stroller. The man had a mustache, a plague again affecting us all, mustaches.

I saw the Odd Fellow’s Club, a sign hung out over the sidewalk. As a founding member of a not-so-secret society, I am interested in such things. Pondering further: these clubs were a substitute for people sorting when people began to be less sorted by class. They were probably about being allergic to Jews. Research: formed in 1819 in the U.S., they were the first to let in white women, in 1851.

Let’s move onto something more worthy of our attention: Peter Ogden was born sometime in the early 1800s, in the West Indies. He became a sailor, ended up in Liverpool, and joined the Odd Fellows there.

In 1842, Patrick H. Reason and James Fields were living in New York City, and had founded their own alternate club after being denied by the racist American Odd Fellows. They meet Ogden, who suggests they hook up with the British Odd Fellows, who are not as racist. They do.

It’s possible this club evolves into part of the anti-slavery and pro-black movements in New York City, but with my quick research, I’m not promising you.

Alexander Hamilton, Rihanna, Colin Powell, Shirley Chisolm: the Caribbean has sent us a lot of greatness.

Anyway: I saw a toy dump truck cemented into a brick mailbox support. I saw a sterile, empty Mexican restaurant. I saw two bars, one opened in 2020, the other, older. I saw the antique place to hit later. In the window, a sign on a love seat said, “FREE.”

I saw several falling down old houses, one with a side that was clearly an amputation: evidence of the supports of the side piece were still in the ground, and the whole side was painted haunted house black.

One old brick house had a driveway, and then a tiny, narrow building that could have been a kitchen or, the usual way of Kansas City, a carriage house.

I go past their old jail, site of the last hanging in Missouri, in 1930. Half is clapboard, probably the keeper’s home, and half is stone with small barred windows. Yin and yang.

Boonville is along the Missouri River. I traveled south of the river on my way. The interstate follows under the river until the center of the state, where the river and the interstate cross. That’s a bit further than I traveled. I won’t cross it again. I will return with the river to my north. This is how checked out the infrastructure I use is from the natural world.

Back to our Boy: does someone have a historical root for him? One that’s unlikely? Of course. It was Cardinal Wolsey! (Thomas More before Thomas More, a man who stood up to a king and is a good role model for today, except yeah he was executed.)

A Harvard historian in 1942 wrote, “The hayward’s horn, his badge of office, must have been used to give warning that cattle or other trespassers were in the corn. Little Boy Blue was a hayward.”

A hayward sounds like what the boy who cried wolf was, except they guarded different animals: Little Boy Blue guards cattle, and the other boy, maybe on rougher terrain guards sheep. However, the boy who cried wolf was 2,500 years ago, an Aesop fable. (I had no idea.)

All right, I get it, Wolsey saying, “Whoa, there,” and the blue boy saying that…. Surprisingly, my nursery rhyme research disappoints most with the historical part. Usually I love a true or true-ish history. Nursery rhymes, to me, though, stand on their own.

Like many of our nursery rhymes, the first known print version of this verse is from 1744, Tommy Thumb’s Little Songbook. (How long have English speakers had this Tom/Thumb connection?)

The most fun fact about Little Boy, though, is that he is (maybe) mentioned in Shakespeare:

Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepheard?
Thy sheepe be in the corne;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth
Thy sheepe shall take no harme.^[2]

I mean… maybe. Lotta Shakespeare fuck boys out there, literarily speaking.

I am staying (for free!) in a lovely old hotel right on the river. The walk through downtown, and to coffee, is a mile. The umbrella I received for teacher appreciation week has already broken, will no longer collapse to its smallest self, so I swing him a bit as I walk. Flip flops, small town, aware fascism must be simmering here (though I guess it’s simmering all over), a walk with a black leather bag too fancy for the circumstance, this is part of the summers in this part of my life. Getting somewhere, anywhere else.

Boonville leaned Confederate (as did most of Missouri), and the local Presbyterians met to decide if they wanted to ally themselves with the Union or the Confederacy. Majority: Confederate. The minority, pro-union, walked across the street to the town’s theater. Called Thespian Hall, it still stands, and still has a stage. I am touched by their commitment to theater.

On their sign, I note that the Kemper family (who dump a lot of philanthropic money at a lot of Kansas City things) somehow got ownership of Thespian Hall and gave it back to the town. The long reach of my small city and its big money!

Boonville is captured by (given to?) the Confederacy, but Union forces later come back and reclaim it. Both sides use Thespian Hall to house their tired, their maimed, their dying.

What a shitshow.

Boonville was first named “Boone’s Lick,” because Daniel Boone’s sons found a salt water spring, and sold the salt to the citizens of St. Louis. For good or ill, the town ultimately lost its lick.

A few miles north, if I cross the river, I can see the spot where the salt lick was licked.

Salt licks only make me think of deer and cattle, though, animals to be protected, not an opportunity for commerce. I had no idea some springs were salty. I may take my flip-flops up there to get a look.