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A snippet of my life story, which will someday be an autobiography if I live long enough to make it so.
In 2020, or was it 2019, I began fitting the jigsaw pieces of my life together to author my story, which I believe is unique enough to be unlike anyone else’s story and common enough to be everyone’s story. It has been written in bits and pieces, in fits and starts, and is far less complete today than I wish. In intervals, I have dived into the depths to gather the pearls with immense joy and vigor. At other extended periods, I have sworn off the project, given up on it entirely, and cursed the day I was born, or at least the day I decided to write about the shitstorm that commenced on that day.
My pursuit of the story has been as volatile and failed as the life I am trying to wrangle into words.
I happen to be momentarily invigorated and determined to press onward. In so doing, I am reading the random bits stored hither and yon on the cloud or a hard drive, as random as the roads I have taken to this place.
I found this chapter, which I have tentatively titled “Ashes of the Just” and decided to share it to prove that I haven’t just been farting around and talking about it. Intermittently, stories have evolved, little ones, which will be the jigsaw puzzle my mom named David Eugene and my dad provided the surname Strother.
Here it is.
Sweet Home Alabama?
I have a love-hate relationship with the state of Alabama. I love some of her citizens and hate myself for it because the only person smugger about his home state than a Texan is an Alabaman.
Alabaman? Come on! Even saying it is annoying. Know what else is annoying? Saying the word “annoying.” Alabaman. Annoying. Same thing.
The main thing that makes an Alabaman annoying is Nick Saban. You know him, right? He looks like a dwarfed version of every used car salesman on every tote-the-note lot in America. He also wins national championships at the University of Alabama more regularly than my bowels move. (Although every time I hear his wretched name, my bowels do move.)
“You can always tell an Alabama fan, but you can’t tell him much.”
So, most of my ‘Bama friends are Crimson Tide fans and Saban sycophants. (Of course, they hated him when he won his first title because he did so at LSU, their rival.) This makes them insufferable some of the time and intolerable the rest.
For a year and a half, I lived in Mobile, Alabama. Most of that time I was staying in a rented house down on Dog River, just a couple of bends of the river from Mobile Bay.
Mobile is a Gulf port town about an hour east of, you guessed it, Gulfport, Mississippi. (Let’s tip our hats to the state most fun for a kid to learn the spelling of, at least the way my dad taught me: “M-i-crooked letter-crooked letter-i-crooked letter-crooked-letter-i-humpback-humpback-i.” which is way cooler than “Alabaman.”)
Mobile has a population a smidge under 200,000. It was Alabama’s first city, founded in 1702, 117 years before Alabama was Alabama. Mobile is home to one of the largest wetland ecosystems in the world. It is also the hometown of the greatest homerun hitter of all time, Hank Aaron. Besides Aaron, Billy Williams, Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, and Ozzie Smith were Mobile natives. The city gets more than five feet of rain per year, making it the rainiest city in the United States. The first Mardi Gras in America was held in Mobile in 1703. Mobile! Not New Orleans.
Mobile is also home to the Pilot family and their billion-dollar business, Pilot Catastrophe Services, where I served as an independent adjuster from 2005 – 2011, and at which company I worked for the 18 months I lived in Mobile.
I had been a field adjuster, assessing catastrophe damages, and writing estimates for repair. In Mobile, however, I worked as a desk adjuster in the facility Pilot dubbed the “Dec Building.” The client was Allstate Insurance.
When I first arrived, the place was lightly organized chaos. Despite thousands of square feet and what seemed acres of cubicles, makeshift desks lined many of the aisles while every cubicle was filled, and in some cases, overfilled with adjusters hammering away on keyboards and taking phone calls like they were switchboard operators. We worked six 12-hour days and one 10-hour day per week: seven to seven Monday to Saturday and eight to five on Sunday.
It was in Mobile that my taste for adjusting began to sour.
The work environment in the Dec building was stressful from the top down. It was toxic. You were treated like chattel, for the most part. Desk adjusting pays well and if you tap out or they toss you out, prospects are standing by three or four deep to take your seat. You are contract labor, an at-will worker, expendable, replaceable, and only as valuable as the level of satisfaction from the surveys of the people whose claims you did your best to resolve. (The only people who were more stressed than the adjusters were the people who were given the surveys. They often needed someone to hold accountable for what they were certain was an insurance screwing-over, so they might take the opportunity to give an adjuster “ones” on a survey ratings scale of one to five when you needed fives to keep your seat.)
You know what rolls downhill, right? Well, in the catastrophe-adjusting business, the desk adjuster is often at the bottom of Turd Hill. I did not like it there. I was determined not to stay.
Stay I did, however, until a call from Canada snatched me away.
Somewhere beneath the turd pile of conniving contractors, pesky public adjusters, manic managers, irritable insureds, and stressed-out coworkers, I formed a few relationships that would last to this very day. The first fellow I met and whose cubicle I was thrown into – the most overbearing of overbearing Alabama Crimson Tide fans – was a fiery redhead named Keith Craft.
Keith is hard of hearing and that is only one reason he talks loudly. He is also self-assured, quick-witted, and determined to spread the wisdom of Keithisms, along with his never-diminishing supply of hand-me-down, homespun idioms across the fruited, cubicle-dotted plane, to one poor defenseless soul at a time. Sometimes it was more than one if an audience gathered, which might happen if he happened to be giving a contractor a lesson in humility on a phone call. (It’s embarrassing, no doubt, when the adjuster you are trying to swindle knows your craft better than you do.) I once heard an entire segment of the Dec Building break out in spontaneous, thunderous applause when Keith triumphantly terminated such a call.
It was either my good fortune or, as I prefer to believe, the gracious hand of a loving God that, upon completion of the orientation class, I was marched to the end of the fourth aisle from the front door and sat down in Keith’s cubicle. Keith and I worked back-to-back in a cubicle built for one for the next several months. A friendship, like Jell-O, slowly set…and kept setting until it became concrete.
Friends like Keith and my roommates John Rhodes and Matt Hess kept loneliness mostly at bay. While I lived on Dog River, but mostly at the Dec Building, my family remained 10-11 hours away in our home in Fort Worth, Texas. I would often go weeks between visits from them and months between trips back home.
I spent the better parts of 2010 and 2011 in Mobile.
Alabama was a new experience for Donya and me. For the first time since we married in 1980, we were separated for more than a few weeks at a time. The distance between us was measured in miles or in how many hours it takes an American Airlines jet to get to Mobile Regional Airport from DFW International. Time apart like that, however, can create distance in other ways, too. Like a soldier deployed into a war zone, I was fighting endless battles on the work front and missing meals on the home front. And by meals, I mean more than chicken fried steak, which Donya makes better than the rest of the known world, or chocolate pie, or okra, or…
I was missing the sustenance that comes from a relationship on which one’s soul feeds. This was Alabama to me – a place I stayed in but never lived in, the place I never belonged, yet kept me from going home for way too long.
Mobile was the place where seeds were planted, seeds that would one day produce the most unexpected harvest. Seeds of connection that would result in career opportunities were sown alongside the seeds of solitude that would someday produce another kind of harvest, a bitter one.
Eli the Just
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was not the first in my family tree to reside in Alabama. I have a first cousin five generations removed who made plenty of noise and left an indelible mark there. He was also a sower of seeds and reaper of their harvest.
Eli Stroud was born in Hancock County, Georgia in 1789. His mother, Martha Patsy Strother Stroud was sister to William Francis Strother, my grandfather 5 times removed. Eli became a legendary Alabama pioneer, moving into the territory before it gained statehood when it was still largely wilderness and home to hostile Indians.
Stroud became known as a skilled Indian fighter.
In an Indian attack that would be memorialized by an official state marker as “The Ogle-Stroud Massacre,” Eli’s wife Elizabeth and their infant son were killed. A Dr. W.B. Ector wrote from Claiborne on March 16, 1818:
“A most horrid massacre was committed on the federal road…on Friday night last, the 13th…I encamped all night within two miles of the place, and dressed the wounded myself… Mr. William Ogly and three children killed, and two wounded; Mrs. Eli Stroud wounded and child killed by the Indians…Two persons only, Mrs. Ogly and Mr. Stroud, escaped unhurt.”[1]
The warriors involved in the attack were believed to have been led by the notorious Savannah Jack. He led another raid that became known as the Butler Massacre a week later.
Eli was one of only two people to escape unhurt the raid in which his wife and child died. He escaped the hostiles and survived several days in the woods.
Stroud was both haunted and driven by the events of that night for the rest of his life, which life would prove colorful and bloody as he followed a vengeful course as a skilled Indian fighter. Eli was a renowned marksman with his long-barrel rifle. He was said to have killed more than 1,000 deer with the gun.
I found this tidbit about the man Eli became after the awful night when his wife, child, and friends were slaughtered:
Eli was distraught, mad with fear, blinded by pain and panic. He hid himself in a hollowed log for hours. Praying for the light of day and that god would spare his life, grief stricken at the loss of his wife and child. He lay in that log until he could no longer hear the screams of his murdered friends and family. When all the awful whoops and cries of Indians were gone, he crept from his hiding place, exhausted and terrified. His home was more than 20 miles away and traveling the road was dangerous especially on foot and in not more than his night clothes. Eli made his decision to stay on the road in the hopes that maybe someone would find him.
As he walked down the dusty road he heard the familiar sound of beating horse hooves. He made his way a bit further up the road and caught a glimpse of a wagon. He ran spirited in an effort to gain the attention of the people driving but he wasn’t met with the hospitality he had hoped for. His condition was not pleasant and the people on board the wagon drove him off like a mangy dog. He begged and pleaded with them for help and again they denied him, fearing he may be a mad man. Eli was once again alone as he watched the wagon disappear in a dusty cloud.
Eli was without even the most basic necessities. No food. No water. Not even a warm coat to keep the cool night air from chilling him. He made his way through the wilderness for 3 days before he finally arrived at his home. He was relieved and was taken in by his community and given a hero’s welcome. Eli’s warm homecoming was short. When the initial shock of survival in the wild for three days wore off, the grim reminder of his slain wife and child was left burned in his mind, their screams still echoed in his head, and Eli was never the same man he was before that awful night, living the next several years in solitude.[2]
Eli would pull himself out of that mind space, remarry, and outlive another wife, also named Elizabeth. He would then get married for a third time, this time to a woman named Eliza Perry. He liked his women like he liked his given name…each of their names started with “Eli.”
By the standards of his times, Eli enjoyed an extraordinarily long life. He died in 1871. He was 83 years old and never suffered much more than a scratch in all of his scrapes with warriors and dalliances with death. They buried him near Smiths Station in Lee County in a place that would come to be known as Eli Stroud Cemetery. He was laid to a restless rest in a buckskin suit.
He refused, some say, to rest in peace. The cemetery that bears his name is known among paranoia enthusiasts as one of the most haunted places in America.
It is said that locals do not care to be in the area of the old graveyard after dark for fear of being accosted by the ghostly hound that accompanies the restless spirit of the old Indian fighter. There is a story about two teenage girls whose car broke down near the cemetery encountering a tall, older man in buckskin clothing and a large black hound. The man offered to help but had no phone and knew nothing about cars. The girls, Erica and Danielle, became convinced after learning of Eli Stroud and the ghostly stories surrounding him that they had encountered him that night. They continued to recount the story with that belief for the next 25 years.
Others report a ghostly child dressed in 1800s-style clothing hailing passing motorists and asking, “Where is Papa?”
In the 1980s, Stroud’s grave was disturbed by graverobbers. To the chagrin of descendants, the casket was missing. Weeks later, a cast-iron casket was found nearby. Forensics determined it was Eli Stroud, the man buried in a buckskin suit, the legendary hunter and Indian fighter.
My favorite part of the Eli Stroud story regards the stone that once marked his grave. It read,
"This spot contains the ashes of the just, Who sought no honors and betrayed no trust. This truth he proved in all paths he trod, An honest man's the noblest work of God."
Eli Stroud was a warrior with a sense of justice, a belief in right and wrong, and a solemn determination to be on the right side of that equation. Wherever his restless soul currently resides, his story lives on in Alabama legend and lore.
I think I would like a memorial stone, something like the one they erected for old Eli. Mine will not, however, be the “ashes of the just.” Mine will be “the ashes of the mortified, the vilified, and the justified…” with the Scripture verse Isaiah 1:18, Come now, let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
[Buy Gene a coffee to support his work and fuel it, too.]
Something like that because the following is too long for a tombstone.
But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, as attested by the Law and the Prophets. And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
God presented Him as the atoning sacrifice through faith in His blood, in order to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance He had passed over the sins committed beforehand. He did this to demonstrate His righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus.[3]
Say what you will about me, I am justified by the grace of the living God through his Son Christ Jesus.
In an unrelated tombstone story, I was just reminded of a story I read and shared in a sermon back in the 1990s. It was about a grave marker in London belonging to a man named Solomon Peas. It read,
Beneath this sod and beneath these trees
Lies the body of Solomon Peas.
This is not Peas; it’s only his pod.
Peas has shelled out and gone home to God.
Write what you will on the stone that bears my name.
Just don’t bury me in Alabama.
[1] Hmdb.org – The Historical Marker Database
[2] http://hauntedhaven.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-ghostly-frontiersman-salem-alabama.html
[3] Romans 3:21-16, Berean Study Bible
