Jake Brakes and Jackboots

A narrative

You know those family stories that have been told, and you aren’t sure if you were there for the event or if you just heard it so many times that it is buried deep in your memories?

I have one of those.

I share the same name as my great-grandpa, and there is lore in my family about him — we called him Papa.

Papa lived on 60 acres in central Arkansas in a tiny town called Alix. It’s about 45 minutes East of Fort Smith.

His farm was close to the Arkansas River bottoms. I stayed several nights with Papa and my great-grandma, Nanny Rose, throughout my childhood.

Both of my great-grandparents never moved farther than 10 minutes from their birthplaces in Arkansas. They never strayed far from home their entire lives.

My great-grandmother was shy and quiet, and from what I can remember, a terrible cook. But she made up for it with a cabinet full of Little Debbie cakes.

She kept her cancelled checks so my sister and I could play bank when we visited. She knew we loved to play that game.

She also kept the JCPenney catalogues for us.

My sister and I spent several hours cutting out women and men and children and housewares to set up our own paper houses from the catalogues. It was a long process and I remember once having my house exactly how I wanted, and my sister became angry with me for whatever reason (we were only 12 months apart) and she got up from her own cut-out home and stood over mine and let out a huge breath.

She blew my entire home and family all over the kitchen. I crumbled hers up in return, and then we both cried over what we had done.

She also gave my Barbies crew cuts, but that’s another essay…

I was close to Papa. He told us stories about the mines and leaving school in 8th grade and his mother who died in a fire when he was a baby.

He lived into his eighties, and he planted massive gardens every spring and sat under the pecan trees on the east side of the property on a metal chair. He had two of those chairs, and one was reserved for his neighbor, Carmel, who sat under those trees with him.

They were about the same age and talked about the weather and local gossip. They were always sitting under the trees.

I remember Papa push mowing several acres well into his eighties. He always wore long sleeve plaid shirts and claimed he was cooler in long sleeves, but when he mowed, he took off the long sleeves and wore only his undershirt. I never saw him out of his jeans, though. I was pretty sure he slept in them.

He didn’t sleep in his teeth, though, and my sister and I would take turns going into the bathroom to look at them in the little yellow tub on the sink counter.

One time he caught us looking at his teeth. He grabbed them out of the tub and chased us through the kitchen with his teeth, chomping them with his hands.

Papa woke up at 4 am every morning and opened an Oatmeal Creme Pie, and sat on the porch watching the feed trucks that ran by the house 24 hours a day. The trucks used their jake brakes on the corner, and there was never a night that I wasn’t scared out of my sleep by the loud brakes.

There was also never a night I didn’t think I was missing the rapture because the train tracks were right down the highway, and they blew their whistles at all hours of the day and night.

It sounded like Gabriel’s trumpet.

Papa loved to fish and I went with him a few times. He had two small ponds on the farm and one was well stocked with catfish. He always used a cane pole and a bobber. There was a big tree on the bank and he sat underneath the tree.

He was never in a hurry and he fished at the same speed.

He did have a fun trick, though. He fed the fish. He would drive the tractor down to the pond, and the fish could feel the tractor vibrations coming and they would practically throw themselves on the bank waiting to be fed.

I asked him once why he bothered to fish since he could just pick them up with his bare hands while feeding them. He told me there was no sport or fun in that.

The story I will always remember is Papa walking back to the house after fishing. He was in his jeans and plaid shirt and his heavy leather boots. He had his pole, and a stringer of catfish, and he was laughing as he walked back to the house. Big, loud hoots and hollers.

He was always laughing, but this was a big production. Even for Papa.

As he got closer, the story goes that he was dragging one of his feet — it looked like it was too heavy to walk regularly. As he got closer to the house, he told the kids to stay back. I feel like I was scared, but like I said, I don’t know if this is a true memory or if it’s a plant from being told so many times.

When he finally topped the little hill, we could see something hanging from his boot.

It was a cottonmouth that had bitten his boot while he was fishing — the snake was stuck in the leather boot. He had walked all the way from the pond with a poisonous snake attached so we could all see it.

I feel like these things happened a hundred years ago. A time gone by that I don’t know we can ever return.

The fishing. The catalogue-cutting. The under-the-tree lollygagging.

The Oatmeal Creme Pies still reside in my pantry, though.

Now I wake up at 4 am too, but it’s not because of Jake brakes or train whistles. It’s the authoritarianism that wakes me so early — the constant hum of fascism creeping in. The loud sound of oligarchy.

I can’t imagine Papa living under the threat of authoritarianism. He lived through so much in his time, even the Red Scare, but this is different.

So different.

I can’t imagine him waking up to an AI video posted by the President of the United States showing himself flying over America and showering citizens with shit. I can’t imagine what he would have had to say about a Vice President tweeting out photos of a President wearing a crown.

Papa would have recognized that fascism was a threat to his way of life and to that of his children and all of their offspring. He was rural to the bone and country to the soul, but he knew right from wrong better than most. No matter the political party.

He knew what was good and right and just.

He wasn’t religious — he was a miner who accumulated a few acres and fished and gardened his way through life.

He would object to what we are seeing around us.

That is ingrained in me.

That’s why I attended a No Kings rally and protest in Kansas City on Saturday. That’s why I spoke at two different events in between the No Kings rally this weekend.

Odessa, Missouri Democratic Event. 10/19/25

Because I can recognize that fascism is a threat to my way of life and to my children and grandchildren.

I know what’s right and what’s wrong. My great-grandpa taught me.

I know that a wannabe dictator can be stopped if enough of us are bothered enough to show up…to take action when we wake at 4 am. To do something.

So we can get back to catalogue-cutting and visiting under pecan trees.

So we can get back to leather boots for fishing rather than jackboots for oppression.

So we can get back to the good stuff.

~Jess