Damon M Farris

Letter in Time Damon M Farris

?Not much future for young sharecroppers who don?t want to farm when they grow up. Especially those with less than nine years of schooling. Jobs may be many, but they?re for the few. Only those properly experienced and educated need apply, others, go do your laboring somewhere else. Cotton choppers and pickers line up for the latter. Unlike his vision when he was six years old of designing cars, JW Engram always queued up in the no experience necessary line. A dark secret of the six year old was revealed eleven years later during the 1954 gubernatorial election campaign. Milford Seymour was running for governor against Faubus, Cherry, and Remmel, and JW had been keeping the traumatizing event to himself for all those years. And Seymour?s campaign manager would make sure JW could never tell. For reasons only justifiable to JW, his school work was a disaster, and the remaining days at Blytheville Junior High were numbered. In a few short weeks though, he would understand why his siblings had always cautioned him to finish school, go to college. But for a kid with no experience and no education, the US Air Force might be the answer. His tour of duty took him to England with side trips to Europe and Africa. What a wonderful life and experiences the nineteen year old was having. A beautiful girl was to be his wife, friends, everything a young man desires was lying before him. The farm surly couldn?t deliver a crop of happiness of such magnitude, ever. JW?s grandmother had warned him of Mars. In her words, ?That is one ruinacious planet,? but he couldn?t stop the wondering star from making its way across the heavens, so why bother. Still, shivers would come over him at times when it was near. It may have only been a coincidence, but it was very close when his persona changed radically during the 1956 opposition. His only defense at the Special Court-Martial was, ?It wasn?t me in that body, I was in the future.? It didn?t work, and after his ninety days in the stockade, the next forty-seven years were not much better. He did everything he had promised his mother he would not do. And he did it without the only girl he would ever love. But what the heavens could do, they could undo.