My life

When I was at Ramble, my interest in reading grew and I discovered the Garland County Public Library, which was downtown, near the courthouse and not far from Clinton Buick Company. I would go there for hours, browsing among the books and reading lots of them. I was most fascinated by books about Native Americans and read children’s biographies of Geronimo, the great Apache; Crazy Horse, the Lakota Sioux who killed Custer and routed his troops at Little Bighorn; Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, who made peace with his powerful statement, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”; and the great Seminole chief Osceola, who developed a written alphabet for his people. I never lost my interest in Native Americans or my feeling that they had been terribly mistreated. My last stop on Park Avenue was my first real church, Park Place Baptist Church. Though Mother and Daddy didn’t go except on Easter and sometimes at Christmas, Mother encouraged me to go, and I did, just about every Sunday. I loved getting dressed up and walking down there. From the time I was about eleven until I graduated from high school, my teacher was A. B. “Sonny” Jeffries. His son Bert was in my class and we became close friends. Every Sunday for years, we went to Sunday school and church together, always sitting in the back, often in our own world. In 1955, I had absorbed enough of my church’s teachings to know that I was a sinner and to want Jesus to save me. So I came down the aisle at the end of Sunday service, professed my faith in Christ, and asked to be baptized. The Reverend Fitzgerald came to the house to talk to Mother and me. Baptists require an informed profession of faith for baptism; they want people to know what they are doing, as opposed to the Methodists’ infantsprinkling ritual that took Hillary and her brothers out of hell’s way. Bert Jeffries and I were baptized together, along with several other people on a Sunday night. The baptismal pool was just above the choir loft. When the curtains were opened, the congregation could see the pastor standing in a white robe, dunking the saved. Just ahead of Bert and me in the line was a woman who was visibly afraid of the water. She trembled down the steps into the pool. When the preacher held her nose and dunked her, she went completely rigid. Her right leg jerked straight up in the air and came to rest on the narrow strip of glass that protected the choir loft from splashes. Her heel stuck. She couldn’t get it off, so when the preacher tried to lift her up, he couldn’t budge her. Since he was looking at her submerged head, he didn’t see what had happened, so he just kept jerking on her. Finally he looked around, figured it out, and took the poor woman’s leg down before she drowned. Bert and I were in stitches. I couldn’t help thinking that if Jesus had this much of a sense of humor, being a Christian wasn’t going to be so tough.

Besides my new friends, neighborhood, school, and church, Hot Springs brought me a new extended family in the Clintons. My step-grandparents were Al and Eula Mae Cornwell Clinton. Poppy Al, as we all called him, came from Dardanelle, in Yell County, a beautiful wooded place seventy miles west of Little Rock up the Arkansas River. He met and married his wife there after her family migrated from Mississippi in the 1890s. We called my new grandmother Mama Clinton. She was one of a huge Cornwell family that spread out all over Arkansas. Together with the Clintons and my mother’s relatives, they gave me kinfolk in fifteen of Arkansas’ seventy-five counties, an enormous asset when I started my political career in a time when personal contacts counted more than credentials or positions on the issues.