“Ode to Billie Joe” by Jeanne Sharp
I grew up in the damp drizzle of Seattle and lived in Washington until I was 24, but my mother hailed from central Florida. She attended college in Atlanta before moving to the northwest for graduate school, where she met my father. Despite settling in the Seattle mist, Mom made it her mission to educate me about my ancestral roots in the southeast, and I took the first of many long-haul plane trips to meet my maternal relatives when I was just an infant.
It was on one of these diagonal journeys from northwest to southeast that I first heard Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe. This was the era when you had to pay five bucks for a headset if you wanted to avail yourself of the in-flight entertainment, which usually consisted of an edited-for-time-and-content movie and a series of music channels accessible using analog (later digital) dials in the armrest of your seat. The playlists were printed in the in-flight magazine, and on this particular trip, I settled on an “easy listening” channel that consisted of songs that were mostly older than I was. Somewhere in between America’s Horse With No Name and Barry Manilow’s Mandy, I was introduced to Gentry’s eerie musical unsolved mystery.
It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day…
The story in Ode To Billie Joe takes place in the Delta region of Mississippi, but my mind drew parallels with central Florida right away. While most people probably think of Disney World, beaches, and hurricanes when they think of Florida, I think of cattle ranches, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Spanish moss, and most vividly, of the long, sandy driveway that led to my great aunt Mozelle and granduncle Mark’s farm in rural Sumter County. During an extended visit when I was eight years old, I dodged dragonflies as big as my hand, shelled peas on the glider in the front yard with Aunt Mo, ate my Uncle Mark’s homemade biscuits, and played with their dog, Miss Blue, in the shimmering summer humidity.
I was out choppin' cotton, and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door, y'all, remember to wipe your feet
Days began early to ensure everyone could get their chores done before it grew too hot. The percolator burbled in the kitchen in the pre-dawn hours while whip-poor-wills sang outside. The hearty midday meal was “dinner,” followed by afternoon naps, and the much lighter evening meal was “supper.” Someone always said grace before we ate, and we went to services at the nearby Baptist church on Wednesday nights.
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
I'll have another piece-a apple pie; you know, it don't seem right
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
Both of my maternal grandparents came from large families, so it was typical for assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins to drop in and visit for a few hours or a few days. Depending on who else was there, Mom and I would sleep in the back bedroom of the painted cinder block house or on the hide-a-bed in the front room. Regardless, my memories are of a house crowded with family, from little kids to wizened elders.
Aunt Mo and Uncle Mark raised two sons and also made a home for a nephew whose father had died young and whose mother was incapacitated by mental illness. These cousins, who were all more than twenty years older than me, treated me like a precious kid sister. The eldest, Bill, had daughters of his own who were my playmates, and an above-ground pool where we took refuge from the oppressive Florida heat. The middle son, Kenny, was a gentle giant and a competitive weightlifter who would carry me on his shoulders and raise me above his head, my eight-year-old body just another barbell to him (and a light one, at that.) To this day, he still addresses me as “Jeannie-Baby.” The youngest, Billy (who went by Woody to avoid confusion with his adopted cousin), was an introverted but warm intellectual who would sit outside with his coffee in the mornings and talk to me like I was a grownup. We understood each other.
And Papa said to Mama, as he passed around the black-eyed peas
Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please
There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow
And Mama said it was a shame about Billie Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
By the mid-1980s, cousin Woody had made an attempt at law school but he dropped out to return to his parents’ farm. I remember my mother asking him what he was up to these days, and he smiled and drawled, “Farmin’.” I was too young to understand that this sudden shift in direction was not just youthful aimlessness, but a harbinger of the schizophrenia that would overtake him as he grew older. As the years progressed, he became catatonic, falling into a stasis that rooted him in place, frozen in that quiet, almost forgotten corner of Florida.
I saw him a few more times when I was in my teens and twenties, and each time the kindhearted cousin I remembered from childhood would reappear for a little while, and we would talk the way we once had: trading stories and discussing music, history, and current events. Woody was the first person I can remember affirming my belief in music as a sort of time capsule; he understood how certain songs could act as mileposts, bringing us back to specific moments in life, both momentous and mundane.
And Mama said to me, child, what's happened to your appetite?
I've been cookin' all morning, and you haven't touched a single bite
That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge
Bobbie Gentry has said in interviews that she wrote Ode To Billie Joe as a study in human cruelty and indifference. The haunting Southern Gothic tale is as much about heartless apathy as it is about the titular character’s mysterious suicide. When I was younger, I was drawn to the song by curiosity: what did they throw off the bridge? Why did Billie Joe jump? As an adult, I’m devastated by the carelessness of the family as they talk about the death while missing the narrator’s connection to Billie Joe and her attendant shock and grief.
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge
Unlike Billie Joe MacAllister, my cousin Woody never lacked love and care. His parents, and later, his brother, watched over him as best they could, keeping a roof over his head and helping him manage his illness through its inevitable peaks and valleys. I’ll never know all the thoughts and fears that lived within him, but I’m certain he knew he was loved.
Cousin Woody died in July 2004 at the age of 51, twenty years after that string of coffee mornings under the giant live oak in the front yard and less than a year after the last time I saw him: at a combination family reunion and milestone birthday celebration for one of our elderly aunts. We didn’t get to talk much at the party, but we exchanged smiles of recognition across the busy room. When he died, I spent more money than I could afford to make sure there were flowers at his funeral.
Jeanne Sharp (she/her) is a writer who has done everything but write for most of her adult life, but she's finally working on an actual memoir. To pay the bills, she has worked for 25 years in the nonprofit space. She lives in the desert and can be found on IG at @that_jeanne.
