This is the first of a two-part series

Dressed in faded jeans and wearing an orange T‑shirt, I was armed with a pail of water, some soap and a rag and was scrubbing the cannons in front of the Old Court House Museum, probably in the late 1970s. It was a sweltering summer day, and the tourists who got off the bus and climbed the steps to the lawn would never have known that the sweaty, dirty, smelly guy was the curator and director. I spoke to some of them, but they just looked at me in the strangest way.

Standing at the top of the steps in his immaculate uniform of a Mississippi State Highway Safety Patrol trooper was Jeff Roberts, a new friend of mine. He had a stern look on his face, and his gun was at his side when he told me, “They think you’re a prisoner from the jail and I’m your guard.” There was a twinkle in his eye, but the tourists didn’t see it.

This is the first of two stories about Jeff, now retired, who lives with his wife, Brenda, in Claiborne County.

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The waitress in a Western restaurant listened to Jeff Roberts’ soft Southern drawl, then asked where he was from.

“Mississippi,” he replied, and she asked, “Does everybody in Mississippi talk like you?”

“Well, naw, not everybody,” Jeff told her. “Lots of folks down there talk real slow and countryfied,”

His drawn-out drawl that can stretch a 3‑minute story into 10, he said, “is a Smith County thing.” He’s now a resident of Claiborne County, but he was born at Pineville 62 years ago. It’s a hamlet, or crossroads, about 18 miles from anywhere else, such as Forest or Raleigh. It had a church and a school and three stores, “And it just depended on who you were kin to as to who you traded with.”

Though the school at one time had all 12 grades, when Jeff came along there were just eight with two in each classroom. Jeff recalls a time in health class — that was a subject Miss Daisy taught. William and Ray were brothers and in the same grade. They weren’t twins, but “one had been recycled a couple of times.”

One day Ray wasn’t there, and Miss Daisy asked his brother about him. William told her that Ray was sick, “I mean he is low.” One of the girls spoke up: “He ain’t neither, Miss Daisy. He’s gone squirrel huntin’ ’cause I seen him with that old dog of his from the bus this morning.”

Was that the truth, the teacher asked William, and he admitted it was, “So she gave him a good dustin’ for lying and promised him another one if he told Ray,” Jeff said.

The next day Ray was back in class, telling the teacher how sick he had been the day before. Since he was so sick, she said, she guessed he didn’t have time to do any studying, but Ray assured her, “I layed with them books pretty much the whole time,” at which point, Miss Daisy told him to get ready for a test. She walked straight to him, looked him dead in the eye, and asked, “Where are the taste buds located?”

“Boy you could see him breathe a sigh of relief,” Jeff said. “He thought he had that one, and he told her, ‘In the garden,’ and she gave him a good dustin.’”

Jeff admits he got some dustin’s himself, one of them on the first day — “I mean the very first day I went to school” — for climbing a tree and picking possum grapes.

At Pineville, Jeff said, “We had to make our own entertainment. Our priorities were fishing or having a swing down at the swimming hole, or this, that and the other. Then all of a sudden those girls who had looked so ugly in years past — well, it seemed like they were changing, and they really started to look different, and we were really kind of wanting their attention, but how were we going to get it?”

The boys — they were in about the seventh grade — put their heads together and concocted a plan. While folks were buying their groceries — “If you didn’t get it on Saturday you couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread until Monday” — the girls would gather in groups, “talking and giggling, you know.”

The boys decided to get their horses and ride through town just at the time the girls had gathered, and “we would be seen and that would make an impression,” but there were problems — they needed some saddles. One boy said his uncle had some old ones in the barn, but they had been there so long they were brittle.

“My uncle, who was no stranger to the jug,” Jeff said, advised them to rub them down good with fried meat grease, “as they called it back then. Everybody’s mom kept a little crock of it on the stove, enough to mop those saddles down once or twice. We put ’em out in the sun, and sure enough it limbered them right up.”

They gathered near the church, waiting for the right time, “and then we filed out. I mean we rode through Pineville as straight as arrows. We wouldn’t look in either direction. We knew those girls were out there, but we didn’t look, just rode straight ahead, up behind the school- house and circled around to our house,” Jeff said.

Every one of the boys was curious: “Do you think they saw us? Oh, they had to see us, no way around it. Everybody saw us. Had to see us. They were all out there.”

On Monday the boys headed to Mr. Nelson’s store, got a drink and sat around waiting for him to say something. Finally Jeff asked him, “Did you see us when we rode through town Saturday evening?”

Indeed he had seen them, he said, adding, “I believe that beat anything I’ve ever seen. Now that was an impressive sight. That’s just about the biggest thing that’s happened in Pineville in a long time.”

“We were eating it up,” Jeff said, when Nelson added, ‘I counted four horses, three mules and 17 dogs were following you boys.’ Every time we’d ride past a house, another couple of dogs would smell that bacon grease and follow us.”

Jeff went to high school in Raleigh, then graduated from Burns High School, went to Jones County Junior College before a stint in the military, after which he enrolled in highway patrol school, graduating on Aug. 28, 1972, when he was 23 years old. The next week he reported for his first assignment in Fayette while two of his friends were sent to Port Gibson. In those days it was customary if a state trooper was near the county line he would go over and help a fellow officer. One of his friends was backed up off the highway watching traffic near Russum one day “when here goes this old gentleman in his pickup truck down the Russum Road, right on through the stop sign, so the trooper cranked up, pulled the man over, gave him a lecture about the law, but the old man said, ‘I ain’t never stopped there.’ He was assured that he had better do so in the future, and with a stern warning the officer let him off the hook.

“The next day or two the trooper got a call — there was a wreck at Russum Road and Highway 61,” Jeff said. “There the old man was in his pickup, and another old man in his had rear-ended him. He told what happened: ‘I been following him for 30 years, and he ain’t never stopped at that stop sign before.’”

Jeff spent 10 months in Fayette and was then transferred to Port Gibson at the request of Sheriff Dan McKay.

“I couldn’t believe a place like this existed,” he said. “It was the most gorgeous place I’d ever seen in my life.”

It would become his permanent home.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.