Free Jim the Boy by Tony Earley

happened before he was seven years old by saying, “This happened during the last century.”
    “Little Corrie and Little Allie hadn’t come along yet, nor your mother, and I was the only little fellow running around the place. Now, my granddaddy (that’s your great-granddaddy) and my daddy (your granddaddy, who died in 1918 with the flu) were doing pretty well. They were farming in a big way and they had the gin and the store and the mill and business was going good, and there was a tannery here then, and the tannery ran a big crew, and a sawmill, and Abraham and his bunch lived up on the hill, and it started to look to everybody like they lived in a regular town. Only they knew it wasn’t a real town because they couldn’t get the train to stop. You could flag it down, but if the flag wasn’t out, it went on through without even slowing down. And Granddaddy hated to see that. Everybody knows you ain’t got much of a town if a railroad track runs through it but the train won’t stop.
    “So one day Granddaddy packs a bag and flags the train down and goes to see the superintendent down in Hamlet and asks him if he’ll make the train stop. But the superintendent, he says, ‘My train only stops in towns. You can flag the train down like the rest of the country folk.’
    “Granddaddy comes back home, and he drives a big, iron stake right in the middle of town and he surveys out a half a mile from that stake in every direction, which made a circle a mile wide, and he gets everybody who owns property inside that circle to sign a petition, and he takes that survey and that petition all the way to Raleigh and files articles of incorporation. Then he goes to Hamlet and he says, ‘Now, look here. We got a town. We got a survey. We got articles of incorporation.’
    “But the superintendent, he says, ‘I don’t care about your articles of incorporation. You ain’t got a depot for the train to stop at.’
    “So Granddaddy, who by now is getting kind of aggravated at the superintendent, comes back home and with his own money builds a depot right over the top of that stake, beside the railroad track, in the dead center of town. Then he goes back to the superintendent one more time and he says, ‘All right. I made you a town. I built you a depot. If you’ll make the train stop, I’ll
give
that depot to the railroad.’
    “Now, Aliceville, as you know, was at that time called Sandy Bottom. That’s just what it had always been called. So the superintendent, who wasn’t too crazy about Granddaddy, either, he says, ‘I don’t care how many depots you give me, my train ain’t stopping at no place called Sandy Bottom.’
    “Granddaddy comes back home and he thinks about it, and he decides that maybe this time the superintendent has a point. Sandy Bottom ain’t much of a name for a town. So he asks around to see if anybody can think up a name, but nobody couldn’t think of anything good, nothing anyway that would stop a train.
    “Now, the engineer of the train at that time was a fellow named Bill McKinney. He was raised not far from here, down a little ways on the other side of the river, and his people still lived around. He was a big old handsome fellow with big waxed mustaches, and he was proud of that train. And the only thing he was prouder of than that train was his little girl, Alice. And everybody knew that.
    “So one Sunday in church, Granny (that’s your great-grandmother), it came to her that all this time Granddaddy had been talking to the wrong man. She thought that maybe instead of working on the man who was in
charge
of the train — but lived all the way down in Hamlet — they ought to work on the man who
drove
the train and came through here every day. She’s the one who thought up the name Aliceville.
    “Now Granddaddy thought that was a pretty smart idea, even if he didn’t think of it. He talked it around and everybody else agreed that it was a pretty good name for a town — everybody liked