Rural Free Delivery was of enormous benefit to Georgia’s farm families, but exposed carriers to fearful weather challenges, and made them vulnerable to robberies and even acts of violence. East and south Georgia was dangerous ground in many ways, where economic hardship might drive the hardest hit to risk breaking the law. Before cell phones, paved roads and reliable automobiles, carriers faced many difficulties. This photo of a 1920’s rural mail delivery is unrelated to this story but suggestive of the period and circumstances of such RFD deliveries. Taken from from Wikipedia.

Another Deep South Story: Rural Free Delivery (1923)

     My mother said.  “I remember that dry November day. Cotton stalks still stood in the field and traces of cotton blew alongside the road spilt from cotton wagons headed to the gin. Aunt Pharabee was delivering mail to country people in her model A Ford coupe.

     Pharabee had just gotten married a few months before. Married your daddy’s uncle. She was awfully young to marry. She got the job because her daddy was the postmaster. So, she had learned the mail routes riding the roads as her daddy had delivered the mail before her.”

     She kept telling the story as she worked at the ironing board, “The days of rural free delivery, RFD they called it, started only a few years before the war. Georgia’s own Tom Watson came up with this idea so people who lived on farms did not have to go all the way to town to get their mail. So, you can bet, all the farmers loved Tom Watson.

     “On that awful day,” my mother continued her story, “Pharabee stopped in front of a tenant shack on the dirt road out by the old Timmons Place. There was a boy standing outside by the mailbox post. Pharabee had never delivered a piece of mail to this house, but she had driven by a thousand times and there was usually a boy standing there in old, worn-out bibb overalls and holding a small rifle. Not twenty feet from this house was the mailbox, made from a lard can and nailed to a cedar post.”

    “The paper said that when Pharabee stopped to put a piece of mail in the box, she looked up at the McBride boy standing by the box. ‘Jimmy Boy’ he was called. Jimmy Boy was strong but weak-minded, or so people said, and he would go from still and quiet to nervous and mad as the temper seized him. When Pharabee stretched her arm to hand him a letter, Jimmy Boy sort of absent mindedly lifted his rifle and fired a small bullet that went into Pharabee’s skull through her right eye, according to the newspaper.   

  “The paper said that the coroner decided Jimmy Boy was killed by a person or persons unknown. But everybody knew who did it. They bragged about it to their friends and to anybody who would listen. People from town felt bad about this later because Jimmy Boy had the mind of a child. He was not smart and never went to school. He was like an idiot, you know, he never could learn anything. Just played in the yard and pretended to go fishing.”

       “Jimmy Boy laid the rifle down on the porch steps and walked across the road into the sandy field toward the creek bottom, just like nothing had happened. His mother Sarah heard the shot and came out from behind the house where she was hanging clothes to dry. Seeing the car sitting there and Miss Mae lying half out the open car door, Sarah started calling after Jimmy Boy, but the boy just walked on.

     “Johnny, Jimmy Boy’s father, had come in from plowing and was unhitching the mule. He came up to the house to find his Sarah sitting on the running board of Pharabee’s Ford car, cradling Pharabee’s head in her arms. Johnny told Sarah he would go to town for the doctor. Johnny had no car and limped along, too. So, he hobbled off toward town. It must have seemed like forever to Sarah before anyone came as she held Pharabee’s head and worried where Jimmy Boy was and what it was that he had done.

     “When he came back with Doc Strickland, they were followed by carloads of men, many riding on the running boards, carrying rifles and bringing their anger with them.

     “They found Pharabee dead, and the men scattered to look for the boy. He was sitting beside a small muddy creek, splashing the water with a stick. They dragged him across the sandy bottom, across the dirt road and back to his house. They tortured and killed him and hanged him from one of the porch rafters of his home.”  As Baby finished the last of the ironing, she pursed her lips and clicked her tongue, shaking her head side to side as she always did when she told a sad story.

     Baby once drove me by the house where Jimmy Boy lived. The tarpapered cabin with its two weathered doors. is there today, the people all gone, no witnesses left of what was done. Baby added as she put away the ironing board, “No one ever said what was in the letter Pharabee delivered that day. Rural Free Delivery.” Baby said these last words slowly to give them weight. “There was no trial.”

Note: Newspaper accounts of these deaths differ from my mother’s account, but the core story she related from memory closely parallels the actual events. Washington County residents would later express genuine sadness and regrets over both deaths in the years that followed. I have changed the names of those involved, though they are readily available in contemporaraneous newspaper accounts. I have oftem wondered why my mother related this story to me when I was only eight or ten years old. I think she may have been preparing me for the realities of my homeland’s tragic history.