My maternal grandmother who lived in Simpson, County Mississippi loved to cane pole fish. When I say cane pole fishing I mean you use the long lean bamboo type of fishing poles for the ones of you who aren’t used to “red neck” wording. As a child I can remember climbing into her old forty model black Plymouth car with red cloth interior and riding down a dusty red dirt road to an old wooden bridge where we fished for Brim. That old car’s back seat had been taken out to make room for all her fishing tackle and she had a lot of it too. There was an odd assortment of hooks, corks, bass lures, rubber worms, sinkers of all weights, rolls of line, net etc. That car always smelled of old car, mildew and..... “fish.” I can remember her graying hair, her stern manner but she had a quick smile and flashing blue eyes. She would hold my hand to walk through the weeds to go sit by the Okatoma Creek bank to set up to fish. She had an old straw hat she wore that looked like it had seen better days she wore to keep the sun off her. Everyone called her affectionately “Maw Ma.” Most folks just called her “Ma” or “Leola.”
Maw Ma had an old tackle box she would open up and she would fix me up with my cane pole and put a popcorn shrimp on my hook and set it out in the cool water. She would do likewise with her pole. Sometimes she brought along a piece of hotdog to use for bait. It might take awhile before we would get a bite and then again it wouldn’t be but a minute or two before I would see something playing with my cork. She’d tell me to watch it close, because sometimes it was a fish, a turtle or worse. The worse could have been one of those water moccasins that swim up and down the Okatoma Creek at any given moment. I know sitting there on the sandy bank among the weeds I would occasionally look around me to make sure one of those mean snakes hadn’t sneaked up to bite me on my rear end. Those snakes loved the small brim we would catch and even try to take them off the fish stringer, they were brave to try to do that! I remember one time one of those moccasins swam too close to Maw ma and me, it was in the water and was coming toward us. Maw ma got her cane pole and started whipping him and he must of thought better of it, because he high-tailed it out of Dodge! LOL I mean that snake swam like he had a fire lit under him. That always stuck in my mind that one time she beat that snake like that! Yep, my Maw ma loved to cane pole fish for those little blue gill brim better than eat them. My mother told me in later years that Maw ma would bring them home and she would clean them after Maw Ma caught them. It was the sport of catching them that she loved, not the eating of them. My Pap Pa Jewel (her husband) would sometimes mount the wide mouth bass she caught. I remember as a child seeing them mounted on their living room wall. Yes, Maw ma was quite the fisherwoman. I always enjoyed going fishing with her and enjoying spending time with her. I still love to fish today and every time I bait a hook “Maw Ma” is with me in my heart... along the old Okatoma Creek fishing with her old straw hat with a smile on her face.
