Home-Built Privy Prank

Oopsy-daisy!

Mr. Henry Evans died when I was three months old, but I knew his son Broughton (b. 1909) and grandson Dale who became a tooth dentist.

They farmed a piece of ground at an Alabama Highway intersection that is identified now by a low rock wall that surrounded the front of the place. No house or barn skeleton remains.

Mr. Broughton was a mainstay of Naomi Baptist Church as a deacon and faithful member. He was a large, red-faced man with big, rough hands.

I had no reason to know about Mr. Henry except that Dale told me the story of how some Hegwood boys made a Halloween night a night too far.

The Evans, like all farm families, had an outdoor privy, otherwise known as an “outhouse.”

Like most home-built privies, it was about four-by-four feet in footprint with a door and a roof. Rather than a ceramic stool, like modern bathrooms, there was a platform with a hole or two cut into it. One of the holes was smaller to accommodate the bottom of a child.

Most privies were made of rough lumber and built over a pit or slope.

My grandmother’s term for visiting the privy was “going to see Miss Jones,” or “up the hill.”

Outhouses had limitations. Bad tempered paper wasps and dirt-daubers built nests on the under side of the platform. A lighted wad of newspaper tossed into the hole made wasps look for another home when the paper wasn’t being used for something else.

Mr. Henry didn’t abide foolishness from boys at church, hay rides, buggy races, or inane games.

On that Halloween night in the late 1930’s, the target was Mr. Henry.

Halloween pranks were more creative in those days, and teenagers took the opportunity to do some payback on cranky and humorless adults.

A common, but frowned upon, prank was to wait until late at night and overturn a (hopefully) empty outhouse.

We think of privies as rural features, but there were urban privies often serving a neighborhood.

As towns installed sewer systems, the privies became garbage pits and were filled with everything imaginable.

High prices paid by bottle collectors made privy pit excavation a corner of urban archaeology. Some pits were cleaned out regularly, but many were filled with household garbage — bottles, ink bottles, beer bottles, patent medicine bottles, buttons, ceramic doll parts.

I never heard of an urban privy being flipped over on Halloween, but on that night in Naomi, the boys should have checked inside first.

Mr. Henry Evans was inside.

joenphillips@yahoo.com