In the first place you wished to know what kind of place Pine Bluff was, and how far we lived from it, we live eight miles below toward the Mississippi river. I have not even seen the place, but from description I should judge it was about such a place as Blakely in Georgia, it has two Taverns, 5 Stores, 1 Church, Court House and I expect a Black Smith shop, and a landing where the steam Boat Stops. I have heard that there is a very pretty Grass Widow that is equal to Pink for beauty but not for wit.
--Amanda Trulock to her brother Bronson Beardsley, May 20, 1835
It would be helpful if one exit sign were marked "to downtown Pine Bluff." Or if the exit sign for the Martha Mitchell Expressway added in parentheses, "old highway through town."
Who authorized the bypass, anyway? Speeding past Pine Bluff without seeing any of Pine Bluff seems disrespectful, an act of historical and aesthetic negligence.
In any case, I took the bypass to its end and wound up at the highway intersection where you turn south to go to Star City. The old gas station is closed, and the opposite corner is now home to an outlet of a national chain gas station that on the inside is a marvel of logistics and marketing. The candy aisle is a masterpiece of pop art; a dozen flavors of hot dog turn on metal rollers; electronics and sundries abound. Every travel-related contingency has been thought of.
It's just as well that I came out so far. The Star City turnoff is just southwest of what's now designated the Trulock Public Use Area, itself just east of Atkins Lake, which encompassed most of the 555 acres that after 1849 belonged to Amanda Trulock and her five heirs. Amanda did not go into the town of Pine Bluff often during her years in Arkansas. After her husband's death, she usually sent Reuben, her enslaved overseer, to the post office.
She did make occasional social or business calls to the growing frontier town, and her most notable report from Pine Bluff involves Henry Washington, the son of Catherine Washington, her neighbor and fellow widowed slave owner. This is from Nov. 24, 1852:
"There was a terrible affair happened when I was at the Bluff. Henry Washington and Mr. Hudson, the man that Married Susan Dorris, were drinking, and had a little political dispute, and Hudson, as I heard it, pushed Henry out of the store and shut the door, and walked out of another door, into another store, and Henry went around a back way, and came in behind Hudson and stabbed him, he died in less than three hours after it occurred. Susan will probably have an addition to her family in less than two months."
Later reports have Henry Washington in Texas, then Mexico, and his wife with her mother-in-law, and then planning to return to her father in Texas.
A homicide report was the first thing I heard when I tuned the radio to a Pine Bluff station recently, followed by an interview with an out-of-state expert who said that street gangs as we knew them in the 1990s have all but ceased to exist. He spoke of them almost wistfully, of the structure and leadership they provided, as if they had been Boy Scout troops.
Nowadays, he said, it's just groups. The experts don't speak of "gang violence," just "group violence," and in your typical afflicted city, only half of one percent of the population belong to the "groups," so of Pine Bluff's 40,000, that would amount to about 200 people; among those, only a handful actually commit violent crimes.
If you're not involved in the mess, then what is there to fear? To find my way back into the town I've been through 400 times, I submitted to instructions from the map application on my phone. I turned left off the Martha Mitchell Expressway onto Sixth Street and, lo and behold, the South. Bungalows in various states of decay. Straight numbered streets.
And even in August, green. So much green, close to the street. A density of vegetation I don't see in Little Rock, not even downtown.
The Ouachitas and Ozarks get no shortage of affection (or, lately, investment), so I'll not hurt any feelings when I repeat something Larry McMurtry said: Mountains breed suspicion. Pine Bluff, being part of the Delta, breeds trust. It says "come on in." It's an open book. Once you get out of ArDOT's fabrications and onto the grid, getting around is easy, and everyone has the time of day.
On Sixth Street, approaching Main Street from the east, not long after the recognition that you're in the South comes the sight of the Pines Hotel, and the recognition that you are in an old Southern city. Old and largely unadulterated. One mid-century skyscraper, yes, but we will forgive it, because how many towns can claim a publicly traded company on Main Street?
Does any place in Arkansas have as much pre-1949 commercial square footage in its downtown? I think the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program has the data that Pine Bluff could use to make an impressive claim.
You wished to know what kind of place Pine Bluff was, Amanda Trulock said to her brother. It's seen some murders, but so have a lot of places worth saving. Pine Bluff is worth returning to again and again. I can't wait to go back.