FAMILY – CHAPTER ONE – CLARKE

Posted On November 2, 2025

CHAPTER ONE

Clarke

Clarke Johnson Mason
Born: February 20, 1921
Died: October 16, 1997
Seventy-six years, seven months, twenty-seven days

One

I have chosen to record his middle name even though he had it struck from his records in later life. He despised it, and perhaps that is reason enough to preserve it. No one ever knew where the name Johnson came from. His mother offered no explanation, and those who might have known have long since passed into silence. It remains a small mystery, a name without roots, unclaimed by either close or distant kin.

Clarke was a man who filled a room. In his middle years he stood six feet two inches, broad in the shoulders and near two hundred pounds. He was handsome in a hard and weathered way, often compared to the actor Lee Marvin, and the likeness was not unfounded. He was something of a dandy, fond of pressed suits, polished shoes, the sharp scent of Old Spice on his skin, and the clean order of a close haircut. His appearance was deliberate, as if he had studied how a man should look and move, then shaped himself into that image.

You may sense that my feelings toward Clarke were complicated, and they were. As a child I regarded him with awe and fear. As a young man I resisted him, and only later did I view him with understanding. It was after his death that I began to see the ways his presence had shaped me. The weight of him did not fall at once but pressed itself into my life slowly, year upon year, until it could no longer be ignored.

Before I can tell you who he became, I must tell you who he was. To understand the man, one must look first at the boy and at the world that formed him.

Two

Clarke was born in rural northwest Florida near Pensacola, the second of five surviving children. Two others, twins, had died at birth. The surviving children were Curtis, the eldest; Quinton, the younger brother; Elenor; and Louise, the youngest by many years. The family lived in the country, surrounded by pine and pasture, where life was ruled by work and weather.

They were poor, even by the standards of 1921. The Masons kept a small dairy and lived on the edge of subsistence. Nat, the father, took what jobs he could find, pouring concrete, building fences, harvesting lighterd wood from pine stumps for kindling. Wilma, the mother, ran the dairy, the garden, and the household. They had no car, no modern conveniences. Milk was delivered by wagon. Meals came from the farm: biscuits, rice with gravy, turnips, greens, and whatever game could be caught or killed. Beef was a luxury seldom seen. Pork came only when a hog was raised and butchered, and that had to last through the winter.

Every day began before dawn. The fire was kindled, the stove lit, and the children sent to milk cows and feed chickens. Wilma’s hands were never still. She worked from first light until dark, milking, washing, cooking, canning, sewing, and cleaning. The sound of her life was the clatter of pans and the murmur of quiet determination.

Scarcity marked those years. Clarke learned early that food on the table was not guaranteed. Children reached quickly for what was offered, and those who hesitated often went hungry. The household was not cruel, but it was hard. Tenderness was rare, and affection often expressed only through labor. In that environment Clarke learned the first lessons that would guide his life: take what you can, endure what you must, and never show weakness. Those lessons became both his armor and his burden.

Three

Work began as soon as he could lift a bucket. By the age of five Clarke was carrying milk, cleaning stalls, and leading cows to pasture. As he grew, the chores multiplied. He was expected to shoulder a man’s share of labor long before he was grown. School came when time allowed, which was seldom. Yet Wilma believed education might open a door beyond poverty, and she did what she could to keep her children in class through the harvest seasons.

Louise was born when Clarke was nearly grown, a gap of nearly seventeen years. By then he was restless, tall, and lean, with a will that matched the Florida sun for intensity. He finished Tate High School in Cantonment around 1937 or 1938 and soon after married my mother, Helen Gertrude Eagerton. Their first child, John Allen, known later as Brick was born in December of 1939.

The young family lived near the farm. Clarke worked at the dairy until it failed, unable to afford the pasteurization equipment now required by law. Helen worked at Sears in downtown Pensacola. Money was scarce, but they managed. In 1940 Clarke tried to enlist in the military, hoping perhaps to find direction or escape, but was rejected as unfit because of flat feet. That rejection wounded his pride deeply and lingered for the rest of his life.

Those were lean years. The Depression still shadowed the South, and the prospect of war loomed. Clarke did what work he could find in construction, carrying lumber, mixing mortar, and dreaming of something better.

Four

When the dairy failed, Clarke drifted between jobs until he found steady work at Marston and Quina Furniture on old Palafox Street in downtown Pensacola. It was there that he discovered his talent for selling. He had the voice, the presence, and the relentless will to close a deal. For the first time he could wear a suit, carry himself with pride, and imagine a future apart from manual labor.

Helen continued at Sears, earning ten cents an hour, a respectable wage for the time. Their son Brick remained at the farm with Wilma while they worked. They were young, ambitious, and still hopeful that life would reward effort.

Then came December 7, 1941. The news from Pearl Harbor swept across the nation like a storm. Within days the world had changed, and every man of fighting age felt its pull. Factories turned to war production, ration books appeared, and the country held its breath. Clarke, who had once been rejected, now found himself called. The Navy wanted him, and he went; resentful, uncertain, and leaving behind a wife and child to fend for themselves.

Five

Clarke’s youth was consumed by war. He served aboard a Landing Ship, Tank or LST. One of the squat, broad vessels that ferried men and machines to the beaches of the Pacific. The work was dangerous, the ships ungainly but essential. Without them the invasions of Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa would not have been possible.

Life aboard was harsh. The air below decks was thick with heat, diesel fumes, and sweat. Men slept in bunks stacked so close together that they breathed each other’s air. The food was powdered and monotonous. The ship rolled constantly, its flat bottom slapping the waves. Yet there was little time to think about discomfort when the great bow doors opened, and tanks and soldiers thundered toward shore through fire and chaos.

Clarke rarely spoke of what he saw. Once, in a rare moment, he described the sea littered with bodies after a landing, the water red and heavy with oil. He mentioned a Marine denied passage because he carried the head of a Japanese soldier as a trophy. Then he fell silent. Whatever else he witnessed stayed locked inside him.

He preferred to tell stories of pranks or small absurdities, the moments of laughter that broke the monotony of shipboard life. Beneath that surface, however, was resentment. He had wanted choice and found conscription instead. He served his country, but without pride. The war became a shadow he carried rather than a banner he waved.

That silence would define him. It became his defense against memory and, later, against intimacy. The things he buried during those years never stopped breathing beneath the surface of his life.

Six

In August of 1944 my sister Mitzie was born. Clarke returned home in 1946, one of millions of men stepping off trains and ships into a country eager to live again. America was turning from war to comfort. Factories shifted from tanks to toasters, from jeeps to automobiles. Soldiers came home to the GI Bill, new homes, and the promise of prosperity.

Clarke seized the opportunity. He joined Moore Handley, Inc., a Birmingham distributor of hardware and appliances, and took to the road as a traveling salesman. He had the gift for it; the voice, the confidence, and the will to persuade. The open road suited him. It gave him the freedom to be his own man, admired and untethered.

He thrived in that world of motels, cafes, and small-town furniture stores. Each handshake was a chance for profit; each smile a performance. He came home on weekends with money in his pocket and stories on his lips, while Helen kept the house and raised the children.

Later he joined Boling Furniture Company of North Carolina, expanding his territory to seven southern states. He was gone more often than home, and the distance between him and Helen widened. In the early 1950s he moved the family to DeFuniak Springs, Florida, a small town built around a perfect circular lake and shaded by oaks and willows. It was a postcard of smalltown America, a place where time seemed to slow.

 There they met Richard and Velma Hestler, who became close friends and a stabilizing force in the years that followed. Yet even friendship could not bridge the gulf that travel and absence had created. Clarke and Helen eventually divorced for a time; a fact shrouded in silence throughout my childhood. They later reconciled, and that reconciliation brought me into the world, the child conceived to hold a fragile marriage together.

Clarke bought land on Back Lake and built a home, solid and painted in the turquoise that Helen loved, a symbol of permanence after years of movement. It was finished just after my birth in 1955, and it would remain the family’s anchor for the next three decades

Seven

The summer of 1955 was blistering. My mother, heavy with me and three weeks overdue, endured the heat with little comfort. Tropical Storm Brenda churned in the Gulf, pressing humidity against the land. Clarke, in his element, turned the waiting into an occasion. The house at Back Lake filled with guests, the smell of charcoal and roasting meat, laughter, and the sound of the radio playing swing tunes. He was master of ceremonies, commanding the stage even as my mother labored under the weight of summer and expectation.

I was born on Sunday morning, July 31, 1955, at the Pensacola Maternity Hospital on East Mallory Street—a modest building with rattling fans and narrow beds. I arrived healthy, weighing a little more than eight pounds. Clarke handed out cigars and told the story of my birth to anyone who would listen. Within a week he was back on the road, while Helen returned home to a house filled with children, chores, and the endless rhythm of care.

That pattern would define our family life: celebration in his presence, endurance in his absence.

Eight

As I grew, I learned to measure life by Clarke’s comings and goings. When he was away, the house was peaceful. When he returned, everything shifted. His voice filled the rooms. His rules replaced our routines. He was charming when it suited him, overbearing when it did not. The air itself seemed to tighten around his presence.

He often took me along on errands, dressing me in small suits on Sundays so that I would look the part of his son among the townspeople. We attended the First Methodist Church on the Circle, where he shook hands and told stories, proud of his family and of the image he projected. DeFuniak Springs became his audience.

The years rolled forward: 1956, 1957, 1958. Clarke traveled his seven-state territory while Helen kept the home. For me, peace was found in his absence, when days followed their quiet rhythm under her gentle guidance. I learned even then that silence could be safety, and distance could be love.

Nine

By 1960 I was five years old, and memory became my own. Everything before that belonged to the stories told by others. From this point forward I recall the house, the sounds, the moods, and the way Clarke’s presence filled the air.

The first sign of his return was the suitcase placed on the cedar chest in the hallway. Then came his voice low, loud, commanding and the smell of cigarettes and Old Spice that seemed to cling to every surface. He moved through the house in rubber flip-flops, the sound of their slap on the floor a constant reminder that he was near.

He stood tall and sure of himself, his hair cut short, his shirts crisp, his temper quick. Nothing about him was gentle. My sister Mitzie and I bore the brunt of his moods, for Brick was away at college. To Clarke I was both a novelty and an audience, a child to impress and to command. His attention was intoxicating but also fearful. When he was kind, I felt seen. When he was stern, I felt small.

These were the first clear years of my awareness—the beginning of a life shaped by the will of one man.

Ten

The house on Back Lake deserves its own description, for it was both stage and symbol in our lives. It was a modest home of concrete block construction, three bedrooms and a single bath, about twelve hundred square feet in all. The front faced the lake rather than the street, a choice that confused me as a boy but seemed perfectly natural to Clarke, who cared more about appearance than convention. The roof was flat and tarred, the windows small, the walls painted white to hold off the heat.

Our lot widened toward the water. The yard sloped gently down to the lake, where a boathouse and a small dock stood beside a concrete picnic table shaded by two willow trees. There was a black gum tree with a tire swing, a fish holding pit we called “the hole,” and a smaller dock near the edge of the property. The waterline was fringed with sawgrass and pickerel weed, alive with insects and fish.

The place teemed with life: turtles sunning on logs, bass breaking the surface in the evening, bluegill and gar flashing beneath the boat. Snakes were part of the scene as well, from harmless water snakes to the deadly cottonmouth moccasins that glided through the shallows. Copperheads, rattlesnakes, and the bright rings of coral snakes appeared often enough to keep us cautious.

Insects ruled the summers. Fire ants claimed the ground, wasps built nests under the eaves, and clouds of mosquitoes rose at dusk. I was allergic to the sting of the red paper wasp, and they seemed to know it. I hunted their nests with gasoline and fire, waging small wars of survival.

Back Lake itself covered about sixty acres, connected by a weedy channel to Lake Stanley. Families lined the water’s edge in similar homes, each with a dock, a boat, and children who swam or fished from sunrise to dusk. On the surface it was a place of ease, a postcard of small-town leisure. Yet within our walls, the same calm did not exist. Clarke’s rule was constant, his expectations absolute. The lake promised freedom, but inside the house there was none. For all its beauty, it was a place where joy bowed before command.

Eleven

Clarke usually arrived home early on Fridays. If the weather was kind, we went fishing in the small boat tied to the dock. If rain fell, there were errands to run or chores to complete. Saturday was for work around the house, painting, fixing, building. Sunday became our social day. After church, the backyard filled with relatives, the grill smoked, and the laughter of cousins carried over the water.

Those Sunday gatherings were his element. Clarke presided like a master of ceremonies, orchestrating every detail—the firing of the grill, the driving of the boat, the slicing of the watermelon, the churning of homemade ice cream. He gave orders to men and women alike, and everyone complied, whether out of respect or fear. To him it was family; to others it was performance.

When Brick and Mitzie left for college, the crowd thinned and the noise faded. Clarke lost interest in the parties and turned his energy toward a new venture. He called it simply “the Store.” It began in the garage, and from the first day it became both his obsession and my burden.

Twelve

The garage had never sheltered a car. It held tools, a washer and dryer, and boxes of forgotten things. Around 1962 Clarke cleared it out, poured concrete for an addition to the boathouse, and transformed the space into a small showroom. With contacts gathered from his travels, he began selling carpet and furniture on weekends. He named it Bell Furniture at first, later Mason and Mason when Brick invested.

At the start it was a small, honest operation. But to me it meant labor. I swept floors, cut carpet, hauled deliveries, and cleaned until my back ached. I did it because refusal was not an option. Clarke’s approval was the only wage that mattered, and it was never freely given.

Business grew quickly. Clarke reduced his travel to three states—Florida, Alabama, and Georgia—and opened a proper building north of town. Sales rose, and his pride rose with them. To others he was a self-made businessman. To me he was a taskmaster, driven by control and image.

The store became my prison. Saturdays were spent under his orders, and later, when I was grown and struggling for work, he persuaded my wife and me to live in the back of the store to “run it as our own.” It sounded like opportunity, but it was exploitation. We worked long hours for promises that never came true. Clarke painted dreams of partnership and profit, but the profits were his, the labor mine. When we finally walked away, the store closed soon after. He had already taken what he wanted.

Mason and Mason was not the honest business it appeared to be. Sales taxes went unpaid, cash went unrecorded, and purchases for his personal use were written off as company expenses. The books showed little profit, yet he lived comfortably. In the end the store reflected its creator—restless, ambitious, and dishonest beneath the surface. When it ended, I felt no regret. Its closing freed me from the last of his illusions.

Thirteen

To return to the rhythm of our household, Clarke’s influence at home was far greater than his business ventures. By the time I was born, he was done with fatherhood. Brick had grown, and I was an afterthought, the child meant to bind a fractured marriage. For a time he treated me as a novelty, a small echo of himself, but as I grew he lost interest. I became a tool—someone to order, correct, or display when it suited him.

Discipline in Clarke’s house came by the belt or by the switch. He favored a narrow strip of leather that he drew slowly from his loops, making me stand before him while he lectured on obedience. The waiting was worse than the pain. At other times he demanded that I cut my own switch from the willow tree, and if it was too short or too thin, he sent me back for another. The sting of that branch was unforgettable, a bright line of fire across the skin.

Clarke’s cruelty went beyond discipline. He showed no empathy for animals and little for people. Once, when I was eight, I befriended a stray cat. Clarke announced that he wanted to test his new pistol. He used the cat as his target. I stood frozen as he fired, the shot ringing out, the animal collapsing in agony. He handed me the shovel and told me to bury it. There was no remorse, no apology, only satisfaction at the weapon’s accuracy.

He shot stray dogs that wandered too close, sometimes wounding them deliberately so they would crawl away to die unseen. On one occasion he crippled a cat with a shotgun blast to the forelegs, then laughed when it dragged itself back days later. Such acts revealed what lay beneath the polish: a streak of sadism, cold and certain, that he did not attempt to hide.

Fourteen

Clarke’s cruelty toward animals extended easily to people. His language about Black Americans was the language of hatred. He used the ugliest word in the English tongue without hesitation or shame, as if it were common speech. He said that every white man should own one, and he meant it.

He was the embodiment of Lyndon Johnson’s bitter observation that if you can convince the lowest white man he is better than the best colored man, he will not notice you are picking his pocket. Clarke’s pride rested on that illusion.

I remember a day in the mid-sixties when he, Brick, and I stopped for lunch in Alabama. A Black man entered the restaurant, neatly dressed, dignified. Clarke told me to feign illness, then summoned the waitress. He declared that I was sickened by the sight of a “negro” eating nearby and demanded the man’s removal. Brick, then serving in the Navy, said nothing. His silence was worse than the insult. Even as a child, I knew shame. The man in the green suit never looked our way, and his dignity has lived in my memory ever since.

A few years later, in 1969, integration reached our schools. Clarke refused to allow me to attend classes with Black students. Rather than accept the law, he sent me to the Lyman Ward Military Academy in Camp Hill, Alabama. He claimed it was to teach discipline, but it was simply to keep me away from those he despised. I was fourteen, living in uniform among strangers, not because of opportunity, but because my father feared equality.

His racism was not merely ignorance. It was the same impulse that drove every part of him—the need to dominate, to control, to stand above others no matter the cost.

Fifteen

Clarke’s life revolved around selling. He could sell anything to anyone, and he took pride in that skill. He liked to say that a man who let the first customer of the day walk out without buying had doomed his entire day. He lived by that creed. He ignored telephones when customers were present, saying, “I cannot put my hand in the pocket of someone on the line, but I can if he is in my store.”

His charm was his weapon. Whether selling furniture, ideas, or persuasion itself, he knew how to wear people down. His gifts always came with a hook. When I was fourteen, he “gave” me the old ski boat that had become too costly to maintain. I sold it to a cousin for five hundred dollars, and Clarke congratulated me on my good sense. He had simply rid himself of a burden.

Later he arranged for me to buy my first car. I dreamed of a Mustang or Camaro. He arrived instead with a green AMC Gremlin, already purchased, and convinced me it was the perfect car for a young man. He saved himself a trip to Pensacola and declared generosity accomplished.

After I married, he built an apartment at the back of the store for my wife and me, promising independence. It became another leash. He parked his motor home behind the building and appeared at all hours. When he later decided to travel to Hawaii, he left me to run the business and care for his mother, claiming it was opportunity. It was only service disguised as favor.

Through such acts I learned his pattern. Clarke’s generosity was always self-serving, his promises always transactional. Every kindness hid a debt. It was a steady education in manipulation, taught by the man who called himself my father.

Sixteen

Clarke met his end on October 16, 1997. He had long predicted that he would die on October 20, 1999, missing his mark by two years. He was seventy-six. Death came by massive stroke as he sat outside in a lawn chair. There was no warning, no chance for recovery.

Years earlier he had survived a car accident that revealed a serious heart condition. The discovery had saved him for a time, but not changed his habits. Declared disabled in his fifties, he drew Social Security and Medicare while continuing to smoke and drink. Cigarettes became cigars, cigars became a pipe, and the pipe was rarely out of his hand. His drinking grew from a ritual to a dependence. Afternoons began with whiskey and ended in stupor.

When the call came, my mother and I drove to Dothan, Alabama, where he had been taken. Machines kept his heart beating, but the scans were final. The family agreed to let him go. Brick and my wife left the room before the end. He died quietly, with my mother and me beside him. The stillness that followed felt not like loss but release.

Seventeen

Clarke’s selfishness reached through every life around him, but none suffered it more than my mother. For me it was manipulation, for others inconvenience, but for her it was a lifetime of endurance. She carried his weight, bent under his will, and kept the family intact through patience and silence.

To understand the full measure of Clarke, one must look at Helen—the woman who lived within his shadow and yet never lost her grace. Her story is the counterpoint to his, the quiet truth behind the noise.

And so, it is to her that the next chapter turns.