Page 49 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 37

with pearl eyes, and pipes, and arrowheads like we used to find just
accidentally walking around.
Also, I remember from the 1920s up as late as the 1940s and
1950s, people used to open Indian mounds as a roadside attraction
where for five cents you could go in for the educational experience
of seeing broken pottery and skeletons of whole families lying on
display in the dust where they found them. People can’t do that
anymore either. All this archeology started because some man—I
think named Gregory Perino—came by Pearl, Illinois, where Per-
rin Ledge is, and he saw all these old Indian mounds and burial
grounds and decided to start digging in Kampsville and thereabouts
in Eldred. There is a legend that a man named Gerald Perrin jumped
from that ledge, and so this rock got its name. There’s a big blue
house and the ledge is behind it, and why Gerald Perrin jumped,
my Daddy joked, nobody could ask him.
On Saturday morning, we all went to the lab site where the Ar-
kies showed slides about how they found and packaged everything
they found and sifted. They explained how they dug everything
up. We were also supposed to go to the Audrey Site back across the
river, but it was too wet. They had the site we went to all covered
with tarps as they’d had heavy rains the night before we arrived,
as well as the morning of the day we arrived.
After lunch we went back to the labs, to other rooms, where
we were shown a flint-napping demonstration. The Arkie showed
us how the Indians made their arrowheads. We used to find them
in the woods when I was a little girl and sell them to the local
doctor. The Arkie demonstrated how to make an arrowhead and
he gave it to me and let me keep it. Everyone on the tour thought
it was so neat that I was born there and lived there the first eleven
years of my life, and I’m the same person now I was then, though
not eleven, and more progressive than some in Kampsville were
back then when boys (not my brothers) would throw rocks at any
blacks—who worked on the boats delivering goods—if they tried
to get off the boats and come into town. Awful.