Jackson Jambalaya

Here in the South, where the soil runs red and the porch light glows softly against the approaching night, we’ve always held a soft spot for small things — a cardstock Jesus fan on a hot Sunday afternoon, a warm biscuit split three ways, and a found penny offering the tiniest shimmer of hope in the dust.

Now that the federal government has declared the penny obsolete, I can’t help but feel the loss like a missing button on a well-loved shirt: small, but its absence leaves us oddly undone.

Folks will tell you it makes sense. Costs more to make a penny than it’s worth. Slows down the checkout line. Time to round up or round down, they say, let the nickel do the work. But some of us remember when a penny did work hard. Out in the country, back before electricity stretched to the far hollows, before paved roads and steady wages, a penny and its brothers often were the difference in hard times.

My grandmother came through the Great Depression in a hilltop farmhouse that my grandfather and father built, down to the wooden shakes on the roof, shaved from logs with a draw knife. She’d save pennies in a Mason jar under the kitchen sink, her “rainy day money.” When the clouds rolled in, usually in the form of an unexpected need or a child’s want — she’d count them out, one by one, with a patience that today’s bank app could never understand.

She said it wasn’t about the money so much as the habit: “You keep up with your pennies,” she told me, “and the dollars will take care of themselves.”

That wisdom — penny-wise — used to mean something in the rural South. Every child knew what it felt like to find a coin half-buried in the dust or on the sidewalk. “See a penny, pick it up,” Mamaw would say, “and all day long you’ll have good luck.” Even today, in my late sixties, my reflex is still to bend over to retrieve a found penny.

Now, as the penny fades from circulation, I wonder if something else is slipping away too: a certain reverence for small mercies. It’s easy, in this fast-clicking world of tap-and-pay, to forget that America once ran on nickels and dimes—and that in the South, it often ran on less.

“Penny candy” wasn’t nostalgia; it was my childhood. For a copper coin, you could buy a sourball that lasted all afternoon. My mind returns to the plethora of choices waiting behind the shiny glass windows of the candy counter in J.R. Chaney’s Store out from Little Rock, Mississippi.

Even our language shines with the ghost of the coin. We say a “bad penny” always turns up, and we hum “Pennies from Heaven” without thinking what it means—that grace, when it comes, arrives in small denominations. The coin referenced in the Bible as “the Widow’s Mite” was the lepton, their penny, the smallest and least valuable coin circulated in ancient Judea.

When you start to listen for it, you hear the penny everywhere: in lullabies, in Scripture, in the slow drawl of old folks who still reckon worth by what’s saved, not spent.

Economists don’t see the poetry in that. They see inefficiency, waste, and clutter. To them, the penny is dead weight. But Southerners learned to make do with dead weight. We’ve hammered it flat on the train tracks to make souvenirs. We’ve pressed it into the soft mortar of a porch step for good luck.

You could say the penny was the poor man’s mirror—humble, worn, yet still capable of catching light. Those copper faces, worn smooth from countless hands, were more than money. They were reminders that value isn’t always written in numbers.

Now that the government’s decided they’re not worth keeping, I suppose they’ll vanish the way that old barns do. But I hope we hang on to a few. Let them gather in Mason jars, on windowsills, in coffee cans by the stove. Let them remind us that thrift is not the same as stinginess, and that gratitude often starts with something small enough to slip through your fingers.

Maybe one day a child will find one in the yard, dull and red as the clay, and ask what it is. And perhaps we’ll tell them: That’s a penny. Folks used to believe they brought good luck. And if we’re lucky ourselves, perhaps they still will.

Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.