Dearest Fellow Rememberers: The Stories of Those Strangers You Passed on the Road Yesterday Might Be Sad, Or Hopeful. Their Stories Are Important.
Last year I finally self-published Ramshackle Houses & Southern Parables for print on demand. It was a labor of love and regret, an autobiography in poetry and creative nonfiction, a full-on act of self-imposed therapy by remembering and writing through my own personal filter. A narcissistic act? I’m sure if more than my generous writing friends read it, narcissism would be a word critics might use, but I think that can be said of any “autobiography”, right? Pro critics might also use the words homespun, unprofessional, raw. I’m okay with all of that.
What’s most interesting to me is that family members that I grew up with–the few who have read my work–have said they don’t remember this or that, they don’t recognize the time frame or the person I’m “hinting” at in a specific piece. That they had no idea I had such a dark, sad view of my childhood. That they had no idea I’ve been a writer the majority of my life. All very interesting comments. Apparently, the people I grew up with were paying no attention at all.
No, I am not intent on bashing family today. I find their comments genuinely interesting because the truth is, I wasn’t paying very much attention to their personal experiences either. Not because I’m a born narcissist who spent so many years writing down my little sadnesses … well, maybe.
I think there are very specific instances in which intuitiveness has aided me well. Regardless, it wasn’t until mid-to late adulthood that I bothered with trying to tune into reading between conversational lines. In the earlier years, if I wasn’t told point blank, if I wasn’t an eyewitness, then I was blissfully ignorant. If my curiosity wasn’t peaked in a certain situation, I probably didn’t ask questions, just moved on with my day. But if I had asked questions, I was probably scolded for being nosey and rude.
Basic, right? Sure. But since I wrote down my little sadnesses and musings, there is of course room for people to comment: I don’t remember that at all. Are you sure you’re remembering correctly? Why don’t you mention your mother more often? She is so dedicated and loving. Are you okay? You don’t seem okay on these pages here in the middle …
I’m okay, thanks. And if opportunity arises, I might say: if you read closer, acknowledgment of my mother’s love and dedication is apparent. Now I have questions: #1. Could we please discuss how you made it all the way to 50-something unscathed by childhood and adolescence? I mean … I’ve met your parents. Remember?
I haven’t taken the opportunity. Yet. That will surely be a fascinating series of discussions, someday.
The image I’ve shared with this posting is from a cotton field near my house a few weeks ago. Note: this isn’t where I grew up. Hubbyriffic and I live in a subdivision of about two thousand houses surrounded by acreage with a series of two-lane roads winding through, at least ten miles in either direction from an interstate ramp. Out on those narrow roads surrounded by real life, real-time agriculture, it’s easy to forget that downtown Memphis is less than twenty minutes away from around the corner.
The surrounding acreage is alternately planted in corn or cotton. The years that the cotton is planted I watch those fields with interest all season on my commute to and from work because of stories my maternal grandmother used to tell me. Stories that often involved “hateful old cotton,” as she called it.
Grandma is featured in two of the pieces I wrote for RH&SP, The Good Old Days, and Generation Gap. She is strongly sealed in my forever memories because she spoke at length about her own childhood–quite a rare thing in my experience with people of that era. Sure, everyone has at least one relative who mentions how easy the kids today have it: We had to walk up hill five miles to school … Right? We all have one of those. But Grandma was different.
This lady could world build. She could put you right there, in the 20s or 30s, skinny as a rail, wearing a flour sack dress, on a dusty old farm in the middle of nowhere, being shouted at by a “foster” dad. Being told to quit asking questions and get to work. Being forced at seven years old to quit school and carry buckets of water to the field. Being whipped for wanting paper to write on. Walking home exhausted at seventeen only to be introduced to a tall stranger and told, this is my cousin Robert, you’re gonna marry him come Sunday.
Good lord that woman made me cry. And she was often curious about why her stories made me cry. “You’re awful emotional, girl. No, I don’t need a hug, wash those beans so I can make supper.”
Sometimes I hear people my age or even younger say dumb shit like, I was born in the wrong era … I should have lived when things were simpler, been a farmer in the good old days … blah, blah, blah. It’s obvious those folks never had someone like my grandma explain what life in “The Good Old Days” was really like. She taught me a few important lessons, one being I was born in exactly the correct era: post-stringent child labor laws, post-civil rights, post-women’s rights, post-central heating and air conditioning.
Even so, as a teenage wannabe independent woman I was one of those hard-learners, as my grandma would say. (hard-learner=idiot).
When I was 17, I worked at a factory for minimum wage, then $3.35 per hour. One weekend I saw an ad in the newspaper: Cotton Pickers Wanted, $6.00 per hour. All I could think was, $6.00 an hour!!!!!!!!! And all memory of Grandma’s dire stories flew out of my head.
So, I put on some shorts and a cute little sun visor and prissed my ass down to that field ready to make a fat paycheck.
Thirty-two minutes after being assigned a cotton row on a brutally sunny, humid, airless, eighty-eight-degree autumn morning, I left crying and fairly certain I was gonna die from sun stroke or blood poisoning. (Those pretty cotton balls are surrounded by vicious burrs that stab and burrow into your skin like hot knife shards.)
I never confessed this absurd endeavor to Grandma. She died that same winter. Her loss was sudden and unexpected. She was 79 years old.
During my frantic search for medical attention after escaping that cotton field, Grandma’s voice thundered through my head: Whatever a body has to do gets done. (a body=a person)
Embarrassment and shame finally dissipated–long before the pain in my fingers and bare legs–and some mental clarity came along. I never fucking HAVE TO walk into a cotton field. EVER. AGAIN.
Unless I want to take a cool photograph on the side of the road, flooded with nostalgia while looking over the hundred acres of that bittersweet beauty. That renewable resource loved and needed globally. That bane of my maternal family’s existence. It was their livelihood as Tennessee sharecroppers. The thing that stood between them and life and death for decades.
Just down the road from our house in that subdivision yesterday, another family’s house caught fire. A house squished between other houses, barely ten feet apart, just like all the other houses in this area. We were driving past to the main road, intent to go buy a new TV when I saw black smoke flooding out of a rooftop. There was a car in the driveway, driver’s side door flung open, and the front door of the house was open. In a split-second, the smoke got worse, thicker, blacker, scarier. There was a young woman on the opposite sidewalk, holding a toddler, a gangly puppy was at her feet, begging for attention. We shouted to her, ARE THERE PEOPLE INSIDE! She was holding a cellphone and said she’d just called 9-1-1.
We shouted in unison again, BUT ARE THERE PEOPLE INSIDE! Sirens sounded in the distance. The young woman stood there blank-faced. I parked the car, and we got out. Hubbyriffic was headed toward that open front door as the fire marshal pulled up. We kept asking questions, the toddler started to cry, the puppy jumped up wanting a pet. The young woman just stood there blank-faced. Eventually, neighbors ventured out, shouting, ARE THEY HOME? The neighbors were of various ages, races, style of dress and accent, their leisurely Saturday afternoon interrupted by the smell of that smoke invading their houses.
In the next twenty-minutes we learned that the young woman was babysitting/housesitting/dog sitting and had left with the toddler for a few minutes, returned to the house, saw smoke, ran from her car into the house to let the dogs out, then to the sidewalk to call for help. The couple, parents to the toddler and two dogs, were out of town. Some of the neighbors across the street were very close to the owners but had no clue who the young woman was. Some of the neighbors were okay with telling us–well, we don’t know much about that couple, they don’t seem very friendly. While one of the neighbors called the owner and took the toddler into her house, I helped another gather up the now galivanting puppy and elderly dog–that gentleman was older than the other neighbors and was tearful because he was especially close to the people whose house was now hopelessly lost. “The fella, he’s a good guy, good to his dogs.” Information I didn’t need but was glad to have. I relieved him of wrestling with the ninety-pound elderly lab and whistled to the puppy, then walked with old gentleman back to watch the smoke finally dissipate.
We also learned that our local fire fighters are quick, efficient, well-trained professionals. Very impressive.
Eventually, once the dogs were safe and watered and one of the owners (father of the toddler) had returned stone-faced and very reserved, to see what was left of his home, and the firefighters were free of their heavy coats and masks, and that young woman was still blank-faced and standing in the same spot, we got into the car and drove away. Neighbors called after us, thanked us, which I thought was odd. We didn’t do anything to help the situation, I said. Hubbyriffic disagreed–we stood with them when they were scared and worried. We showed our concern. Now they know we’re their neighbors, too.
On the way back home, I noticed the cotton fields had been stripped during our eventful afternoon. Why, I don’t know, but the crop was in the ground very late this year. I never like to see fields stripped, the combine tracks weaving between big round bales of smashed together cotton. The cotton is no longer a natural-looking thing… just massive clumps of plastic-wrapped white dotting the torn-up ground. The bittersweet beauty is gone.
I like to think my grandma would appreciate my homespun, raw, narcissistic way of telling stories. I like to think she’d want to frame that photograph of mine, that maybe she had a few happy stories to tell me, stories she’d saved up and kept close just for herself but always planned to share with me, someday.
I like to think that young woman found her voice, lost her fear and worry, petted the puppy that so badly needed attention, and the owners are well-insured and will rebuild their cute little house before winter sets in. And they’ll go back to helping their elderly neighbor with his yard work and letting their daughter play in the yard, helping to guard the old lab from the antics of the gangly, needy puppy. I like to think that the neighbors who hadn’t been properly introduced to the “good guy”, bring over cookies and Christmas decorations and become as close-knit as the rest of the group. And they’ll wave back when we pass by next time.
