Sometimes visiting places from where your roots grew is like
taking a calming dip in a pool of warm memories. It was for my sister, brother,
and me yesterday.
We started out from our home place, a site much altered from
our youth. It once contained a small country grocery store with a home attached
to it. Our parents bought it and opened for business on January 1, 1940. They
reared the three of us there. It disappeared long ago with all the other
country stores. To date, no politician is promising to bring them back along with
the employment they provided.
Driving south into what is lovingly referred to as “L.A.,” or
Lower Arkansas, we passed a site where, in a small shack in 1918, a frail woman
was struggling for her life after giving birth, somewhat prematurely, to her
eighth child, a girl. The woman was so near death that the doctor laid the
infant aside to die, and concentrated on saving the woman with, among another
tools, Vick’s Salve, the WD-40 of the medical world at that time. It worked,
lucky for us.
The woman was our grandmother and the infant was our mother.
This, and much of our family history, was provided by her oldest sister, Hallie
Harris Harden, the matriarch of our clan, and a character of great enjoyment
until her death at near 100 years of age. I thought of her as we passed a small
country church, for I remembered the time I was driving her around and she
pointed at it and announced, “There’s where Jesus saved me from going to hell, and
your Uncle Carl saved me from being an old maid.” I’m not sure about the timing
of the first event but the second occurred when she was 15 years old.
Three years after my mother survived childbirth, her father
died. My grandmother was left alone in a harsh rural environment with no means
of support, and three young children in hand. Mother never talked much about
those awful days except to relate the story of when the local church members acquired
new curtains for its windows. My grandmother begged the castoffs from them and
made underpants for the girls. My mother never forgot the day she fell on the
playground and that embarrassing secret was revealed to a group of cruel schoolchildren.
The horrible mask of poverty forms many faces.
Life goes on. Not long after, an older brother married the daughter
of a widower whose wife had given birth to 13 children, and then died. The
couple carried messages back and forth, and my grandmother ended up marrying
the widower and caring for his children that were still at home. The son of one
of those children is now Mayor of Mansfield, Arkansas and I see him from time
to time. He never fails to say, almost with tears in his eyes, that my
grandmother was the only grandmother he ever knew.
We visited the gravesites where our grandparents are buried,
near their fathers—one a veteran of the Confederacy and the other of
the Union. The unit of the latter saved my hometown, Pine Bluff, from a Rebel
assault and the city erected a small monument to it. The obituary of the former
stated that he was a “good man who never took part in any of the neighborhood
brawls.” Don’t ask.
It was a good day. One final surprise caused me to chuckle.
Now first understand, my sister started out in her professional life punching
data cards for the state’s electrical utility in the basement of a building in
Pine Bluff. She ended it in an office near the top of a high-rise office
building in Little Rock running a major department for that same company. She
is a serious person, and highly respected as a professional by her former
colleagues. She is considered a good person by all, and I doubt she would ever
take part in a neighborhood brawl, if they have those where she lives. Did I
mention that she is a serious person? We lovingly call her “The General.”
Imagine my amusement when, as we passed over a railroad
track near our old neighborhood, she began telling me how she and her
girlfriends used to put bags on sticks, walk down those tracks, and pretend
they were hoboes. What an image. Times reserved for memories are full of
surprises like that.
Overall, the day ended on a happy note to be filed in the “Ps”
under “pleasant.”
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| Traveling Companions |
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