Growing Up Southern: April 1, 2018

If I could do it all over again, I would sure ask my grandmother more questions. I learned a lot from her, but wish I had learned more.

I learned a bit about her father, who joined the Confederate Army, and told her about his greatest fear. “It was walking back home,” she said, “he told me there were roving bands of bad men, they called ‘gray-legs’ who would kill and rob soldiers trying to get back to their families.”

She taught me some useful things her brothers had taught her. “The best grapevines for smoking weren’t too hollow or too thick. You wanted one that would draw good, but not too fast.”

She taught me about the dangers involved in going swimming in some man’s stock pond with Rupert, Ronnie, and Larry Austin. “I’ll whip your ass if you do that again,” she explained.

She taught me about the intricacies of politics in LA (lower Arkansas) back in Civil War times. When I asked her if It wasn’t odd that her daddy was in the Confederate Army and her future husband’s daddy was in the Union Army, she looked at me as if I had asked her why hens gave eggs and cows gave milk. “Why no,” she said, Daddy was a Democrat and Mr. Harris was a Republican.

Not all she taught was proper. When the butcher at my aunt’s grocery store talked to her in familiar terms, she was irate. She later explained, “He talked to me just like he was a white man.” Life in LA didn’t create perfection, and we are all, I suppose, prisoners of our times.

She taught me about decision-making. She used to read to me, employing her third-grade education. As I grew older, I realized she was misusing about every third word. You would never have guessed it, for she never stumbled, hesitated, or exhibited any lack of comprehension. I guess she passed the trait on. My mother later, in teaching me about the grocery business said, “If you don’t know the price of something, make the best guess you can. If you look confident and lie, they will believe you. If you go and look it up, they won’t.” We can see that developed into an art form, these days.

She taught me about other aspects of eloquence in speech. When I was about three, I once began playing with the earphone of a party-line telephone. While stopping me, she heard the sounds of a woman’s voice yelling bad things at me, “Mama-Rodgers” grabbed the phone, moved to the speaker, and let loose a stream of threats and obscenities that would have earned her the Navy Cross.

I used to have a large photo of her father hanging in my living room. Last year I found a distant cousin of that name and gave to him. The old man looked stern and held a Bible. His obituary said that he was a part-time preacher and never took part in neighborhood brawls.

I’d give anything if my grandmother had told me what that meant.

And she loved
that pretty hat.