Some pages are missing, others are torn or partially illegible. Viriginia has an annoying habit of never mentioning dates and only very rarely providing the names of her various husbands and lovers (with the notable exception of Charlie Chaplin).
What we present here covers:
Let's start with my father. I don't remember him clearly from my childhood. Just a figure that I was afraid of. I remember more clearly a big negro named Bud, the husband of my nurse. He told me stories and took me to see the animals. When he took the carriage into the pond to wash it, I always thought he would drown, and I stood on the edge of the pond and cried until he came out. Sometimes he would tease me by pretending he was going to be completely immersed by the water. In my early childhood I don't remember my mother nearly so well as my nurse. Once she bought me a pair of slippers, and after she put them on me, she made me say:
"Roses on my shoulders, Slippers on my feet,
I'm my mama's darling,
Don't you think I'm sweet."
My father heard me recite it and tried to make me say, "I'm my Papa's darling." He tired to bribe me with a nickel, but I took the nickel and refused. This pleased my mother.
My next impression is of leaving the place I was born. Then a memory I have so vague that it might be something I've imagined: of waking up in the woods and finding a cow licking my face. I have never known why we spent the night under the trees. I wasn't interested in our financial condition at the time, but I learned later that my father had lost all his money and also his land. He was now twenty-one, with a wife and three daughters, and penniless. We had numerous relatives who would have taken us, but I think my father was reluctant about going to them because they disapproved of him so. Maybe we were camping out because of my mother's gypsy blood. We roamed around for a while, then I found myself at the home of Auntie Daisy who had married the farmer on the bridge. They l a tiny cabin and were very poor. Their place was crowded, but she made room for us. I slept in a bed with numerous children. The oldest was named Maude. I thought it was an ugly name. She was bad tempered. There was another girl called Ophelia. I liked that name. It was the first time I had ever thought of names. They were very naughty children and I learned many vulgar rhymes from them. However, I didn't like them; didn't realize they were bad; only I didn't like the sound of them and forgot them very soon.
I was beginning to be conscious of an inquisitive instinct and life was like Auntie Daisy's scrap bag where I often found odd pieces of material and tried to sew them into a garment for my doll. One day I overheard Auntie Daisy remark to my mother, "I just can't have another baby," and she had a bottle of medicine in her hand -- babies from bottles of medicine.
This was the most difficult part for me. Baby chickens came from eggs which had been dipped in bluing so as to make a blue dot on the tip. It was the blue dot that made the chick I decided. The bits of life I pieced together. I kept a secret.
Reading was simple. I had watched my Auntie's husband reading his paper by holding it before his eyes, his feet propped on the table and his lips moving. Now and then he would turn a page.
What was happening in the grown-up world didn't bother me. I didn't know my father was away looking for work and that he was finding it difficult, as he had never worked before; or that Theodore Roosevelt was becoming prominent; or that my father's first cousin, the one my grandfather had educated, was being sworn into office as governor of Missouri; or that my mother's father had died and that she did not go to his funeral because the money she had received to take her to the funeral she spent on clothes for us. There were great events happening all over the world, but I was interested only in cotton seeds sprouting form the ground and growing. I couldn't take nature for granted. I wondered about everything.
My father returned form job hunting and we went on a short train journey. I was delighted until a cinder got in my eye. There were cinders all over the red plush seats... The journey brought us to the place my father had lived as a child, the family plantation -- Estes Hall. I knew the place well -- a large white house in a grove. This is where I had seen Aunt Tabitha in her coffin. My mind jumped from Aunt Tabitha in her coffin to the hollyhocks against the garden fence -- tall spears of color against a white fence. I left stilted greetings of relatives and rushed to the flowers. Bumblebees were burrowing into the blooms. I disturbed one of them with a stick and it flew out with an angry buzz. I tore the petals apart, but I couldn't find what the bumblebee wanted, and I threw the pieces on the ground. Then I went from one stalk to another, touching them lightly, enjoying their beauty, still wondering what the bumblebee found inside the blooms.
Under the trees were hammocks made of thin curved boards held together by wire. My father's Uncle Joe went there to read, but I always disturbed him because he had a long white beard and I liked playing with it. I would pretend it was a lady's head of hair and would braid it and arrange it in coils and puffs. Sometimes he went to sleep while I played with his beard, or he would tell me a story about the Civil War. He didn't like killing people, and he had run away and hid until the war was over.
My father had gone away, and one day my mother was leaving without me. I clung to her and cried. And she cried and Aunt Minnie, who was Uncle Joe's new wife, had to hold me by force to keep me from running after her. For a while after that I cried myself to sleep every night. I didn't like Aunt Minnie. I have never liked her, and I never knew why. She wasn't really unkind. She didn't take care of me at all, though. She allowed my hair to get very tangled, and when she did try to comb it, I cried because she always pulled it roughly.
But there was a lady living nearby whom I did like. Her name was "Cousin Rose." I heard someone say she was peculiar. I told her about it. I thought she was very pretty, and I liked the sweet peas blooming over her veranda. I began to think I preferred them to hollyhocks. There were more different colors. She let me pull them, too, if I didn't tear the vines. And she combed my hair and didn't pull at all, and curled it into pretty golden ringlets, and then showed them to me in the mirror. I adored her ever afterwards.
Uncle Joe's home was always full of guests. Crowds of young people playing tennis and drinking cider fresh from apples gathered in the orchard. There was a fascinating horror in seeing a heavy press come down on lovely red apples and lifting again, leaving them a mass of pulp with juice running out of a spout. My curious mind was becoming aware of the phenomenon of change.
One of the guests was Aunt Donie, my father's eldest sister. She had a tiny baby, and I was told it was my cousin. She let me hold it, but it cried. In after years, when I was a young lady having beaux, this baby was then a bad boy who used to blackmail me out of my boxes of chocolates by threatening to tell that he saw someone kiss me. This baby because Senator Estes Kefauver, the late senator from Tennessee who is most noted for his crime fighting television appearances. I lived most of my teen years in his family home and we were lifelong friends.
Guests came and went, and it seemed that no one noticed me. I felt very lonely, and often cried into my pillow at night. There was a big party one night. I was going to be a flower girl at a mock wedding being put on. Then it was discovered that I didn't have the proper shoes or dress, so another little girl was chosen, and I was sent to bed early where I cried myself to sleep, longing for my mother. I couldn't go to church either because I didn't have a hat. The young ladies had lovely dresses and lacy hats and parasols. It seemed wrong that I shouldn't have them also. I asked one of the girls where she got her hat.
"I bought it."
"What does that mean?"
"I paid money for it."
"It know what money is. It is nickels, dimes, and dollars."
"You are a very bright girl."
"I am as bright as a dollar. I heard you say so yesterday."
She kissed me and gave me a dollar.
"Could I buy a lace hat with this?"
She held up her hands. "I would take this many dollars."
"Ten?" I said, holding up my own fingers.
She laughed and shook her lace parasol, and hurried out to the waiting carriage which took the guests to church.
I waved to them and, left alone, I wondered about the grove, thinking of the lace hats and parasols. I saw elder blooms with spreading white blossoms. "They look like lace hats and umbrellas," I thought. Then suddenly, like magic, they became what I wished. I picked one and placed it on my head. I pulled a larger one with a long stem and carried it like a parasol. There was nothing to keep me from going to church. So I did.
Then for an extended time I went to live with Aunt Nora in Mississippi. She was a strict paragon of Southern Christian womanhood. I have a vivid memory of visiting, while there, with a French family. One night during our stay I had terrible pains in my legs and was told by the wife of the family that I had growing pains. It made me feel that I was going to suddenly grow to the height of my aunt. What strange ideas children get about things they don't understand. It is possible that grownups are just as childish about things they don't understand. I was disappointed when I didn't notice any growth after a night of these pains. Soon after that I had my birthday, and I stood up in bed to measure myself by seeing how much nearer to the canopy I had come since the day before. I was certain my head could touch the crimson lining, but I was disappointed again.
My aunt gave me a new dime for a birthday gift. Estelle, the daughter of the French people gave me a fan, but her father had to buy her one also. I was allowed to drink wine with the French family. They drank to my health, and the father played the accordion. Estelle and I danced with our fans spread coquettishly. But she soon decided that my fan was the most desirable and wanted to trade with me. When I refused, she used violence and we ended in a fight. She got the worst of it because her hair was long. My aunt punished me. She didn't approve of little girls fighting.
Estelle's mother didn't punish her. I was not only switched, but I had to go for my own switch, which added greatly to the punishment. First I brought a tiny switch, and my aunt made me go for another. Then I got a large ridiculous looking one. But my aunt didn't see the humor of it and, for what she called my impudence, I was not only soundly switched but sent to bed as well. I cried for my mother, as I always did at such times. After it was over, I was again fond of my aunt. A child must have someone to love, even someone who doesn't understand her at all.
I like Aunt Nora best when she told me about her sweetheart. She said he was so tall that he had to stoop when he came through a door, and he had red hair and a red face, and a big long pointed nose. I imagined a most frightful monster. Then one day she told me he was coming to see her. She dressed in one of her loveliest dresses, and though she looked pretty. I waited anxiously for him, and when he arrived I watched to see if he had to stoop to get in the door. But though he was very tall, he entered the door like any other man. His hair was red, but not the red I had expected; nor were his face and nose the way I had imagined. I like him. He had nice smiling blue eyes, and he looked very shy.
"Are you going to marry Aunt Nora?" I asked. His face turned red then, but his eyes smiled with little wrinkles at the corners, even at his ears, and the smile crept to the corners of his mouth. My aunt became very prim. "You may go out and play," she commanded.
A year went by. I learned to pick blackberries with the children, fell in love for the first time with a little French boy named Clarence, and discovered that the naked baby birds which we found in a nest could swallow a whole blackberry all at once.
Then one day our trunks, which had been lost, were returned, and there was joy over a soap box and some rings. Estelle didn't have a ring, and wanted mine. I think she wanted to fight me again, but I gave her the plain one to avoid trouble. Still not satisfied, she wanted the one with the rubies, but I wouldn't give it up, and we had another fight. This time we both got punished. I suggested to my aunt that she punish me in the same way that Estelle's mother punished her: by making her kneel down for a few minutes. My request was granted. I thought it much better than being switched. But my aunt didn't think it severe enough because I could find amusement as I knelt by singing and pretending I was playing the piano on any nearby surface. I preferred the windowsill.
When I returned to Tennessee at the end of the year, I was considered a curiosity as I could speak French better than English. Everyone wanted me to speak French, and this embarrassed me, so I tried to forget it. I visualized the mental process of forgetting in a very strange way. All the French I knew appeared as white squares when I closed my eyes. As I would forget it, there would be fewer white squares and more black squares. I would be pleased when I saw many black squares in my mind, and would think only of English words. Besides, French made me sad. It reminded me of Clarence, and of how sorry I was to leave him. Also Estelle. She had cried, and Clarence had come to say goodbye, and we had sat very still and looked at each other, and the mother of the family served us wine and cake, just as though we had been grownup lovers.
That summer my aunt expected to take me to Indian Territory with her. It is now the states of New Mexico and Arizona. Although she had told me about papooses and Indians with painted faces, I didn't want to go. I wanted to see my mother. When the time came to go, I was ill with fever, and she went without me.
I was left with a kindly relative, some great aunt. I was well cared for, and recovered rapidly, but for a long time I wasn't allowed anything but rice to eat. I got very tired of it, and cried for canned salmon. I wanted it with lemon. I began to want salmon more than anything, and finally they gave it to me. The little bones I liked best. They were soft and pleasant to chew. I felt a kind of sensuousness in chewing them.
That summer I went to a picture show for the first time. I remember only the colored slides illustrating a song called "Always in the way." It was very sad: about a little girl who had a cruel stepmother. I was touched by it. It gave me a sense of uneasiness.
Something in the world plotting against good little girls was the way I interpreted that uneasiness. I went home with a bitter resentment against that stepmother. My first bayonet was against the world.
Then one day I was dressed in my best and placed in the charge of the conductor on a train. I was going to my mother. My father met me at the station. I was a bit afraid of him before, as I mentioned, and now he was losing his hair, and was bald on the top of his head. That somehow offended my sense of the beautiful.
I was reunited with my sisters, Grace (three years younger) and Mary Leila (five years my junior). We were left alone except for an old lady named Mrs. Carwell who lived with us and looked after us when my mother went out. Everyone thought I was something strange, and my good table manners were commented upon by everyone. I was shy and didn't wish to be noticed. It was difficult to adjust myself to my new surroundings with my two sisters. They wanted everything that I had, and I soon lost my ring with the rubies. Also I think I lost some of my good manners. My mother was very lax in discipline. She would take us often to a picture show. I saw more colored slides illustrating songs. One was "Hello Central. Give me Heaven, for My Mother's There."
"You will find her with the angels on the golden stairs...."
There was a sad little girl talking on the phone and golden stairs with an angel on each step dimming away in perspective. Another song was "Won't You Come to My House and Play You Are My Little Girl?" This little girl had also lost her mother and she was very poor and ragged , sitting alone on some steps. And a rich lady pointed to the house across the way. My romantic idea of life became definitely to be that girls with curls were always unhappy, and their mothers died and they were mistreated by stepmothers. And, if you were lucky, someone came along who lived in a big house across the way.
I began to grow morbid under the influence of the melancholy period that was then in vogue. Sob stuff was then in its heyday. I wonder how many lives have been seriously affected by it. The songs were all about young women dying just before they married, and young mothers having babies in the streets and offering them for sale for half a pound of tea.
"Today is the day we give babies away, with half
a pound of tea..." "For sale, a baby..."
Wayward fathers were receiving tiny worn shoes to stir their consciences.
"Two little baby shoes,
Tiny and soft and blue,
Don't let your heart break,
Come home, for the sake
of two little baby shoes."
Proud pure young ladies were saying, "You would not dare insult me, sir, if Jack were only here." Men, too, were allowed to indulge their feelings of morbidness, at this time. They were often deserted by faithless wives, and left to hold the baby, and be brokenhearted.
"I love her, yes, I love her just the same,
Though she had gone and disgraced my name.
Though she's gone with another,
She's still my baby's mo----ther,
And I love her, yes, I love her just the same."
That was the time of East Lynne and other such sentimental plays. They were the "good old days" when people had ideals, and women were given seats in tram cars and didn't know anything about politics, and didn't pretend they did. They wore petticoats, and suffered in silence, if they were ladies. If they couldn't get their man, they wept softly in lace handkerchiefs, and pined away and died, and were buried under old apple trees. Even if husbands came home drunk and beat them, ladies did not get divorces. Also "Rags were 'Royal Raiment' when worn for virtue's sake." I remember this line from the play Every Woman. It was such things as these that my ravenous children's soul devoured. It gorged itself until it developed chronic spiritual dyspepsia. I have been years overcoming all this sentimentality about purity and melancholy. Perhaps I have gone to the other extreme in overcoming this. But nature, given a chance, will always work out its own salvation.
My next memories are about a family friend called Mrs. Carwell (Remember how she had lived with us and was a sort of "Nannie"?) She went to church regularly, and once I heard my mother call her a "hypocrite." I wondered what that word meant. This old lady's life was mysterious.; She always called herself a Kentucky thoroughbred. She had been married to a major at one time, and told convincing stories of grandeur, and of all the men who came to woo her fair hand. At this time she was in love with a man she called "Modeen." I heard he had taken her money and disappeared. Every now and then she would call out, "Oh, Modeen", in ecstasy. My youngest sister would mimic her. When she lived with us, she always slept with a butcher knife or a poker under her mattress because once she had awakened in the night and found a negro standing over her. Then she screamed, "Oh, a big black Negro," and my mother, sleeping in the next room, got her revolver from under her pillow and rushed after the Negro and shot at him. They found blood on the wall next morning.
Sister Mary Leila told me this story. This same old lady had a diseased ankle. It had swollen eruptions all over it. some feelings of objection registered in me when I watched her putting plasters of greenish yellow salve and leaves of mullen and polkberry plants, and a mixture of herbs she boiled to a "smelonious" mass. There were times she could hardly walk, but because of her great pride she would try to walk without limping. She couldn't bear to think anyone imagined her old and helpless. Every morning she told her fortune in the coffee cups. There was always a journey and a dark man. Most of the day she spent rummaging among her collection of silk scraps, lace, ribbons, shiny buttons, brilliant pins and buckles for making hats. She had a new one each Sunday. Afterwards she would tear it up and make it over. At this time she appeared to be about sixty-five years old. Later she looked younger, and had her second eye-sight. She lived in the Old Ladies' Home, and still made hats from scraps. And when she was visiting she still hid the axe of the butcher knife under her mattress, and every morning told her fortune in the coffee cup. There was still the journey and the dark man. She believed what she saw in the cup, although it never came true since Modeen ran away. Finally, she was killed by a tram car, or she might have lived forever, like Shaw's Immortals in Back to Methusalah.
I also remember another woman living near us whom we called "Miss Sadie". She and my mother used to talk, and we would be sent out of the room. She wore long wrappers, trailing in the back, empire waisted, and she smoked cigarettes. I never saw her outside the house. Mrs. Carwell said she was a sinful woman. I thought it was because she didn't go to church. I liked her, and now and then she gave me a present. But I thought it was strange for a woman to smoke. My mother didn't smoke.
One morning that fall, my mother took me to a large brick building across from where we lived and enrolled me for school. I remember learning Roman numerals up to X. Learning them bored me, and I didn't do them very well. My teacher said they looked as though they were dancing. That gave me an idea. After that, I made them dance more and more. I liked drawing pictures on my slate. Objects were drawn on the blackboard for us to copy. I liked the cats best. I drew them by making a small circle and putting ears on it, dots for eyes and nose, and a small curve for a mouth. Sometimes the curve was one-sided, which gave the cat a cynical smile. A larger circle joining the small circle was the body, and a looped line made the tail. Under it I wrote, "This is a cat."
At recess we marked from the school room two by two, and burst from the building with the explosive sound of children suddenly released. Then, if I had any money, I would go with the other children to a nearby store and buy red candy called "wine balls" and stick one into a sour pickle, sucking it, and eating bits of the pickle at the same time. This was a great delicacy among children then.
That summer when school was out, I played with other children on the deserted school grounds. The child I liked best was a little girl whom the other children made fun of because she wore boys' overalls. Her name was Frances. She had a little brother called Ausie. Sometimes she and I would venture far form home. I would take my baby sister, and she would take her brother. My sister was a very temperamental child. She would bite and scratch and hang on my skirt until it was torn from the waist. I found a way of managing her by lying down, closing my eyes, and folding my hands across my chest, as I had seen Aunt Tabitha in her coffin, and saying, "I am dead." She would try to open my eyes by pulling the lids up. Then she would cry, and I would say, "I won't be dead if you will be good." "I be go--goo--good," she stammered when she was nervous. Sometimes I would tease her by showing her a puddle of water in the street where the reflection of the sky made it look miles deep. I would pretend I was going to step into it, and she would pull back, screaming with terror. I thought this was very funny.
Frances and I were always looking for empty whiskey bottles. We used them for dolls, and made paper dresses for them from colored paper we collected form various sources. Sometimes we were fortunate enough to get a book of wallpaper samples. We begged paper from everyone we met.
The neighboring children formed a secret circle apart from the world of our adults, and investigated the mysteries of life, discussing our different ideas of where babies came from, and also the reality of Santa Claus. We found out that little boys were different from little girls, and that there was always a mama and a papa and a doctor when a baby was born. We knew also that they slept together. We played mama and papa, and the doctor brought the baby.
Next I remember having a knee injury which required stitches. At first I had a Negro woman to carry me about. After I was able to hop around on one foot, I had difficulty keeping from pulling out the stitches. I had a habit of gazing out into space in a trance and, when in this semi-conscious sate, I would play with the stitches that protruded themselves upon my sense of touch. Then my foot would bleed, and my mother would get alarmed.
Before my knee became completely healed, we moved again, and I didn't see Frances for about two months. Then one day, she came to see me. I was just able to walk and was so anxious to show her how active I was, I ran and jumped until I hurt my foot again, and had to go back to bed for another spell. Then we got a letter from Aunt Nora. She had gotten married to her redheaded friend who had come to see her in Louisiana. He was now a doctor, and they were living about ten miles away, in Natchez, Mississippi, and wanted me to come to visit. I don't remember not wanting to go. The thought of a train journey pleased me. I don't remember the trip, but I know I was again put in the charge of the conductor.
The next memory I have is of being with my aunt. She and her husband were living in a country house with lots of grounds around it. There were horses and cows and chicks, a dog, a cat, pigs, and little baby pigs. There was so much to see that I didn't get homesick for a few days. I slept with my aunt and her husband, whom I started calling "Uncle F. O." and had always liked, slept in another room. After about three days, I was put in the other room, and he wanted to sleep with Aunt Nora. I couldn't understand this. I felt very hurt to be put out that way. I cried and became homesick.
My new uncle had his office in the house, and patients would come from all over the countryside with toothaches and every possible thing the matter with them. I became very interested in the patients and their diseases.
There was a Negro man who tended a few acres of field for my uncle, and he was very good to me. He showed me all the animals and caught a tiny pig for me to hold. And, most of all, I liked to hear him sing songs. He used to sing
"Stood on the railroad
looked way down the track.
Said to the conductor,
Bring my baby back."
It wasn't long before I started to ride horses. They had to be taken to water about a mile away, and I started first riding behind the Negro on one of the horses while he led the other. Then, later, I rode the other horse. Once the horse I was on became frightened and jumped, then started running. This startled me so that I forgot to hold on and just let myself fall off.
The next six months were spent helping my aunt with the housework and learning to sew. I started piecing a quilt. I liked the idea at first, but I soon tired of sewing tiny squares together into larger squares, and of the scraps of materials, mostly left from one of my dresses which I had already grown tired of. Still, I had to do a square a day, and more sometimes, for punishment. I began to hate it, and would choose the softest material because I could run the needle through quickly. Sometimes, when my aunt wasn't near, I ran the squares together on the sewing machine. When she discovered this, she made me rip them out and sew them over with the needle. She always added several extra ones for discipline.
Many times I took my sewing to my horse, Dick's, stall and sat in his feed box. I would tell him frankly what I thought about things. I didn't think I should have to sew when I wanted to be out in the woods. The violets wouldn't bloom forever and now, underneath the trees, they made a purple carpet. The other children I knew didn't have to sew quit squares. They went to the woods and gathered violets. Some of the blooms were larger than the others. They called these "rooster" violets. It seemed very strange to connect roosters with violets. But they knew more than I about the woods. I could only teach tem not to say "ain't" or "tote" for carry.
I was happy in the woods. When I was alone there, I felt different in some way than I did when I was a home or in the woods with the other children... the violets and the yellow jasmine climbing among the trees; trees white with large star-petalled blossoms; and between the softly rolling hills the pink honeysuckle that looked like floating pink clouds in the distance. I didn't just look at them. I belonged to them.
My uncle's sister lived not too far away. She had many children. They are like shadows to me now. I can't remember any of their names. They were different form the children I played with in the city. They had no sex curiosity. they learned things from nature. They had seen the mating and the birth of cows, pigs, and chickens. And their mother had a new baby every year. Their speech was strange to me. My aunt said it was incorrect. When a little girl told me she had to "hope Ma scour down the walls" I didn't know what she meant at first. But I soon found out the "hope" meant "help", and "scouring down the walls" was pouring scalding soap suds against the boards of the wall and then scrubbing them until they were almost white. Other expressions they used were, "I ain't had nary one", meaning I haven't one; a dish of food was "a mess of grub"; and fatback was called "fry". I tried to correct them, and sometimes they got the corrections mixed. A little boy once said to his sister, "Don't say 'ain't', say 'carry'." Everyone laughed, and the story was told over and over.
Every Saturday the yards had to be swept clean like rock. I often helped them. Later in the evening, when the cows came home, lowing for their calves, I watched the older girls milk. First the calf was turned out to its mother. It would rush to the swollen teats and hunch them until the cow's hind legs were almost lifted off the ground. This brought the milk down, I was told. Then a little boy would put a rope around the calf's neck and pull it away before it got too much of the milk. The girl then squatted with a pail between her knees, and squeezed the teats with two hands, alternating so that it sent two strong streams of milk, one after the other, with a shish, shish, shish, shish into the pail with such force that the milk frothed and foamed. The cow stood quietly licking the calf, her rough tongue making it look like the marcelle waves I had seen my other get done to her hair in the beauty shop. There was a dreamy look in the cow's eyes as she caressed her baby. the calf now and then sniffed at its mother's nose, and then suddenly rushed to the end of the rope. Stopped by a terrific jerk, it stayed there, with its neck stretched towards the teats, its tongue hanging out, rolling its eyes, as it was choked by the rope. One teat was left for the calf, if it was not old enough to eat grass. This it enjoyed after the milking was finished, while the cow stood with twisted neck, licking the calf's hindquarters.
Time passed very quickly. Soon it was early summer and we were gathering mayaws. These were red berries that grew on trees near water, and there were sloughs of water everywhere from showers that came suddenly, with thunder and lightning. The berries were shaken from the trees and fell into the water beneath. There they floated, and we skimmed them up in handfuls. They made beautiful jelly, like apple jelly, only sharper in taste. Later there were wild plums and blackberries.
I began to feel a part of this country where women went barefooted and wore no underclothes, and relieved nature by holding their loose homespun dresses away form their bodies in the back and front, standing with their legs apart, in the manner of a cow squatting for the same purpose. They worked in the fields like men, after ploughing oxen. There were streams but the women did not often fish. Sometimes they muddied a pool of water and caught the fish when they came to the surface for air. The woods were full of rabbits, squirrels, oppossum, coons; partridges and wild ducks in the winder; also wild turkeys. But these people never hunted. They were lazy, good-natured people -- happy, with the kindest hearts I have ever known. There was none of the malice I find among cultured people. Everyone worked for himself, and there was hardly a family that didn't own a farm. They started working at sunrise, singing, letting their voices out in calls that found echoes.
One day I heard that my uncle was going away. I was very unhappy about it. He was going West to look for a suitable place to practice medicine. My aunt was snobbish. These people wanted a sociable doctor. I heard my uncle tell my aunt so. Before he left, I went out to the well with him. It was during an electrical storm, and a flash of lightning streaked before us, blinding me for a moment. But I was used to this. I had followed him to the well to ask a question I had had on my mind for a long time:
"Uncle Teddy, why did you marry Aunt Nora?"
"Because she was pretty and good."
"Do you think she is pretty?"
"Yes, don't you?"
"No. I don't even think she is good."
The windlass creaked as he finished drawing up the water form the sixty-foot well. We didn't say any more.
In the summer were Protracted Meetings at the County Churches. They were held more as social gatherings for the people who lived miles apart then to bring sinners to the Lord. It lasted for weeks, and was the holiday part of the year. Families came in wagon loads, bringing with them their choicest hams, baked or boiled with spicies, and sweetened with rich molasses from their own sugar cane; rich cakes and pastries; and pickles, jellies, spiced peaches and pickled watermelon rind; and boiled eggs deviled into a succulent mixture. Never have I known such flavors. Even my aunt forgot her snobbishness, and prepared food for days. She made beaten biscuit caramel cake and creamy lemon pies. I was happy then. The children didn't have to sit in church and listen to the preacher save sinners. I'm sure these people didn't think much about sin. The service was mostly song singing.
One day when I was playing outside and my aunt was in the church, a man rode up on a horse and asked for her. He and a woman and a little girl were waiting at home. I sent inside and told my aunt, and we left immediately. I think she must have known who it was. I didn't suspect.
At home I found my mother and youngest sister waiting for me. I hadn't written to mother for a long time, as my aunt had forbidden me to. I was happy to see my mother. She said she had come to take me back with her. I didn't mind leaving my aunt. I had begun to think much less of her. She seemed against everything that made me happy. I wasn't even allowed to eat mulberries, and there were trees of them everywhere to tempt me.
My mother, sister, and I started off, and had gone a little way when my mother discovered she had left something. We turned back, and she went into the house. After we started again, she told me that she had found Aunt Nora lying on the bed crying. This seemed strange to me -- her crying. I didn't know she minded me going. I didn't think she cared for me when I was with her. She had punished me too much for every little thing -- even to holding my knife and fork the wrong way. "Don't hold your knife and fork so low down," she would say, twisting her mouth primly.
"Don't get milk on the outside of your mouth," and "Place the knife on the edge of your plate when you are not using it."
My life had been all "don'ts". Now I would be free. I remembered the freedom I enjoyed with my mother. I wouldn't have to sew or do anything else that I didn't want to. With these thoughts, I drove out any feeling of regret that I was leaving Aunt Nora crying. She should have treated me better, and let me write to my mother. All sympathy for her vanished. I hoped I would never see her again. Yet, for some reason, I felt like crying.
My little sister seemed to have something to tell me. She kept looking at my mother and giggling. Before I left, I had taken her out to see the peach trees with the large ripe peaches on them. But she was afraid of the bees, and wouldn't go near them. She was even afraid of the chickens. I thought, "How different she is from the children of the country."
"I'm afraid the damn bees will sting me," she said. I was surprised. My aunt had not even allowed me to say "sakes alive," or "my gracious." I had not been allowed to say anything that was not correct. Also, Aunt Nora would never talk to me, and she wouldn't let me tell her about Frances and her little brother, and the bottle dolls, and Effie, and Ella, and Audrey, and the man they called "Doctor", with the motor car and the little goatee, and about my mother's white cream. I thought the white cream would make my aunt prettier. She had freckles, and I hated freckles. There had been so many things I had wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that my mother did her hair in two braids instead of one, as she did; and that my little sister had a high temper. She would only say, "Children should be seen and not heard." But my uncle had listened to me. And again those little laugh wrinkles would appear around his eyes, and smiles would start from his ears, and creep to the corners of his mouth. I felt sad for a moment because I might never see him again.
After several hours train journey, we spent the night in Jackson, Mississippi. Then I discovered what my sister had been giggling about.
"Mama has a new husband," she whispered. I didn't understand.
"It is Louie. He is a barber. A barber shaves people."
"What happened to Papa?" I asked.
"Mama divorced him. Louie cut him across the face with a razor in a fight. I saw it. Papa went to the hospital. Louie went to the jail. I used to go with Mama to see him. She took him things to eat and cigarettes. He boarded with us. I like him. You will like him, too."
Her words fell like hailstones, bouncing off my brain. I made no comment. I listened.
"He is good-looking. He has dimples, and he is deaf. You will have to shout to him."
I didn't know the meaning of all this. I had heard of divorce, but I never thought of it as belonging to real life.
I must have looked unhappy, for my mother tried to cheer me up by suggesting that we stay in Jackson all day. There was a noted insane asylum there. We would visit it. So we went through it to see the mad people. I didn't know what to think of them. Some of them amused me, and some made me feel sad. It was like looking at freaks in a circus. I thought they were there just to be looked at. One woman was rocking a doll. The guide explained that she did it all the time. Her child had died, and she had lost her mind. All I remember of the others is a sea of expressionless eyes and pasty faces. But the rocking back and forth of this woman with the doll left an impression, and started me thinking about the minds of people.
Then we continued our journey back to the hectic, gay life of my mother. We had plenty of clothes. I had red shoes and a red plush coat and hat to match, and a red silk dress. When Christmas came, we got lots of toys and, although I did not believe in Santa Claus, I didn't let anyone know it.
Louis was like another child with us. He liked teasing my second sister. She was learning to read the Primer. She read aloud, "Put-- the--apple--in--the--cuppp." Louie would imitate her. Soon we all began to do it. She was so earnest in her study that he paid no attention to us. Once she let me cut her hair, and I cut it to make her look funny. She cried when she saw it, boring her knuckles into her eyes. I liked seeing her cry.
That winter I fell in love. I was ten; he was eleven. His mother was an invalid. She used to have a needle stuck in her arm. I was there once when her husband did it. The boy told me it was to stop the pain. I couldn't understand. She had her first pain, I thought, and then the needle must hurt when it was stuck in her arm. Why cause the woman more pain?
One night I went to a children's party. During the evening I had to go for a walk with the little boy I was in love with. It was something I had to do to redeem a forfeit in a game of "Spinning the Plate." I had planned it all with the girl who was giving the party. I had on my red dress and shoes, and had a red ribbon in my hair. I hoped he would kiss me, but he didn't. He only said he thought the road was dusty, and that he thought they were serving ice cream, and we had better go back or we wouldn't get any. That was the first indication I had that love meant so much more to a woman than to a man. I used to wonder how a boy could expect a girl to love him. I thought they should be glad if a girl noticed them at all, as girls were so much prettier. Because he wouldn't get romantic, I began to think he was in love with another girl I had seen him talking to. She was older than I, with long red curls. I would have to think of some way to win him. I must make myself more beautiful than the other girl.
My hair was light brown and short, except for the section in back that was braided and tied with a ribbon. When I loosened this part of my hair and parted it in the center, it covered the short hair and made me look as though I had long hair. I did this one day, and tied a band of ribbon around my head, with a bow on the side. My mother was out, so I painted my cheeks and lips thickly with rouge. I went to my mother's dressmaker, who lived next-door to the little boy. He was in his yard cutting wood. I sat on the fence between the two houses so that he could see me.
He said, "I thought you had short hair!"
"I did."
"Well, your hair must grow like birds flying."
Later I found out the red-haired girl was his sister. He had really loved me, and I had wasted all that time primping for nothing.
Another character I remember vividly was a mild-mannered man I watched putting his wife and children out in the street and throwing all their lovely clothes and jewels and wardrobe trunks out after them. I had never seen him like this. He was not only mild, but shy, coming in from his work and going into the kitchen to find his wife. There he would sit with his beer, the paper, and his simple food, calling his wife, "Jenny". He remained always in love with her. He had once been jealous because Jenny had shaken hands with William Jennings Bryan after hearing him speak. She had only wanted to tell Mr. Bryan that she had always read about him, and had named her son Bryan after him.
This same man showed up on different occasions during the following years. Once I came upon him, an old man, collecting refuse and dumping it into a wagon. And I saw him one Labor Day when all the employees of the city marched in a parade: street sweepers, garbage collectors, park commissioners, fire commissioners, city judges, and the mayor. The city was Memphis, Tennessee. How proud the old man was in his clean white suit, as he marched along in his place among the garbage collectors. Once I was with his daughters, Ella and Audrey, when they met their father engaged in his work. They were embarrassed and would not look at him. They considered his business a disgrace to their social standing, I suppose. The quality of snobishness never changes, only the environment.
The most fiendish person I knew at that time was the dog catcher. I was back with my parents and my sisters now. I watched him slip up on wretched little dog waifs and , with some kind of hook on a long pole, he slung them into a wired-in wagon. I always quarreled with him and told him he would certainly go to hell for hurting those poor little dogs. Once, when he wasn't looking, I turned all the dogs in his wagon out. They ran in every direction, and crawled under houses. I ran, too. I was afraid he would hook me and sling me into his wagon.
I once had a dog named Fritzie Lu. Someone poisoned her. It must have been a man because she didn't like men, and would try to bite one of them if they came near. I held her in my arms towards the last and, just before she died, she looked at me and tried to smile with her eyes, and then went limp in my arms. The next day she was carried away by the garbage man. I always thought puppies were the sweetest things in the world. I liked the way they smelled, a sweet warm milky smell. I like kissing their little noses, but I was told not to. So after that I only did it when no one was looking. If my sister saw me, she would run and tell on me. I also wanted to sleep with the puppy, and would slip her into my bed when I got the chance. I hadn't found anything in life so satisfactory to me as a soft, warm, milk-smelling puppy, especially baby hounds. They were so pathetic looking and awkward, with large floppy ears and long gawky legs and heavy feet.
I have so many impressions of this period of my life that they crowd one upon the other without continuity. I remember the white cream my mother used on her face that made her look like a ghost. I tried it once and my face broke out in a red rash. Once she forgot she had it on and went to the drug store for something. I noticed it but didn't say anything. I was with her. Everyone looked at her. She wondered why and glanced at herself in a mirror, and we hurried out of the shop. I also remember that mother always carried a revolver when she went out. She hid it in the folds of her skirt. I also think she was absentminded because once she forgot to put on the waist of her suit. She took me to the theater and during the show she removed her coat. When the lights came on, she was sitting there in her camisole. It couldn't pass for an evening dress, as it was a matinee. "She told these incidents to everyone and laughed. My mother liked to laugh. It rippled out and lasted a long time. She slept late in the morning. I went to school without breakfast. I never wanted any. My stomach has always been weak in the mornings, even as a child.
When we asked for a story, she told us about the kind who wanted a story that would never end, and a man told him the story of the crow which each morning came to the barn to get a grain of corn; the next morning came and got another grain of corn. "What do you think he did the next day?" "What?" we asked, hopefully, with wide eyes. And she would say, "He came and got another grain of corn." That was repeated over and over again until we were in tears and screaming for her to stop. Sometimes she played on our emotions by telling us that she wasn't really our mother, and that she had only found us in a mud hole. We would cry so that she would have to say she was our mother to get us to stop. Then she would say, "Some day I shall be old and wrinkled and lame, and then I will die and be put into the ground." How little she realized she was distorting our ideas of life. She thought it only amusing, and would break out in her rippling laughter. That was her way of showing us attention. I'm sure she adored us. But she was young and full of her own life, not realizing her responsibility in bringing up three girls. She realized it later and was very wonderful in her care of my oldest son. Teenaged parents should not have the care of their own children. They are too interested in themselves. Grandmothers should rear the children.
I remember going with the family to visit our father. I liked him better when he was not at home. HE was living in a camp, doing some kind of work connected with building the levees to keep the Mississippi from overflowing. We lived in a tent while there. The contractor's children were there also, a baby and a girl. The girl had a misshapen mouth, and I heard it was caused by taking calomel, and eating sour pickles afterwards. I always remembered this when I was forced to take calomel, which was often, because the valley of the Mississippi was full of malaria. I liked the boy. I think he liked me too. I was very romantic then, and always dreaming of falling in love, and getting married. It seemed I would never grow up.
Once that summer, after I returned from camp, I saw my girlfriend, Frances, and her little brother. Our secret clan was broken up, and most of the children had moved away. I was spending the night with Frances one time, and we were going to play with some children on the street. We rushed out of the house, Frances and Causie ahead of me. As I ran across the street, I stepped on something and, although I didn't realize what had happened, I turned back and got to the door, and dropped. Instinctively, I put my hand to my foot and felt a gush of blood, as my hand fitted into the gash in my foot. My big toe was almost off. I screamed for Frances's mother. Later a doctor came. I remember he was handsome, with lovely dark eyes. He tied something tight around my leg, and I heard him say he would sew my foot. then came the stitches. I don't think he gave me anything to deaden the pain. He tried to soothe me by saying I was a brave girl, and "only one more stitch." I gritted my teeth and, after he had taken one more stitch, he took another. And each time I would ask, "How many more?" And each time he would say, "Just one more," until there were twelve. I counted them on my fingers. I didn't cry. Once, during the stitching, I looked up and saw Frances and her little brother looking at me through the half-open door. I remember the shy little smile on her face, and the wondering, frightened look in her eyes.
I was taken home next day. My mother bought me a large doll, and dressed it like a baby. My foot healed very slowly. As before, it was difficult to keep the stitches in, for I was very absent-minded and gazing into space. Humming or singing, I would play with the rough ends of the stitches until they became loose, and my foot would bleed, and mother would be alarmed. I didn't walk the rest of the summer.
That fall, Aunt Nora wrote, asking me to visit again. I was glad to go on a train journey, and I had forgotten all the unpleasant discipline from my aunt. The conductor put me into the charge of my Aunt and the tall man whom she referred to this time as my Uncle Teddy. We drove through the country in a buggy. It was nearly dark. I could see trees with long grey veils hanging from them, almost to the ground. My aunt said it was moss. For the first few nights, as before, I slept with my aunt and then got shoved to the room next door, and her husband took my place in bed. I was hurt. I was jealous. I cried and became homesick again. But then this time I thought that maybe, if they slept together they would have a baby, and I could play with it. I wondered how long it would take. They could get it soon, I thought, because he was a doctor. He could bring his own baby.
One day my aunt tried to teach me where babies come from. I was embarrassed. She was so precise and self-conscious. She split an corn open and showed me the tiny tree curled inside, and told me that a baby grew like that -- only the other's place for carrying the baby was under her heart. I didn't think her explanation very clear. She didn't tell me how it got there, only that it was connected to the mother by a cord which had to be cut. This only left me more confused than ever with the mystery of birth.
A little boy sometimes came to play with me. We played Indians. He made bows and arrows with sticks and strings. Once we found a block of buzzards eating a dead cow. We shot our arrows at them, pretending they were wild turkeys. Our efforts didn't annoy the birds, as they were so ravenous over the carrion. The hideousness of this scene impressed itself on my memory, and since then I have seen nothing so disgusting as those people who haven't the courage to live themselves and prey upon the emotions of others for their knowledge. Then when there is something that threatens to bring them out of the stagnant water into the current of life, they run and hide.
One day I tried to tell the little boy how babies grow. I showed him the little tree in the acorn and told him that he had started like that, under his mother's heart, and that he had been tied to her with a cord that had had to be cut. Before I had finished, he ran away and started throwing stones at a bird's nest.
I went to the country school that winter. It was not allowed to ride Dick to school (the horse I told you about on my last visit to Aunt Nora's). I thought it too far to walk, so I rode a broomstick. It was no distance then. I galloped all the way, and hitched the broomstick to a post until I started home again. Several of the children started riding broomsticks to school.
I was trying to learn the multiplication tables, and thought the three times table very difficult. The five times table was easy, it seemed to me, and so was the ten times table.
Sometimes I went to Natchez with my aunt to her singing lesson. I thought she made horrible faces when she sang, and I didn't like the sound she made, either. I did like the words to some of the songs. I could play the melody with one hand on the piano, and sing the words:
"There is one dear maid in all the world,
To whom my heart is true.
And her lips are like the roses;
Her eyes are Heaven's blue."
My favorite was:
"There, little girl, don't cry,
They have broken your doll, I know,
And your tea set blue,
And your playhouse, too
Are things of the long ago.
But childish troubles
Will soon pass by.
There, little girl,
Don't cry, don't cry."
There were other verses which I learned later, and I have often wondered if I felt the prophecy of the verses then.
Another one was:
"There, little girl, don't cry,
They have broken your slate, I know.
And the glad wild ways
Of your school girl days
Are things of the long ago.
But life and love
Will soon come by.
There, little girl,
Don't cry, don't cry."
It wasn't long before I knew this song expressed all the waiting in life, looking forward to something that is always in the distance -- a never-ceasing longing. And, if you stop longing, you no longer have the desire. And when the time rolls around, what you wanted doesn't matter. The price of waiting was too heavy. And the last verse:
"There, little girl, don't cry.
They have broken your heart, I know.
And the rainbow gleams
Of ;your youthful dreams
Are things of the long ago.
But Heaven holds all
For which you sigh.
There, little girl,
Don't cry, don't cry."
It's too bad if the little girl doesn't believe in heaven. The song is pure irony -- meaning no more than: Naught equals infinity -- a trick algebraic problem.
After Christmas, Aunt Nora, Uncle Ted and I moved from Natchez. I overheard them say it was because of the boll weavil eating the cotton crop. No one had any money to pay my uncle-doctor. He was going to another place in Mississippi where his family lived. I didn't hear the name of our destination. Uncle Ted had to take the horses through the country. My aunt and I were to follow on the train, after her voice recital. When my uncle started I begged to go with him. So I loped out of Natchez on Dick, ahead of my uncle in a buggy pulled by his horse, Bob.
Now and then we would change horses, and he would ride and I would drive. When it rained, we both rode in the buggy with the oil curtains up, and tied Dick on to Bob's bridle. Sometimes we crossed streams so deep that the water came into the buggy and the horses had to swim, pulling the buggy like a boat.
We stopped at farm houses at night. I always slept with my uncle. I began to feel a great passion for him, and hoped that he would hold me in his arms during the night. My imagination ran riot with my feelings. Whether or not he noticed this, I never knew. I was in love with a man, and with the greatest sexual urge I have ever known. I wonder if everyone's sex instinct is greater between the ages eight and ten? I have heard others say that they had these same feelings at that age.
We arrived after five days at the home of my uncle's brother in Collins, Mississippi. He was very like my uncle, only not so good-looking. He also had red hair, but his nose was sharper, and his eyes smaller. His wife, like my aunt, had dark hair and eyes. He and his wife had numerous children: Eunice, Lois, and Alice, who was my age. There were several boys of all ages; also two or three very young children. Their mother was much pleasanter than my aunt, and prettier, I thought. I had a sore throat when I arrived, and she told me to wrap a soiled stocking around it when I went to bed. I used one of the stockings I had worn during the trip. The next morning my throat was better. When my aunt arrived I told her of the soiled stocking. I think she was horrified. My aunt was very aloof in her manner towards her husband's people.
There, we went to stay with my uncle's father and mother in the country. His younger sister was there. She was fair and plump, and her name was Dagmar. I began calling her Aunt Dagmar, and the old couple became "Grandmother and Grandfather to me. The old man had been in the Civil War, and he told me terrible things that the Yankees had done, and of the bravery of the Confederate soldiers.
Although it was winter, violets were blooming in the yard. I picked them early in the morning. They were growing near the front porch below a shelf where water was kept in a cedar bucket. A gourd dipper floated in the water. A basin was fitted into a hole cut in the shelf. There was a soap disk with pink soap and roller towel on the wall. The waste water was thrown on the hydrangeas. Grandmother told me they wanted heaps of water. I threw my water on the violets. They were blooming; the others were not, although Grandmother said the others were more beautiful than the violets when they did bloom. But I felt then, as now, that the present can be hurt by thinking too much of the future. I found that in this part of the world this was the usual location for drinking water, and the wash basin. As you passed houses along the road you could see men slushing their faces with water, rubbing soap into their ears, or lathering their faces and shaving by a little mirror on the front porch.
All the houses had lightning rods. The prosperity of the farmer was judged by the number of shiny globes and spears and weathervanes he had on his house. There were only one-story houses. Only a few were painted. The older ones were rambling, showing the farmer had a large family. For, when a couple first married, they had only a shack of two rooms and a bit of land. As the family increased, rooms were added. My adopted grandmother and her daughter did all the housework. There were no Negroes in that part of the South. The kitchen and dining room were separated from the rest of the house and connected by a bridge with railings. And there was white sand on the floor. Sage grass, tied in bundles, was used for brooms. The yard was swept clean down to its hard surface. Not a particle of loose dirt could be found outside the flower beds. There was an inner yard planted entirely in flowers. Each house had several lightning rods.
While my uncle was finding a place to settle, my aunt and I went to East Tennessee to visit her sister. I don't remember Aunt Nora's leaving, but I was now in the care of my loving Aunt Donie, Phredonia Estes Kefauver, whom I had seen at Uncle Joe's (Estes Hall) with the baby cousin who cried when I tried to hold him. He was now about five. His full name, I learned, was Cary Estes Kefauver. The "Cary" was after the most famous Estes ancestor, Henry Cary, who built the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. I often wonder why they bothered to name a baby for somebody they were proud of, and then dropped the name. A different kind of "name dropping." Estes had an older brother, Robert, who had a high temper. His sister, two, was beautiful, with light brown curls and dimples. They had a Shetland pony. We could never catch him when he was in the pasture. Sometimes I was allowed to ride him. An older boy next-door threw things at the pony when I was on him to make him kick up his hind legs. This boy liked teasing me. Every time he saw me, he would pretend he was picking fleas off me, and cracking them on his finger nails, saying, "Fleas. Fleas." This made me fight. And then he would run and laugh at me. Most of the time I ended in tears, and then he would say, "Don't be a baby. I was only playing with you." His name was Neil. I disliked him then. But later, when I was almost fifteen, and he was seventeen, he was my first girlhood love.
On Sundays we visited my Aunt Donie's mother-in-law. They lived in a large plantation home built, even to the bricks, by their slaves before the Civil War. There were vast orchards and fields and chestnut groves. I liked going there. The old lady told us stories of the Civil War. Sherman marched over their land on this way to the sea. She told us of a goat she had who could smell Yankees miles away, and would run into a cellar. This was a warning to them to put away their valuables. By this time I thought that everyone living north of the Mason and Dixon line were sub-human fiends. I had heard of General Lee as some great god, and Abraham Lincoln as the master fiend of the Yankees, with a personal grudge against the Southerners.
The daughter of the house was a very tall masculine old maid. She went into the fields to oversee the workers, which caused much criticism. Also, she had a habit of adopting little girls from the Orphans Home. Most of them she used a servants. And, because of her cruelty to them, they always ran away. One of them ran to my Aunt Donie for protection, and she refused to send her back. After that, the "in-laws" never liked my aunt, and when she had babies, I was told this mean cruel sister-in-law always "felt sorry for" her brother and sent him rare foods: tomatoes out of season from her greenhouse...
The family burial ground was in the garden. My aunt's first little girl was buried there. She haddied of diphtheria. There was a very tall stone, marking the grave of some grandfather. He had written the epitaph for his tombstone before he died. The words glared at you:
Remember, man, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
Prepare for death and follow me.
He almost seemed to rise out of the grave at me when I read it. Even the pets had graves there, and all around were early spring flowers. Later the cherry trees would be in blossom, and there would be strawberries all among the graves.
In the barn, we found dozens of eggs and thousands of pigeons flocked about. Sometimes we played a game called "Pigeons". My oldest cousin would be the paper pigeon and I would be the mama pigeon, and always the younger boy would be the baby pigeon and have to stay in the nest and swallow everything we brought to him. And Robert, oldest, would often bring the most unsavory morsels to him. And, if the "baby pigeon' wouldn't swallow them, there would be a fight. Sometimes we played pony and cart, and the younger cousin, Estes, would have to be the pony and pull us about. He was so tyrannized over by the older boy that my Aunt Donie often had to intervene in favor of his rights as a human being.
(This cruelty suffered by Estes at the hands of his brother later turned into a close relationship. Six years later, Robert drowned in the Tellico River in Tennessee while swimming with Estes and some other boys. Estes was eleven years old at the time, and although he pulled his brother ashore and gave him artificial respiration, Robert couldn't be revived. This seemed to be the turning point in Estes's life. He from that time on had to make up to his parents for Robert's loss and be a better person, study more, and make something of himself).
The most peaceful game we played was shop-keeping. We collected objects belonging to my aunt and sold them back to her for pennies. She gladly humored us. She did most everything her children wanted her to do. This entertained us for hours. We would go to town with our pennies for candy: long whips of licorice, and hearts with mottoes on them were favorites. The boys had skates, and I learned to skate on the front veranda. My aunt's husband was very annoyed when I skated on that veranda. Years later, he was annoyed when, with a few couples, I danced on the veranda to the music of an old-fashioned victrola. Sometimes he would get very annoyed with his wife, and then often I have heard her say, "I should have known what to expect when you behaved as you did on our honeymoon: not taking me into the opera house when I commented on hearing the singing as we passed by. And I only said, 'Let's stay here and listen awhile.'" Her husband would fly into a rage, "I won't have any of that."
My little girl cousin was still wearing diapers. Sometimes I would change them. I liked holding her little feet and powdering where the soft fat folds of her legs made creases. Now she is a young lady of twenty-five, very hysterical and moody. Although she had always been a temperamental child, I feel somehow I may have had something to do with her condition. I made a confidante of her when she was only a child and I a grown girl. I read her my love letters, and her imagination was fired. Then her life was never like her dreams. As a child, she had looked forward to being old enough to have love affairs -- with the flowers and the chocolates in blue satin boxes that went with love and beaux. But the kind of beaux of my early girlhood departed on the last ebb of a romantic period. After the War, things were different. The young men of her age are not the kind that fired her imagination through my romances. They are brought up with the idea of equal rights with women.
How little one understands and feels the mental agony of others. Physical pain gets all the sympathy, and the mental pain arouses mostly irritation because it is not as easily understood as a pain in the stomach. There is never sympathy for something that is not understood. That queer thought gave me mental agony. Sometimes I think of humanity as passengers on a ship doomed to sink in a moment. There are the same elements of fear, panic, and madness. While some find consolation in religion, and sing "Nearer my God to Thee," as the ship sinks, some others face death and oblivion calmly. Perhaps we are only cells that die and are sloughed from some great body of "All Things", new cells taking our place. Just, as in the human body: bodies within bodies, lives within lives, worlds within worlds. All things are victims of experimental agents. There is a principle that governs time and space, but all we know is that everything seems to go in cycles, and surely we can see a returning to nothingness out of which we all came: the world falling to pieces humanity afflicted with the disease of slow rot, the rotting substance of a child planet. Will a prodigal earth some day be taken again into the burning breast of its mother planet? Poor earth. Getting colder and colder. And humanity, puffed with vanity, think their words must be the law of the universe. Great because they only compare themselves to monkeys: fleas and ticks full of blood on the belly of a dead cow. If there were only some way of interpreting our thoughts as we feel them. Words come from the struggle to express feelings. Feelings burst open the surface of thought, making a noise; the noise is words. Words are dangerous. They can be twisted according to our feelings. Some feelings can't be expressed in words. The moments of silence between two people, each feeling the others' deepest feelings. If they try to put them into words, or even bring them to the surface of thought, there is misunderstanding. Words fly around like darts. In this agonized thinking, could there be any truth? It was once pleasant to pray for something, thinking I would get it. I think I was frightened out of religion. I crawled under the covers at night in terror of the angry God I heard about.
It is painful, twining through the maze of the past trying to find a lost child, trailing her back through time. The child knows the answer to many mysteries. It hasn't forgotten what it brought from creation. And that, I think is what is meant in the Bible, "Unless ye become as little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Our everyday civilized world today is a parasite upon the truth, which is taken for itself. Parasite truths. A child is a natural enemy to these false truths. Therefore, the child must be conquered, and turned into a machine that will carry out the cruder human functions, and obey man-made laws. But some hide away in dreams.
Although I was happy with Aunt Donie and her family, no one can take the place of your own family. So when Mama came to take me back to Memphis again, I was again anxious to get back to her, my sisters, and my friends. My little sister, Grace, told me what had been happening in her life since I went away. Mama had divorced Louie and married him again. Now she was divorcing him again. "He came home one night and found Ella and Effie (her man-chasing friends) and some men with Mama. He was drunk, and he slapped Mama. The men and Ella and Effie ran out of the house, and he threw victrola records after them. He called Ella and Effie whores. Mama told him he couldn't insult her friends, but Louie only slapped Mama again." Grace bragged, "I got a poker after him and hit him with it. He called me a 'damn little bitch.'" She seemed amused at all this. She told me she was going to be a witness in the divorce.
"What is that?"
"I just sit in a chair and hold up my right hand and answer questions. I did it in Mama's other divorces."
"What did you say?" I asked.
"Oh, I just lied like the lawyer told me to. He gave me half a dollar. He used to take Mama out. She got her divorce for nothing. You'll see him sometimes. He's got a car."
I soon adjusted myself to my new surroundings. My mother took my money I had saved from selling my pigs and bought me new clothes. I began wearing my hair in curls with a large bow of ribbon. I powdered my face and wore silk stockings. Louie came to the house and cried to be taken back. Mama got out an injunction against him. Then my sister and I went to his barber shop to see him because he gave us money. My mother was out most of the time. Sometimes she was in and would tell us to say she was out when anyone knocked. One day I forgot and said, "Mama said she is not at home." It was a man collecting for a bill. My mother had to come out, but she didn't pay the bill. She told him to call again next week.
An old negro woman cooked for us. She had fits. One day she had a fit and fell into the fire. I pulled her out and jerked off the cloth she had wrapped around her head -- it was on fire. She went to the hospital. I went to see her. Her face was swollen. They said I had saved her life by thinking to tear off the wrapper from her head. I burned my own hand. She couldn't work any more after she recovered. She had been a slave of my great-grandmother.
Most of the time, my sister and I went to the corner grocery store and bought pies and milk for our dinner. She liked peach pie, and I liked mince. So we got half of each. My mother often had men and women friends at our house. I could hear them laughing. they drank beer, but my mother would not let me drink any. The men used to say I was pretty, but I was never allowed to stay in the room.
Every night I rolled my hair in kid curlers, but I pretended it was naturally curly. I hated rainy weather because the curls would come out. I wanted to look pretty because there was a boys' school next-door to us. I would watch them play football from our porch, but if any of them noticed me, I would turn away, because I was shy.
My mother met the master of the school. He had a black scar on his face where a boy had once thrown an ink bottle at him. He looked very pale and thin. My mother used to make fun of him because he was so proper. He liked my mother; and when he took her out, he always brought something back for us -- chicken sandwiches or cherry pie or an oyster loaf. We would wake up in the middle of the night when she returned, and eat them.
There were two widows with sons living near us. The sons worked and supported them. One was seventeen and the other fourteen. I liked the younger one. He worked for the Western Union, delivering telegrams, and had a bicycle. He used to take me for rides on the handlebars at night. He was shy about kissing.
There were many children in the neighborhood. One was a little crippled girl with lovely auburn hair, whose mother took in boarders for a living. Just across the street was a boy I began to like. He was not so shy about kissing. We played in the street, and I could stay out as late as I liked because my mother was never in. We liked to play hide and seek because it gave more opportunity for kissing. All of us were very romantic, even the crippled girl. She hobbled about on her crutches, dragging her thin legs in braces. She was not self-conscious of her affliction and was very popular with the boys. She wore her hair in long curls, in the Mary Pickford Fashion, and powdered her face and rouged her lips.
I had begun to go to the movies then. I was keeping up with a serial called "Lucille Love: The Girl of Mystery." Grace Gunard played Lucille, and Francis Ford was the hero. They both became idols of mine. Later, in Hollywood, when I was the star in a picture, Francis Ford played a small bit with me. I told him that he had been my favorite star when I was a little girl. His face brightened up. I felt sad that he should be doing only small bits in pictures then. And once I recognized Grace Gunard playing a drunken hag instead of the sweet young girl she had been in "Lucille Love".
All my thoughts at this time, like the thoughts of other girls I knew, were of boys. We wore the tiny white bows from the lining of our sweethearts' hats pinned over our hearts. In a few months I had collected several hat bows. To wear more than one at a time was not decent. I insisted on wearing all of mine. Very soon all the girls who had more than one hat bow did the same. Then the boys stopped giving them.
After that badges from cigarettes became the symbol of popularity. It was the fashion then to wear large ties of silk under the collars of middy blouses. The tie was spread out and pinned with these badges of red and blue and white celluloid. Such mottoes as "I love my wife, but oh you kid"; "Cheer up, the worst is yet to come"; "Oh you chicken"; "I'm the guy that put the beans in Boston"; "When you see me, wink"...
The crowd usually met at my home. My little sister sang and danced for us. She dressed up in long skirts and stuffed towels in her bosom for breasts, and painted her face and sang, "I'm a Great Big Grease Ball Baby," and "Balling the Jack." I asked her what "grease ball" was. She said, 'Oh, you don't know anything!' Ella and Effie and Audrey and May down the street are 'grease balls' -- whores. They sleep with men for money." This made very little impression on me. I was in the clouds with my own romances. Life was just one dream of love for me.
Mama never talked to me about anything that went on. She only said that something terrible always happened to girls who disobeyed their mothers. This was after she had found us drinking beer with several boys one night. We had tried to pour it down the sink when we heard her come in, but we were caught in the act.
That fall I was thirteen and went to school. It was the same school where my secret circle met years before. It was strange meeting one or two of them again and finding them so grown up.
I was in the fifth grade. I found all the lessons easy except spelling. I could memorize my daily lesson, but it wouldn't stay with me. A word didn't mean letters, it meant a picture of the object itself. The word "Apple" was never for instance A-P-P-L-E. I would see in my mind an apple, a red apple, a green apple, green apple trees, apple trees in bloom -- everything connected with an apple that made a picture would come into my mind before the letters. The abstract words that didn't conjure up pictures I learned to spell very easily. I can't remember when I couldn't spell "psychology."
In the spelling matches we had once a week no one would choose me for their side. I would be left alone after all the other children had been chosen, feeling humiliated. The teacher would place me on one side one week and the other the next. When I was given a word to spell the children laughed even before I attempted to spell it. The teacher gave me the simplest words, but it didn't matter. I could never tell by that time whether it began with "A" or "Z".
I was ahead of my class in everything else. I learned too easily. I had time to be idle waiting for the other children to catch up. I drew or wrote notes to a little boy I liked. He didn't laugh at me when I couldn't spell. I console myself now by coming to the conclusion that not being able to spell is a definite talent. I have observed that many interesting people are poor spellers.
My sister's teacher at this time was one who still remembered me from years ago. Then she was young, and very dark, and had a tiny black moustache. She let the children write their names in colored chalk on the black board when they got "correct" on their slates. I had been trying for a long time, and finally she marked a "C" on my slate. I was happy and felt a great flood of love for her when I thought of the colored chalk. I wanted to say something to show her how I felt, but nothing would come. I looked at her and saw her little black moustache. I finally managed, "You have a moustache just like my mother's aunt." She was furious. "You don't have to remind me of it." Her eyes flashed at me. I knew I had said the wrong thing and began looking at the colored chalk without being able to enjoy choosing a color to write my name. I was hurt and embarrassed and didn't know exactly why she was angry. I liked my mother's aunt. She told me stories when I visited her. But the teacher had never forgotten this and therefore my sister was not a favorite with her.
My mother gave us each a nickel for lunch. We bought bowls of soup from a woman living on the school grounds who sold soup, spaghetti and pies to the children. We stormed into her kitchen and stood pushing and stamping, and waving our nickels in the air.
"Give me a bowl of soup!"
"I want spaghetti!"
I want chocolate pie!"
Give me lots of crackers!"
The woman stood over the stove, her face hot and red, pushing red gold hair from her eyes, dishing out things for the children. "Please be quiet. I have only two hands." I noticed she wore diamond earrings. Sometimes I noticed baked fish with tomato sauce. It was for her dinner. I always wanted some of it. She was, to me, an exalted being. It was a blessing when she finally took our nickel and gave us a bowl of soup or a wedge of pie.
There was a time I didn't have a nickel. It was when my father walked out of his job. He had quarreled with his boss. My mother was very angry with him. I didn't understand our financial matters. One day I wasn't given a nickel for lunch and found nothing in the house to make a lunch with except a piece of old rye bread and a slice of salt pork, used for boiling with vegetables. There was only enough for two slices. I fried it and made two sandwiches. My sister and I each took one to school. I was ashamed of my lunch and didn't want the children to see it when I was eating it. Poverty was a disgrace in the school -- the children would scorn another child beneath them in circumstances. I slipped away with my sandwich and hid in the girls' lavatory. I shut myself in one of the little booths and ate it. It tasted very good.
And this was democracy in schools that America is so proud of. Good schools where children of all nationalities and colors and circumstances mingle and learn equal rights. Nothing is more cruel, and they learn bitterness and false values. No adult ever told us that we should not be snobbish. It was just as bad for the little girl whose mother drove her to school in a fine motor car, and dressed her in fine clothes and gave her rings to wear, for she was being trained in the idea that these were the important things, and her sense of judgment was warped. My mother soon gave me two of her diamond rings, and I wore them. After that I was in good standing.
My father didn't seem at all worried when he was out of a job. He was working on the tiny model of a machine. He always wanted to show me how it worked. I was interested at first, but later he bored me with it. It was finally completed, and he sold his invention to his boss.
He had no sense of responsibility for his family -- only a desire to give my mother all his money because he was devoted to her. Money meant no more to him than to a child. When my mother searched his pockets to see if he was keeping back anything, he would laugh and say, "Isn't your Mama cute?" He was always proposing to her. This annoyed her. Finally, he would say, "Let's get married," just to tease her and make her leave the room. He never cried over her anymore now. He didn't seem to care whether he went back to work or not, and we began to treat him as a nuisance.
When he was at home, I couldn't have any of my boy friends in the house. Once he came in and found two of them and caught them by the collars and threw them out the door. I was furious and flew at him, and he slapped me. I could see there was something strange in his expression that frightened me. But I wouldn't let him see it. After that, his visits became a terror to me. The longer he stayed with us, the worse he would be treated, until he would finally go back to his old job again. The contractor always took him back, whether it was because he was good at his work, or because he liked my mother, I don't know, but he kept him on in spite of frequent quarrels and even though he now and then shot and killed one or two of the negro workers.
Since my father's death, I have dreamt of him at regular intervals that he was trying to hurt me in some way. I would wake up in a nightmare. I started talking about my fear of him to people, and now the dreams are less often and not so dreadful. Once, in a dream, I accused him of an incestuous passion for me. I had never consciously thought of that, but I may have felt it.
One day when I was playing in the street wiht other children, a tiny old lady came by. Her head tembled as she spoke. She was dressed in black silk. She asked if any of us wanted to take piano lessons. No one seemed interested.
"I've had a few lessons, " I said. She looked my my hands.
"You are very talented. I would like to give you lesosns."
I brought her to my mother. My mother told her that at present she didn't have the money. But the old lady said she would give me lessons, and we could pay her when we had it -- that it was most important for me to have lessons.
Her name was Miss Valentine. She was smaller than I, and her hands could barely reach an octave. Her hair was dyed black and coiled in a heavy bun on top of her head. Her hands and head tembled and her voice was weak and refined. Her family had lost their money during the Civil War. She often told me about her wonderful girlhood. Her betrothed had been killed. She often told my fortune from my palm. All I remember was that I would have many changes. She also conjured a wart off my hand. I had to bury one of my hairs. She had got these ideas as a child form the negro slaves.
The South is full of superstitions that you don't find anywhere else. I have always believed they represent some sound knowledge that is yet unkoown and only felt by people whose minds are not too full of superficial things. Idiots and children, even animals have it, and people of strongly developed intuition and imagination. Like flower -- the roots are feelings, the stem thought: the flower -- imagination, and the fragrance -- something beyond -- a breath of the unknown. Miss Valentine was one of these rare beings with a sense of the unknown.
I learned very fast from her. She spent hours at a time with me because I wouldn't practice at home. She was proud of my sensitive touch. She often called in another teacher to hear me play "The Flower Song."
Because of her determination, I played in her concert at the Goodwin Institute, and my picture was in the paper the next day as a talented young musician.
I enjoyed the preparations for the trip. I was allowed to help pack, and I had a new dressing gown -- we were going to sleep on the train, and she gave me soap and a soap box of my own and two rings. One was plain and the other set with tiny rubies. I put the rings in the soap box with the cake of soap and put them in my Aunt's trunk. When the trunk was taken away, I wanted my soap box and rings. I worried my Aunt for them. I must have been a trial for a girl only twenty.
On the train she taught me to spell cat and to write my name in print. Also how to tell the time. We changed trains at New Orleans and spent the night there. A yellow fever epidemic was raging and it was necessary to get a certificate of health to go further into the sate. The next night we were again on the train. I dressed early so I could wear my new dressing gown. Later, soldiers came through the train collecting the certificates. Aunt Nora searched through everything for hours, but they were not there. We were told that we must get off. The train stopped and then I cried and clung to the seats and the...
I had been told that my Grandmother before my father was born wished for a little boy with blue eyes who would be bad. "I'm so tired of good little children with black eyes." Father was all she wished for. She adored him. She died when he was only six, and my Grandfather died six months later.
[fragment] ...life may be awakened in her -- doors of pleasure through which she had been afraid to venture, and beyond -- fields of flowers, multi-colored, undulating under the caress of the wind and sun. Beyond that door is the highest fulfillment of love. It is like that for a while. The lover becomes the most important thing in her life. She becomes more beautiful. She can't go back to the old life. The stodgy husband irritates her. She wishes to leave him. He usually becomes suspicious and discovers her guilt. Maybe then he cuts her throat, or maybe he divorces her and takes the children. And nearly always the man who has shown her the highest fulfillment of love will desert her. The husband who has had a great appreciation for his wife's virtue will see that she is properly punished for losing it. The more moral he is the more unmerciful he will be in dealing with her. He will call her vile names, releasing that way some of his own suppressions that have grown foul. Maybe she will weep and fall on her knees and ask forgiveness. And should he forgive her, he will never let her forget that he forgave her. I feel I must speak against the vileness of self-made purity, and its ruthless and ignorant self-conceit. Just why denying oneself the natural joys of life should be any consolation to anyone is unknown to me. It must be some insidious form of self abuse...
Mrs. Carwell, the old lady who lived with us, took us ...
...a short cut this way. He pretended not to see me. Later one day on my way to the mail box I found a wreath of flowers pinned to a tree. My name and "I love you" was written on the piece of paper. I knew who had done this -- the young man who had seen me bathing under the trees.
One day, his sister called me when I passed her house. She wanted to talk to me -- I listened timidly while she suggested that I elope with her brother and enthusiastically offered me her wedding dress. She had seen more of the world than most of the people around there, as she had once been sixty miles away to Hattisburg for an operation. I was embarrassed. I didn't want to be a married woman. At this time, there was something repulsive about the idea. I wanted to run and climb trees and hunt wild flowers, and ride my horse through tangled woods, and dream of my white horse with the wings, and wake up and be lost so that I would have to let loose the reins for Dick to find the way back. Only I often wished I didn't have to go back, just on and on. I wanted to return to what I had been before. All that was connected with this new thing that I had become was nauseating to me.
One day when I was a little way form the house, trying to follow a turkey hen to her nest, the young man came through the woods and stopped.
"Howdy," he said.
"Hello," I answered. I was embarrassed because of the flower wreath and the marriage idea with the wedding dress.
"It's purty hard to find a turkey nest. You better let me hope you."
Just then I heard my Aunt calling me.
"I've got to go." I was glad to get away from him.
"I thought you were meeting someone in the woods. Now I am convinced." My Aunt's eyes glared at me. Her face flushed. The precise "doing her duty" manner was gone. She was angry.
"That is not so."
"Do not tell me a falsehood. Remove your clothes."
She went for the switches. I stayed where I was in the backyard. She returned with several long switches.
"Remove you clothes!"
I only looked at her angry face with the freckles standing out from the red, short hairs straggling down the back of her neck. I hated her and stared at her without moving. Then she struck me across the legs, biting her tongue as she exerted herself. Collie jumped at her just as she was going to strike me again. She had to leave me to switch him off. He caught her waist in his teeth and held on, growling. She tried to strike him with the switches. My sister stood motionless in the midst of the confusion -- I was aware of my Uncle choking Collie to make him turn loose and my sister dragging him. He was barking furiously and struggling to get away. The dog was all I saw clearly -- all else around me became my tortured senses -- some anger of soul too gruesome for my memory.
"What's the row about?" my Uncle's voice.
"She must be punished severely." She was trying to get my clothes off. I struggled to keep them on. "You must help me. I haven't the strength and she must be punished."
I didn't struggle any more. I prepared for the sting of the switches. They didn't come. I was still and alone. All the conflict and confusion was between the two others. I lost all sense of relation to them, then sensed that I was in the conflict and being torn to death. A terrible rhythmic sound was in my brain. It grew louder and louder. I did not see my Uncle take the switches. I felt them sting into my flesh and whelps rise and heard Collie barking and howling against the door in the house. I knew when he dropped them and walked away. Then something broke loose in me. I turned screaming and buried my fingers in my Aunt's hair, tearing it down -- scratching and screaming -- I let ...
...most of the time. Once he said, "I think you are glad to go home."
"I am. I don't want ever to come back."
Then later, "You won't tell anyone what happened to you?"
"No. I won't. But if my mother ever wants me to come back, I shall do anything to keep away."
He put his arms around me. I move further away from him and put one foot out of the buggy.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"No," I answered.
"Do you hate me?" And I saw little laugh wrinkles around his eyes, and a smile creep from his ears to the corners of his mouth. There in the dusk, his face looked like a picture of a satyr I had seen.
Following us, just above the horizon was Halley's Comet. Its tail was streaks of light miles long. My Uncle told me it appeared only once in seventy-five years.
I couldn't imagine that this enormous thing could go unnoticed in the sky for so long. Then he told me something of the stars, and that a comet traveled in such a wide orbit that they rarely came in sight of earth, and that some of the stars were larger than our earth. This seemed strange to me and frightening. I did not want to talk to him. He started singing:
"All the way from Shiny Rock,
Bet my money on Proctor Knot,
Proctor Know don't win no race,
Goin' t'move my money to another place."
This song I had heard him sing for years. Before it had always made me feel gay and happy. Now it was just the only thing in the entire world that was familiar to me. He kissed me goodbye as he put me in charge of the conductor.
"How is Dick?"
"He has been sold and is all right." I was glad. We all were very pleased and asked and answered a thousand questions.
It was not long before my sister got into the way of our crowd. She did her hair in curlers also at night and powdered her face. She had lovely skin and was pretty with her curls. I was afraid my beaux would being to prefer her. She soon found a sweetheart of her own. She was even more of a flirt that I. She would put boys caps on and say, "You know what this means? It means a kiss." Sometimes the boys were embarrassed. She liked the shy ones. I liked them bold, for I was more shy than she.
A dark young man dressed like an Indian rode by our house on a pinto pony every day. He pulled a sign behind him, advertising Castillian Springs Water. I began to feel romantic about him. My two sisters noticed him and waved. My mother began to notice him also. I thought he looked like a movie hero with his straight nose and dark eyes.
One day, I returned home and found him with my mother. I was shy and awed by his Indian clothes. I thought he had come to see me for I had waved at him that day as he passed on his pony. But he came to see my mother, and I was sent out of the room. I felt sad. I was old enough, I thought, for a grown man with long trousers, instead of these boys of thirteen and fourteen. I was tired of them. I wanted to get married so that I wouldn't have to go to school any more. My mother got all the marriageable ones, it seemed.
A girl of eighteen lived down the street. She came to use our phone when my mother wasn't there. She would tell us about sleeping with men and about almost having babies and getting rid of them. This embarrassed me, but my girl friends were interested, especially my younger sister, who caught on to what was said better than any of us. I heard it but never thought much about it. It didn't seem romantic to me.
One day I discovered that this girl also wanted to get married. She told us that she had found that if she wanted a husband, she would have to behave herself. She got the husband soon after and then a baby. I lost track of her, but I'm sure that after she got the husband, she didn't continue to behave herself.
All the women I knew got presents from men. So did my mother. All their cosmetics were bought in the evening after the theater. They would suddenly remember that they must stop at a drug store as they were out of everything. I heard them saying they got everything they could out of a man. This must have had an unconscious effect on me as I was always afraid when I was out with a boy he would think I wanted him to buy me something. I usually preferred staying at home as this idea made me self-conscious when I went out.
I never got presents like other girls. When I cared for someone, anything he gave me was precious. But I got candy, and roses and pansies, while other girls got jewels and silk stockings and silk underwear. When I was sixteen I got a watch bracelet from a young man I had only met once and had been corresponding with. And years later a man gave me a diamond bracelet because I had only asked for a string of crystal beads for Christmas. I had a reaction of disappointment when I opened the box and didn't see the beads. Soon I was glad it was the bracelet instead. I gave it back to him when we broke up, and he took it. Afterwards, I was sorry I gave it back. I always had a secret desire to be clever like other girls, but some sensitiveness in me wouldn't let me. This feeling of...
Part of the time he lived with us. Other times, my mother spent the night with him at his Uncle's. He had great schemes for making money. We all thought he was very clever. Once he and I intended going on the stage in a sketch. We rehearsed for weeks. Nothing came of it. He became interested in learning conjuring tricks. He was taking a correspondence course in magic. He baffled me once by rubbing burnt paper on his bare arm and making my name appear in large black letters. Afterwards my mother told me the secret. He had written my name on his arm first with a match dipped in urine. It couldn't be seen when it dried. The burnt paper brought out the letters. I was embarrassed when I next saw him. My youngest sister surprised him one day by doing it. I was afraid she was going to tell how she did it.
Next, Joe was going to walk across the continent to California, selling old "Blue Back" spellers. My mother thought it was a good idea, but he waited too long to start, and she got tired of him. She made me tell him that he could not live on my father's money. I didn't mind sending him away, as I had gotten tired of him also. He was not so attractive as a stepfather as he had been in his Indian suit riding by on the Pinto pony.
My mother divorced him on the grounds of suffering humiliation because of the "Blue Back Speller" idea, and non-support.
I saw him a few years later. He told me then that he had always been in love with me and that he had been taken in by her because he was so young. I sympathized with him at the time, but today I think a man belittles himself by such an excuse for an affair that didn't turn out happily. A young man has an affair with an older woman because her superior knowledge of love appeals to him. He learns through her -- just as a younger girl learns through older men.
When my mother heard that Louie had married again, she determined to meet his wife. Her name was Louise, and she was only sixteen, but looked much older. Her figure was full, yet she was slender. Her hips were graceful, and her breasts stood out. She came to see us often.
One day, she came to us with her face bruised. Louie had come home drunk and beaten her. She wanted to stay with us, but Louie found her and cried and begged my mother to persuade her to go back to him. She returned, and they moved near us.
She had several lovers, and told her husband that her Uncle John had given her the new clothes she wore. He found a letter from one of the lovers who signed himself "Uncle John." One night he came home unexpectedly and found her in the arms of a man. "I suppose this is your Uncle John." He said no more and went out.
Louise thought he had gone for a pistol and ran to us. "Uncle John" escaped. After that she left him and went to live with a friend, known to us as Miss Dolly. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. My youngest sister told me she was a high class prostitute, but she wasn't very happy and had once tried to kill herself.
Louise loved a man called Gordon. I heard he had taken her out of a house of prostitution when she was only a child. He did not return her love. He was fond of her and helped her when she was in need. He told my mother that Louise had been sold to an old man by her step-mother when she was twelve years old.
One day we heard that Louise was ill. My mother went to see her and returned with her in a taxi. That night she was singing delirious and kept calling for Gordon. She slept in my bed and I slept in a cot in the same room. I was frightened for she kept sang over and over -- "Don't put me in a black box. Put me in a white ox. Don't put me in a black box." She begged Gordon not to leave her and held on to his hand and cried when he pulled away from her to go.
My youngest sister giggled when Louise talked about the black box. Afterwards, she sat by Louise, keeping ice on her head. A doctor came, and we had to leave the room. We heard Louise crying out in agony. My sister had some idea of what the doctor was doing, but I didn't understand. Later she told me that Louise had syphilis.
"What is that?"
"It's the bad disease. Don't be so innocent. The doctor sticks long needles into her and they hurt. You can get it form toilets, but men and women get it from sleeping together. Did you notice that she always had a sore on her nose?"
I had noticed it. "How do you know so much?" I asked.
"What do you suppose I have ears for? I heard people talking."
All these things that happened around me had very little part in my own life, which was within myself. I was as unconscious of it as I was of the air I breathed.
Late that summer, after I had firmly established my ankle length dresses and pinned my curls on top of my head the way a little actress in a stock company did hers, I went to see Aunt Donie. She lived in a small town in East Tennessee.
I found them living in a small hotel they had built. They had their own electric light plant and hot and cold water in every room. No other place in town even had electric light. Everything in town centered around it.
They had not known the day of my arrival, so I found them at supper in the dining room. The other tables were empty. My little girl cousin was now about seven years old.
"You were a baby when I saw you last," I said to her.
"I don't remember," she said shyly.
My Aunt looked tired and sad. There was another tiny girl that had been born since I was there last. She was three. She had black eyes and a wide grin. While I was talking to my Aunt, she got up on the table and poured water in the sugar, and her brother, the younger boy cousin of the old days, was trying to correct her. I didn't see the other one.
I watched my reflection in the mirror. My waist was small and my hips were round. As I looked closer and longer into my face, I noticed that the two sides were different -- one of my eyes seemed to open wider, one eyebrow arched slightly higher, and one side of my nose turned up more. My eyes were blue-grey, with dark lashes -- I would have had them violet or brown. My Hair was brown -- I would have had it black, and naturally curly instead of having to roll it up on kids every night. After massaging my breast, I started rolling up curls. I wondered what I would do when I got married. I couldn't let my husband see me do this. I always said it was naturally curly. I had difficulty keeping the curl in during rainy weather. It was terrible then when the curls came out, and some would say "I thought you had naturally curly hair". I thought what a wonderful thing it would be to have some way of curling it permanently.
Afterwards, I brushed my teeth -- the way I had been told to at school -- up and down. It gave me pleasure every time I saw them. Everyone said they had never seen such teeth. I remembered when I first noticed them years ago when they were too large and had a space between. I closed my mouth over them and studied my lips. My mouth didn't want to stay closed -- it wanted to smile. My lips were full and red. I looked sullen. I parted them into a smile. It was like relaxing. There were dimples in the corners of my mouth. There was a shadow of one in my cheek. I pressed my finger into it so it would show more. Then, after stretching my arms and noticing that my ribs showed like the pictures of Christ on the Cross, I put on my nightie and turned out the light, and knelt down and said my prayers -- an obedient child to a fearful unseen Father, wooing his favor. And always I ended, "God make me a good little girl." And sometimes now, when a blow has plunged me back through the years, I still say my childish prayers into my pillow and ask God to make me a good little girl. And I go to sleep because I am near to Creation -- like a little child.
I decided to stay with my Aunt and go to school. I started at the High School. I had two girl friends -- Minnie a year older than I, and Jenna two years older. We were together all the time and kept no secrets from each other.
Jena was in love with a young man, but her family didn't like him, so she had to see him secretly. The family had objected to him for several years. Jena said they had forgotten what the objection had been, but they hated him as much as she loved him. Everyone helped her deceive her parents.
Minnie had been in love twice. One had been her first cousin. Her family had been upset about it. She read me his love letters. I thought they were beautiful. He spoke of "A Garden of Love" and "Flowers of Desire." We both wept when she read them. She had become tired of getting only love letters and found someone to demonstrate what the other man only wrote about. She told me of kisses. I had never been kissed like that. She called them "Soul Kisses". "He is very passionate," she aid. I didn't know what that meant, and she told me.
Then he went away. It seemed all the best young men left the town sooner or later. She was very unhappy. I wished I could love someone like that. My life seemed so empty. I knew now that all my little romances had been just pretending at love.
Neil was at school with me and still trying to get me to notice him. He made faces at me and put his foot out in the aisle to trip when I passed, and even pelted me with spit balls. I hated him, and he enjoyed my fury. Then he started wearing a large hat and boots like a cowboy, and it made him look older, and I liked him well enough to go riding with him, until one day he leaned from his horse and held me in his arms and kissed me. After he let me go, I raced ahead of him and would not speak to him for a long time. He only laughed. I had begun to like him, and I resented it because I had known him as a child. That spoiled my idea of the lover that would suddenly appear and sweep me off my feet with passion and soul kisses.
Then I heard that he was going away. Suddenly, I realized I would miss him. Then in a flash I knew I loved him. I became shy and went out of my way to keep from meeting him. I didn't want him to know my feelings.
Then one day a girl and I were talking about love. She was in love, she said, and asked me if I was. "Yes, I answered. But neither of us would tell who we loved.
"Let's write the names on a piece of paper," she said. I agreed to that, and we each wrote a name and gave it to the other. The name she gave me was "Neil", and she saw the name I had written was also "Neil." We didn't know what to say. She was a sweet girl and looked hurt. I felt I wanted her to have him, and she insisted that I must have him. We were talking during a study period at school, and the teacher asked us to "Please stop talking.
Late that afternoon, when I was walking down the street alone, thinking of Neil, I saw him coming up the road in a buggy. It had been raining and the buggy was axle deep in mud. He saw me and drove up to the side walk. He was very cheerful. I thought he couldn't love me and be so cheerful.
"Get in and we'll go for a ride." I got in without saying anything. I could feel my heart beating. I couldn't have uttered a word at that moment, for there was a pain in my throat. He was silent also.
The horse was having difficulty getting through the mud. We turned off the main road.
"I bet you are glad I am going away."
"Why?"
"Because you don't like me."
"You don't like me," I said.
"What makes you think that?"
"I don't know."
"Would you like me to like you?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do know. Tell me."
"You tell me first."
"I don't like you. I love you. Do you -- me?"
My throat tightened. I couldn't answer. I turned and slipped an arm around his neck and buried my face against his coat. He lifted my ace and kissed me softly. I kept my eyes closed because I felt tears in my eyes.
"Look at me," he said. I shook my head. He held me in his arms. The tears that I held back in my eyes were running from my nose. I sniffed, and he gave me his handkerchief. I blew my nose -- embarrassed -- looking straight ahead.
The horse was ploughing through mud to his knees. I could hear the mud spattering off the wheels. The horse stopped and lifted his tail, and I turned away, and around us saw nothing but bleakness -- crows sitting silently on the bare branches of trees -- mud and slush everywhere, and not a tint of sunset -- everywhere dull greyness. The horse started again. In the distance, a train blew a wailing cry. I shivered and got closer to Neil. He put his arm around me.
"You are my girl now. Aren't you?"
"Yes," I said. And I wanted to cry again. I wasn't sad. I didn't know why, but I had to cry, and he mustn't see me. His arm felt strong.
"May I come and see you tonight?" he said.
"Yes," I whispered.
And that night I received him in the parlor of the hotel -- a huge gloomy room. He wanted me to sit on his lap -- I wouldn't do that, but I let him kiss me and hold me close to him. I was shy and counted the buttons on his coat. My boy cousin stepped out of the linen closet where he had been hiding.
"I saw you kiss him," he said. "And playing with his buttons."
I all at once felt very guilty and terrified that I should be found out.
About four o'clock the next morning I was awakened by pistol shots and shouts of "Fire." I went to the window and looked out. A man was running in his underclothes, carrying his trousers over his arm and firing a revolver into the air. I recognized him as he came nearer. It was the Sheriff. People were running in all directions. I could see the flames. They were very near. I put my skirt over my nightgown and put on my coat and slipped on my stockings, knotting them at the knees to hold them up, and my bedroom slippers.
The fire had destroyed the only clothing store in town when I arrived there. The hardware store and the grocery were almost gone. There were no fire engines. Buckets of water were being carried from the town pump in the Court House Yard and thrown on the burning side of a building that stood between the original fire and the residential section of the town. I heard some say that if this building went, all the houses beyond would go.
I met Minnie and Jena in the crowd. They were enjoying the excitement. I thought everyone was enjoying being terrified.
Neil was with the men on top of the building throwing water on the flames. My Aunt was frightened...
"...Do you think a man always knows? -- Did it hurt you to be in love? I felt as though my heart would burst." But no one seemed to be interested in this thing that filled the world for me.
Jena squeezed my arm. "Look!" Her lover was going closer to the flames.
"Oh, Jena, darling. I know how you feel. Aren't you glad he is so brave?"
"No, I'm not. I don't want him to be brave. I want him to be safe. And I can't go to him after it is over -- I shall just have to look at him and see him looking at me."
When the fire was finally put out, the women rushed toward the men when they came down from the roof. I pulled Jena along with me as we edged nearer the circle where the men were being given cups of coffee sent from the hotel in milk cans by my Aunt. The fire had died down, and only the light of dawn was in the sky. Neil saw me and waved as he started toward us. Jena's lover saw her but he could not come because her father was there.
"Oh, Jena, how can you bear it?"
"I'll just wait," she answered.
"It seems everyone is always waiting for something. I wonder what I'm waiting for?" I looked up and smiled at Neil as he took my arm.
I kissed Minnie and Jena goodbye and we went in different directions.
We found a quiet place in the shadow of the Court House, and he took me in his arms. I counted the buttons on his vest.
"Some day you will be my wife."
"I knew a girl who married when she was thirteen."
"I wish we could, but Dad says I've got to finish school. I hate school I want to have a farm that grow things."
"That's what I would like -- why can't we do it now?" And suddenly, waiting appeared like a great empty black space where I felt things were going to jump out at me.
We started back towards the hotel, and my stockings kept coming down. Now and then I would stoop to pull them up again, hoping Neil wouldn't notice it. They wouldn't stay up and the next time I stooped to pull them up, he handed me something. "Try these," he said. They were two rubber bands. I felt embarrassed, but he turned his back while I put them on. In front of us the sun was just coming up from behind a distant hill.
The months went by, and I saw him only twice, as between us lay thirty-six miles of unpassable muddy road and the journey by train took a whole day because of the bad connections between the local mountain railway.
The waiting was irksome. Letters did not make up for kisses -- I met someone else, older and nearer. But he went away also. Before he left, I promised to marry him after I finished school. But letters again and waiting -- that dark emptiness I couldn't bear. Besides it had never been as wonderful as the first love.
I began to feel romantic about Minnie's brother. He was twelve years older than I. He had told Minnie that I was very pretty and had such a sweet innocence. He was a doctor, also County Superintendent of Schools. He gave lectures to us on School Spirit and its affect on our lives after leaving school. I was very proud of him on these occasions.
I was always at Minnie's house so I would be near him. I would go into the parlor when no one else was there and play and sing sentimental songs on an old organ. I tried to tell him of my love with such music as "Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms" and "In The Gloaming," "O My Darling, think not bitterly of me." I would pump the organ until my legs ached, hoping to entice him from his reading. Often, he would come in and if no one was around, he would take me in his arms and kiss me with soul kisses. But he never said he loved me.
When I saw my mother again, she had moved from Memphis and was living in Jackson, Mississippi. She met me at the train with a young man. He had dark veloucious eyes, and dimples, and he called my mother "Deareth." She called him "Hop darling."
I found a household consisting of Louise and a new lover, and my two sisters, and my mother, and the beautiful young man who lisped.
Louise's lover, Julius, taught dancing, and he wore house aprons and little caps around the house. My youngest sister said he was a "Sissy."
"I like him, but I hate Hop. He's Mamma's sweetheart."
My second sister had no comment to make on the strange arrangement. She always had a book and never talked. My youngest sister quarreled with Hop and once threw his clothes out when my mother was away.
"If my Deareth was here, you wouldn't treat me like thith," he lisped.
"You are a dirty pimp. Living on Father's money."
Hop brought his clothes back after my mother returned. He soon began to make love to me when my mother was out. I thought he was very handsome, but my loyalty to my mother kept me from responding to his love making.
"You are like a flower, though thweet and pure," he said.
I didn't like the lisp. Maybe it was that and not loyalty that kept me from responding to him. He went away very soon. My sister said it was because of me.
Julius and Louise quarreled. I could hear them in the next room. "You only want to go because he went. You're in love with him."
I couldn't understand this. My sister explained it to me, but still I didn't understand. She said Julius liked men.
"Wait until you see Charlie Pierce. He is a friend of Julius. He puffs his hair out on the side and curls it with irons, Julius told me, and he wears a corset and shoes with bows and heels like on women's shoes, and a wrist watch and a dinner ring on his little finger. He puts his hand on his hips and wobbles when he walks. He designs dresses in a department store. 'There must be just the suspicion of a crush in the fold.' 'Oh, it will thrill your very soul,' and 'How is darling Julius.' I laughed in his face once, and he said, "Impertinent infant.'"
Louise was very upset to lose Julius. Our household was now ordinary except for an occasional visit from other of Louise's lovers. They always stayed several nights with her. I thought nothing of this. It seemed very natural. My mother had many men friends, but they never stayed the night.
I started to school. Life consisted of algebra from a teacher who hated me; English from a teacher who liked me; and Latin from a man who sent me out of the room at least once a week, telling me never to come to his class again. When I didn't come back, he sent for me. The Study Hall teacher, named Miss Butt, hated me. I think it was because I always forgot to put two "t's" in her name. She spoke to me about it once, and I told her that I had learned to spell it years ago "B-U-T" --. "It is a conjunction," but if she really wanted me to, I would misspell it for her.
Once I fell in love. We were happy for a while. We used to sit on the steps under a blooming Marischal Neil rose vine -- yellow roses like gold in the light of the street lamp shining through the chinaberry trees bordering our street. He told me he loved me and kissed me and after he had gone, I looked in the mirror to see how I looked to him and I was radiantly happy because I had never seen myself so beautiful. Soon, for some reason, he stopped coming to see me. I was unhappy and couldn't eat for a while. But I didn't suffer long. There were others who cared for me.
We lived near the university, and I met many of the young men. The son of the College President came to see me often and took me to dances. But I didn't enjoy them. I felt shy in a crowd. I never cared for him or allowed him to kiss me. He once told me I was much too clever for him -- I had just scratched his face for trying to kiss me. I pondered a long time over this remark.
Louise still had a sore on her nose. Occasionally, she had mad moods of writing poetry, and when she would shut herself in her room, lying on her stomach on the floor. She seemed to be in agony on these occasions. Afterwards, she would read her verses to us.
"Down a path of roses where the sun shines forever bright,
But, ah, when one by one the twinkling stars appear, 'tis night.
And not even the twittering of the birds
Or the rustling of the leaves are heard,
But rolling waves come one by one,
They bring to me salted tears of those wasted years."
My little sister used to laugh at Louise's poetry. I thought it was remarkable.
Some of my mother's and Louise's friends were High State officials. I heard my mother say that one of them was in love with his negro housekeeper, and only wished she were white so he could marry her legally.
At the end of the year, I went back again to visit Aunt Donie. I loved her. She was so different from Aunt Nora. She had separated from her husband and had moved back to the old residence. He came to see her often, looking very sad. She was always too busy to talk to him, excusing herself just as though he were a stranger.
Another man came to see my Aunt. She liked him because he took an interest in her children. He told us stories about the parts of the world he had visited. He was staying at the hotel. No one knew why he was in town. He never did anything except sit around the lobby, complaining of insomnia. He was short and stout and bald-headed. His face was round and rosy, and he smiled, showing short childish teeth under a stubby moustache. He was about fifty.
When he went away, she invited my boy cousin to visit him and bring his mother. My Aunt went with all the children. After she returned, he wrote to me often, and enclosed a note for her, and she always sent a note back in my letter to him. Very soon their messages were sealed. Once I found one of his letters in a drawer when I went for a towel. It was lying unfolded. "My Own Darling Sweetheart" it began. I didn't read any more. Somehow it frightened me to see this much. I didn't know they felt that way about each other. I told my Aunt that she should be more careful with her letters, and she only remarked that she thought it was safe there, as she was the only person who ever put out a clean towel.
That summer I sat in the lawn swing most every night with Minnie's brother -- the Doctor. He was living across the street with another brother who was also a doctor. I was more in love with him now than I had been a year ago. Every evening I waited in the lawn swing for him. After the lamplighter had lit the lamp at the corner, he always came to me. Often the moon would cross the sky and grow pale in the dawn before I slipped up the stairs in my stocking feet, wondering why boards only creaked at night. He had never yet told me he loved me. He only listened to the sound of his own voice reciting Kipling, and kissed my lips, and traced the contours of my face and throat with his fingers.
"You will be very lovely when you are about twenty-one."
Sometimes his hand would wander from my throat down to my breast. Then I would freeze with some instinctive fear. Once he held me so close that I had to bury my teeth in his chin to make him let me go.
"You little devil," he said, and pushed me away. I cried and said I was sorry, kissed his chin, and asked him to forgive me. But he went away angry.
The next day I went around the house in a daze. When the lamplighter came to light the street light, I was sitting, waiting, as usual. I wondered if he would come. He did. He wanted to tell me that the people next door could see our shadows on their bedroom wall as we sat in the swing. He was very amused about it. He said they could lie in bed and know every move we made.
Everyone made a joke of my love for him, as he was not a very romantic figure -- being very fat. But I only saw his dark eyes and listened to his voice. I rarely said anything. I thought he was too heavy, but he was reducing every day by cutting his brother's lawn until there was hardly any grass left. Then my Aunt suggested that he begin reducing on her lawn, and he did. But he couldn't work ver