Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Your mother's going to be mad at you for getting your dress dirty," Maggie said. She and her sister, Carolyn, were walking, one on each side of me, as we strolled home from the school bus stop. The dust from the unpaved road rose up to greet us with every step. These teenage girls were my third cousins, and my next door neighbors. However, our houses were some distance apart. What was once a field of corn lay between their house and ours. The field was bare then because the corn had been harvested. It was September in our community. Maggie and Carolyn looked out for me while we were being transported to and from school. It was 1943 in Dudley, a small, rural piedmont district of North Carolina. I was six years old and a first grader.
The dress in question was blue and white checkered with box pleats and a large white collar trimmed with lace. It was new and I had a small smudge on the front of the skirt from playing outside at recess. That morning while I was dressing for school my mother mentioned how cute the dress looked on me. I was as a petite, round-faced girl with a coffee and cream complexion and soft, black crinkled hair.
My hair, which barely touched my shoulders, was too unruly to be worn loose, so Mother usually parted it on the side and braided it, one plait on top and one on each side of my head. In contrast to me
Maggie and Carolyn were very light. Their complexion was a soft mellow color, like that of a ripe peeled, banana. And they had shiny, black, wavy hair that fell just below their shoulders. It was naturally "good" – no hot combs were used on them. Their hair texture was the norm in our community. Some of my neighbors were slightly darker in color than they were, but most had wavy or curly black hair, with a few whose locks were light brown or nearly blond. Regardless of the color, most of the women's hair reached to their waist or below. Obviously, I did not fit the norm. And even at my young age I was beginning to feel like an outsider because my physical appearance differed from others in the community. However, my mother always saw to it that I was very clean and dressed neatly. My cousins knew this.
I wrinkled my forehead and poked out my lips. "No she won't!" I said angrily. My mother was a single parent, with two children–my older brother and me. I thought to myself, she has more to worry about than my getting a dress dirty. Maggie and Carolyn must have noticed the expression on my face because they started laughing. I realized they were teasing me. I laughed, too, and began hitting and chasing them. All three of us giggled harder.
These cousins and I lived in a section of Dudley called Simmons Town. Nearly all the families settled along the two roads, which met at a corner forming an L, were the descendents of 9 siblings whose surname was Simmons. The four sons settled on the land their father had left them.
My mother's father, James Simmons, was one of the four. He and his three brothers died before I was born. There were five sisters, two of whom were still living at the time Maggie, Carolyn and I were walking home from the bus stop. One had married a man from Dudley, but he was not a resident of Simmons Town, rather he was from an area nearby. The other sister's family built a home and lived in our community. The land in Simmons Town had been passed to succeeding generations.
In about ten minutes I arrived home. I ran up the four steps to the front porch and heard the old clock that hung in the front bedroom striking four. Our house was an early American, single story, wooden structure, badly in need of paint. It sat on red brick pillows. The porch was a little ragged along the front edge, but this was home and I was glad to be there.
From the porch, I went into the living room, letting the front screen door bang shut. It had been a beautiful, warm, sunny day so the windows and doors were open to let in the refreshing breezes. I glanced in the bedroom to my left. As usual Aunt Clara, my mother's sister, was sitting in her rocking chair next to a cold, potbellied stove. She was crippled from "rheumatism," the doctors said back then. She had walked with a crutch under her right arm since her teen years when she first became ill. This caused her left hip to protrude out of line with the rest of her body. She once told me that she used two crutches at first but that hindered her in doing minor tasks. She got around very well in the house using only one crutch and often cooked the family meals. She was able to work outside the home at the end of the tobacco season when a farmer hired her to assist his wife in tying cured, that is dried, tobacco. This job was done sitting down. When she was seated her lopsided body was not evident, not that the slant of her body would make any difference in tying tobacco.
In addition to my aunt's rheumatism, she had another health problem that caused her to endure excruciating pain in all parts of her body. This occurred every six months or so. When she had these painful episodes, she screamed in agony — calling upon the Lord to please help her! Sometimes when she was screaming and calling out to God, I believed in my young mind that she was faking her illness and her pretense was mainly to punish me. I felt so shaken and uncomfortable when she was sick and carrying on like that. I always knew there would be three or more days of listening to her, day and night, before the spell she was going through ended and home life was back to normal. Years later doctors diagnosed her condition as sickle cell anemia.
Intermittent with her physical suffering, Aunt Clara had outbursts of anger. She would get angry with my mother or grandmother over something minor and accost them verbally — spewing curse words and vulgarity at them. They never responded to her tantrums. She stayed mad for two or three days, slamming things around. Then she would say something pleasant to her most recent target. Her comment was not an apology. But she resumed an amicable relationship with that person as if her anger at the victim had never occurred. She was never disgruntled with my brother or me, but her times of rage were nonetheless disconcerting to me.
Aunt Clara was small of stature with a slim, oval face and she was one of those people whose complexion reminded me of a ripe, peeled banana. She had thick, straight, black hair that fell down to her hips when it was loose. She usually wore it in two big buns, one on each side of her small head. She was very prejudiced toward dark Negroes. However, it didn't seem to matter to her that my brother, Jim, and I were brown with nappy hair. My mother's first husband, Jim's and my father, whom I had never met, was from Mt. Olive, N.C. His folk were from a purer African heritage than the Simmons family. Although his mother was half white, his father, who was deceased, was a "full-blooded" African, so Mother told us. My brother was a bit darker than I, but Aunt Clara was very accepting and affectionate toward both of us, maybe because she depended on us so often to fetch things and to help her in other ways. Our parents were divorced.
"Hi, baby. How was school today?" Aunt Clara asked as I looked in on her from the living room. "It was fine," I said. I stepped into the bedroom and proceeded to tell her about my day. After talking with her for a few minutes, I walked through her room to the back bedroom. I dropped my books and lunch box on the bed. I heard someone on the back porch. It was either Mother or my grandmother, whom we called Momma.
The house had four rooms situated around a central chimney: the living room with the dining room located behind it, the front bedroom where Aunt Clara was sitting and the adjoining back bedroom. All interior walls were whitewashed plaster. Aunt Clara and my grandmother shared the bed in the front bedroom. My mother and I shared one bed in the second bedroom and my 14-year-old brother, James, slept in the other bed. A door led from the second bedroom to the back porch and the water pump. Sure enough, Mother was the one I heard on the porch.
She was busy empting water from two large tin tubs in which she had washed clothes earlier that day. They were the same tubs we used for our Saturday night baths. On other nights of the week we used a foot tub (a smaller version of other tub) for taking sponge baths. I noticed the big iron pot that sat in the backyard appeared cold, so I guessed she had not boiled the white clothes that day. Silky black curls framed Mother's light tan, sweaty face as she struggled into the backyard and a distance from the house to empty pails of water. She was 33 years old, a five-foot-three, very petite woman. Already the strains of life were beginning to cause small lines on her face. I asked if she wanted me to help. She said, "Not now, but you can help me bring the clothes in from the line later. Go change your clothes. I'll call you when I'm ready for you." She didn't say anything about the dirty spot on my new dress. I knew she wouldn't be mad.
Mother had completed only the seventh grade. However she, like others in Simmons Town, spoke mostly correct English. Perhaps we had a slight southern cadence to our speech, but it was not as distinctive as the drawl of white folks in the south, and it was not the usual Negro dialect of the time. The one thing that nearly all the residents of Dudley had in common was using the word "ain't." In sixth grade our teacher required his class to go through the ritual of burying "ain't." That broke me from the habit of using that word.
I left Mother and reentered the back room where I took my play clothes from an old chest of drawers. I placed my school dress on a wire hanger and put it on a nail behind the door. I redressed, picked up my lunch box, and went to the kitchen to put the box on a table.
The kitchen was adjacent to the back porch and shared a common wall with the dining room. There were two rectangular tables along one wall in the kitchen: one, white enamel on metal and the other, wood, covered with a faded floral oilcloth. A ladder back chair was between the two tables. That was Aunt Clara's seat, where she rested while cooking and where she sat to eat at the end of the white table. The rest of us sat around the remaining three sides during meals. The other table was used for preparing food and washing dishes. Washing dishes was usually my chore.
The kitchen was small and rectangular in shape. On the wall across from the two tables were a metal cabinet and two additional chairs. A black, flat top, iron cook stove was along the end wall, where there was a chimney. The one window in the room was beside the stove, providing a view of the side yard and a plot of land where my grandmother planted a vegetable garden every year.
I glanced out the window and saw my grandmother. She was leaving the chicken house with a few eggs in each hand. She was a tall woman with angular features and a rosy-tan complexion. Her silky, black hair was mixed with some gray and hung in a long braid down her back. Aunt Clara once told me that my grandmother was of mixed heritage. Her father was part Indian and Negro and her mother was half white. She said my great-grandmother's four children were fathered by the master on the plantation where she lived. Aunt Clara emphasized the point that my grandmother and her siblings were "free-born." That was important. In some instances it meant the "master thought enough of a slave or a slave's children to free them before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed," she explained.
Looking out the window, I saw the wooden outdoor toilet that sat several yards behind the chickens' wire enclosure. Although the pigpen couldn't be seen from the window, I know it was in back at the very end of the property. My grandmother owned six acres, one on which the house and outbuildings sat and an additional five acres east of the house. When she could find someone who wanted to grow an extra crop — like peas, corn, or cotton — she rented the five acres.
Momma's property was not a farm in the true sense of the word. We didn't have horses, cows, or many chickens like the farmers around us. There wasn't a tobacco allotment (governmental approval) on the five acres, so no one could grow the greatest money making crop in the area on that land. We usually had only one or two hogs in the pen. Momma "went in with" another farm family during hog killing time — they killed and dressed her animal. In exchange she assisted them in cutting up and preparing her pork and theirs for storage. In later years, when times became tougher, we didn't have any pigs.
Momma's husband, my grandfather, had worked as a fireman on the Atlantic Coastline Railroad. Train engines during his time ran on steam. The steam was produced by men constantly stoking the train's furnace with coal. Those men were called fireman. My grandfather's occupation had provided a better living for his family than farming. So he owned less real estate than his brothers. His savings were maintained in other holdings. And he used his money in ways to make his family happy. For example, he bought a Model-T Ford for his daughters. They were the envy of their cousins and others when they drove around Dudley. The car was sold after his death, many years before I was born.
Grandfather was only in his forties when he died of a ruptured appendix. His family could have remained well-off after his death. However, my grandmother was illiterate — not able to read or write. She did not know how to manage the money she inherited. She held on to the house and land but the savings were not invested and were soon gone.
Momma entered the house from the back porch. She stopped in the kitchen where I was and took a bowl from the cabinet for the few eggs she was carrying. "Hey, Hon," she said. "I didn't know it was late enough for you to be home. I have to start dinner." She went into the dining room and put the bowl of eggs in the ice box. I followed her and saw a large block of ice in the top compartment of the box.
"The ice man came today?" I asked.
"Yeah," Momma replied. She checked the container under the box to make sure it was placed correctly to catch drips from the ice as they drained out of the bottom of the box.
I glanced around and noticed the large round table and chairs where we eat only when we had company, and the curved glass-front china cabinet which contained Momma's pretty white china with pink flowers and scalloped edges. The plates were so thin you could see a shadow of your hand through them. I was not allowed to handle them when I helped with the dish washing after we'd had guests. Those were the only treasures remaining from the first house the family had lived in before my grandfather died and afterward, before it burned down — all before I was born. In our dining room there were two French doors between the corner where the cabinet sat and the opposite corner where there was a wood burning heater. The doors opened into the living-room, but no one was there at the time.
I went out through the kitchen and ran down the porch steps to the back yard. Mother was ready for me to help her. As she took clothes off the line and folded the larger pieces, she handed them to me. I held a few pieces to my nose and sniffed them before putting them in the basket — the clothes smelled so sweet and fresh. I folded the smaller items as Mother handed them to me.
I was so happy to be with my mother that I felt like skipping in circles around her. She was away from home much too often. In fact, she would leave in a few weeks. During the late fall and winter, she was a maid for a white family in Raleigh, North Carolina. When her employers left at the beginning of the summer to go to their cottage on the coast, Mother returned home and became a day laborer for neighborhood farmers. This wasn't a steady job, she only worked days when farmers required assistance beyond what a family could provide. The jobs available to her were: chopping weeds from the rows of different crops, "suckling tobacco" (that is breaking off the flowering tops of tobacco stalks) and later in the season, handing tobacco. In the latter instance, she and others stood around a tobacco sleigh (truck) to which opened burlap bags formed sides. The truck had been pulled by a horse into the shade of the tobacco barn. The horse was unhooked from the sleigh. Six people, usually women, stood around the sleigh, picking up four or five sticky tobacco leaves at a time, holding them by the stems, and giving each handful to the woman on her side of the truck. Those women took the leaves handed to them and, using a special technique, tied each bunch to a stick laying horizontally on a man-made rack. Their job was called looping tobacco. At the end of the day, the sticks of tobacco were put on rafters in a tobacco barn where the leaves were "cured" for about a week. Curing involved the farmer feeding a fire in the furnace of the barn and keeping the heat going 24 hours a day for several days, during which the tobacco turned a golden yellow. When I was older I, too, worked in tobacco during six to seven weeks each summer. I used my money for school clothes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Seeking Personal Validation"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Anece F. McCloud.
Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
