by Sissy Spacek
T. Holl had invested in land all over the Rio Grande Valley, but he was a notoriously bad businessman. What land he kept was leased out to tenant farmers. He was a generous landlord—some say to a fault. He lent his farm equipment to anyone who needed it. You could see it parked in fields all over the valley. And he didn’t have the heart to kick families off his property for nonpayment. So when the Depression hit, the banks foreclosed on most of his holdings. He ran for justice of the peace in Mission, and his only income during those years was his civil servant’s salary and the small fees he’d charge for marrying couples, usually right in his own living room. They called him “The Marrying Judge.”
My parents met on a blind double date in Mission, Texas, in 1938. My dad was a dashing employee with the South Texas Chamber of Commerce; my mom was a darling, spirited young woman finishing business college. Mother wasn’t even my dad’s date—she had been set up with his friend. Daddy was driving and it was dark, so he only occasionally caught a glimpse of her tucked into the backseat of the car. But once he heard her soft, musical voice, he was smitten. “That’s the girl I’m going to marry,” he told himself. But he was working under a slight disadvantage. It was hot in the valley, and on a dare from a buddy, probably after a drink or two, he’d shaved his head. And he was being transferred to another job, in another town outside of the valley, in two short weeks, so he had to move fast. Fortunately for him, my mother thought his bald head was cute. After a brief courtship, they were married in the Methodist Church in Mission, on a sweltering hot August afternoon. Just as the pastor was asking, “… if any of you know just cause why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace,” the bride and groom were startled to hear one loud crash after another, as the candles arranged behind the pulpit slumped over in the heat and tumbled to the floor.
The newlyweds moved to Abilene, but didn’t stay long. Daddy kept transferring to new positions all over Texas until World War II broke out and he joined the army air corps. While Daddy was in the army, Mother moved back home with her parents in Mission, where my brother Ed was born in 1944. When Ed started talking, he couldn’t understand why his mother was always calling his grandmother “Mama.” So to keep things straight, he called his mother Little Mama and his grandmother Big Mama. Before long, everybody was calling our grandmother “Big Mama.” It must have started sounding like a Tennessee Williams play inside those white clapboard walls.
Mother’s younger brother, Wade, inherited his family’s gentle spirit, good looks, and easy way with people. She was as close to him as I was to Robbie and Ed. Wade was a champion tennis player and a junior at the University of Texas when he volunteered for the infantry. He was sent to the European theater, where he quickly worked his way up the ranks to sergeant. Mother wrote him several times a week, and even got some letters back. Then suddenly his letters stopped coming, and the army sent a telegram declaring him “missing in action.” Big Mama retreated to her bedroom and barely came out for the next five months. Nobody in the family told her when all of their letters were returned in bundles stamped “Deceased” and a telegram confirmed his death. My mother never gave up hope that Wade might be a prisoner, and she would sneak over to a neighbor’s house to listen to ham radio reports of American prisoners being liberated across Germany. Then, in the late spring of 1945, the phone rang and it was Wade, calling from a hospital in France. He was gravely ill but alive. As Mother had hoped, Wade had been rescued from a German POW camp.
After he was shipped home, Wade married his sweetheart, Arlette Fowler, a vivacious, whip-smart girl from Austin. He went on to law school at UT and became an influential member of the Texas State Legislature.
Shortly after he left the service, my dad was offered the job in Quitman as a county agriculture agent with the Texas A&M Extension Service, advising farmers on the best crops to plant and how to eradicate weeds and pests. Quitman was so far north in Texas that Mother’s family teased her about living way up in “Yankeeland.” Our family was a long way from the Mexican border, but every year at Christmas, we would join the whole Spilman family at my grandparents’ home in Mission.
Papa and Big Mama still lived in the rambling old wood frame bungalow where Mother was born. It had been added to piecemeal over the years. When they first moved there, the roads were still dirt. But by the time I arrived on the scene, there were sidewalks and fat palm trees lining the paved street. During our weeklong visits, the whole family slept in a guest room at the front of the house. In the morning we’d wait until we saw the light under the kitchen door that meant Big Mama was already up cooking breakfast. Then we’d creep through the sleeping house, across the breezeway, and into the kitchen.
“Would you all like some orange juice?” she would ask.
We’d all three nod our heads in unison.
“Well then, climb on up in the tree and pick some.”
“Okay, Big Mama,” we’d say, and we’d tear out of the kitchen as fast as we could go.
There were huge orange and grapefruit trees in the yard right by the kitchen door. The best orange tree had low branches that you could climb up like a monkey. We’d each bring back an armful of fruit and watch Big Mama squeeze it right in front of us. Sometimes she’d slice up some grapefruit that we’d scoop out with the silver spoons she kept in a special glass in the middle of the table. Now I have that glass of spoons in my kitchen in Virginia. It was the thing I wanted most to remind me of Big Mama.
The kitchen table was enormous—to us kids it seemed as long as an aircraft carrier. All the family could fit around it, and we’d gather there for every meal.
I loved my aunt Arlette dearly—and still do—but there was a time when we locked horns over a tray of Christmas cookies. Every year Big Mama slaved in the kitchen making her Southern delicacies for the family to enjoy—biscuits, fried chicken, roasts, and pies. Every afternoon after the family dinner Big Mama set out trays of homemade sweets. As Arlette tells the story, I would come by, pick up a cookie or piece of cake, take one bite, and put it back. One day, after I had ruined four or five cookies and was coming back for more, Arlette decided to put a stop to it.
“Sissy,” she said, “Big Mama has worked her fingers to the bone to make those for us. Eat as many as you want, but if you taste one, you have to finish it.”
I looked at her sideways, then picked up a piece of fruitcake.
“I’m telling you, if you bite that, we’re gonna sit here until you’re done eating it.”
We were eye to eye. I nibbled a small piece, then put it down, never taking my eyes off of her.
“Okay, Sissy. You and I are going to sit here until that’s eaten.”
I sat down. The rest of the family cleared out, but Arlette and I sat there, the piece of fruitcake between us. It was like the Old West and we were gunslingers. An hour went by. Finally Arlette gave up in defeat. Little did she know that if it had been a sugar cookie, she would have worn me down in seconds. But I hate fruitcake and always have.
Big Mama loved all children and drew them to her like a magnet. She saved us bowls of trinkets that she’d collect from cereal boxes and would have them waiting for us by the front door as soon as we walked in. My brothers and I would fight for position next to her when she read us stories from Boys’ Life magazine. I was so little, I used to just lay on top of her while we all snuggled on the couch.
Papa was fifteen years older than Big Mama, and was going blind from glaucoma toward the end of his life. What I remember best about him were his hands, which danced lightly over my face and ponytail whenever I ran up to greet him. It was his way of seeing me. Because Papa was so much older than Big Mama, he never expected to outlive her. And nobody could believe it when she died after a short illness at age sixty-one. I traveled with my mother down to Mission to see her before she died. Big Mama always had beautiful long hair, but when she took to her sickbed she cut it off into a blunt bob. It looked so strange to me. That’s probably why I neve
r want to cut my own hair. I remember her looking up from her bed and smiling at me, and that was the last time I saw her. Papa died a year and a half later.
I was too young to really understand what death was when I lost three of my grandparents, all within a couple of years. I just knew that for a while I had them, and then they were gone. During this time, my mother also lost two babies. Yet I never remember her complaining, or even being cross with us. She had a strong faith, but not a completely conventional one. Even though we attended church every Sunday, my mother never bought into the traditional view that God was an external deity who ruled his kingdom from above. She always told me, “The kingdom of heaven is within,” and “God is love,” not restricted to any religion. A thumb-worn copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking was always nearby. She believed that what happens to you in this world isn’t as important as how you respond to it. She could find God in the daily routines of life, and I must have absorbed those lessons from her, because it’s what I believe. I find the divine in the ordinary, a miracle in every breath. And like her, I try to keep things simple.
Mother told me that when she went through Big Mama’s things after she died, she found lacey handkerchiefs and other precious gifts that she’d saved but never used. My mother encouraged me to enjoy the beautiful things that surround me, not just put them up on a shelf to admire or hide them away in a drawer. And that’s just what I do. I use things up, wear my favorite clothes until they have holes, put the good rugs on the floor in the hallway, and stir my coffee with Big Mama’s silver spoons.
Sometimes I hear myself repeating my mother’s favorite sayings. She seemed to have something to fit every occasion. Some were rather pointed (“Pretty is as pretty does,” and when she caught me chomping my chewing gum: “That’s cute now, Sissy, but pretty soon it won’t be very cute....”). Whenever I wished I was taller or didn’t have freckles, I was likely to hear “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” But my favorite was: “Don’t kick against the pricks.” Anyone who has grown up in cactus country will instantly understand the meaning of this advice. But I have found myself repeating it often in New York and Hollywood, and it seems wiser all the time.
And now I know that everything we tell our children probably doesn’t go in one ear and out the other; it really does stick somewhere inside those little heads of theirs. If you ask me to list all the wonderful things my mother told me, I couldn’t. But they always seem to come to me when I need them most.
… 3 …
My mother was not a stay-at-home housewife; she took a part-time job typing up documents for Don Roberts’s abstract company. Those were the days before Xerox machines, and all the property deeds and liens had to be copied by hand. Her office was in the county courthouse, and she was proud to be one of the fastest typists around. I loved visiting her at work. She was a modern woman and very stylish. She often had her clothes made from Vogue patterns and wore high-heeled shoes that would click on the marble floors when she carried those heavy, leather-bound deed books across the hallway to her desk. Then I’d watch her red-painted fingernails fly across the keys.
Her office was located on the south side of the first floor, across from the little booth where Jewel Thomas—we all called her Sister—operated a snack concession. Sister had some sort of affliction, probably cerebral palsy, that twisted her up and made it hard for her to get around. But she was sharp as a tack, and everyone loved her. I used to save my nickels to buy a Coca-Cola from her, sometimes with a bag of peanuts. I’d drop as many of the peanuts as I could into the thick glass bottle and let it fizz up a little, then suck down the salty soda and the deliciously soggy peanuts. I thought I’d invented something new until I learned that kids all over the South were doing the same thing in their small towns in the 1950s.
Mother worked with five others in the typing pool, but the most memorable was Claude Bruce. He was a little different, a nervous man who wore his shirts buttoned at the neck and wrists and who jumped back whenever he was spoken to. He was so terrified of dirt and germs that he scrubbed his hands raw. This was a problem for a typist, because the ribbon ink would get all over his fingers and Claude would have to run to the sink every few minutes.
“Claude, don’t wash your hands again,” my mother would call after him. “Just do like this!” she’d say, licking her fingertips to wipe off the smudges. But somehow that didn’t work with Claude. Luckily he was a good typist, and he had other amazing skills. He remembered the name of everybody he ever met, along with each person’s birthday. And if you told Claude what day you were born and which year, he could tell you what day of the week it was in the blink of an eye. I’ve heard it told that when he was in the service, he could recite the dog tag numbers of every man in his battalion. I guess today we’d call him a savant. But to us he was just a real good guy with chapped hands and a great memory.
Their boss, Don Roberts, was also unusual. He walked with a wooden leg and wore a patch over one eye, just like Long John Silver. He had a big voice that echoed up and down the corridors when he was visiting the courthouse. He’d had lockjaw when he was younger, and that caused all of his physical problems. “That’s what can happen if you don’t get a tetanus shot,” my parents warned us.
One day my mother showed me a broken office chair that she had been trying to fix and asked me if I could give it a try. I was just a little bit of a girl then, probably about six, but I was famous in our family for fixing things. Toys, roller skates, oscillating fans, alarm clocks—I somehow knew how to put them all back together again. So I had gotten down on the floor and started fiddling with the wheels when I heard a booming male voice—it may have been Don Roberts himself.
“Sissy, you get away from that chair!”
I left the room long enough for everyone to go back to typing, then crawled back through the door and slunk along the floor underneath the desks until I reached that old chair and fixed it. I was good at sneaking around, too. In fact, my dad gave me a nickname, Snooter, which was some sort of variation on “snooper.”
Nobody ever found out, but when I was five or six years old I used to slip into our neighbor Edna Lipscomb’s house when she wasn’t home. I’d watch until her car pulled out of the driveway, then look all around and let myself in the front door, which was always unlocked. Once I was inside I would walk quietly through the darkened rooms, just looking at things. I was curious to see how she lived. The only time I touched anything was when I took one piece of candy from her candy dish. I figured that was for visitors anyway. Although probably invited ones.
But my favorite place to explore was the courthouse. With the summer days long and the adults all focused on their grown-up jobs, a clever enough child could become almost invisible in its nooks and crannies. I would sneak into the courtroom and sit in the judge’s swivel chair when nobody was looking. There was a balcony overlooking the main chamber, and I would take the side stairway up there and root around in the boxes of odds and ends that were stored up behind the highest seats. I’m sure the county records have never been the same. My favorite of all was the spiral staircase behind a heavy door next to the judge’s bench. That was where deputies would take the prisoners up and down from the holding cell on the top floor of the courthouse. Most days there were no trials and no prisoners, so I could play on the metal steps in that spooky old stairwell.
My dad’s office was in the courthouse basement, so I could go down there and visit him when I got tired of snooping around the building. His main job was advising farmers about which varieties of seeds to plant, how to get the best yields, and how to control weeds and pests. In those days, that meant massive applications of fertilizers, DDT, and dioxin-based herbicides. Years later Daddy agonized about the environmental damage and the health risks caused by all those chemicals. But then it was standard practice, and nobody questioned the chemical companies or the recommendations of Texas A&M. My dad told me about an herbicide that the state and county suggested for la
wns, to make them beautiful and weed-free. People would spray their yards, and then before long a school bus might come by and let off a group of children who would run through the sprayed lawn and then track it into their own homes, where their little brothers and sisters crawled around on the floor putting things in their mouths. The chemical was called 2,4,5 T—better known as Agent Orange. Sometimes when my dad went out to the field to work with farmers and ranchers, he noticed that an awful lot of them seemed to be getting sick, and he wondered if there might be some connection. But nobody was keeping those kinds of records back then.
And nobody thought twice when a city truck rolled through the streets of Quitman at dusk, exhaling a cloud of DDT that was supposed to keep down the mosquitoes. My brothers would run or ride their bikes behind the fogger with the other neighborhood kids, all of them dancing and squealing in the sweet, acrid mist that was so thick they could hardly see their hands in front of their faces.
A county agent was responsible for a lot of things, including handing out bounties on coyotes. The old-timers called them “wolves,” even though the last big lobos had been exterminated decades before. To them it was all the same. If it had four legs and a bushy tail and it preyed on livestock, if was a wolf. The county paid $10 per animal, so the farmers and ranchers went out of their way to kill them. Everybody knew where Daddy lived, so sometimes they’d ring the doorbell, or sometimes we’d just open the front door in the morning and find Mason jars stuffed with “wolf” ears. Later, the rules changed and the bounty hunters had to bring the whole carcass to collect the money. That was exciting, because there’d be pickups filled with dead coyotes in the open beds, and my brothers and I would run outside to see them. Eventually the county ran out of money—and “wolves”—and the program ended.
