Well, now, that flew all over me I’ll tell you right now, but I didn’t say a thing. I looked at Anna Grace to see what she thought. Her mouth puckered a little bit, and she said, “Mmm hmm.” Just like that. I could see she thought it was forward of Myrtle to do her square that way. A Sunbonnet Sue on a man’s quilt with her own dress material in it. Law! My mama would have beat me.
Then Lizzie got out her square and you would not believe—a double wedding ring! I like to have died. I say it. Me and Myrtle just stared at each other with our mouths open like a couple of trout. What was the meaning of this?
Anna Grace said, “Why, that’s real pretty, Lizzie. I remember Aunt Mary Nell used to do a lot of double wedding rings.”
“That’s what my Mama said. She said Aunt Mary Nell was y’all’s very favorite aunt.” Lizzie favored Myrtle and me with a glance and a little simper to go with it. “My Mama and Anna Grace are first cousins.”
Well! As you can expect, I didn’t rightly know what to do. I reckon me and Myrtle finally got our mouths closed by the time Anna Grace got over to her sewing machine to sew our squares, the very last three, onto the quilt top. I kept my head down, pretending to look for my quilting sharps in my sewing basket, while I tried to think of what to do.
It wasn’t nothing for second cousins to marry in those days. This city girl thought she had a claim on my future husband because of family connections. The double wedding ring quilt square made that perfectly clear. I just had to figure out a way to get Anna Grace on my side.
When Anna Grace got the quilt top finished she had us help her put the top and the backing together with the cotton batting in the between. Now I can put in a quilt as tight as Dick’s hatband right by myself, but with somebody trying to help me, much less three somebodies, it’s a job that could make a preacher cuss, kind of like hanging curtains. You have to get everything all straight and make sure all the wrinkles are out of it and what with one pulling it one way and somebody else another, we right nigh started pulling hair even while trying to stay on our best behavior.
Finally Anna Grace got the quilt pinned onto the ticking which was tacked to the side of the frame, and we got it hoisted onto the cords that suspended the whole thing from the ceiling. The three of us got seated in front of our squares so we could all quilt them. It was a tight squeeze. I was on one end and had to come at it sideways so Myrtle could sit in the middle. Lizzie had all the room she wanted because hers was on the end. And believe you me, she needed the room. That girl could down tea cakes the way a field hand could put away collards and cornbread.
Anna Grace was going around the edges of the quilt basting it down here and there so the layers wouldn’t slide. She gave us a big spool of white cotton thread for us to work with. I took it and measured out an arm’s length before I bit it off and handed it to Myrtle. I reckon the fight had gone right out of Myrtle. She had done gone plumb peaked. Even her hair bow kindly hung like a sad sack. But I was still thinking, even as I threaded my needle. I was never gonna give up on your Grandpa.
Lizzie had been yammering on about Atlanta and I think she was even getting on Anna Grace’s last nerve almost as bad as she was getting on mine. It was during an especially tedious description of the fine houses her father’s family lived in that I got my idea.
“What line of work is your Pa’s family in, Lizzie? Are they all preachers?” I asked, all innocent-like. I was doing my quilting in the shell pattern that Anna Grace had showed us on a piece of paper. She wanted it all to match.
“They’re bankers mostly, all except for my Daddy, who got the call to preach the Gospel.” Lizzie said, with a proud little tilt of her chin.
I thought about how my grand-daddy always said he’d trust a mule trader before he’d trust a banker and smiled. I could get five stitches on my needle, using my underneath hand to guide it, before I pushed it through with my thimble. Myrtle was only getting three and Lizzie two. I couldn’t tell if Anna Grace noticed. “Do you have any farmers in your family?”
Lizzie wrinkled her nose. “Not on my Papa’s side. My Papa’s side has the educated professionals. My Mama’s people are the farmers.” She was ignoring the pattern that Anna Grace had given us and was doing her quilting in some fashion that looked like a fan. A crooked fan.
“Do you fancy the country yourself?” I said a little prayer and reached into my sewing basket for another needle and some dark embroidery thread.
“Oh, no,” Lizzie said. “I prefer the city.” Lizzie didn’t miss the way Anna Grace’s thin eyebrows arched close together setting up a wrinkle down the middle of her forehead, so she quickly added, “Of course, I could live in the country . . . if I had to.”
“Could you now?” Anna Grace said. She had started quilting squares opposite us.
“Well, you know, being a farm wife is hard,” I said. Why, my Mama and my Grandmas and all my sisters and aunts and girl cousins can plow like a man . . . if we have to.” I threaded my new needle with the embroidery thread and hoped I could do some free-hand script with a running stitch without making a mess of it.
Myrtle might not could sing or cook, but she wasn’t slow. She looked at me keenly as she took another stitch. “Me, too,” she declared.
Lizzie looked distressed, and one of her little white hands, the one without the needle in it, fluttered to her throat. It was plain she had no idea how to use her free hand to steer her needle underneath the quilt. “Really?”
“Oh, yes. To put food on the table, farm wives get to do everything from churning butter to butchering hogs. Why, my first chore on the farm was when I was four years old. My Grandma would wring an old chicken’s neck and cut his head off with a hatchet on the chopping block. “My job was to keep the cats offen it until it stopped floppin’.”
Lizzie turned as white as the quilt backing, and Myrtle snickered.
“I heard you were a good hand with the livestock,” Anna Grace said as she kept on quilting.
I started my letters with the running stitch. I had to make it look just right. “Yes’m. I had to pull some pigs just the other day. One of them Yorkshire sows was having trouble with her first litter how they will, you know.”
“W-what’s pulling pigs?” Lizzie asked. Myrtle leaned over and whispered something in her ear and if Lizzie didn’t stab herself with her needle, I wasn’t sitting there. A look of horror came over her face like she’d seen a haint. Myrtle had just told her that I reached in after them pigs and pulled them right out. Why, if I hadn’t of, they would have all died, the mama too. My arms were slim, but they were strong.
“Be careful, there, Lizzie. You don’t want to go and get blood on that pretty block,” Anna Grace said. If she thought my pig birthing talk was too unladylike for the parlor, she didn’t let on.
Lizzie was trying to pull herself together, but she was still looking a mite bilious. It was then that she stuck out her little chin and said, “Well, Daddy’s people will find my husband a job in a bank. In fact, they’re opening a new one in Charleston. That way we can live in the city and I won’t have to do any of those awful things.”
Well, Anna Grace showed her teeth like a mule eating briars and huffed out a breath, but she didn’t say anything. Finally, she looked my way and noticed how I was stitching away like stitching was fixing to go out of style. “What are you doing there, Winnie?” she asked me.
“I’m just adding a little saying onto my square,” I said. Anna Grace came over and looked over my shoulder at it. Then she patted me on the head and gave me a wink.
When it was time to go, she said goodbye to the other two girls, but put her hand on my shoulder to stop me from following. “Winnie, why don’t you stay to supper?”
“I’d be happy to, Miss Anna Grace,” I said. “You know, ever since I tasted your biscuits at the last camp meeting, I’ve been wanting to see how you make them. Would you teach me?”
My future mother-in-law hugged my shoulder a little and took me into her kitchen, where she opened a drawer and got out a bowl of self-rising flour and a tiny little glass.
BY THE TIME Grandma had finished the story, the biscuits were in the oven and she was sitting in her wooden rocking chair, the one with the flowered, home-made cushions. The long narrative seemed to have tired her, and she drifted off to sleep, a gentle smile on her face.
I tiptoed to the bedroom and unfolded the quilt. I hadn’t paid close attention to the individual squares before, but now I scanned each of them quickly, looking for the one with the cottage applique’. And there it was, on the edge next to the tattered binding. In neat, even running stitches faded with the passage of time, my Grandma had embroidered her name and the phrase, “There’s no place like home.” I laughed and refolded the quilt.
I checked on the biscuits—almost at just the right golden brown—and went back to the living room as Grandpa was coming in the door with a grocery sack in each arm. Grandma opened her eyes at the sound of the door opening.
“If it isn’t my two favorite girls,” Grandpa said.
I took one of the sacks and kissed him on the cheek. “Biscuits almost done,” I said.
“I’ll go wash up. Be right back. Don’t start without me, now.” We set the bags on the kitchen table, and Grandpa walked toward the back of the house.
I started emptying the bags—two gallons of milk (one sweet, one butter) a bag of corn meal, a jar of peanut butter. Grandma put the kettle on to boil. “You’re pretty smart, Grandma.”
“How’s that?” She removed the biscuits, as perfect as always, from the oven and put them on another hot rag in the middle of the table.
“How did you know just how to get Great-Grandma on your side?”
Grandma laughed. “I had the notion that Anna Grace was wondering how she was going to keep your Grandpa down on the farm after he’d seen Paree’. She’d decided to marry him off straight away or she wouldn’t have invited the three of us girls to that quilting bee. She was determined that if she ever got him home from the war, she’d keep him here. And I ‘spect she figured that a good way to do that would be to have a bride waiting for him when he got back.”
“You sure knew how to eliminate the competition. That cottage applique’ looks a lot like this farm house.”
“Doesn’t it, though? I thought I did a good job on the porch especially.”
“I would have picked you anyway, you know,” Grandpa said. He’d been leaning on the refrigerator while Grandma was setting the table. “Even without my Mama’s encouragement.”
“Gee, Grandpa, you’re almost as smart as Grandma.” I laughed and took the last item out of the grocery bag—a quart jar of sorghum syrup.
“I don’t know if I’m a smart man,” Grandpa said, taking his place at the head of the table. “But I know I’m a lucky one.”
Grandma poured boiling water over the instant coffee in her and Grandpa’s cups and milk in a glass for me. Then we joined hands and Grandpa said his simple prayer of thanks for the food Grandma had prepared.
After our “Amens” I asked, “Can I make grey horse with this fresh sorghum?”
“You know you can,” Grandma said.
I poured some of the thick brown syrup onto my plate and put a dab of warm butter in the center. “Why do they call this grey horse?” I asked, probably not for the first time, but for the first time in my memory. “It’s not grey, even when you swirl it. It’s more light brown.”
“Who knows?” Grandpa said, stirring his coffee in the cup with the pine cones on it, the same cup he’d used for, by my estimation, about a million gallons of coffee in his life time. “It’s just a country saying that goes with all the country ways we have. We say it because our folks said it to us and theirs said it to them.”
“That’s good enough for me,” I said. I got myself a biscuit, made the same way as generations of my womenfolk did, put my knife into the butter and sweet-sour syrup and swirled and swirled.
The Sun, the Moon and a Box of Divinity
by
Clara Wimberly
It is prosperity that gives us friends,
Adversity that proves them.
—Proverbs
Summer, 1949
MARY ANN CALLAWAY was the prettiest girl in the fourth grade. She was also the smartest. She had thick brown hair with streaks of shining blond hidden in the depths. She wore the nicest clothes, nothing handmade like the rest of us. I always envied the way she looked in her pleated wool plaid skirts and cardigan sweaters. On those cold wintry days when many of the girls in class wore pants underneath their dresses to keep warm, Mary Ann never did. She might wear woolen knee socks; she might even wear a longer dress. But she never wore those boyish pants.
I never understood why she chose me as her best friend.
My other best friend, Kay Dean, was nothing like Mary Ann. She was as poor as any kid in class. She made C’s in school and didn’t seem to care. But she always made me laugh. There was nothing Kay Dean wouldn’t do. She was bold and adventurous and rebellious and had a sense of who she was long before any of the rest of us even knew what that meant.
Mary Ann and Kay were acquaintances but as much as I wished we could all three be best friends, it just didn’t happen. I was often caught in the middle of trying to please them both.
My Mother once said that Mary Ann and Kay were as different as the Moon was from the Sun.
I began to think of them that way. Mary Ann was like the Moon—cool and elusive, sitting quietly in the distant night sky. Beautiful, but never causing a fuss.
She was the kind of girl you wanted to sit and talk quietly with. Someone with whom you could share your innermost feelings and emotions. We studied together, our laughter ladylike and subdued. With Mary Ann I felt mature and sure about what I wanted in life. I knew that she would always be my friend and that she would never betray me.
Kay was like the sun, unpredictable, either out and too warm or hidden by clouds and unavailable. The sun was bright and hot; couldn’t be ignored and sometimes you wished it would go away, just for a moment of peace and quiet. That was Kay Dean exactly.
When Kay and I played together I usually allowed myself to be coaxed into doing something I knew I shouldn’t. Nothing really awful, just small forbidden things. She was the first person I ever skipped school with. The only person I ever smoked rabbit tobacco with and the first girl I heard use a cuss word. She was full of mischief and sometimes our antics made me feel quite guilty. But she had a good heart and would do anything for me and I knew she loved me as a sister.
The first time I spent the night at Mary Ann’s house was in the spring of 1948. After the games and birthday cake, Mary Anne was allowed to have one guest stay over. She chose me.
I’ll never forget that day.
To begin with I’d never been in a house like the Callaway’s. The white two-story home with large columns in front sat on a hill overlooking a narrow country road. It looked like something out of Gone with the Wind.
Mrs. Callaway met each guest at the door. I remember that she wore a cotton dress sprigged with pale green flowers and she wore a pearl necklace. She was very pretty and so polite. She didn’t treat any of us like children, but rather like honored guests.
She seemed so different from Mr. Callaway. He was the Sheriff of the County and also a farmer. Daddy always said he was a good man—probably the best and most honest sheriff we’d ever had.
I remember seeing him drive past our house in his faded blue pickup truck on his way home. He always wore a hat and he always chewed on the short stump of a cigar that was never lit. He was a plainspoken simple man who sounded like the rest of us.
Mrs. Callaway, although she had a southern accent, sounded different. Her speech was slower, mo
re languid, and even more southern than ours.
“Why you must be Cara-line,” she said as she welcomed me to the party that day. “Mary Ann has told me so much about you. Come in darlin’.”
I wondered if I should tell her my name was Caroline. Then as I heard her talk and greet others, I decided she had called me by the right name—it was just her pronunciation that was different. I was fascinated by her accent. Somehow she sounded so genteel and elegant.
We played games, including musical chairs in the large living room. Our chairs were placed in a circle on a thick, lovely old rug of muted blues and greens. We were surrounded by beautiful antique furniture and lamps, and art work in gilded frames. A huge grandfather clock ticked softly in the hallway.
Mrs. Callaway had a colored lady who helped with the cooking. That day she came into the living room carrying trays of dainty rectangular sandwiches and cups of pink punch. I’d never tasted anything like it.
Kay Dean picked up several of the sandwiches, stacked them on top of one another, making a Dagwood-like serving, and tried to cram it into her mouth all at once.
Mrs. Callaway came in quietly, took Kay by the arm, pulling the sandwiches away from her mouth.
“Southern ladies never, ever make gluttons of themselves in polite society,” she said. “No matter how hungry they might be.”
Kay Dean looking chagrined, lowered her eyes and took a small nibble from one small sandwich. “Yes ma’am,” she said.
“There,” Mrs. Callaway said. “That’s much better sweetheart.”
“Do you like the sandwiches Cara-line?” she said, turning to me.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “Very much. I don’t think I’ve had it before.”
“Probably not, but it’s very simple to make. It’s just plain old cream cheese and watercress.”
I knew about watercress because we always had it in a salad in the spring. But I didn’t tell her I’d never tasted cream cheese.
“You know when I was a little girl, livin’ in Mobile, Alabama, we had tea every Sunday afternoon. There would be cucumber sandwiches, watercress and cream cheese sandwiches, cheese straws with orange marmalade and a variety of desserts.”
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