I own an oil painting of that house when it was in its prime—with trim green shutters, a white picket fence (which I once had to whitewash, like Tom Sawyer), a red-white-and-blue flower bed, a blue snowball bush, a pink climbing rose, and tall leafy trees hovering above the roof. My mother painted this scene; she painted one copy for each of her children and one for herself. It has been a long journey from our little house into the wide world, and after that a long journey back home. Now I am beginning to see more clearly what I was looking for.
2
In the summer of 1949, when I was nine, my mother and I traveled to Detroit to visit Mama’s aunt Mary, her father’s sister. Mama had made the trip several years before, and she was excited about showing me the big city.
“I want you to see them big buildings,” Mama said. “They’re so tall your eyes’ll pop right out of your head.”
“Are they as tall as the trees around the house?”
“Taller than that. Heaps taller.”
“Taller than the courthouse?”
“Ten times that high.”
It was a peculiar promise, like something from the world of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” But what struck me more than the imagined height of the buildings was my mother’s joy at the prospect of showing me Detroit. She sparkled like a Coca-Cola that had just been opened, and her laughter accentuated her beauty.
Mama washed and ironed our best clothes, made me a new dress, polished my shoes. She packed everything in a heavy-cardboard suitcase snake-striped on one end. Secretly, I thought of it as a valise. In my reading of girls’ mystery series books, suitcases were called valises, which I pronounced “vall-is” in my mind, since I had never heard anyone say the word. The idea of packing a valise fascinated me—the notion that we could stow our necessary belongings and then just vamoose.
We were country people. We didn’t ordinarily go on vacations because there were cows to milk, chickens to feed. The dairy farm held us back with invisible fences as confining as the real barbed wire bordering our pastures. Summer was for work, not for gallivanting. Earlier in the summer, I had gathered at dawn with a bunch of kids at a small grocery in Mayfield; from there, we rode in the bed of a pickup truck out to some strawberry fields. We picked strawberries in handies—flat wooden crates that held six quart-sized boxes. For our morning’s labor we received a nickel per quart. The fruit went to Paducah, where berries from all over western Kentucky met to travel north on the trains so that people in the fine hotels and restaurants of northern cities could enjoy farm-fresh strawberries.
During the Depression, country people from the South had begun trekking northward to find work. Farm people were actually on the move then. Many of them, after planting crops in the spring, left their families and traveled to Detroit to sweat on the auto assembly lines until fall harvest. They came home to get the crops in, then returned to Detroit for the winter. My father’s people, the Masons, were rooted on the land like gnarled old trees, but some of my mother’s paternal relations, the Lees, joined the migration north. Mama’s aunt Mary Lee had moved to Detroit in the thirties, and Mary’s brother Rudy followed during the war, finding work at U.S. Rubber.
“Mary and Rudy make good money up there,” Mama told me.
In front of the hotel in Mayfield, Mama and I boarded the flashy red-and-white Brooks bus. The Brooks Bus Line, a family operation based in Paducah, hauled people back and forth between western Kentucky and Detroit, a distance of six hundred and twenty-three miles. The company had started out as a guy with a car, an entrepreneur who realized that Kentuckians got homesick and needed to make quick trips home.
I was throbbing with excitement. As we rumbled across the bridge over the Ohio River into Illinois, I felt I was soaring into a new freedom. Mama and I were escaping, riding the bus together, leaving the farm behind, with the cows, the dog, the cats, my grandparents, my father, my little sister—the whole world known to me. Coconspirators, Mama and I were heading for a bigger and better place, one that would somehow transform us. Several black people sat in the rear of the bus, and I wondered if they were escaping too.
For the journey, I brought along The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City. I had read it several times, and I was under the spell of New York City, the Bobbseys’ destination. The twins chased enormous clanging fire trucks, got lost on an underground train, and became involved with an Italian organ-grinder and his monkey, who did tricks. I loved it. In a big city, any adventure might happen. Nothing ever happened at home.
“You read it too,” I begged Mama. I wanted to share it with her.
“It’s for children,” she protested. But she gave it a try. I thought she was bored with the book because she soon fell asleep. A chatty man across from us lowered the green paper shade so that the sun wouldn’t glare in her eyes.
“Don’t you touch that emergency cord, now,” he whispered to me. “That ’ere’s liable to get the po-lice after us.”
We rode the red-and-white Brooks bus all night. The bus traveled catty-cornered across the bottom of southern Illinois and on up through Indiana. I woke up intermittently as we passed through strange towns. Late in the night, we tumbled from the bus into the smoky station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a rest stop.
“Fort Wayne,” I said to myself over and over. I had never been anywhere farther than Paducah. In the Weekly Reader at school I had read about Brazil and Africa and Holland. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see mountains or giraffes or people in wooden shoes there in Fort Wayne. The bus station was a stage in our journey to the unknown, where passengers demanded hot dogs and grilled-cheese sandwiches in the middle of the night. The scene was as strange as if I were dreaming it—or reading about it. A black couple from the last row of the bus, sad-eyed and shabby, walked down the sidewalk to the corner. I heard the woman say, “We never ought to have left her,” and the man said, “We couldn’t have brought her. We couldn’t have brought her.”
We continued into the night. Strains of “Cow-Cow Boogie” by Ella Mae Morse and “How Are Things in Glocca Morra” swirled alternately through my head, the sounds textured like a marble cake, until I finally fell asleep. The green paper shades shut out the shock of dawn, but as soon as I was awake I peeped out to see where we were. I saw flat fields of corn. I wondered what would happen if I touched the emergency cord. But I knew I wasn’t ready to stop yet.
De-troit! Everybody said “De-troit.” They said “Polacks” lived there. “Don’t let the Po-lacks get you,” Granddaddy had told me. He didn’t explain what he meant.
Mama had visited Mary in Detroit when I was two. She stayed for two weeks, leaving me at home with Daddy and my grandparents. When she returned on the bus, the driver let her out on the highway, a quarter mile from our house. Carrying her suitcase, she headed down the road. She saw me playing in the yard, and she says that when I saw her, I ran straight to the house. My grandmother declared that Bobbie didn’t know who her mother was, she had been gone so long. But Mama said Bobbie recognized her and had run into the house to tell everybody that her mama was home.
The story was repeated all my life, how I didn’t recognize my mama when she finally showed up after traipsing off to Detroit. But Mama still insists that I did know her. And I’m sure she’s right.
We got off the bus in Wayne, a suburb of Detroit, where Aunt Mary lived in a neighborhood of postwar houses. The houses were all similar, as if they had been created simultaneously, like a paper-doll chain. I was amazed that they were so close together. I marveled at Mary’s house number on a post—number three-three-five. We didn’t have a number at home, except for the one I had painted on my playhouse. Mary lived with her husband and daughter; and her brother Rudy, who was lame, was staying there, too, during our visit. Mama and I slept in the attic, where the knotty-pine ceiling smelled so fresh and sweet it made me giddy. The smell was the essence of promise.
I was eager to go into downtown Detroit, where there were tall buildings and museums and theaters and magnificent store
s. I had seen two souvenir postcards from Mama’s previous trip: pictures of the Detroit Institute of Arts. It wasn’t taller than the courthouse, but it was grand—a stone building with arched doorways and a splendid row of 1940 and 1941 cars out front. The other postcard, an interior view, showed the Court, a room two stories high, with tropical foliage and a fountain and immense paintings on the walls—and what appeared to be a statue of a donkey on a pedestal.
“I’ll show you that,” Mama had promised.
But our hopes collapsed on our first morning in Michigan.
“Bad news,” said Uncle Rudy, brandishing the newspaper at the breakfast table. “The buses are going on strike.”
We couldn’t go into the city because the buses weren’t running. I had never heard of a strike. It sounded like something to do with clocks. Or baseball. I imagined a ball bat poised to make a loud crack. Even though Aunt Mary explained the meaning to me, I envisioned the buses disabled by violent crashes.
Mama moaned. “Just our luck,” she said. “Of all times for us to pick to come up here.”
“They may settle it before y’all head home,” Aunt Mary said. “You never know. Or they might drag it out till Christmas.”
“Don’t worry, littlun,” Uncle Rudy said, patting my head.
Mama gave me a little squeeze. “I got your hopes up for nothing,” she said.
Every day the news was the same—the strike continued. A neighbor gave us a ride to downtown Wayne. But it wasn’t a big city. I was surprised to see the familiar Woolworth’s sign on a store. Woolworth’s was in Mayfield—it was odd to see it here too. We went in, and I bought souvenirs—two dainty little ceramic pots with MADE IN JAPAN labels stuck on the bottom.
“Dust catchers for whatnots,” Aunt Mary said.
“We beat them Japs and put ’em to work making pots and things,” said Uncle Rudy. “That keeps ’em busy so they won’t be a-making guns.”
There was no Detroit. It was disappointing. A dim image of a promised city formed in my head, like the pearly gates and golden streets of heaven. I did not know how to readjust my desires to the ambiguities I was discovering in my early travels. It would be absurd to find Woolworth’s everywhere I went.
But what I remember from that trip more than my disappointment was my mother in this new setting. She was comfortable with her kinfolks, and she let loose with them in a way she didn’t always manage to do at home. She seemed happy just to be somewhere different. Although she was always spirited and full of gaiety, she seemed to burn even brighter up here in the North. I remember how pretty she looked, with her black curls piled on top of her head and the rest of her hair hanging down around her neck like a curtain. Her hairdo was like one of Joan Crawford’s, but Mama was prettier, I thought. If she was so pretty, why wasn’t she a movie star? I wondered.
I loved the North. There were sidewalks to skate on—if only one had skates. I played jacks and Old Maid with a neighbor girl, but she made fun of the way I said “fire.” I said “far.” And I said “tard” for “tired.” Her family had a television set—the first I’d ever seen. We watched a blurry picture of Howdy Doody. At home we had a splendid console radio with wonderful programs—Jack Benny and Fred Allen and shows that played records. Listening to our radio, I had to imagine the faces behind the voices. Now I hoped they didn’t look like Howdy Doody.
Every night the adults played cards and whooped it up. Mary drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Her raucous laugh encouraged Mama’s own laughter. Mama giggled and let loose her best laugh—a trill of little ha-ha’s as gladsome as a rooster crowing at sunrise.
“I can’t stand the taste of beer,” Mama said, making a face when she tried a sip. She smoked a few cigarettes, though.
“Wilburn got me started smoking,” she explained. “I don’t really smoke.”
“I started before I got here,” Mary said. “When the war was on, all the women commenced to smoking, but I beat ’em to it!”
Mama shuffled the deck of cards. “When Wilburn come home from the Navy, he’d be a-laying on the bed, and his cigarettes would be across the room. And he’d say, ‘Light me one, hon.’ So I’d go get a cigarette and light it up for him and bring it to him. Once in a while I’d tell him I was going to have one too, if it was that good.”
From the living room, where I sat on the floor coloring in a coloring book, I could hear the adults at the kitchen table, slapping cards down in a boisterous game of catch-the-deuce. Mary’s raspy voice cut through the smoky air like the sound of Daddy’s truck cranking up. She had adopted a Northern brogue, talking sharply and to the point. She was a big-boned woman, and she wore wide-legged pants. Uncle Rudy wore a brace on his leg, which had been damaged by polio when he was a child.
“They didn’t call it that then,” he had told me.
“It was polio, all right,” Mary said. “We just didn’t know it till now.”
The great polio scare was on that summer, and Mama worried that I would come down with it. But Mary said it came from public swimming pools. I longed to know what living in Michigan would be like, in a place that had swimming pools, in a lovely house like this on a street with a sidewalk, so close to the magic towers of Detroit.
Wandering around the living room, I gazed at pictures of dead people: my great-grandparents and my grandfather Robert Lee. I remembered him, but I didn’t remember when I learned he was dead. He was Mary’s other brother. He was Mama’s daddy. His portrait was on a lamp table. He had a sly grin and a thick head of hair. He stared across the room as though he had something to say, but it would be a long time before I knew his story. I had noticed that Mama wouldn’t look at his picture. I thought she didn’t like him.
I remembered him, even though I was only four when I was around him. I remembered his red hair. I recalled a cold, bleak day at a cabin on a hillside out in Clear Springs. The ground was bare, and chickens roamed through the yard. He showed me a wonderful thing. He dug a hole in the side of the hill and built a fire in it. Then he placed a potato in the hole and covered the entrance. Later, we came back and found a hot potato there—steaming, its skin charred. I had never had a potato cooked in the ground before. At home we always had boiled potatoes-in-the-jacket.
I stared at his photograph. Then I opened my Bobbsey book again, and the New York skyscrapers renewed my longing to see the tall buildings of a big city. In the kitchen, the adults were ending a hand, yelping and puling in their teasing. I heard Mama cry melodramatically, “You fixed my little red wagon!” After a while, I heard her mock boo-hoo’s when she lost a hand. I could imagine the pout on her face. And then later I heard her sing out, “Shoot the moon!” I could hear my mother’s laughter rising above them all, and I could feel her triumph as she gathered the pile of winning cards to her bosom, raking them across the table in glee. Upstairs later, in our cozy pine-paneled loft, she hugged me as though she were sharing a secret with me, something she desperately thought I needed to know.
3
My mother was an orphan. I was her first child. She says it was hard to wean me from her breasts. And she says that when I was little and company came, I would cling to her and look to her for what to say. Today, my awareness of her missing parents makes me cling to her still, because I have never been able to bear the thought of such a hole in my own life.
Her father, Robert Lee, abandoned the family just before she was born, and Mama lost her mother in childbirth when she was only four. She was left to grow up without affection or closeness or indulgence. Yet she wasn’t thrown into an orphanage or adopted or shuttled around to foster families. She lived at first with her grandmother, then in the teeming household of her aunt and uncle. Her kinfolks took her in, out of obligation. But they gave her little love. “You’re lucky to have a roof over your head,” they said as they put her to work. She says she felt like a lost kitten, crouching beneath the passing shadow of a hawk.
For me, the image that most illuminates her childhood is the Christmas orange. One Christmas, i
n the houseful of kinfolks she was raised with at Clear Springs, the older cousins got dolls, but all she got was an orange.
She remembers how, as the smallest child in the household, she was made to work in the garden, the fields, the tobacco patch. “I was just an extra mouth to feed,” Mama says bitterly. “But I was always a hard worker. I guess I got that from my mama. They said she was a hard worker. I don’t know what else I got from her.”
I believe she also got her black hair, a tendency toward plumpness, and her sense of humor from her mother. Maybe she got her enduring spirit from her, too. Mama has a few tiny memories of her mother, Eunice Hicks Lee. And Mama remembers that everybody said Eunice was short and fat with a good disposition, and that she liked to laugh.
“I had hair when I was born,” Mama tells me. “They said my mama had heartburns all the time she was carrying me, so that’s why I had hair. They said I didn’t have any fingernails or eyelashers. I was real little and didn’t cry for two months, and when I did it liked to scared them to death.”
Although my mother has told me about it many times, I still can’t quite manage to grasp the facts of her losses, the darkness of her painful upbringing. My own childhood was sunny and privileged, thanks to her efforts, and so my own choices were wildly different from hers. By the time she was seventeen, my mother had quit school and eloped.
After her grandmother died, my mother, Christianna Lee, was raised by the Mason family in Clear Springs, on the original Mason homeplace. She was taken in by her aunt Rosie, who had married Roe Mason, my father’s uncle. My parents weren’t related, even though they shared a set of cousins, and they did not grow up together. Yet my mother was dominated by Masons all her life.
In May, 1936, she was not quite seventeen. My father, Wilburn Arnett Mason, was twenty. They had met the year before. When they decided to marry, Wilburn kept it from his parents. Christy told no one except Aunt Rosie, who was relieved that Christy would marry into a respectable family. “I was afraid you’d fall in with somebody no-’count like your mama done,” Rosie said. Christy crammed her meager belongings into a suitcase Rosie let her borrow. Then Christy and Wilburn drove across the state line, to Tennessee, where they were married by a justice of the peace named Squire McDade, a popular performer of spur-of-the-moment, no-frills marriages. Wilburn brought Christy home to his parents’ house that night, long after his parents were in bed. The mantel clock was ticking loudly in the living room, where Bob and Ethel slept in the summer because it was cooler there. Wilburn and Christy crept into the north bedroom and settled onto a narrow bed that folded out Murphy-style from an elaborate piece of cabinetry containing a carved headboard and drop-down legs. Wilburn was clumsy, and the racket he made rigging up the bed made Christy giggle. The night was black, and she could see only vague shapes in the room, like people crouching.
Clear Springs Page 3
