Posts Tagged ‘ancestor’

He was a sharecropper, or so I’ve been told.  He lived in a large, beautiful house with a large, beautiful family.  My mother, when she speaks of it, usually breaks off in mid-thought and looks at me.  “Do you remember that house?  You were so young when they lost it…”  The question is always the same, and so is the answer:  no.  I don’t remember anything about that house; I was too young when they moved.

I don’t remember anything about him, my grandfather, either.  I have only the words of my parents, and since mom rarely talks about her father, my only real knowledge comes from a story my father tells.

“He loved that house.  It was on the corner of a big farm, and the owner had worked out an arrangement with your Grandpaw where he could live in the house and help farm the land.”  I nod.  I understand sharecropping, half a step from slavery but an honest way for a man to earn a meager living in hard times.  The Depression made callused hands a badge of honor, feed-sack clothes a sign that you were living better than you might.

“Eventually, of course, he got too old and sick to work.”  My father pauses, remembering.  “He was afraid that he would have to move his family, and he didn’t have any place to go.  He went to the landowner and asked him about it.  He was a good man, though, and he told your Grandpaw that after so many years of hard work, he had nothing to worry about.  ‘Y’all can stay in that house as long as I live,’ he said.

“It was sometime after you were born,” looking at me, “you must have been about three or four — the owner died.  His son inherited the property, and he had big plans for it.  Pretty soon your Grandpaw found out he couldn’t live there any more.

“We had the old van by then, so we drove up there to help them move.  The whole time we were there, hauling furniture out the door and driving it to the new place, your Grandpaw just sat in his chair and rocked.  He never lifted a finger to help us, never said a word, just rocked.  When nothing was left but his chair, he stood up, walked out to the van, and buckled up.

“At the new place we unloaded his chair first.  He found a place for it in the living room, and he sat down and started rocking.  We unloaded everything in the van without a word or a bit of help from him.

“He never did recover from losing the old house.  It was just a few months later that he died, and he spent most of it rocking in his chair.”  Mom has been silent this whole time, thinking about a man I know I met, a man who must have held me in his arms, but whom I cannot remember.  I know the house they moved to.  It was a run-down turn-of-the-century house purchased by my cousin, and I remember looking up into an elderly male face against a backdrop of tattered ceiling.  I do not know if that was my grandfather; it may have been.

The only clear memory I have regarding my grandfather takes place after his death — how long after, I can’t say.  I was sitting on the back porch steps, crying, because my young mind (how young?  4?  6?) had realized my few memories of my grandfather would be lost to me by adulthood.  I buried my head in my arms, sobbing. 

I was right:  the memory of that realization is burned into my mind, but the memory of my mother’s father is only a shadow… perhaps less.That must have been my first glimmer of understanding about death.  All of my grandparents are gone, now, and I don’t fully understand it yet.

* For those interested in the Depression, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor to stop by exit78.com and look at Mike Goad’s “Eyes of the Great Depression” series.  My favorite is #004.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. — Henry David Thoreau

Good things come...

Patience is not a virtue I often witness in people these days.  Our instant-gratification culture has eliminated the need for patience in so many ways that we rarely practice it at all; combine our impatience with our increasing selfishness and the results can be devastating.

In my college classes we sometimes discussed a method of studying the ability to delay gratification.  A child would be placed in a room, sitting at a table.  On the table were a handful of M&Ms.  The child was told by the researcher that he would be left alone for several minutes, and if the M&Ms were still on the table when the researcher returned, the child would be rewarded with more.  If the child grabbed the M&Ms while the researcher was gone, there would be no reward. 

Once the researcher left the room, hidden cameras recorded the child’s actions.  Some children were grabbers; some were waiters. 

Most of the students I teach, I feel certain, would be grabbers. 

So. 

I must have been about ten years old when my grandmother waved me over to the easy chair where she had lately spent all of her time. 

“Take this,” she whispered.  I had to strain to hear her, but I knew that she was speaking as loudly as she could.  She handed me a twenty-dollar bill with one shaking hand.  “This is for your graduation.”  She looked at me.  I was obviously confused.  “I won’t be able to see you graduate,” she explained, leaning back and closing her eyes. 

When I got home, I put the bill in the top drawer of the chest in my bedroom… the same drawer where I kept bicentennial quarters, the occasional Canadian coin that a distracted shopkeeper might give in change, and my favorite pirate ring. 

I didn’t touch it again for three years. 

When I was thirteen, I came home from school one day to find that my mother had locked herself in the bedroom.  Dad was in the kitchen, sipping coffee — rare for a man who almost never drinks it.  He placed his mug on the table with the patient care he uses for every action.  “Your grandmother passed away today,” he said, making direct eye contact. 

I think my mouth fell open at the blunt statement.  After a moment, I found my voice.  “Which one?” I asked. 

“Your mother’s mother.”  He cleared his throat.  “We’ll be going up there tomorrow night for visitation.” 

That was all that needed to be said.  He returned to his coffee, and I went back to my room.  I opened the top drawer of my chest and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill — the one my grandmother had given me years before.  I sat on my bed, looking at the bill, for several minutes before returning it to the drawer. 

When I was eighteen, I graduated from high school.  On graduation night, after I got home, I pulled out the twenty-dollar bill and put it with the checks, gift cards, and other gifts of congratulations my relatives had sent.  After eight years of waiting, my grandmother’s gift had finally fulfilled its purpose.

We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. — Abraham Lincoln

Great-great-granddad

My great-great-grandfather, by all accounts, didn’t put much stock in photographs.  Too new, too strange.  It was almost indecent, making pictures of people like that.  He’d heard that kings and princes and such had painters to come and make pictures of them, but that was painting, that was different.  It took a while… several days, by his reckoning… and, well, that was for kings.  Like wearing those bright-colored tights — fine for fine folk, but not for him.  These photographs, somehow, were worse.  Too quick.  They didn’t take so long to make, and so people were going around wasting them on regular folks.  That just couldn’t be right, could it?

He didn’t hold with fairs and festivals and the like, either.  Too much like carnival.  Oh, yes, he’d heard stories about carnival.  A visiting preacher had spoken one Sunday morning about the immoral ways of the old country and how every year they had revelry so scandalous that it took forty days to atone for it afterward. (more…)