I spent a dozen years teaching and living in Native
Alaskan villages; my wife is also Native American – she is a registered member
of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Massachusetts.
I admire the respect shown to Elders by all Native tribe
members, both young and old. Elders are
held in a special venerated position, and during Potlatch and special
ceremonies Elders always feel free to stand up and lecture the tribe or
gathering – and everyone listens respectfully to their every word.
During such time I have often found myself sitting through disjointed
ramblings of circular and pointless stories expressing bias and even raciest
views; and I admire the people who respect their elders enough to listen
attentively.
As I have said before: age does not automatically confer
wisdom; it often calcifies past prejudices and results in a rigid view of the
world in past tense.
The aged, however, do have an untapped resource of untold value. As custodians of living history they have
tales on a personal and local level of life and times past: perhaps this is the
real history.
After retiring from the military my wife and I attended
college. One of our class projects was
the recording of living history of the western Maine area. We located subjects between the age of
seventy (old to me at that time) and ninety, and recorded their vivid
remembrances of youth and early life.
A ninety two year old wood cutter recounted his life during
the depression. Wood cutting at that
time was done with whip saws and axes. He
hired six men to harvest the timber, paying them one dollar a day and room and
board. The men lived in his barn. His wife would prepare rolled oats and maple syrup,
harvested from their own trees, for the breakfast meal. The evening meal was always meat (deer bear or
moose) and potatoes that he had grown during the summer. Oxen were used to drag the timbers to a
loading area; and then he would transported the timber to the local mills on a
sled pulled by eight oxen.
A seventy year old woman we recorded told of raising six
children while her husband worked in a wood mill. Along with local history she gave us a number
of recipes, including her recipe for biscuits – which we later tried.
I was raised by my grandmother who was born in 1892. I am sorry to say that I never questioned her
about life in the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century.
As a young boy in the 1950’s I would visit with an elderly
neighbor in her late nineties. She would tell me stories about her life in the
Delta during the Civil War. I was young
so remember very little of her tales – it is a shame someone didn't record her
knowledge for posterity.
Now, I am in my seventies.
I was raised during a time before television. Our telephone number was 126 and my great uncle’s
number was 6. If you didn't know a person’s number you could
just tell the operator who you were calling and she would ring them.
Mail was the standard way of communicating over a
distance. Stamps were three cents and
postcards were a penny. It took a week
for a letter from my grandmother to reach her daughter in Kentucky and another
week for an answer.
My grandmother and I lived on one side of a shotgun
house. They called them shotgun houses
because a hallway ran down the center of the house, and you could shoot a
shotgun through the front door and it would exit the back door. Across the hall was an older couple that
owned the house. Most local houses,
including ours, were built on brick pillars, because before the levees the
Delta would flood every summer.
We had three rooms:
two bedrooms and a kitchen and a small bath.
There was flowered linoleum on all the floors. In each room a light was suspended from the
ceiling on a cloth covered electrical cord.
A screen porch stretched across the front of the house and at night in
the summer my grandmother and the old couple would sit on the porch to escape
the heat – I would often fall asleep in the swing.
After the rent, my grandmother and I lived on twenty-five dollars
a month. A loaf of bread was fifteen
cents and a quart of milk was a quarter.
I usually had grits for breakfast, sometimes bacon and eggs – the eggs
came from my great uncles coop across the street. I qualified for reduced lunches at school. During the summer my lunch was usually a mayonnaise
sandwich – two pieces of Wonder bread with mayonnaise; sometimes a pineapple sandwich
– two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and a ring of pineapple; or a tomato
sandwich –two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and tomato; or a lettuce sandwich,
you guessed it, two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and lettuce (I still love
those sandwiches today.) Supper was
usually something simple: sometimes a piece of meat with rice and gravy;
greens, tomatoes, beans and okra if they were in season; but almost always rice
and gravy, biscuits and gravy or bread and gravy.
One of my uncles owned an automobile dealership and sold Kaisers
and Henry J’s; but he went broke and later moved to New Orleans. He is the uncle that gave me my first gun
when I was twelve years old: a 22 cal. bolt action rifle that I still own.
My grandmother and I didn't have a car, but I had a J.C.
Higgins, red and white, twenty-six inch bicycle that I road from second grade
to ninth (until I was old enough that I was ashamed to be riding a bicycle to
school.)
Before moving to Mississippi at age eight, we had lived in
Kentucky. I remember the Second World
War and star flags in peoples windows. I
remember ration books and tokens used for money.
My memories of the history, politics or current events of
my early years is crap – but I remember the things I experienced growing up in
the forties and fifties; that is, of course, considered only nostalgia in the overview
of history.
But, perhaps it is not the big things elders remember that
is of consequence, but just the everyday life of a different time and place.
Sorry for such a long winded blog entry.
the Ol’Buzzard
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