The first statement I must
make is that my earliest life was influenced by the Old South southern
culture. Anyone not a part of that bygone
culture will not understand the Faulkneresk (William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily) mind set of southern men and
women that hid family secrets and lived lives of illusion.
To begin at the beginning my
grandmother was born. Her parents lived
in a small Mississippi Delta town. She was born in 1892; and it
is my understanding that her father owned and operated an undertaker and livery
service. He had been a teenage scout
during the Civil War and guided Confederate soldiers through the Delta around
Union lines.
My grandmother was married at
age fourteen to a man in his early twenties.
Her husband was from Kentucky
but was the station master for the Illinois Central Railroad in a nearby Delta
town. I can remember my grandmother
telling me how handsome he was riding his horse when he came to court her.
Within a very few years my
grandmother had six children: four girls and two boys. My mother was the youngest.
My grandfather was strict,
but of all his children my mother was his favorite, and the hardest to control. From the stories I have heard, my mother
reminds me of the young girl Scout in To
Kill a Mockingbird. At eleven she
got into her father’s whiskey and took his Lincoln automobile and drove through the
cotton fields. She became pregnant as a young teen and, as families did in that
day, she was sent away to live with her aunt and uncle in a different town
until the baby was born. About that
same time the aunt and uncle ‘adopted a baby.’
I suspicion that their child is
my half-sister.
True to the southern Mississippi mystique,
the story does not end there. My
mother’s older sister was engaged to marry a man from Vicksburg.
While her sister was working at a defense plant in Memphis
my mother secretly accompanied her sister’s fiancé on a business trip to Savannah, Georgia. There she became pregnant with me. Needless to say, this broke up the
engagement of her sister.
So to pick up in the middle:
I was born. My mother abandoned me in
the hospital, but my aunt came down from Memphis
and retrieved me. I was passed around
for a very short time and ended up with my grandmother, whose husband had just
left her for a younger woman. My
grandmother did not like my birth name so she changed it – she also did not like
my birth date so she changed that also.
We soon moved to my
grandfather’s home town in Kentucky
where we lived for eight years: My grandmother possibly thought her husband
might return to her - but he never did.
The story does not end
here. At the age of eight, my
grandmother moved me back to her home in the Delta of Mississippi. Her children were all grown and so she
received no alimony, and this was before welfare so we were indigent and lived
off the generosity of her oldest daughter who had married well. My grandmother was well respected in the
community (ie. A Rose for Emily) but
we had nothing except her pride.
I grew up believing my
grandmother was my mother and that my actual mother and aunts and uncles were
my brother and sisters. It was not until
I joined the Navy at age nineteen that I discovered my name was not my name; my
birth date was not my birth date; and my sister was my mother and …. I don’t believe even Faulkner could have put
this story together.
I have absolutely no antipathy
toward my mother. She was a woman that
could not be forced into a mold of conformity.
After I was born she decided to enlist in the Navy; but women who had
had children were not eligible. My
grandmother’s brother-in-law was governor of the State of Mississippi and my mother imposed on him to
use his political connections to bypass the unmarried/childless
requirement. Strings were pulled and she
enlisted. She was in the very first
group of Navy Waves to be assigned in a war zone. She was a hospital corpsman aboard a hospital
ship in the Pacific during the Second World War. One of the men she nursed was Claire
Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers.
They corresponded for a while.
Later she married an architect in Vicksburg,
Mississippi. He had been stationed in Pearl
Harbor, at the same time she was assigned; though they had never
met.
Fast forward: I left the
South when I was eighteen and did not return for forty years. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy where I
was a drinker, a fighter, a nonconformist and a womanizer – not a very nice
person. The military rank and social
structure was abhorrent to me; but I stayed in the Navy because I found I could
control my assignments. When I retired
I married a wonderful young woman: we attended college together and then move
to Alaska
where we taught school in remote Indian and Eskimo villages.
After leaving Alaska we moved to the small town in Kentucky
that I remembered from my childhood (no way would I have ever gone back to Mississippi.) I really could not say why I felt the need
to return to a place in the south, other that I identified it with my
roots. Perhaps this poem written in Kentucky will explain:
SITTING ON THE PORCH ALONE AT
MIDNIGHT WITH A BOTTLE OF WHISKEY
Kinsmen from the distant past
Eternal specters faintly
moving
Never seen but somehow
speaking
Their voices just beyond my
reason
Unknown forces drew me back
Can destiny be preordained?
Keeping some appointed
meeting
Generations fade but never
leaving.
We had saved a little money
and were able to pay down on a house.
We owned five acres that was surrounded by two hundred acres of farm
land. No neighbor was visible from our
house. The place had been built in 1864
and was structurally sound and in immaculate shape. It had been owned by an undertaker and his
wife who used it as a party house and retreat.
The rooms were eighteen-by-eighteen with eleven foot ceilings and two
huge fieldstone fireplaces. They had
decorated the place in French-whorehouse chic with wall to wall mauve carpets
and chandeliers – not exactly our taste but the location was fantastic and the
rooms were great.
Now to the Rainbow vacuum
cleaner. We had a little bit of money
left over and because of the carpets decided we should by a quality vacuum
cleaner. We settled on a Rainbow water
vac. The price was almost a thousand
dollars back then (1993.) We felt
guilty spending that much on a vacuum cleaner; but the unit was real quality,
with stainless steel wands and hard rubber tools.
That was twenty years
ago. Now we live in a small cabin in Maine and this morning
we vacuumed the living room with that same Rainbow vacuum cleaner.
There is something to be said
about quality.
Sometimes you get what you
pay for.
the Ol’Buzzard
