Aunt Sis

My Aunt, Carmen, was the only girl in the family for a long time before Harriet came along, and she was usually just called "Sis" or "Sister" by the six boys she helped raise. I always called her "Aunt Sis" and never thought twice about the oddity of it. It's possible that her given name simply didn't fit her well. My grandmother was either Dutch as she said or Deutsch, a short, round woman, but she must have loved Spanish-sounding names for her girls since she named the other "Harriet Arlena Maria". Big, chunky Carmen with her thin yellow-blonde hair looked much more Teutonic than anything else.

It's odd how little about the woman herself stands out for me. Somehow I seem to not have liked her very much, although it might have been that she and my mother didn't care for one another. Maybe not. Maybe it was just that she was such a country woman. My grandmother was country, too, but there was a bit of leavening about her.

Aunt Sis was married twice but never had any children. I don't remember much at all about her second husband, probably because when they married they moved "away over Bon Aqua way" and so wasn't around the homeplace quite as much. I have the vaguest memory of a suspicion that she was much happier that way. Perhaps it was just that she had finally caught her a man who'd given her a real little house with city plumbing.

She must have been something of an old maid when she married the first time. My early memories of her are along the lines of "young wife", even though she was older than any of the others except Uncle Jethro. I liked her first husband. Probably because of his name. You have to understand the accent I grew up with, and it is difficult to convey, but it is nothing like the "Southern" you hear in movies and on TV; not much like Clinton's, although that is closer. A bit like East Texas with a little lilt to it, very sing-song, flat a's and hard r's. So that Thomas Lamasters came out as something like Tom-miss la-Mas-Tiss. He was usually called by his full name,too, probably to distinguish him from my uncle John Thomas (sometimes called "John" and sometimes "Tom" and by his wife, "Johnny"), and the however many other Toms and Thomases there were in the area.

They first lived with his father in a cabin right up at the source of Yellow Creek, where the gravel road was little more than a wagon trace crossing the creek. It was an old cabin, around a hundred years, and looked more like a shed than a house. It was what I believe is called single pen, but separated into two rooms with the old man's room in the back, a curtain made from flour sack covering the doorway. Aunt Sis and Uncle Thomas had their bed in the front room, which was also the kitchen and living room. The foundation was undressed rock, and there was a distinct list to the place. There was no well, so water had to be carried from the creek, upstream of the place where the road crossed it. The water bucket hung from the porch post, a knobby bark-peeled thing, smooth with wear. Above the bucket there was a nail for hanging the long handled gourd dipper. My grandmother's dipper was tin and gave the water a metallic taste I was used to. Drinking from the gourd was different; the taste was flat, but the texture was unlike anything else. An adventure. I think that even at the time I considered the place exotic.

Later, whether to have a life of their own, or because the old man had died, I can't remember, they moved down the road a bit, to rent the dogtrot house across from the Primitive Baptist Church by the bridge. A dogtrot is sort of like two cabins under one roof with a breezeway in between. This one had porches running the length of the house both front and back, and was sited beneath a huge, upright oak. It was simple, but comfortable. They couldn't have lived there very long, though, before he died and she moved back to live with my grandmother.

That's the way I remember it. I may be wrong.

I Never Sang For M.I.C.K.E.Y.

It is a beautiful October day, and oh, yes I do love October. If I could sing it right, then I would sing.


When I was eight or nine or ten, I sang. In the back yard, I sang, swinging. And, Joan, my next-door neighbor and I used the doghouse roof as a stage for song and dance numbers. (A favorite was the Gillette Razor Theme Song from the Friday Night Fights.) The picnic table was off limits because, "somebody might want to eat on there some day." I remember wanting the car windows down so when I sang the Mickey Mouse Club Talent Scouts would be able to hear me. I liked Doris Day in the fifties.

I wasn't the only one around the house who sang. My Mama did, too. But only when she was depressed or angry. I don't know why. She must have liked music, she had played french horn in one of her high school marching bands and had a letter. (Mama tended to get kicked out of schools. She had a temper.) But when she was singing around the house, or whistling, she usually chose bad hymns and--not blues--depressing songs, like "... if I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly." She rarely knew whole sets of words, and so would sing what she did know over and over again. To this day, hearing someone begin to whistle in the house for no reason makes me want to find a place to cower. I wonder what will follow.


There is only one time I remember Daddy singing. I'd been with him down to Dickson to see the relatives. Mama and Glenn had stayed in town for some reason. It was late summer and within a week or two I would be going away to college. Going away anywhere for the first time. At some point, about three quarters of the way home, he started up on "Red River Valley".

From this valley they say you are going.
I will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway awhile.

Come and sit by my side if you love me.
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
But remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that loves you so true.

This from my never-affectionate, barely expressive father. Don't ask me what I said. I was seventeen and conversation with Daddy usually turned on books and bicycles and fishing, anything but emotion.

So, I suppose somewhere along the line it impressed itself on me that singing (outside of the irrepressible beer drenched crowd tuning in a bar or the spirit soaked counterpart Sunday morning) has to be laden with important emotion. Something heavy.

Evening In Nashville

Yesterday I was standing in the window loving the feel of the breeze almost brisk, almost chill. I do love this time of year. But it was the sky that caught me, just that moment when the horizon still has an orange blush. Above that is light blue, softly grading into cobalt.

It reminded me that when I was in elementary school, fifth grade, sixth, we took a field trip to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. If I was impressed, I do not remember. We weren't allowed inside the rooms, couldn't touch anything. The hallways were long and the wooden floors echoed. Outside , though, there was a beautiful double row of trees, cedars I think, maybe oaks (I should look that up, they were many of them lost in the tornado several springs ago) , along the lane leading up to the front door.

At the end of the tour, we went to the gift shop. I bought a necklace there. It was a silhouette of a cedar tree against an evening sky. Iridescent blues and almost amber, the tree in black. They told me it was made of butterfly wings.

Starlings and Minnows

It is starling season again. Not my favorite birds as individuals or, come to think of it, when roosting, but I love them in flight. They whirl and swirl and it is like the wind made visible. Feathers, leaves, wind in the oat grass like wavelets on streams. Like minnows flashing black and silver as they weave and turn and turn back on themselves.
I learned to swim in a creek not far from my grandmother's house in Dickson County. Yellow Creek at the time was crystal clear and icy cold, and the place we swam was just deep enough for diving on one side. The other side was a limestone shelf. That's where we would drag ourselves out, blue and wrinkled, to thaw and bake until we were ready to go back in and start over again. There was a bridge there. When no one was swimming, you could sit up there, high above the water and watch the minnows.

Yellow cat on the woodpile sunrise and frost 

The Woodpile

Fall. It won't be long until we begin to sight rusty pickup trucks loaded with ricks and cords of firewood for sale. Guaranteed seasoned, dry, split, hardwood. Delivered to your house, stacked free of charge. I love the smell. Hickory, oak, maple, you name it.

My country grandmother cooked with wood, in addition to using a wood stove in the living room for heat, both fueled by a big, loose woodpile back behind the house where a mule-drawn wagon could unload easily, not neatly stacked in ricks and cords, but tossed. Then one of the men, Uncle Jethro or Tom or Will or Herb, or Daddy would split enough to use for a while.

Climbing the woodpile was great sport for me and my cousins when we were small. It was a place of mystery and danger, since our mothers were constantly promising rattlesnakes and copperheads.

I found cats there. The almost-feral barn cats had their kittens in safety somewhere, sometimes even in the hayloft, then when they were about to open their eyes, moved them until they were satisfied with the location. One place they used was the woodpile. I would wait and watch the mother cat leave, then reach down into the depths, scraping my short arms on the rough bark, again and again, trying to find where they were hidden. Now and then my reward would be the back of my hand scratched by spitfire and I could barely get my arm out fast enough, but on rare occasions I could catch them sound asleep and I would slowly pull out a warm, soft handful of kitten.

Elective Surgery 1950s Style

I had my tonsils taken out when I was nine. Literally. They checked me into the hospital on the Sunday afternoon before my birthday. They gave me a beautiful doll from Phillips Toy Mart, a Madame Alexander, I believe it was. When her head came off...This was not a good omen.

Everything about the hospital was a horror. In the room with me was a moaning girl I never saw, always surrounded by a curtain. Mama said, in that way she used when she was lying, that the girl had an accident on her bicycle. Poor Mama. She was within a week of her due date, hugely pregnant, and had to stay the night watching over me.

Poor me. Clear liquids for supper and then the enema. No explanation, just torture. I certainly never connected it with the odd-smelling stuff they used the next day to put me to sleep. Ether may have been a miracle drug when it was introduced for surgery, but it was a far cry from today's relatively safe anesthesia cocktails. There's not much I remember. The mask over my face, a cone actually. The smell was sweet and cool. Someone asked me questions: my name, my school. I was embarrassed because I answered with the school I used to go to and not my new one. Count backwards.

Then it was all over but the hurting. Back to the room and I didn't care if it was clear liquids because swallowing hurt. There was a replacement doll, not so fine, but with blonde hair and pearls. Another night in the hospital before it was pronounced safe for me to go home where I received my promised ice cream.

Two nights later and I was awakened and dumped at my grandparents house. Forget the tonsils! It's a baby brother.

Altogether, I was out of school for three weeks, and by then it was almost Thanksgiving.

My country grandmother's house was golden. Unpainted drywall, the paper backing had turned amber over time, baked by woodsmoke. There were ochre canvas roll-up shades. Hanging bare from a brown-knit covered wire, a single weak light bulb gave a yellow glow to night.

Little Evil

Do politicians in the rest of the country use parenthetical names on their signs, like D. W. "Buster" Brown, or Randolph "Doc" McGovern, or is it a Southern thing? We once had a pol here in Nashville, Gene "Little Evil" Jacobs. Someone had spoken of him as the lesser of two evils. He decided to fly with it. That was before his jail term.

Boy/Man, Girl/Woman

Let me say here and for now that when I use a term it is in context of its time. My time. I was still a Girl and learning long after the absurdity of my first experience with sex.

I never did learn to socialize. The ways of men and women together have always been a foreign language to me. So much that even after all these years I watch the lives around me like subtitled film, never sure I really understand what is going on.

I had almost no practice at simple day to day communication with a man outside the group. Crushes. In high school once I fell for a boy who was kind enough to pick up a dropped pencil, and I can still relive that fractional moment. A tooth-dented yellow stick had linked me with another being and his smile.

In college one boy did ask me out, Richard. And because he asked, I went. We went to football games together and one disaster of a hayride. I ate some cafeteria suppers with him, wishing all the time to be back with my room-mate and her Arnie and his room-mate whom I had adored from near day one. Ray and Arnie punned and laughed; Richard and I went to church and discussed religion. One night he asked me to go steady who had never had a date with anyone else. I shrieked "No!" and ran out of the dorm parlor for the safety of my room. Relieved. There were no more college dates. Only Syl and Arnie, and Ray who never wanted me, and gay Harold whom I loved, not understanding.

Small wonder it took so long to learn which of my crushes were love and which were lust. More often than not it was sex at first sight and I wound up heels over head in love with the wrong men.

Easter 1950
On Hamilton

The Big Town

I can only tell you the things I know. Of course what I know now and what I knew then swirl around in my mind some, so that fact and memory and impression are sometimes indistinguishable

Fact: The city was full of churches and colleges (and church-sponsored colleges). Insurance was big business, as was Protestant publishing. State government. It was a coal-burning city, dusky with years of accumulated smoke. O. Henry's description in A Municipal Report was apt for his time and not so different for mine. "Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix." My memory includes a pooling of stockyard offal when the winds had been stagnant for too long.

When I was little, we lived in one of those clapboard postwar houses that popped up like mushrooms for newly returned troops and their newly minted families. A living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms off a hallway intended for an oil stove, but with the floor space filled by a gas heating grate. Dangerous for a toddler, and I had the scars to show, but during the ice storms we had heat and could even warm food. If the house was insulated, it was barely so. It was hot in the summer to a degree beyond the reach of one black oscillating fan. Half the time I slept with my head at the foot of the bed, hoping to catch the least bit of breeze.

First Lesson

I don't know exactly when it was that I got my first inkling that segregation was wrong. I could read, but was still interested in reading anything and everything in sight. We'll say I was 6, which would have made it 1953 though it might have been a little later. Not much.

Where it was, that I know exactly. Rock City. A strange place for clarity, but there you have it. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but what I remember is that at the entrance was a rock-faced ticket kiosk that provided the only shade in the whole hot, concrete-paved area.

There were three water fountains on the back of that brown and tan stone wall. One read "White"; another, "Colored"; and the third, a knee-high faucet with a bowl beneath it, "Dogs".
It didn't seem funny and it didn't seem right.