Second Christmas

This past MLK week-end we has Christmas with family who got trapped in another city by snow during the actual Christmastime. We are having a lot of cold, wet weather. The Southeastern US was supposed to have a warm, dry winter due to the influence of La Nina. I guess that forecast was a little off.

My nephew and niece are darling children. 4 and 6 years of age. I see them once a year, and am amazed to see the similarities between them as a set and my brother and I growing up. The boy is my brother's clone. Mom played an old cassette tape from 1979 (my brother was 4), and we discovered that his son even has the same laugh he did as a child! The daughter does not favor me in the face, but she has my tall, thin frame. Beautiful child.

Snow again today, and a chance Sunday night. Winter in Memphis is usually much milder than this. Fun! Hot chocolate calleth.

Fall Rains Have Come!

My grandparents mostly farmed bottomland of two small rivers ( Little Harpeth and Big Harpeth, named for brothers who killed people and threw the bodies in the river). The land was fertile, as river bottom usually is, but farming there is always risky. The spring floods came every year except during extreme drought. Both rivers would flood over their banks for a week or two, depositing rich silt and organic material, but leaving the ground saturated so that crops went in late, after things dried out enough to plough the fields. 

Tennessee has a long growing season, so that might not be a problem, except for two more seasonal happenings. We usually have a dry July/August with very little rain. Then things shrivel up. With the spring soaking, the bottomlands held more water and could be irrigated from the rivers until they, too, dried up to barely flowing creeks you could cross on foot without getting your rolled-up pants wet. Then some years the fall rains came, bringing welcome moisture, but the risk of flooding. That's what we have this year. It is all within normal variation of rainfall for Tennessee. But late planting and a fall flood could be devastating to harvests. No wonder my grandparents switched to mostly growing hay and grazing beef cattle in the bottoms, except for a few vegetable patches.

Hoping to Learn To Play Before I Go

This is one of my paternal grandmother's father's brothers, Cleveland (on the right), with his uncle Frank Crawford (on the left). Cleveland played piano for silent movies and traveled around the country, until he came home one day to find his wife telling him he was not welcome. 

The Rieves family was musical. My great-grandfather could play the fiddle, and did for dances in which they pushed the scant furniture back to the wall and danced right there at home, or out in the barn. Granny said he would throw his fiddle in a pillowcase over his shoulder and go play or preach for anyone (race did not matter) who wanted to hear him. Maybe that is why I want to learn to play a stringed instrument, especially a fiddle, before I go. Just maybe when we all get to heaven I could have a jam session with the Rieves boys, playing the old hymns and telling the old, old story once again. And wouldn't that be heaven?

The Green Hills of the Home Planet

I forgot to take my camera to my 20th high-school reunion over the week-end, so I did not capture it, but it was a great time. Everyone was friendly. I chatted until I was hoarse, then got some water and kept going. It was so wonderful to go home- this cooler and wetter summer had the July hills clothed in brilliant green instead of dried-out olive and crispy brown. It was like vacationing in a warmer version of Scotland or Ireland for the week-end with 150+ of your old friends and their spouses, and I'm about as jet-lagged as I would be if we had actually done that.

For me, it was a welcome break. We hugged and talked and met children and marveled at family resemblance (she is YOU at that age! Wow!), and where everyone is now. What a life! Hope I'm more coherent tomorrow.

Do Not Worry

If you want something to worry about, the Internet is a great place to look. H1N1, E.Coli, economic policy, lots of things. If you're worried about Bugs from Farm Animals, the following story from my childhood may help you calm your paranoia:

When I was a toddler (that's me in the picture), I ate some dirt. We lived on my grandparents' dying farm, complete with cows, chickens, dogs, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, possums, skunks, deer, birds, snakes, and lots of other critters. Pigs were there before I was born. We had a smokehouse out back. Mom called our pediatrician. He was an elderly man, shaky, but expert in the ways of small humans. "She ate some dirt! Will she be O.K.? What should I do?"

"Don't worry about it. If you put dirt in her bottle and let it sit all day, then gave her the bottle, it would make her sick. But eating dirt will not hurt her."

On a farm, with animals. So relax. Wash your veggies in a dilute bleach solution of you have doubts. Wash your hands. Maintain basic hygiene when cooking. And leave the worrying for someone else to do.

My Ancestors Didn't Need No Stinkin' Gym

This is my paternal grandmother's father (lower right) with his brothers. I'm beginning to realize, as we have an older house and I garden and can and hang laundry and hand-scrub floors, that the hands-on life requires a LOT more sheer physical effort than swiping the vacuum over the floor and eating take-out. You don't need a gym when you're hauling baskets of laundry up 2 flights of stairs, scrubbing floors, processing tomatoes and peaches, and clearing some garden beds for fall plantings. That's me this week-end. Barefoot (except for outside) and hausfrauing. If you asked my female ancestors if they did 3 hours of vigorous exercise a week, they would probably have told you they did more than that every day!  Got to get to work.

Birthday! (or How To Make Someone's Day on a Budget)

On this day 50 years ago, my beloved was born. To celebrate, I bought a cheap bouquet of flowers and ironed a tablecloth. I got out the nice dishes. I cooked up some pork chops from the supermarket; corn, green beans (canned in June), and fresh-sliced tomatoes from the backyard; caramel walnut brownies from the corner cafe; and vanilla ice cream from the supermarket. It turned out well. We had fun, and did not spend too much. 

Sometimes You Love Unpopular Things

Yesterday, when I told some of my committee members that I miss the classroom, some of them were very surprised. They seemed to think I would not like teaching at the college level. They find it boring, something they have to do. They'd rather be in the lab or in their offices.

I am a Teacher. It is part of who I am. I started teaching in Vacation Bible School with pre-schoolers when I was 12. Never looked back. Wanted to teach. I still do, but in an environment where I will be physically safe, and where I can contribute, even if my joint condition becomes severely disabling.

I love helping people learn new things. It is fun, even if you have spoken the words 30 times previously today, to help out one more time with that last class. To see it "click" for someone who did not "get it" before- that is an awesome responsibility for me and a joy, especially in a church class. 

I love the Bible and I love teaching, too, so combining the two is great. I hope to make money teaching science, maybe even basic biology. I hope someday to settle in a church and help make lives again teaching the Word to children, which is beautiful as it molds their moral development and opens their hearts to God. Someday.

What Girls Used to Learn in School

This is a picture of one of my great-grandmothers with her two younger sisters. Note the dresses, then look at the picture below from Scientific Sewing and Garment Cutting, copyright 1898 (the youngest sister was born in 1892), by Antoinette Van Hoisen Wakeman and Louise M. Heller.I downloaded the book from Google books. This book describes a sewing program for grades one through eight, in which girls would learn to sew, first by hand, then by machine, including mending rips and patching. By eighth grade, each girl would be able to take a few simple measurements, and using a square and a parallelogram as bases, draft a pattern for a dress in 10 minutes! Modern women talk about being liberated, and being so much better off than their ignorant ancestresses trapped at home, but could your eighth grader design and manufacture any article of clothing from scratch given material, thread, needles, a sewing machine, brown paper, a ruler, a tape measure, a pencil, and pins? 

The description of the work girls did back then makes me feel a bit dumb. I want to work through this book sometime, if only to learn the darning and patching techniques, and how to match plaids. Maybe someday I'll be as smart and capable as my great-grandma was at age 13. We shall see.

Summer Has Changed Since I was Young

If you grew up on the edge of suburbia/rural America as I did, summer went by in a hot, happy blur of outdoor play, lying indoors reading, drinking tea, and leaning off the back porch eating juicy peaches and watermelon. Evidently kids don't do such things anymore. According to the National Institute for Summer Learning (warning: sales pitch for structured summer activities for kids), kids gain three times as much weight during the summer as they do during the school year, because so many sit at home alone all day eating and playing video games indoors instead of running around outside. How sad is that?

I can say as a caveat to the statistics they provide, that I grew a LOT the summer after my seventh grade year- an inch a month for three or four months. I ate massive amounts of food. My BMI probably changed pretty dramatically- though I was a severely skinny child, anyway. I could eat an entire medium pizza alone, and not look like I had eaten anything, like the skinny cows in Pharaoh's nightmare. I just got taller. I still get accused of having an eating disorder, even though I have a healthy weight. So, "kids gain a lot of weight in the summer" might just mean they are growing- or might not. It just might mean somebody needs to kick them out in  the yard, or take them to a park, or leave them with someone who can- which is where those summer programs have their place. I'm going out to run around in the yard now.

Memorial Day

Remembering veterans is a long and proud tradition in the South. Tennessee isn't called the Volunteer State because we like to bring extra to potluck dinners (though we certainly do that). The military volunteering for us started in the War of 1812. I had ancestors in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. One of my mother's father's brothers drowned shortly after coming back from World War I. My father's father and his brothers were exempt from service in World War II, and mom's dad had a damaged hand that probably kept him out. My dad served in Vietnam. 

I say all that to say that in the Southern US, with its monuments to the wars and the boys we sent there, many of whom never came home, the gratitude we ought to feel is ever before us. For my Dad, his service was difficult, even though he was not in combat (fixing generators on an air base that was shelled daily was not easy on a man from a family full of depression-challenged people). He heard so much from so many that the Vietnam war was useless, that he believes it himself, which means the risk of his life was useless. I do not think so. We had a job to do over there, and we did not let our military do it properly. If we had stayed the course and done what needed to be done for the people of Vietnam, would Pol Pot have dared to torture and kill millions in Cambodia? Probably not. Might our Vietnam veterans have led easier lives if someone had said," You tried to do something noble over there. You tried to bring freedom and light to people. You were not given the right tools to do the job, and some of the tools you were given had evil effects on you and the people you were there to help. We understand, and we are sorry, and we will do what we can to make it right."? Instead they were spat upon, turned into a caricature, and used for decades by the news media to generate anti-war sentiment, no matter how just the cause. 

I respect my Dad and the men of his generation who fought for us and the Vietnamese. They were given horrible tools to fight a horrible war, and they live with deep emotional scars. But the fact that they keep going is the bravest heroism of all.

"Devil Horse"

Have you ever learned that you had a relative or an ancestor named in a book? This is one of mine. His name was Nathaniel Green Rieves, or "Green". He fought in the Civil War. He was permanently crippled by a shot to the hip, but fought from horseback until the end of the war sent him home to sharecrop for the rest of his life. He is mentioned in "Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War" by Sam Watkins. He was called "Devil Horse". The book confirms some old family stories, exactly as they were told to me by my grandmother. He was eating with a group of men in camp one time, and a cannon ball bouncing through the group shattered a man's skull, killing him instantly. While other men sat in shock, spattered with blood and tissue, my great-great-grandfather quietly threw a blanket over the body, wrapped it, and took it away for burial. Brave man.

His family was interesting, if nothing else but in names. His father was Thomas Jefferson Rieves. His brother was Elijah Napoleon Bonaparte (or ENB) Rieves. I guess there were hopes for greatness in the family.

What they got was a lifetime of hard work. They lived on the Duck River, which is some absolutely gorgeous Middle Tennessee land- rolling hills, forests, river bottom land, good climate. I can see a bit of inherited stubborn tenacity coming from these hard-working people. I hope my work can be an extension and fulfillment of the aspirations their parents put into their names. 

Bones of My Ancestors

This is the Oliver family. William James Oliver, seated in front, was a veteran of the Civil War. Nancy Jane Thurman was his wife. Granny's mother is standing in the back row behind William. You can see that tall-and-skinny goes back in our family a long way on this side.

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I am a Keeper of Memories for my branch of my family. That means that I keep old pictures, interviews, and stories, and try to expand what is known about my ancestral lines as I get time. Previous generations have been generous enough to share their wealth of stories and precious photographs (please, please, please label those for the future, in hard copies, archival quality- you never know what great-grand-cendents of yours will want to know about that wacky summer in France), so I try to save what I can for my brother's children. Looking through the old photos and postcards and newspaper clippings, I can step back in time to a different world. It was a world of much less material wealth, but much closer interpersonal relationships. A world where agricultural time ruled (milking, planting, harvesting, hog-killing, etc.), but everyone knew everyone, and neighbors were there to help if anything went wrong.

I live a few hours away from their stomping grounds now, and miss the hills of home pretty severely sometimes. It helps a bit to go back through the old stories, and stare into the eyes of the stern old men in the photographs, to remedy the lies told in revisionist histories ("they only lived to be 40 years old in the days before modern medicine..." "the Civil War was a regimented affair- we've never seen roving mobs in America..." " we are so much more intelligent/evolved than our ancestors were... the tests tell us so...") with the truth of the actual records in newspaper and copied microfilm and photograph and old family tale. 

If you have no Memory Keeper, and your elder members are aging, start now before it is too late! Interview! Get copies of pictures and newspaper clippings! Collect the arcane memorabilia of the past! You'll cherish it when they are on the other side. 

Surviving (and Being Helpful) in a World that Isn't Home

Yesterday's post may have implied that I somehow felt superior to the girls who became my neighbors as time passed and the farms disappeared. That was not the case at all. One of them was a model, about my size. She noted our obvious relative poverty and brought over bags of clothing once or twice after photo shoots (She was always being given clothes she did not need or want after the photo sessions). She tried to check on me frequently, and really provided friendship when I needed it, in a sensitive way. I still have a few things she gave me, 20 years later. 

I just felt very, very different. Once everyone matured and the bullying stopped (early high school was pretty rough for me), things were great. Even the boys, noting how I cringed when they used bad language, tried to control it around me (I took a lot of math/sci classes, where girls were a minority), and I tried in turn not to act too surprised when they slipped.

Moving to a big city to get my Ph.D. was a jolt about as culturally shocking as going to school with very wealthy children, but in the opposite direction. I did not see beggars on almost every corner (they seem to work in shifts here) back home. Poverty here means living on food stamps or fast food and church handouts, not garden-grown food and fish from the river. It's a different paradigm of poverty, and must be handled differently.

How to help, even in hard economic times?

1. DO NOT GIVE OUT CASH if you can help it. I saw a beggar regularly on my route to a different school a few years ago, and I started making him a small lunch- sandwich and fruit.He seemed to appreciate it. You might also keep an inexpensive coat in the car to give if someone looks cold (quilt-lined hooded sweatshirts are really warm, and quite popular). 

2. Donate to charitable organizations you trust. They can feed people effectively.

3. Be sensitive to the needs of people around you. Give a good starter cookbook to a college girl struggling to meet budget and needing to learn to cook. Hem up a co-worker's pants or let out a garment for them. Offer skilled help when you do not have money. From someone who grew up in a cash-strapped home, such things are usually welcomed and not as embarrassing as being offered bare cash.

When your values differ drastically from those of the surrounding culture, life can be difficult. Being helpful- and being humble enough to accept help when you need it- bridges the gaps. It doesn't make this world Home, but it does make it a bit more livable until we get There.

Resident Alien

This is a picture of one of my GGF's brothers and his wife. It is illustrative of the ideal of beauty I grew up viewing.
I was reared to be weird. I was a teen in the 80s. When my companions at school were humming "Material Girl", I was humming "I Can't Feel At Home In This World Anymore" (we listened only to Southern Gospel, with a little classical and pre-1970 oldies allowed). They bought outfits for our 8th grade PE fashion show at the malls, while my Mom made mine (a red flannel suit with a cropped jacket and a calf-length circle skirt). I walked like I was in a cornfield no matter how hard I tried to be feminine, because we lived on a dying farm, and we spent a lot of time in pastures cutting wood. My house was full of old books, home-sewn dolls and pictures of fully dressed women, not fashion magazines and minimally clothed plastic dolls and Entertainment Programs of gossip about Hollywood. I had a few Barbies given by family friends, but I tried to make them clothes with more coverage than they had in the package. I was raised by parents with definite beliefs, clearly communicated.

It made a huge difference. It is dreadfully fashionable these days for people not to be "dogmatic" in raising their children, not to insist that their way is right, but rather to let their kids find their own path. "Dogmatic" means "characteristic of a doctrine or code of beliefs accepted as authoritative", and that's where the trouble lies. Authority outside the self, obedience, submission, joy found within boundaries, all of these things have become bad somehow in modern culture. Parents are no longer authorities, but friends. I was SUPPOSED to rebel as a teen. All mom's friends told her I would, that she was too strict. It was more fun to rebel against them (and sometimes even my own emotions, which taught the priceless lesson that emotions are not a dependable guide) than to violate the family rules. 

Did I do some things differently as an adult? Yes. Do we see eye to eye on  everything? No. Did everything go smoothly all the time? No. But I can tell you that raising your kids WITH CLEAR BOUNDARIES and FAITH (and a deeply thought-out, Bible-based rationale for why we believe) is better than the alternative. 

A True Find

The picture above was among the ones inherited from my grandmother (Father's side). Imagine my excitement to turn it over and find in her mother's handwriting, "my Grandfather, Mr. and Mrs. Ervin Thurman". I looked him up. He fought in the American Civil War. If you had ancestors who fought in that war, and they later requested pensions, the Mother Lode of information about them is available on microfilm at your state archives, or maybe even your library. He was in Cook's 3rd infantry (TN) and fought at Donelson, Chickasaw Bayou, Chickamauga, Lost Mountain, Atlanta, and other battles. He was wounded in a Very Sensitive Place at Chickamauga, but he managed to sire four children afterward, so it must not have been too devastating. As he was being carried off the field, he was hit in the back by shrapnel, once again causing "flesh wounds", but that was not why he was claiming a pension. He was claiming the pension because of a 40-year case of diarrhea, which had recently gotten worse, to the point of disability ! A witness note dated 1905 (these microfilms really are fascinating) states that he was also taking care of his 90-year-old father! He owned no land, and made a living by share-cropping. If you think his life was easy, check out his wife's hands. The ragged child looks a bit like my great-grandmother, but is probably a cousin. When I look at these pictures, and read the bits of information about the lives of these ancestors, I am grateful for what I have, and that is good.

How We Lived, Not So Long Ago

For those who say the Worst Times Ever are coming, I kindly refer them to my great-grandparents on my mother's side. Above on the left is HD, my great-grandfather, going with his brother to get corn ground. He was born in 1865, so this is a pretty old picture.

Below is a later picture, with his family and some grandchildren, standing in front of HIS HOUSE, or as some of our relatives call it, their "cabin home". My grandfather may be one of the teens close to HD, who is on the left. They lived a hard life. 

My grandfather had most of the fingers on one hand cut off in a game of "chicken" involving an axe and a chopping block. He didn't back down. Many of the pictures of relatives from the 1900s-1930s on Mom's side are in front of cabins this ragged. Their belongings were few ("no bought toys"); their formal education was limited; their work was hard and continuous; but their lives, if not cut short by moonshine, accident, or injury, were surprisingly long. Mammy, HD's wife, lived to be 90 years old in that cabin. She is below.

So maybe we can live without cable, eh?

The Chicken Business

This is an excerpt from an interview in 1995 with my (now) late great uncle, Marvin. He is the man in the picture above. The girl is my aunt. She is still alive.

Marvin: Yeah, after I got married I assumed the chicken business, raising little chickens up into hens. They went to laying. I have been close to 1,000 of them. George would have nearly 2,000. He kept me busy. Your grand-daddy Orville used to fool with milking cows. I never did get into that part. George and I were into all those chickens. That kept me busy day and night. Some days I’d get 60-70 dozen eggs a day. I’d have to gather them up twice a day, bring them in, clean them that night. I had a thing, an egg washer. You put them in some warm water, and it rotated like that. You’d buy a special kind of soap to put in there, to help clean them. Set them down, let them dry out overnight, then get up at 4:00 the next morning to carton them all up and label them for the people I carried them to. I’d carry Rozena in to work. She’d take several of them during the week; two or three days of the week she would carry them to people where she worked. I carried them all over Belle Meade, and everywhere else down through here.

I remember going to the 2-story chicken house with my grandfather and two uncles as a young child. The egg business was gone, but they still raised chickens for personal use. It was a large, airy structure with chicken-wired windows running the length of it, with wooden shutters to close in inclement weather. They would feed the chickens outside, then get the eggs and clean the house while they ate. Nowadays those chickens would probably qualify as "free range".  That farm was hard on the men, but it was a home away from home for me as a young child.

Another Ancestral Farmer

Francis Hodge was one of the first settlers of the Nashville area to leave the safety of the forts and build his own cabins on his granted land. One still stands in a local park. There is a good essay about it at http://pages.prodigy.net/nhn.slate/nh00055.html. He and his descendants settled near an old Native path, which became a road later. They were active in the Methodist church, and often held Bible studies with people who were passing through the area.
It felt good to go to the park and see that they were restoring the cabin, even if I could not find where some of my ancestors are supposed to be buried in the park. It is very close to my grandparents' former home, which narrowly missed the land condemnation that formed the park (part was donated by a wealthy donor, and the rest was forced from the hands of much poorer small farmers, who were given a pittance for their land). I visit the park with mixed emotions- it is preserved from the development surrounding it, but many people had their livelihood permanently altered by the assembly of the park.
It is also comforting on another level to read of the Hodges and Northerns and other founding families of Nashville to whom I'm related and their faith. Faith held them together when they set out, literally into the unknown, to settle land they had never seen and farm under unknown conditions we would consider nowadays to be those of severe hardship- no grocer, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no appliances. And still, at the end of the day, an open Bible by evening firelight.
No matter what our coming hardships, we can depend on God to help. We have depended too long on ourselves and our good credit; let us turn to the God of our fathers, who will get us over the rough places. Our own "inner light" has led us deeper into the dark; let's turn around, and go back to where we erred in order to go forward.

My Farming Genes- Dempsey Sawyer

There is an interesting story of a boy named Dempsey,  who volunteered at the young age of 16 to serve 2 short stints of duty in the Tennessee State Militia during the War of 1812: one in 1812, and one in 1814. He drew a land grant in Middle TN for his service, and settled in what became known as Sawyer's bend of the Harpeth River. He happened to draw a beautifully scenic farmstead- full of rocky hills, with  a small, winding river subject to frightening floods in the spring season. That setting does not a plantation make. He and his many descendants were self-supporting subsistence farmers, who cooperated with neighbors to start a small school, a Presbyterian church, and a general store nearby in Ash Grove(a town known now only by a historical marker, and a wooden school building slowly rotting in an overgrown field) . His wife requested (and obtained) an 8-dollar-a month pension in 1879, when she was 82 and he had been dead for 19 years. She described him at the time of enlistment as "about 5 ft 4 inches in height, black hair, gray eyes, and fair complexion". No portraits of them have survived. The above is a sketch from a bad photocopy of a faded photo of his home, taken in 1967. The family actually kept a piece of the poplar log in which he cured meat, and I have the sliver of wood (with explanatory note from my great aunt) to this day. The land is out of family hands except for the last 5 acres, but at least we have our pack-ratting ancestors to thank for the memories we can share.