Until I was about four years old, I lived with my grandmother, who was already 63 years old when I was born. My mother was the youngest of her nine children and I was the youngest grandchild. Grandmother took charge of me almost from my birth because the influenza epidemic of 1918, the year I was born, carried off my older sister and brought my mother near death and this was followed by a difficult pregnancy and delivery in which the baby died and my mother almost died too. These catastrophes made an invalid of her for a long time.
Under my grandmother’s care in early childhood I felt both secure and free, unhampered by adult supervision. Grandmother never seemed to be checking on me and yet she always appeared when I needed her. And if, after roaming through the house and grounds, climbing the old oak tree, or pulling books out of the shelves to look at the pictures, I became restless for something else to do, I could always find her. She might be sitting in one of the upstairs bedrooms where the light was especially good, mending socks or sewing on buttons, or she could be in the kitchen, churning milk into butter and buttermilk, or sitting in the breezeway, reading the Country Gentlewoman. I would go up to her and lean against her knee and she would promptly enfold me into whatever she was doing.
“Here, maybe you could thread this needle for me. My old eyes aren’t what they used to be and you have good eyes.”
“Do you want to help with the churning? Get that chair and push it over here to stand on and you can work the plunger. Gently now. The butter is almost ready to come. Which butter mold should we put it in?”
“Isn’t this picture pretty! Would you like to cut it out to keep? Go get the blunt scissors; they’re in my sewing basket on the table.”
And best of all, as we ‘worked’ together she told me stories about when she was growing up. I would sidle close to her and look at her deeply lined face and old veined hands, comparing their thin, wrinkled flesh to the plumpness of my own until I became so caught up in the story that I was filled with visions her words created in my imagination. Now, three quarters of a century later, I still have within me my grandmother’s first childhood memory of a hundred and forty years ago.
“We lived in a log cabin,” she told me, “my mother and father and I. And the first memory I have is being in a big bed with my mother and father early in the morning. I was jumping across them, and do you know what? I jumped too far, and fell right off the bed. I expect I cried, but I don’t remember that.” So I don’t remember that, either, but I can see, as clear as clear, the sunlight coming through a small window and falling on the white sheets and pillows of a bed. The head of the bed is to my left, with the window just beyond it. There are two people in the bed, but I don’t see them as clearly. What I do see is a small girl in a short white nightgown that leaves her legs bare. The sunlight catches her as she jumps up and down and across the figures in the bed. Writing this just now, I realize that at some point, I have become the girl. I don’t see her anymore; instead I feel the energy and joy of jumping, jumping, on a bed with two older people lying in it who will take care of me whenever I fall. It is our earliest memory, Grandmother’s and mine.
Most of the things she told me did not register so vividly, many I am sure I have been forgotten and some things that I would so like to know now, she never talked about. Oh, the questions I failed to ask when she was there to answer them! Now I have only disjoint episodes with no idea of how to sequence them except by some internal clues as to how old she must have been when they occurred. I know that her father was named Solomon Boykin and that he emigrated from his native state of Mississippi to Texas because he abhorred the culture of slavery. (Boykin is an unusual name; from what she said, it came from Dutch ancestry.) Her mother’s maiden name was Amanda Barber and she was of Scotch-Irish descent. She must have died soon after Grandmother was born, but Grandmother didn’t talk to me about that nor did she tell me much about her four older brothers who remain nameless to me. It does seem that they looked after her when she was very young from what she told me once when we were talking about freckles. In the summer time, I tended to grow a large crop of freckles on my arms and across my nose and I had just been teased about them by my playful Uncle Herbert. Teasing I didn’t know how to handle. She took me on her lap (so I must have been quite young and small at the time) and told me about her freckles. “Oh, I had a lot of them and one time, when I was playing in the creek in summer, some man on the bank said, ‘Who’s that young ’un bouncing around in the water like speckled turkey egg?’ And my brother just said to him, ‘Well, Sir, that speckled turkey egg is my sister,’ and that quieted him down right away.” She smiled at the memory and I felt comforted.
So it seems she was looked after and protected when she was very young but things changed when her father married again. “Yes, I had a stepmother and we didn’t get along well. My father told me, though, that my mother was the only one he ever really loved.” Life became harder. There were half-brothers and half-sisters she had to help take care of when they were babies and she remembered how she hated having to feed one of them, a boy. “He was a fussy eater, he cried all the time. I’d try to get the food in his mouth and he’d bat it away. ‘Doan wan it’”, she mimicked an infant’s nasal whine.
As the stories unwound, I tried to visualize the settings. Log cabins I knew. The syrup for my pancakes came from a tin can with a log cabin painted on it and a spout at the top that was supposed to be the chimney. I also knew logs were made from tree trunks. The creek that she “bounced around in” I thought must be like the Bosque River that crossed the dirt road below the Negro houses at the outskirts of Stephenville, where it trickled over mud and rock and sand through a tunnel of trees drooping with heavy vines. I had waded there a few times with my Cousin Mary and longed to go there more often.
And then one day, Grandmother actually took me to see where she had been born and spent the first years of her life. In a rented car with driver, we set out for Fairfax County, not terribly far from Erath County in terms of automobile travel on paved roads today, but the journey may actually have taken more than a day. I remember we drove over narrow, winding, unpaved roads although I have no memory of stopping to spend the night anywhere. As we got close to where the log cabin used to bae (it had vanished some time ago), we stopped to make enquiries at a farm house and after that Grandmother began to lean forward in eager excitement. So far, I had been the usual half apathetic childish self that I assumed whenever taken by other adults in a car to some unknown destination for reasons I was never given. In such cases, I simply enjoyed the experience of being in a car and watching things go past or I didn’t enjoy it and whined, but going in a car with my grandmother was a rare event, so I didn’t whine, and now I became curious and excited myself.
At last we drew up to a grove of trees with a clearing in center, where we stopped and got out. With uncomprehending eyes, I stared at the blurred outlines of a grass-covered foundation. The space it enclosed looked so small!
But Grandmother looked at it a long time. Then she took my hand and drew me over to a little pond of water, a spring welling up from the ground, surrounded by moss and shaded by the trees. And there we both stood and stared. Nothing stirred in the pond, but the reflections seem to shift and change, as the water welled up and as air moved the branches of the trees above. “Can I touch it?” I asked uncertainly. “Yes. Go ahead.” The dark water was clear and cool. I was puzzled. It was no bigger than a bathtub. You couldn’t swim in it. Did you bathe in it, or drink it? Somehow, I never asked. But standing there, looking and looking, holding my grandmother’s hand, I knew that here was something mysterious and not to be approached lightly.
Years later, reading that springs were regarded as sacred by the Greeks, I thought “Of course.”
(UNDATED)
