I am looking at this picture of my Mama. I do not know old she was when this picture was taken. She must have been 19 or 21 years old. She sits on this bench looking off in the distance. She is dressed to the nines. Beautiful black dress trimmed, it looks like in velvet. She wears hose of course. Everybody did. And the shoes were tied with black ribbons. Her hair is jet black.
I wonder what was going through her mind. What dreams did she have?What longings there must have been sitting there on that fancy bench. She was born at the turn of a new century—1905. Seventeen years later she married my father.
These were the depression years which turned this country upside down from 1929 until 1938. But you would not know the hard times yet to come looking at her picture.
The Hard Years
Those were hard years especially for the farmers and in desperation, this new bride and husband fled their home and moved to a place of promise 120 miles away. They had heard you could get a real job paying real money in some cotton mills in Georgia. And not only that but they were told the mills provided housing as well. It was hard to believe those houses had electric lights, running water and indoor toilets.b Rick Bragg would tell the story of these folk in his book, The Best That Ever Was.
Home
How could they not move? So they put their paltry belongings of a wagon and headed 120 miles away. They first moved into a three room apartment with friends. They stretched a sheet in the bed room where the two couples slept in privacy. They got jobs and every week a real paycheck. making $17.00 a week. At first they worked from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon six days a week. One the other side off town they did not know the well-heeled would call them lint heads.
Sitting there in her fancy dress on that stool she had no idea she would work in that mill until she was 65 years old. They would move from that first apartment into their own three room place and later a four room house. She must have been happy. A real job. Real money. Warm, with lights that turned on and a refrigerator bought on time and a bathtub and a wood stove for their kitchen.
They wanted children but no children came. But 17 years later I was born in the mill house where I would grow up. My mother named me Roger because she said, “he makes me laugh.” Four years later in that same house my brother would be born.
With a pittance of a paycheck my mother made sure her boys had the clothes we needed. I never heard her complain about the pretty clothes she could have bought. Her boys came first.
We never had a car. Why would you need a car when the bus stopped at the corner every few minutes? We attended the red brick Baptist church with the tall pillars on the front. She was a Baptist and it took. Sometimes in the kitchen cooking supper I could hear her quietly singing: “ I Can hear my Savior calling” or “Blessed Assurance” or the “Old Rugged Cross.” The myth went that Baptists didn’t drink. So when we needed whiskey for the Christmas cakes she would send the black woman who worked for us to the Liquor Store after dark. She didn’t want anyone to know that the whiskey would be for us.
Sacrifice
But she continued to grow. Years later she could come into our den and see my son drinking a beer. “What are your doing?” she asked. He said, “I am drinking this beer.” After a long pause she asked, “Could I taste it?” And she did swirling the drink in her mouth. And this Baptist woman did and said, “I believe I’ll get me some when I get home. She read books, listened to the radio, she kept up. She crocheted and made quilts. She longed “to make something of herself”. Little did she know how her life in that cotton mill village would not be the parameters of her world.
Nobody in our family had ever gone to college but I still remember the morning she got off work, came home and helped me pack my foot locker. A friend drove up, he helped me load my foot locker but my mother stayed on the porch. She waved but she did not want me to know she was crying. But she let me go.
In the mail week after week she would send me Fifteen dollars those four college years. I never realized what a sacrifice that was for her. The wrote often and when I would come home the fatted calf would always be killed. About every three weeks a package of a homemade cake would arrive. The boys in the dorm always had a feast.
Mama
That wisp of a girl in that back dress trimmed in velvet had no idea how she would one day fill the word mother full and running over.
Her life was hard but she did what she could and more. Once I dedicated a book to her. And when she died we cleaned out her old cedar chest and found a scrapbook filled with clippings and letters and photographs mostly of me. I never knew she kept all those things.
She died when was eighty-eight. But really on this day my memory swirIs. She would never know that long after her passing her l supposedly simple life.
Her name was Ruth and this day and so many others I will always remember.
--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blospot.com
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