she could pee—she was modern. But Johnny was a hand-me-down rubber doll who had been left out in the rain. He was bleached-out and lazy and no-account. In one of my earliest memories, Santa Claus left a domestic tableau across the foot of my bed—a little iron and ironing board, and a kitchen stove and sink and pantry. Mama had saved all year to achieve this surprise, to see the delight on my face.
I practiced for my destiny with my new toys. But jigsaw puzzles, not dolls, became my obsession. As soon as my hands could manipulate objects, I was working jigsaw puzzles. In my playpen, I forced the pieces into place and celebrated my discoveries. I had tantrums if the pieces wouldn’t fit. “You’d stand on your head and show your butt,” Mama always says, with a laugh. I loved coloring books and connect-the-dots—any sort of play that caused a design to emerge—a surprise, like the sun coming up.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my parents and I all had the mumps. President Roosevelt was on the radio. Worry suffused the air, and Mama was afraid for Daddy. Daddy had to stay in bed, whileMama helped Granddaddy milk the cows and deliver the milk to our customers. Women could handle mumps, but mumps had a way of “falling” in a man, causing sterility, Mama explained to me years later.
Before the mumps, I had already been stricken with pneumonia my first winter. My parents and I slept in the unheated north room, the coldest room, and I was often sick. I slept in their bed with them for warmth. One night Mama awoke to find me completely uncovered. “You were cold as a frog,” she says. When fever developed later, she fed me juice she squeezed from onions roasted in ashes, and she painted my chest with black-walnut juice, staining my skin brown. She crooned baby talk, her voice throbbing with worry. I can imagine how she must have clung to me fervently from the time I was born. At last she had something of her own in the world. She had me. And she had survived childbirth. At every point of her pregnancy, she must have been aware of her own mother’s fate.
My earliest memories seem to have soundtracks. I try to make sense of the fragments of sounds I remember, but they are growing fainter. I try to grasp them from the foggy air:
My grandmother’s muted, stern murmur, and her soft way of protesting, with a slight self-effacing laugh, all wrapped up in the word “Pshaw!” It was a smoothly rounded cat-spit of a sound.
Granddaddy’s grinning “tee-hee-hee.” He was mild-mannered and calm most of the time, and gentle in his humor.
My mother’s series of little cat-sneezes.
The way she said “Shhh! Be quiet!” when Daddy was taking a snooze.
Her bursts of hilarity and Daddy’s guffaws, his haw-haw-haw laugh at anything foolish.
The bull bellowing. The slap of cows’ tails against their flanks, swishing flies.
The motor of the small truck, Daddy returning from his milk route.
The creaking chain of the pulley as Granny drew the bucket of ice-cold water from the cistern.
The voices of kinfolks gathering, the variety of pitches.
The individual voices—Mose, Herman, Uncle Roe, Uncle Bee, Mary, Datha. The older ones said “holp” for “help” and “ye” for “you,” and they all said “mess” for just about any situation.
Sounds had shapes. Before I learned to read, I assigned a visual language to the sounds I heard. The image for Daddy, naturally one of my first words, stayed in my mind for many years. It was a dented aluminum cup of the kind used for drinking water from a cistern. (We used an aluminum dipper to sip from the bucket drawn up on the screaking pulley.) This crinkled cup flashed into my mind whenever I heard the word “Daddy.” Even now, sounds always have shapes—abstract ones, arcs and shadings of spaces—and a typewritten word accompanies each one like a subtitle. A whooshing sound is long and drawn out, wide on the ends, rounded as the mouth would make it. Traveling
I practiced for my destiny with my new toys. But jigsaw puzzles, not dolls, became my obsession. As soon as my hands could manipulate objects, I was working jigsaw puzzles. In my playpen, I forced the pieces into place and celebrated my discoveries. I had tantrums if the pieces wouldn’t fit. “You’d stand on your head and show your butt,” Mama always says, with a laugh. I loved coloring books and connect-the-dots—any sort of play that caused a design to emerge—a surprise, like the sun coming up.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my parents and I all had the mumps. President Roosevelt was on the radio. Worry suffused the air, and Mama was afraid for Daddy. Daddy had to stay in bed, whileMama helped Granddaddy milk the cows and deliver the milk to our customers. Women could handle mumps, but mumps had a way of “falling” in a man, causing sterility, Mama explained to me years later.
Before the mumps, I had already been stricken with pneumonia my first winter. My parents and I slept in the unheated north room, the coldest room, and I was often sick. I slept in their bed with them for warmth. One night Mama awoke to find me completely uncovered. “You were cold as a frog,” she says. When fever developed later, she fed me juice she squeezed from onions roasted in ashes, and she painted my chest with black-walnut juice, staining my skin brown. She crooned baby talk, her voice throbbing with worry. I can imagine how she must have clung to me fervently from the time I was born. At last she had something of her own in the world. She had me. And she had survived childbirth. At every point of her pregnancy, she must have been aware of her own mother’s fate.
My earliest memories seem to have soundtracks. I try to make sense of the fragments of sounds I remember, but they are growing fainter. I try to grasp them from the foggy air:
My grandmother’s muted, stern murmur, and her soft way of protesting, with a slight self-effacing laugh, all wrapped up in the word “Pshaw!” It was a smoothly rounded cat-spit of a sound.
Granddaddy’s grinning “tee-hee-hee.” He was mild-mannered and calm most of the time, and gentle in his humor.
My mother’s series of little cat-sneezes.
The way she said “Shhh! Be quiet!” when Daddy was taking a snooze.
Her bursts of hilarity and Daddy’s guffaws, his haw-haw-haw laugh at anything foolish.
The bull bellowing. The slap of cows’ tails against their flanks, swishing flies.
The motor of the small truck, Daddy returning from his milk route.
The creaking chain of the pulley as Granny drew the bucket of ice-cold water from the cistern.
The voices of kinfolks gathering, the variety of pitches.
The individual voices—Mose, Herman, Uncle Roe, Uncle Bee, Mary, Datha. The older ones said “holp” for “help” and “ye” for “you,” and they all said “mess” for just about any situation.
Sounds had shapes. Before I learned to read, I assigned a visual language to the sounds I heard. The image for Daddy, naturally one of my first words, stayed in my mind for many years. It was a dented aluminum cup of the kind used for drinking water from a cistern. (We used an aluminum dipper to sip from the bucket drawn up on the screaking pulley.) This crinkled cup flashed into my mind whenever I heard the word “Daddy.” Even now, sounds always have shapes—abstract ones, arcs and shadings of spaces—and a typewritten word accompanies each one like a subtitle. A whooshing sound is long and drawn out, wide on the ends, rounded as the mouth would make it. Traveling
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