It’s raining, in Cleveland, Tennessee, as I begin to write this week’s column. It’s not that cold. A good steady rain. It’ll last for a while. Sure wish this old house had a tin roof. My grandmother, Miz Lena’s maid, Elizabeth, and her husband, Booker, had a tin roof on their little house on Grand Mom’s farm.
It was a cozy little whitewashed wooden house. It was a touch larger and nicer than the other wooden homes on the farm occupied by Miz Lena’s black sharecropping families.
There was a small front yard with an apple tree grown up next to the house, a couple of old tires, painted white, with purple iris flowers growing over the sides and a big gray rock that protruded from the ground. Booker used to talk about how he was going to “take a mule and pull ‘dat rock up outta here!” I don’t think he ever did.
Not that Booker was the least bit lazy. Quite the contrary. He was Miz Lena’s foreman. He understood and respected her. His job was to make sure that Grand Mom’s farm was productive and paid attention to. He delivered year after year and was handsomely rewarded by Miz Lena for his gold-star performances.
Often, Elizabeth would do some of her ironing from her home rather than up at the big house. I really liked hanging out with Elizabeth. She ironed on a little screened-in porch right off her kitchen.