I was looking through a mess of scrapbook pictures the other day. A few of them date back to my childhood. Those pictures that have, rather than straight-cut edges, a little ripple around the borders. All of them in black-and-white, taken before they invented color pictures. Those snapshots of my life remind me that I’ve been around for a while.
With almost every photo, I can recollect what was going on at the time they were taken. There are school pictures from the ’50s all the way up to my 1966 high school graduation. There’s some of me and my dog, Prince, and several family shots. Photos taken on special occasions, like birthdays and Christmas and long-ago Florida vacations.
A great many have family members in them who have passed on. Mom, Dad, my brother, Ricky, Grand Mom and Grand Dad, my Aunt Sis and some of my buddies. I’m sure all my family members made it to heaven and probably most of my friends.
There’s a couple of them who, I’m almost certain, went straight to hell. My cousin, Ronny, for sure. I don’t know, maybe he and the rest of them have been sitting on a bench in purgatory all this time. They say God is forgiving. Still, I doubt Ronny made it. He was a scoundrel.
I have tons more pictures lying loose in cardboard boxes. I’m gonna get around to putting them in scrapbooks someday. More than likely, way on down the road when I’m too old to get up and go. It’s a funny concept, gluing memories on pages in a book.
Regretfully, I don’t have a single picture of the black people who worked for my grandmother, Miz Lena, even though they helped raise me. I loved them all. Elizabeth, Dimple, Clarence, Ole Tom and others. Back in the ’50s, when I was coming up, black people weren’t invited to be in white people’s pictures. What a shame.
I’d love to have a picture of Dimple out in the backyard of the big house, clipping roses to be set on the kitchen drainboard and breakfast table. I’d settle for just one black-and-white of Ole Tom mooching cigarettes from anybody who walked up the red brick sidewalk to the front door. It would be cool to have a photograph of Clarence in his straw hat and khaki work clothes.
I wish I had pictures of Elizabeth and me riding in the backseat of Miz Lena’s mint green Cadillac. Or she and I down at the creek. Her standing guard, protecting me.
I’d love to have a video of Elizabeth teaching me how to tie my shoes or helping me to tell time on my Donald Duck watch. It would be hilarious to possess a video of her and me in Grand Mom’s kitchen, in our socks with the radio cranked up and dancing up a storm on the checkered linoleum floor. That is, after Miz Lena left the house.
But all I have to do is close my eyes, and I can see them all clear as day.
I was barely 6. It was summer, and I was living with my grandparents on their farm over in Middle Tennessee. We weren’t far from town. Close enough that, sometimes, right after supper, Grand Dad would drive us into town to get an ice cream cone at Mr. Princeton’s Dairy Queen.
Me, my two younger brothers and Elizabeth in the back seat. Grand Mom sat up front next to Grand Dad.
When you’re a knee-high kid, nothing goes better with early Southern summer evenings than ice cream. I had a grin on my face from the time we pulled out. The drives into town and back out weren’t exactly relaxing. Miz Lena helped Grand Dad drive.
She’d start with her instructions to my grandfather from the time he put his wide, brown Buick in reverse. He never said a word.
While Grand Mom was carrying on about driving safely, he’d turn the car around at the top of the driveway, point it toward the county road, kind of bend forward in his seat, with a cigarette hanging from his lips and his glasses at the end of his nose. With his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, he’d drop it into drive and, in a silent act of henpecked defiance, gun it! Gravel would fly everywhere!
Right off the bat, Miz Lena would make her “woop woop” sound and tell him to slow down and remind him of the time he slid off into the ditch. She was always bringing up his mistakes, even if they’d happened only once 20 years back.
On the 15-minute ride into town, my grandparents talked about a little bit of everything. Miz Lena did 90% of the talking. Most of it was about Grand Dad’s driving. Every once in a while, he’d grunt a couple of words. It was an interesting study, watching them from the backseat.
I remember, on one of the ice cream runs to town, Grand Mom telling Grand Dad she would be so glad when his visiting mother got on the plane and went back to where she came from. Grand Mom didn’t care for her much. And, in her mind, for good reason.
When Grand Dad and his older brother, Harold, were in their early teens, their mother checked them into an orphanage outside of Detroit. Then she took off with a man to Los Angeles. Harold and Grand Dad didn’t see her again till they were grown. For the rest of his life, Harold wanted nothing to do with their mother.
Harold was a couple of years older than Grand Dad. He was a big fellow with a loud voice and rough around the edges. He wore a flattop haircut for all his life. He and Grand Dad couldn’t have been any more different from one another.
Harold made a modest living working for Otis Elevator Co. out in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Ethel, lived in a little house in Silver Lake, California. No kids. Grand Mom didn’t care for them either.
Ethel had a bad habit of popping her knuckles and acting real nervous. According to Grand Mom, Harold was clumsy. She used to equate him to “a bull in a china shop.” She was afraid that Harold was going to “mess around” and break some of her antiques.
Grand Dad was a successful architect, and he and Grand Mom had a beautiful home. Consequently, Grand Dad’s mother took her yearly six-week vacation with her “favorite son,” Grand Dad. Miz Lena started getting moody and irritable a month before, what Grand Mom called, “the queen’s arrival.”
Grand Mom started rattling, “Yore mother don’t git up till lunch and then expects for ever one to wait on her hand and foot for the rest of the day. She don’t lift a finger to help with anything. She never says thank you, kiss my foot, nor nothin’. Look out for this curve comin’ up. Yore goin’ too fast!” We made it through.
Grand Mom continued, “Her Highness has got Elizabeth hoppin’ around all day with somethin’ or ‘nother.” Them bubble baths of hers is eatin’ into Elizabeth’s work.” Then, in typical Miz Lena fashion, she looked up toward heaven and said, “Please, Lord.” Not a peep from Grand Dad. He stepped down on the gas.
If we got back to the farm early enough, Miz Lena would let me run down the hill to Elizabeth’s until it was time for bed. I’d meet up with some of the kids of the sharecroppers who lived on the farm and, with a Mason jar in my hand, I’d join them out in the front pasture to catch lightning bugs.
It was getting late. I had a jar full of lightning bugs and a cut of Elizabeth’s blackberry pie in my belly. All the kids had gone home. Booker, Elizabeth’s husband, was in the front room, sawing logs in his recliner. Elizabeth wrapped a few slices of pie in wax paper and put them in a Piggly Wiggly grocery sack for my grandparents. We headed back up the hill to the “big house.”
There were a million stars and a glowing moon in the wide-open July sky. As we crested the hill, the moon got bigger.
Elizabeth pointed up and said, “Sweet Boy, ever one of dem stars is one a da Lord’s angels. Dey sits up dere and look out fo’ dey’s children, still down here. Someday, I be lookin’ down at you. Pick one out, somewheres right of da moon, and dat’s where I be ever night, watchin’ out fuh you.”
The other evening, I was sitting on the porch looking at the summer sky. I got this profound feeling that she was up there, somewhere, out there, on the right side of the moon. It’s comforting to me.
Bill Stamps’ second book, “Southern Folks,” is now available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. For information, email bill_stamps@aol.com.