Filed under: Memoir | Tags: Arkansas, Children Youth and Family, Creative Nonfiction, Essay, Family Farm, Farming, Grandmother, Great Depression, Humor, Memoir
It was a hot summer afternoon in 1963-everything in sight seemed to be bleached pale by the sun. I’d been playing near her flowers and somehow managed to get myself stung by a bee. Seeking comfort, I ran onto the wide front porch and Maudie was the first adult I found. She was sitting in one of her old rockers, staring out over the fields which lay across the road. I was tentative in my approach, we didn’t talk, she and I.
I held out my swollen little finger and she eyed it for a few long seconds. Then in a single fluid move she extracted a large brownish glob from her mouth and lay it squarely on my wound. The pain vanished instantly-more than likely from pure visceral shock, as opposed to the effect of the snuff.
She watched my face but never ventured a smile. The slight twitter in her eyes tells me today that she may have been amused. My grandmother was 76 at the time and she’d dealt with many a 4 year old. The thrill of new progeny had long since passed.
I was the youngest child of her youngest daughter. The last of her 10 grandchildren. Maudie Mae was tired. She had birthed three of six children in this house. She’d watched her husband die twenty years before in a bed just yards from where we stood.
This is the only personal interaction can I remember between the two of us. I’m sure others happened, but none have left such an impression. Even then, she was beginning a long, slow slide into dementia. For the rest of her life I would be part of the background. She would never answer my questions or tell me about my mother as a child and she would die before I emerged from adolescence.
Though I have no conversations to look back on, I still remember my grandmother with great fondness, mostly for her quirky behaviors that are now family lore. Here was a woman who refused to sit in front of her TV without dressing up-concluding that if she could see them, then surely they could see her. Maudie would call her dog Rex in from the fields by shooting over his head. She used the same gun to shoot mockingbirds on sight. Why she hated them, we never knew.
This essay is supposed to be a tribute to her. That was my intention almost a year ago when I started it. A tribute to her pioneer spirit; to her farm, which gave us all retreat; and to Maudie Mae, the legend. Our gun-toting granny who toughed it out through the Great Depression with six kids and an ailing husband.
So is that how it works? Do we take an ordinary, hard country life and make it into legend? And though legend certainly makes for an entertaining story, what is it that we are ignoring? Is legend enough to tell me who she really was?
In this instance, the legend does not fill the void between what we are now and what my grandmother was back then. Yes Maudie Mae was a bit crazy, but she was also a tough, distant, suspicious, and sometimes mean lady. These traits are as much a part of our family legacy as the legends. They persist from one generation to the next.
So although I adore the legends, I can make no more use of them than I can of her dusty snuff bottles adorning my desk. They do not fill in the gaps or make sense of the cycle. I take little from my grandmother other than stubbornness, bad genes, and a sense of place.
And so to me the real story is about choices-survival choices-made long ago by children who lived in a very hostile, not-so-distant world. It is about work, struggle, abuse, neglect, ignorance, emotional distance, and a host of other downstream effects. It is about growing up female under a man’s violent control. It is about growing up on an American family farm.
One hundred years ago, most American farms were not the mechanized, scientifically controlled, chemically dependent wonders we see off in the sterile distance today. The farms of 1888, were smaller, meaner, and there were many, many more of them. Each one was a running experiment of barely harnessed animal power and carefully controlled lust. On the typical turn of the century family farm, nearly every seed was put in place by a human hand, and in Arkansas most of those calloused hands belonged to woman and children.
Thus my grandmother, Maudie Mae Rosenbaum, was born a farmer. She was the middle of three sisters and the sixth of eight children overall. Her matriarchal ancestors had worked farms for at least five generations. Starting in Germany, and arriving in Arkansas, via Pennsylvania and Tennessee. What’s interesting to me is that though she would spend all but a few of her years on a family farm, she never really held the title “farmer”. Look at the census records from this period and you find it is usually the men who are described as “farmers” whereas the women are most often listed as “housewife” or simply “wife”.
This was the audacity of being a 19th century female. You can live the life of a farmer; you can plant the seeds; harvest the cotton; cook the food, carry, birth, and raise the next generation of farm hands. But you can never own the farm. That honor goes to your father, brother, or husband.
My grandmother was born and apprenticed in but one occupation. By the time she reached 20, she knew it inside out. Yet she also knew that it would be one of her brothers who would carry the family business into the next generation. They would get the land, equipment, and livestock. For her to practice the only skill she knew, she needed to move on, marry a man with land, and start from scratch.
Put in that context, who the hell wouldn’t be bitter?
Arthur W. Edwards seems to have appeared out of nowhere. I do not know the circumstances of how he met my grandmother. Hell, my mother doesn’t even know how it happened. But I do know there is one consistent rule in southern families-if a story isn’t passed down, then it isn’t all that pretty.
I also know she married late (almost 20), and she married poor. And, though she likely didn’t realize this, she also married an alcoholic. Later in life, she’d see three of her daughters do the same.
They moved around for a while, but by the time my mother was born, they had built a good sized farm, about seven miles northeast of Fulton, Arkansas.
My mother grew up working this farm. Their cash crops were milk, eggs, and cotton. Even today, mom is more than happy to complain about picking cotton, and of seeing her fingers bleed from it.
But then she will jump to her teenage years, of her petty (and apparently still heartfelt) jealousies over her older, prettier sister Sue. And of preparing for school every Sunday night in the kitchen. They’d haul water in from the hand pump out back and heat it on the cast iron stove. Then the girls would take turns bathing in a galvanized steel tub on the floor (I shudder to think of going last) .
On summer evenings, boys would work up their courage and visit. They’d sit in the swing together, and look out over the gravel road to the fields in the east. The boys were willing to endure Maudie’s scornful gaze, while the girls endured the embarrassment of their drunken father, who would sometimes stumble out onto the porch in the late summer twilight. Far too inebriated to walk to the outhouse, he’d settle for peeing on Maudie’s roses.
By the time Arthur died in 1942, they were doing very well. By the time she passed on in 1975, the farm was gone, taken by taxes and another man who didn’t even have the patience to wait for her to die.
Though no longer a reality, today that farm still exists in our collective family memory. It is a reservoir of identity that all the grandchildren dip in from time-to-time. Through the years I’ve heard many stories, and they ring very true because I can still sense the place. I’ve stood in that kitchen were momma bathed, and swatted flies on that porch (for some reason I really got into it).
It is the memory of the farm which personifies Maudie Mae in my heart. I cannot bring myself to think of her ten years later, living out her final, sad days in a darkened cinder block nursing home. No, to see her properly I need to return to the unpainted frame house with the wide porch, and the tall oak tree just outside the front gate. For me, Maudie’s soul will always be reflected in the memory of her large, neatly organized yard; surrounded by a chicken wire and always, always, swept clean of all grass (in the tradition of African-American slaves, though I doubt she knew that).
There are no farmers in our family today, Maudie was the last. But if she were alive, she could count lawyers, teachers and PhD’s among her great granddaughters. All of them carry their title well, and all of them carry her strength within them.
Today the land is empty, just another grassy hill in just another field as you drive past on just another paved state highway. But our family farm was more than a patch of dusty land. It funneled five generations of brutal livelihood into a nexus of love, sweat, and hard cold decision making. The seeds of that compression have scattered across the country, spreading weeds, flowers, and clean swept soil.
© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.
