In the one picture I have of Mammaw’s side of the family, my Great-Grandmother Roma is a solemn-faced woman, wrinkle-browed and worn by work and sorrow and the total responsibility of ten children born and a husband buried by the time she was thirty-five.
My Mammaw related, time after time, the story of the day her Daddy died---"Come in out of the field, drunk two dippers of water, and fell dead in the yard." That was 1904, and he was forty years old, with ten children, the youngest six months. She always ended with her usual "It was the Fourth a' May and we didn't have a seed in the ground." I can attest to those May temperatures, and Since-Daylight-plowing-with-a-mule must have been his morning's work, there in those red-dust hills of Yalobusha county, we agreed that it must have been sunstroke. It certainly mustn't have been "heart trouble" because all but one of their children lived well into their seventies---with one lost to a lung problem in his twenties, with a wife and two babies.
She usually finished with a tribute to her Mama's two older brothers---Unca Taylor and Unca Fate, saying "I don't know what woulda become of us if not for them and the Mattress factory." They had created quite a thriving mattress-tufting business, with a great talent for upholstery and even cloth-walling the elegant rooms of the more affluent denizens of the county. Even back then, ladies would save fabric, or the skirt of an older "nice dress" and have fancy pillows made for their parlors.
Mammaw and her three sisters were "dab hands" with sewing and quilting and such, and each earned a little money with the needlework to help out at home.
You know, I'm just realizing that I never once set foot in either of those uncles' houses---we just went on Sunday afternoons, driving out to visit the uncle and aunt who were the last dwellers in the family home. Speaking of decoration, that little living room had a couch up against what had been the fireplace, with an enormous red-white-and-blue CROCHETED American Flag----48 stars then, and at least 8x10----hanging down behind---can't imagine WHAT it was originally made for. The weight of that heavy flag made it into a great curved swag like a curtain at the top, falling clear to the floor---I cannot imagine the time and weight of that project in a lap, and always thought they must have somehow made it on something like the quilting frames which were hung neatly in the ceilings of several of the houses--it was HUGE, and my imagination made it the work of several folks, sitting around that big rectangle, slip-stitching and chaining away in their respective areas.
But ALL THOSE CHILDREN raised in that small, small-roomed, no-screens house, all of them coming up in the Mississippi hills with such a start, and all the wonders they achieved in those lives they lived! I could never parse the rooms enough to know where they all SLEPT, and three meals a day for that brood must have meant a garden of several acres, and of course, their own milk and a few pigs, with what started as LOTS of chickens.
She and Great-Grandpa (who did not live long enough to be a Grandfather) had had the felicity of having a full chicken-house as inheritance when they married, from a great wagon-full of chicks donated by family and community.
It was the one and only Chicken-Shower I’ve ever heard of in the history of matrimony, but it really makes a frugal kind of sense.
Everybody had a flock of some kind---Reds and Domineckers and other barnyard breeds, and any chicken that hatched was a bonus one way or the other. So when GG Roma and GG Earnest married, they were showered with a pot or pan or two, maybe a pair of homemade pillowslips from one of the older sisters, and a nice flock of chickens.
In the first couple of their married years, GG Romie would fry TWO on Sundays, for there was the go-home-with-you-from-church crowd of family, and even on their Sundays to themselves, they killed and cooked two, for Mammaw said, ”They had a-plenty then, and my Mama always said ONE chicken is just not enough for two people and some leftover for dinner next week while we’re in the field.” Mammaw’s philosophy echoed that: Why fry twice, when you can do a lot at one time.
That idea had its influence over our own family as I grew up, for though Mother might gingerly fry a chicken once in a blue moon, having to start off her Sundays for so many years in such a gruesome manner as killing and cleaning a chicken put her off eating it for life. Oddly, the liver and gizzard were sacrosanct, reserved just for her (far removed from all the pluck and singe, I suppose), and she readily bought and cooked whole packages of those.
Mammaw always had a chickenhouse right there in their backyard, along with a fruit-house, an immense rose garden, a twice-as-big vegetable garden, and that little moon-doored necessary, and for many years they had a cow which I “walked” to and from the town pasture, from when I was about four. Boss would see her friends already out there in the grass, grazing and gossiping, and she'd take off by herself while my little Buster Browns would pelt along in the dust alongside, trying to beat her to the gate.
And when Mammaw and Grandpa were married in 1917, they took with them about a half dozen of the layin' hens and one rooster. Those sufficed for breakfasts and GOOD cakes for many years, and still had a few descendants scratching out by the outhouse way up into my teen years. Mammaw's other dowry was a few cuttings from a huge pink floribunda rose which almost took over their small yard, with the cuttings I took to my new house in the 70s still thriving out there on the family land.
Years later, when in Mammaw's own words, she was "gettin' on up there," the flock were layers only, but by then, I’d named them, and so rendered amnesty to the whole stupid, cackly, feckless bunch. Had it not been for those immense, richly brown “yeller yawked” eggs which were the linchpin of those legendary Pineapple Cakes, she’d probably have swapped the lot for a card of buttons.
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