1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: SUSAN, THE CONSCIENCE

I hadn't seen Boy in about two weeks, not since I grabbed the toy car for the second time and ran home. Well, I had actually seen him once, at Mr. Bittner's store, but he wouldn't look at me. I had run there on impulse after seeing a television commercial for a Mars Bar candy bar that prompted me to run barefoot on the gravel road to the store to pluck one off the shelf and run out shouting back over my shoulder to Mr. Bittner to "charge it".
Boy was pretending to read a Superman comic, turning pages quickly one after another. I didn't think he could read, but if he could, I was certain he couldn't read that fast. It had to be a ruse. I left without speaking to him, but my heart hurt a little as I ran home, hoping fervently that I hadn't missed much of the Mighty Mouse cartoon.
Even though I had several friends my own age in Purdon, I actually liked to play with Boy. Most of the time he let me be the boss and decide what we were going to play, and he often gave in to my wishes, the exception being the silver car.
It had been about two weeks since I got the car back for myself. I sat it on the chiffarobe, but every time I looked in the mirror or opened the small closet door beside it, the car stared at me. Susan had asked one evening about dusk why I didn't leave it over there at Boy's house since he didn't have nearly as many toys as the six of us had. Now she sounded like Mother. I didn't answer. I just hugged Monkey even tighter, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried mightily to go to sleep.
Monkey had been the highlight of my fifth birthday as I proudly took the $5 I had been given by my parents and bought him at F.W. Woolworth Dimestore. He looked so merry and mischievous, he seemed a worthy companion. Besides, in the several years I had owned him, he had never once griped at me for something I had done.
Susan, though. She was not nearly as congenial with me as Monkey. She was like having a conscience sitting in your room all the time. Always reading her books, she seemed wise for her years. She was older, but I was scrappier, so we mostly avoided physical confrontations At least Susan did. I often hoped matters would become physical because I could hold my own with her there, but not if she started using her big words and ideas. It was hard to find a comparable comeback when she presented her "oh so logical" arguments. Our fights sounded like a duel between a philosopher and a lobotomy patient.
Susan: "Felisa, I think you should let Jan (our youngest sister), play with your dollbaby because she is younger than you and she doesn't grasp the concept of sharing yet."
Felisa: "No, it's my doll, and I don't wanna share."
Susan: "Felisa, just set a minimum time limit, let her have the fun of playing with her, and when she is satisfied, you can have your doll back, and she will forget about her. Remember what Gelene taught you in Sunday School?" Weirdly, we always called our parents' friends by their first names, but in a respectful way.
Felisa: "No, it's mine and I don't wanna share." The Sunday School comment hit me like a stone thrown directly at the gut though, as I really liked Gelene and wouldn't want her to know I didn't like to share. Susan hadn't threatened to tell her- yet!
A lengthy pause arced lazily between the beds in the stifling air of the bedroom. I hopped up and turned on the huge buzz fan, hoping to drown out Susan's voice. She was looking directly at me with brown eyebrows raised behind her black rimmed glasses. She looked too much like an adult, and I felt uncomfortable. I ran to my bed, snatched the baby doll, and threw it hard at Susan.
"You smell sweaty," I yelled, and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. I had grabbed the car on my way out and put the tiny metal toy in the waistband of my shorts.
On a list of fears, snakes were number one, and the dark was a close second. It wasn't quite dark yet, but the sky was moving stealthily toward it. I had on my tennis shoes, so if I stepped on a snake, I hoped it would roll off my shoes and slither away. I hadn't ever seen any snakes in the pasture right by the house, but I hadn't walked in the tall Johnson grass like I was doing now either. Before, I had always stuck to the paths made by feet traveling the same worn grass day after day.
After pushing open the heavy iron gate, I let it swing shut pulled by the strength of the large spring my dad had installed at the base of it to make it easier to open and shut. I crept along the fence, staying close to the barbed wire since the grass was a little shorter there.
Once I made it to the back side of our garage, I could see Boy's house. Someone turned a light on, the first since darkness slid across the landscape, eclipsing the sun.
I hesitated, edging up against the weathered paintless boards of the old building. It looked like a big wind could cause it to sag eastward and collapse, but we still kept our cherished Buick inside.
Courage resurrected, I headed south along the barbed wire fence, bending at the waist. I hoped no one was outside, and I would bet they were all inside watching Gunsmoke. Grass cut at my legs, making little marks that brought blood, and I let out a little muffled scream when I stepped on a snake that turned out to be a stick from a large oak tree in Boy's yard, its branches drooping low over the fence. When I got even with the screened porch that ran the entire width of the side of his house, I forced myself to take about ten more steps. My best pitch, and the car went over the fence, landing with a little thud and a puff of dust in the dirt that Evelyn called a side yard.
Bolting for home, I secretly hoped Boy found the car soon. Maybe he'd ask me over to play.
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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: “BOY", THE BADBOY

I was mad enough to attack an armadillo if I could find one. I needed to vent my childish rage on someone or something. Stomping across the gravel driveway, past the recently bloomed purple dahlias in mother's flower bed, I jerked open the screen door and let it slam.
"Mother! I yelled. "Are you here?"
"In here," came a muffled voice.
I followed the sound to my parents' bedroom. It was the only room in the house with a temperature less than 80 degrees today because it had the only air conditioner. Sometimes I would beg to sleep in my parents' room, cajoling, crying, whatever it took. They occasionally relented and let me make a pallet in the area that abutted the outer wall of the large walk-in closet. It had been built as an afterthought, after the need for storage trumped the need for space in that room. My sister Susan, along with me and our friends, liked to play in the closet, but always posted a lookout since Mother strictly forbade it. More often, the sleep request was denied, but I tried to remember to bring it up every two to three days during the summer.

"Felisa, you need to sleep in there with Susan. She will be lonely without you." Mother often offered a lame excuse for the refusal. "Anyway, you'll be in third grade in September. You're too big to sleep in here." What did that mean? I certainly didn't know! How do you get too big for air conditioning?
Susan, hearing this whole exchange, rolled her eyes. She was three years older than I, her calm bookishness a clear contrast to my proclivity for perpetual activity. The large room we shared had been the dining room, but was converted to bedroom space after my birth. I was the fifth child of six, the second or third to be greeted with consternation by our paternal grandmother, who had only raised one child, our father, to adulthood. Her firstborn child, a boy, had died at age 18months after tragically drinking coal oil. I heard vague stories that a babysitter was responsible for leaving the coal oil on the floor, but I never got up the nerve to ask Nettie about it. It was one of the few taboo subjects in our home.
Our bedroom was large, and each of us three girls had her own twin bed, two of them set end-to-end, lining the outside wall so that each faced a big window, the third placed opposite them on the inside wall. The windows were open every season except winter and permitted air to freely enter the room. In the daytime, the air was often warm or hot, but at night, it was fresh and cool, no matter how hot the day had been. A huge and heavy gray steel fan, its two-part shape resembling some huge round robot, kept the air circulating in the room, and shorty pajamas were the standard uniform for summer nights. Cottons were cooler than nylons and the preferred material for nighttime.
Occasionally, Mrs. Bittner, our neighbor, told Mother how she heard me talking in my sleep. It embarrassed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was known to have a very active sleep/dream life, and once scared my grandmother, Molly Jeanette, whom all of us called Nettie , when I was spending the night at her house in Corsicana. Nettie told me the next morning that she had been awakened by a commotion and woke to see me jumping up and down on the small twin bed that occupied space in the same ample bedroom with her. I was also making sounds like an ape . It took a few seconds, but then I remembered that my cousin Phil, about seven years older than I who was also spending the night , had read me a bedtime story about apes kidnapping a woman and taking her into the jungle. Then I remembered my dream about apes taking me into the jungle.
"I guess I was fighting off the apes," I laughed.
"Well, tonight, you and Phil need to find another sort of bedtime story to read," Nettie cautioned.
"MooooTHER!!!!" I yelled again, impatient this time.
"Right HERE, Felisa. In the closet."
"I'm mad at Boy!!! I wailed.
"Oh?" Mother paused, folding clothes and putting them in a brown pasteboard box. The pause…..I noticed that Mother often did this with me. My brothers and sisters seemed to get instant answers.
"He stole my yellow metal race car and now it's silver because he scraped the paint off it, but I know it's mine. He says it's his. He stole it and scraped the paint off it and he's lying about it." I stomped my foot hard. My face was contorted, but Mother seemed to be suppressing a smile.
"Where is the car?", Mother asked tentatively.
"Right here," I unfolded my palm to reveal the small car.
"Oh, I see. Well, how did you get it?"
"I just grabbed it and ran. I threw some dirt at him too when he started chasing me."
"Well, I suspect he could have caught you if he'd really wanted. He's ten, you're only seven . And he's a foot taller than you are."
"That's wrong, isn't it? He wouldn't admit it."
Mother hesitated a minute. A soft look moved like a shadow over her face.
"Yes, it's wrong for someone to take what is someone else's. She paused. "How many cars do you have, Felisa?"
"Five or six," I guess.
"And how many does Ed…uh, Boy, have?" Ed possessed a name, but for some reason no one ever understood, not even me, I called him Boy, and my family honored it, as did Ed.
"I guess he only has the one he stole," I retorted, feeling my cheeks flush as hot lines ran up my face.
"Felisa, I'm not going to make you do this, but I want you to think about something. Boy may be having trouble admitting that he took something from you, and that's wrong. But if you have six cars, and he only has one, and if you give him the car, then you don't have to be mad about it anymore. You and Boy can still play together, and if you give it to him, it's a gift, not something that is stolen. If Boy did steal it from you, maybe he will realize he was wrong. Would you like to go over there and give it back?"
I kicked at the floor and studied the Chinese pagodas and wise looking men in Chinese hats on the wallpaper.
"Ok" Mother said, sensing this might not be easy.
"Well, I will, but he has to say he's sorry."
"We'll see," Mother clicked her tongue, and her eyebrows were raised. "Do you want me to go with you, or do you want to go alone?"
"I'll go by myself," I said, resigned.
Tennis shoes squeaked softly on the wooden floor, the back screened door whipped open with a whack, popping loudly against the facing as it slammed shut, pulled sharply by the tightly wound spring at its base. Gravel, kicked roughly, flew in all directions. Small feet pounded away at the spare Bermuda runners, hungry for water, crushing them further into the hard black earth. By the time I reached Boy's house, 40 yards southeast of ours in what used to be a pasture, my chest hurt and I was breathing like a mad bull, red-faced, and spent. I leapt the three steps up to the wide front porch and fell against the screen, my tiny fists rapping on the door. Evelyn, Boy's mother, answered.
"You here to see Boy?" she asked flatly, with what I interpreted as a scowl, a permanently etched sour look to her face. I saw only the etching, not the acid of events that formed those hard lines. She opened the screen door before I could answer. Boy was slouched on the old navy blue brocade couch, his legs loosely attached to his body. He was assiduously avoiding the springs that were poking through letting the cotton stuffing escape. He looked dejected, and he was not laughing even though he was watching one of my favorite episodes of I Love Lucy where she was dancing down the stairs in a nightclub dance routine with a six foot tall feather hat.
I scuffed my shoe on the pink linoleum, actually on the gray wood floor beneath, since I was standing at a worn place in the doorway. Years of feet stepping across the threshold had worn completely through the linoleum to the floor beneath.
"Here Boy," I said, looking slightly down at those pink flowers, never letting myself look directly at him. "I brought you this." I handed over the now unpainted car, the silver primer glowing in the glare from the television.
Evelyn gave Boy a questioning look that seemed to become accusing, and he squirmed uncomfortably. He slowly rose, his legs seeming to reattach themselves as he got to his feet.
"Aw, that," he said. "You can keep it if you want it. It ain't no big deal anyway." He seemed to be acting nonchalant for Evelyn's sake. She was watching him very closely. I felt tensions flittering around like hummingbirds, moving back and forth between Evelyn and Boy.
"Here," I thrust it toward his hands. "Whosever it was, it's yours now. It's just an old car. Girls don't play with cars anyway."
"Thanks,Felisa. Wanna play in the dirt for a while?"
Some unseen emotional force exited the room. Evelyn stopped looking suspicious, Boy started smiling as he opened the door off the screenedporch at the side of the house, and I didn't feel like throwing dirt or kicking rocks. I sat down with Boy, strange playmates though we were, and dug, spooned, poured and sifted dirt for an hour until I heard the back door of my house slam as usual and my oldest brother Elton call me to supper.
When I headed home, Boy didn't chase me and I didn't throw dirt at him. And I don't know why, the idea just seized me as I stood up and took off running for home; I reached down and scooped up the metal car where it sat in the dirt and stuffed it into the pocket of my cotton shorts . As I glanced back, Boy stood watching me, his mouth agape.
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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: THE BARTLETTS

I liked the Bartlett kids, at least the two that were about my age. There were about a dozen of them. They made our family of a mere half dozen kids look smallish and wimpy by comparison. They had a few that were already married, probably in their late teens. Then they seemed to have one in each of the grades up to about the 10th which is when most of them dropped out of school or got married. I guess I never noticed that even though there was one of them in each of the grades with my older four siblings, none of my siblings ever befriended them or asked them home for supper.

But I made up for it. I befriended Lila, who was one year older, and Reba, who was one year younger than I. One particular fall day, I invited them over after school. We decided to help my mom out because she was away working at the cotton gin as a bookkeeper, a job she did part-time in the fall, to help my dad when the cotton ginning season was in full swing.

There were a few dishes in the sink, and Lila pulled up a stool and started making large plumps of soap suds and blowing them about the kitchen. I didn't say anything because I had never washed dishes, not with any seriousness anyway, and I thought maybe that was the way you did it. Anyway, I liked the way the suds floated up in the air, their little iridescent bubbles twinkling like kitchen stars, and the way they landed soft as a cloud on the yellow leatherlette of the kitchen chairs. Spread out there, they looked like miniature snow-filled lakes, and even as they dripped over the chair edge and plip-plipped onto the floor, I found myself lying prone on the thick, green linoleum following the water's path till it ran down the slight slope of the floor back toward the sink.

Reba, who was not nearly as industrious as her older sister, started skating around in the suds, faster and faster, until she couldn't stop and slid directly into the kitchen window at the far end of the table. I heard a little crack sound and noticed a long line now dividing the 30 inch square plate of glass. Reba looked a little sheepish and as soon as Neila, who had heard the telltale splitting of glass, entered the room, she started making up the most outrageous story about how the crack happened. Lila had glanced arround when the window cracked, but now she appeared engrossed in her dishwashing so much that she didn't even stop when Neila started trying to get to the truth.

Just then, we got a reprieve. The phone rang, and there was no one else to answer it except Neila.

"My daddy will beat my butt," Reba whimpered. "We cain't pay for no window. We cain't pay for nothin'. He'll whup me for sure."

Lila, with her back to us, started humming. She was actually the more socially adept of the two, but she was acting like someone on a distant planet right now. The dishes squeaked as she rubbed them with the dishcloth.
"Which plate is yours," she asked without looking.
"What?!"
"Which plate is yours. Don't you each have your own plate?"
"No!", I snapped. "We all eat off all the plates. No one has a special one."
"Oh," she said limply.

I turned my attention back to Reba who seemed to be shrinking, puddling toward the floor.
"Don't worry about it," I reassured Reba. "My little sister threw a baseball through my parent's bedroom window playing "Annie Over", and it was the window with the air conditioner in it. My daddy wanted to get mad, but my mother wouldn't let him. Just let me do the talking."

"No, Mother, they're fine.," I heard Neila say. "Felisa brought home two friends, and they seem to have cracked the kitchen window. I'm not sure what happened yet. No one is hurt. Ok, see you in a few hours."

Neila hung up the bell-shaped receiver on the wallphone. I was sure that in a few minutes, it would be all over town that we had a cracked window since Molly Townsend, the telephone operator, liked to listen in on phone conversations. She seemed to especially like to listen in on ours, since six kids and a laconic mother made for interesting happenings quite often. Her own life, by comparison, was dull, except when her brother Buzzard, who was well-liked when sober and mean as a rodeo bull when drunk, came home after too much of the drink supposedly named for another bird, Wild Turkey. He was unable to support himself in the the totality, so she had lent him room and a place to stay if he would contribute to her household expenses. He did, and she made him make his bed neatly every morning, and hang his clothes in the wardrobe, not pile them on the floor.

"Ok." Neila squats down to our level. "What happened here?"

We look down at our dusty tennis shoes, silent.

"Felisa?" she asks accusingly.

I hesitate. Then tentatively......"Well, we were playing in the soapsuds, and..............

"And?"

"I can't really tell because something really bad could happen if I do."

"What bad could happen?"

"Well...........how much do windows cost?" I query.

"Oh yes, the cost......well, not much. Daddy will gripe, but he'll fix it or have one of the men at the gin fix it. The cost is not much. But you could have been hurt, whichever one of you did it."

"Reba's daddy will whup her if he finds out," I blurt out, unable to hold in this information any longer.

Neila raised one eyebrow, probably at the "whup" pronunciation.

"Oh, I see," she says. Understanding filled her hazel eyes. "Well, then. Is anyone cut? Let me see your arms and fingers."

We hold them out. She surveys them carefully. Reba's toughened skin next to my still babyish fingers. Her raggedy, bitten nails, next to my neatly trimmed ones.

"Don't worry. Just clean up this mess and yall go out and play something else that's not so dangerous."

I couldn't wait till Mother got home because Lila had asked me if on Saturday we could hike to their sister's house about two miles down the road in a cottonfield.

Mother would probably let me go. I could tell she felt sorry for the family. Once, she had offered to pick the girls up for a covered dish supper for a 4-H club banquet at the school. When the girls came out with a package of cheap weiners as their culinary offering, Mother found a way to make them into a tasty dish that people actually ate.

On the one and only visit I remember making to their house, the two girls insisted that I stay for the evening meal. I didn't eat very much because it seemed like too little food for too many people, and nobody insisted that I take the best piece of meat like we did at our house when we had company. I told them I didn't eat much meat, which was a lie, but it made me feel better not to eat it.

Their mother had come in from work wearing a white nurses' aide uniform. She worked at a nursing home in Corsicana, a larger town about twenty miles away. She looked real tired, and she didn't even seem very happy to see her kids like my mother always did when she got home. She just yelled at us to "Fill in that hole!"

Lila had had the bright idea to try to dig up her dead dog to see what he looked like after three weeks in the ground. Fortunately, we never could find the exact spot where he was buried. We got pretty hungry doing all that digging though, and Lila went to the house while Reba and I kept digging exploratory holes trying to locate Jeebie. Lila came back with three plastic cups filled with about 1/3 cup of dry oatmeal with sugar tossed on top. It wasn't something I had ever eaten in that particular form, but I was hungry. We had to make a pretty quick trip to the house to get some water to wash it down with, so we held our throats and made dying of thirst sounds and ran up the thick creosote logs to the heavy plank front porch.

Shortly after supper, I made an excuse to go home. I still wanted to play with Reba and Lila, but I wanted them to come to my house in the future. I didn't want to go over there. Even though they both seemed really happy and not to notice, I could feel and almost see a dark, sad cloud that hung over their mother.
I had an urgent question to ask Mother as soon as I got home too, since Reba had whispered something secretly to me just before I left when it was becoming dark, about a girl getting "scraped" on the railroad tracks; I was naturally concerned since the tracks ran right in front of our house.
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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: LEVEE BREACH

You could see them in the distance, about 200 yards off. Two little girls with dishwater colored hair, trudging along the narrow farm-to-market road. Heatwaves rose off the pavement obscuring their faces, their bodies like upright pieces of cooked bacon, brown and wavy.
Lib guided the '53 Buick carefully onto the grassy edge beside the road, stopping it with a slight swoosh from the power brakes. Even though it was five years old, it was the fanciest car the family had ever had, bought during a period of prosperity fueled by ginning bumper crops of cotton.
She glanced at 18 year-old Neila, sitting quietly in the passenger seat. The cool interior belied the devastating heat of a July day in Texas. Both of them watched the approaching 8 year-olds, hot, dusty, but definitely not desperate. They walked at their normal pace toward the car, seemingly not in any hurry, proudly displaying their independence.
They had begged that morning to walk up the road about two miles to Lila's sister's house which sat in the middle of a cotton field. They wanted to play with Judy's babies, Lester, age 2 and Billie Jean, who was just 6 months old. Lib had packed them a lunch and snacks. The young mother cared for the children while her husband worked in the fields. She was 18, the same age as Neila, but she had dropped out of school three years ago. Neila would leave for college in a few months.
"Now don't ask for anything to eat or drink while you're there. I packed plenty for both of you." Lib admonished Felisa.
"Y'all don't stay too long either. She has a lot to do with those babies. Are you sure she wants you to come?"
"I'm sure. Lila talked to her Saturday when they came to town, and she knows we're comin'."
"Ok, then. Wear your tennis shoes and drink a lot of water. It's really hot."
"Lila said they don't have a phone. I don't know why, but anyway, we can't call you."
"Well, don't stay more than 2 hours, and then start home."
"Ok. Lila says the babies are really cute."
"They are, I'm sure. I never met a baby I thought was ugly."
"Really?"
"Really." she answered, handing her two brown paper lunchsacks stuffed with food.
The back door slammed, and Felisa and Lila set off on their big adventure.
Neila shot a knowing look at her mother. "Are you sure it's okay? It's at least two miles down there."
"She has to learn about the world sometime. She's too idealistic. She needs to see how other people live. And how fortunate she is."
"Yeah," I guess. Neila sounded unconvinced. She sometimes thought her mother too cavalier, too trusting of people, and too eager to let her children experience more troubling aspects of life. Her mother, the eternal optimist, the non-worrier, had just released the worryingest child she had to walk two miles to a sharecropper's cabin that lacked running water or an indoor toilet, things she had not experienced.

The girls climbed in the backseat. Deep sighs, then Lila immediately started babbling about the babies, how much fun they had, how glad Judy had been to see them, and planning the next trip out loud. She appeared not to notice that no sound was emanating from the seat occupied by her fellow traveler. Felisa stared out the window, silent. Lib and Ann knew better than to interrupt or pry. It would all come out, like stormwater breaking through a levee, but this wasn't the time.
They dropped Lila at her house, an old commercial building that had been converted to a home. The rooms were huge, as they needed to be for the large family of 12 children. She skipped happily toward the wooden steps that led up steeply to a small porch made of thick wooden planks salvaged from a railroad waiting platform. She turned to wave, kicking at the three mongrel dogs running up the steps to greet her.
"She's probably going to have some oatmeal and sugar for a snack," Felisa said flatly.
"Do you like that?" Neila asked.
"No, I choke on it, but that's all they have over there. That house didn't have any paint on it." This without a breath between sentences. "And those little babies have to wear dishcloths for diapers. And the floor has so many cracks in it between the boards that there is dirt all over the floor and the babies crawl in it, and then they cry, and it smears a dirt smear on their face and then they wet their "diaper" (this said with a look of disgust), and then there's mud on their legs, and it is so hot there you can't even hardly breathe, and the flies and bugs are in there because she leaves the front door and all the windows wide open to try to get a breath of air. And they have an outdoor toilet, and it stinks and has flies everywhere and wasps in the corners and spiderwebs and no telling what is under that hole you're supposed to sit on, so I just held it and now I really have to go to the bathroom. And there's nowhere to wash your hands except in a bowl that everybody else has washed their hands in and the baby's bottoms have been washed in, and oh my gosh, I just feel so sorry for them. Why would she want to have those babies when it's so bad for her already? She doesnt' sing to them or smile at them like we all smile at babies. And even if Lila said she was glad to see us, she didn't smile at us when we got to the house. She let us give the babies some of our lunch food and snacks. That's the only time I saw her smile. Lila can go back, but I don't want to."
Mother and Neila sat quietly, listening to the levee break. The water swirled through the breach and over, coursing its way through the carefully crafted banks, destroying what had been there. It couldn't be put back. It was too strong and swift. Sometimes water like that spread out in the fields on the other side, making the grass grow, the flowers flourish, and the soil moist and life-bearing. Sometimes it sat, dark, mossy, and stagnant in the fields breeding mosquitos and snakes.
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