A POWERFUL WOMAN

Chapter 3
ARE YOU HUNGRY, BOY?

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Romans 2:1

When I think of our growing up years, looking at our Mom was shrouded a little in mystery. She didn't like "to talk outside the family." I don't know exactly what that means and to say she was incredibly private is way beyond understatement.

Mom grew up knowing hard work. It was a part of life. She never talked lots about her early life but there was no doubt that she was absolutely devoted to her Mother. Her Mother was teacher, philosopher and above all, long suffering.

In my Grandma's household, all the women were in the kitchen lots. It was there they were taught those mysteries of preparing food and looking after a household.

So much of life revolved around eating. Since we were farmers, food was plentiful. I think that Mom developed a belief about food and being together as she made it central to our existence. We had these rules. Always on Sunday, there was a formal meal and most evenings, everybody sat down at the table. Mom was the last one seated. And, once she sat down, nobody was allowed to get up. If something wasn't on the table, then you did without it. Woe be until any of us to asked for something. We had to have our napkin, cloth, no less, in our laps and we did not talk with our mouths full of food. Where did she get these rules?

When she wanted to zap you, it was God that you were disappointing. She invented the concept of "natives starving in Africa and look at all this you're leaving on your plate.”

I can never remember not always having food around and although it was basic—fatback meat, butter beans, white ones of course, fried cornbread, it was always there.

Poverty is a relative thing, I think: we were poor and the joke was, "The first one up is the best one dressed." But, we always had plenty to eat. And what never ceased to amaze me was that when she put out a meal it appeared effortless and could feed an Army post. The idea that there would be just one meat, forget it—three or four, chicken, steak, fatback, things that might appear to be delicacies to others, especially today but then they were simply the bill of faire. This was soul food, long before it became popular and an ethnic identity.

Food always represented an act that would heal the greatest hurt, establish the greatest control over the situation, regardless of how grave the problem might be. The question always was, "are you hungry?" Well, a little. The next thing you knew, materializing right before your eyes—a complete meal. In some ways, it might be compared to asking for a tomato sandwich in some other household. Mom whipped it up with an effortless quickness that would make a short order cook envious.

As for the track that she could stop you in with a look, to go with that was an astute perception of the world that few had in my view. Even as a youngster, I can remember thinking, how did she know that? I don’t remember ever seeing her read although there were always newspapers around and my Dad seemed to be pouring over something constantly. Maybe they were discussing all of this between intimacies, I don’t know but she knew things.

Later on, it was TV. She seemed to be watching it constantly. When I was in college, she would call me up and chew me out for not coming home more often. I would load in my old 49 Ford and get home and then after greeting and eating, she was back watching her soaps. Early on, as I was half listening to her talk about people, I would wonder, “Who are these folks?” Later on, I would discover that she was talking about the TV family as though she was intimately involved with them. And, then when friends appeared, they discussed the latest dilemmas of the Soap characters.

I don’t know what her politics were but do remember that she watched Jesse Helms religiously when he did the news. He was constantly running for office when he wasn’t. When he finally did, she got out of her sick bed to vote for him. It would be fascinating for her to be alive today with all the media and politics. We would give anything to know her thoughts.

Hard work was the order of the day. We would get up before dawn, Mom would make sure we ate a hearty breakfast and out of there for the fields. We might or might not come back for lunch, more likely no. If we ate at all in the fields, it was a country ham sandwiched between one of Mom's great biscuits, along with sweet ice tea in a mason jar. When we all piled in at suppertime, it was a table ready for a group of hungry farmers. Much of these memories are surmised as my real work in the fields came after Raz and Corb were gone. Raz to the war and Corb to a real job. Farming for the family was never considered a real job—it was what you did. If you needed to earn money, you went to work somewhere else: the mill, a store, anywhere that one could be paid the cold cash.

Leaving home was always a matter of great trauma to Mom. It seemed to be a little piece of her disappearing. When I went off to war, she lost that stoicism and was constantly dabing her eyes. She and my sister would seem to be up and down constantly to collect themselves.

We never forfeited our places at the table. When we came back, even though nothing had changed and everything had changed, our place was preserved.

Mom as a role model was simply the best even if we can only see her through our very biased view. She was fiercely loyal to her family, sometimes maybe when she should have been more pragmatic. Our Mom was the haven of rest in any storm.

She was powerful in all kinds of ways. My Mom ruled, she knew about money, where life was and how it all stood in relations to all other things. I’ve often wondered, where she would be if she had been formally educated and had even the smallest of opportunity. She was educated in the school of hard knocks and her education far exceeded that which she might have ever gotten from a mere institution.