Bang! You're Dead!

As the aunts, grandmothers and mama quietly sat on the porch, drinking coffee, my cousin Timothy and I were busy with a game of Cowboys and Indians in Grandma Polly's yard.  I was the best tree climber of all the cousins, so I had perched myself high up in one of Grandma's Tung Nut trees.  Timothy looked up in the tree and shouted, "When I shoot you, you're dead!"  "Okay," I replied.  Then pointing his finger straight at me, "Bang!" he screamed.  Obediently and right on cue, I let go of the tree branch, going limp as a dead person should, and fell out of the tree, splat, onto the ground.  The fall knocked me unconscious.  Hearing Timothy's scream as I hit the ground, the ladies rushed out to the place where I had fallen, to see what Timothy had done to me.  When asked, he simply said, "I shot her."  Well, with that, the ladies became hysterical, yelling and screaming at Timothy! "What did you shoot her with?  Where did it hit her?" 

Believing for a second that his finger had been really loaded, Tim looked at his finger, showing it to the women and said, "my finger."  And seeing that I was regaining life, they started laughing uncontrollably when they realized what had really happened.

Timothy and I went on to play, and this time, I was a nurse, giving him a shot, just because he had shot me earlier, I took one of Grandma's big thorns off her oldest rose bush and gave him a stick with it in his arm.  He ran to the ladies, immediately, crying, "she gave me a shot!"  When I showed them the thorn I had stuck in his arm, I got in trouble!  Proving, you can never trust boys!

Christmas Memories

“Goodbye Joe, I gotta go, meo myo!  Son-of-a-gun gonna have big fun on the bayou!” I can still hear daddy in his big number, crooning out the words to “Jambalaya”.  He had been playing his guitar all night with the others, patiently waiting while each of my uncles played their favorites.  I had been waiting all night as well.  The men got together with their harmonicas, their guitars, their accordians and their favorite tunes at my grandma and grampa’s house on Christmas Eve.  It was a family tradition.  All my cousins and I would listen intently for the age old tunes, a mixture of old southern, cajun and Irish songs as well as all the Christmas favorites.  I loved the look on my daddy’s face as he began playing “Jambalaya”.  His eyes lit up.  It was like something out of a movie! 

Growing up, I can remember no other times that made me feel as good, as secure or as happy.  The food was always potluck and delicious.  Mama and Grandma  worked for days making their traditional desserts.   My favorite was their famous Japanese fruitcake.  Oh, I didn’t like to eat it, I loved to watch them make it, grinding the coconut from the real coconuts because they had to have the milk from inside to make the frosting.  It was a huge process and just one of the traditions they shared. 

There were loads of fireworks brought in for the kids to shoot.   Grampa had built a gigantic bonfire in front of the house out by the road, where we lit the fireworks and otherwise kept warm.   But I preferred to stand by the performers, waiting for my chance to join in.  My grandma’s living room was sparkling with Christmas, and the smell of the food set the scene for a wonderful time to be had by all!

Gifts were exchanged at some point in the night.  All the wrapping paper was thrown into the fire, lighting it up like a bonfire! 

Afterwards, the Uncles and my daddy would start up again, singing until way past the time when we children were snug in our beds, in anticipation of Santa’s arrival.

My Bug

We grew up modestly.  Our home was a three bedroom house, barely one thousand square feet.  But we owned it and the piece of land where it sat.  Joining our land on either side were my grandparent’s houses, which gave us plenty of room to roam.  The summer before my senior year, Daddy promised me a car.  I had learned to drive the family’s Chevrolet Impala, a big car for a small country girl.  So you can only imagine how we felt when my brother and I were on our way to school that first day in my Bug!  I had already purchased a “Keep the Faith, Baby” bumper sticker for it at the KOA Campground store out by the Interstate and we were good to go.  It was game day and I was pretty sure my brother was real proud of me, as he glanced at me in my cheerleader uniform.  We were going to school on our own wheels!  I couldn’t have done it without my brother, though.  You see, Daddy bought the car for $200.  It was several years old, but looked REALLY good when my brother and I got it shined up!  However, I really couldn’t have driven it without him.  It took both of us!  While I was driving, he was busy holding it into fifth gear!  It was the poor old Bug’s only flaw!  The gear shift wouldn’t stay in fifth gear.  Junior’s hand got pretty tired while we were driving that first day, but it was all worth it when we pulled up into our own assigned parking space at Pearl River Central High School.  I was a Senior and he was only an eighth grader whose sister was Miss Teen, a Cheerleader, Editor of the Yearbook, Class Treasurer, Member of the Beta Club, the FHA, and Hall of Fame, but most importantly, that day, the driver of a Volkswagen Bug.  Little did he know, she was also a member of the “I joined everything because I couldn’t decide what I want to do” club. However, I took school work very seriously.  I was an excellent student, number four in my graduating class, even won the Crisco Award that year in Home Economics.  I was a friend to all the boys on the football team, but never dated any of them.  I really loved all of them!  I was proud of every win we took from the opponents and cherished every sweaty victory, when those boys carried me off the field.  But they had a dark side and showed it, on the very first day I drove my very own car to school.  The minute I came out of sixth period class, Junior came running up to me yelling, “Liz! You are not gonna believe that them boys did!” 

“What boys?” I asked, trying to get in a word. 

“Them football boys!”  he yelled, almost hysterically. 

Running all the way out to the assigned parking space we had been so proud of that morning, we saw her, the Bug, there, still in her parking space.  Only now, she was lying at rest on her side.  She was almost grinning at us as we approached.

Furious, Junior was stomping around, doing nothing but circling constantly around the Bug.  “What’re you gonna do?” He asked, pacing.

About that time, Jay, John and some of the other football players approached like nothing was wrong.  “What happened here?” Jay asked, grinning, along with the rest of ‘em. 

“Put it back on its wheels!” I demanded, stomping my own foot, hard, “Right NOW!  My daddy’s gonna kill you!” I shouted.

By the look in my eyes, they knew I was dead serious, so they literally lifted it up and set it back upright.  Upon close investigation, I noticed not a scratch or dent was on the Bug.  “Thank you!” I shouted and Junior and I got in the Bug and drove off. 

We sat quietly all the way home, Junior holding the Bug in fifth gear the whole way.  But as we sat in silence, we both knew that this was a story we would tell, over and over again for many years to come- but today, not to another soul, especially not to our parents!

My Brother Must Have Loved the Hospital!

It was one of those sweltering summer days in south Mississippi, when you just couldn’t catch a breeze.  Mama was huge, pregnant with Rhoda Lynn and Aunt Shirley was also pregnant with Shelia.  My brother, Junior, and I were tired of sitting around watching them get larger, so we decided to take a walk up to the sawmill near our house to get a cold drink.  There was an RC Cola machine on the back porch of the office and it was quiet up there because the men were taking their lunch hour. 

Our dog, Gopher, had followed us up there and no sooner than we had stepped onto the little porch to get to the drink machine, Gopher and the neighbor's the “Bisquits” dog began to fight.  The neighbors were nicknamed Bisquits a long time ago.  I don’t know why.  The dogs knocked Junior off the porch onto the ground.  He became part of their altercation.  I grabbed him and pulled him back up onto the porch, only to find he had been bitten (chewed, even) on his leg, so badly that he couldn’t walk.  He was about four and I was only eight, but I grabbed him into my arms and carried him down the street, screaming all the way for my mama. The men from the sawmill still sat, all the while, eating their sandwiches from their little gray lunch boxes, never moving or lifting a finger to help me. 

Mama and Aunt Shirley emerged from the house, running, as best they could.  Mama took Junior from my arms and carried him all the way up to McNeill (the center of town), where daddy was in the only vehicle we owned at that time.  Then off to Picayune to the hospital.  While at the hospital, Junior got about twenty-something stitches in his leg.

Junior made many trips to the hospital before he was even five.  I remember when he was not even two, his stroller got stuck in an ant bed.  Mama and Grandma Polly were on the porch drinking coffee while Junior strolled around the yard.  By the time he began crying uncontrollably, he was already covered with the tiny fire ants all the way to his diaper.  He was taken to the hospital that day and given sulfur that Mama had to mix with honey to get him to eat as his daily “dose”.  The sulfur was supposed to help heel his now pus-covered legs.  I wandered in one day just after she had given him his two teaspoons and found the remainder of her mixture in a bowl on the coffee table.  Before Mama got back from her bedroom where she was changing his diaper, I had polished off the rest of the creamy mixture in the dish.  She had a hissy fit, claiming that now my bones would go brittle and I would die.  She would not let me have any water for fear of it killing me.  It didn’t.

Then there was also the time we were at Aunt Agnes’s house and her Chihuahua bit Junior all the way through his upper lip.  He was rushed to the hospital that day.  The poor kid!  He also had scarlet fever when he was about four.  That was when Mama found out that he was allergic to penicillin.  He had gone into convulsions after the first couple of doses and scared Mama half to death.

Mama and Daddy had waited for years to finally get a boy and he ended up to be the most troublesome of all the kids as a toddler! 

And he was the last child.  Mama lost Rhoda Lynn.  She was stillborn in May of that year.  It was devastating to me.  I still remember that little white satin covered coffin as they lowered it into that grave at Gipson Cemetery.  It was clearly devastating to Mama as well.  She was never the same.

The Good Ole Summertime

Although it was summer vacation, I woke up just after the sun came up, because mama made me.  Well, partially because she made me, but partially because there was no insulation in my bedroom and it got hotter than hades in my room.  The reason she made me get up this morning was because she and Grandma Polly had already been to the cornfield and there was a whole wash bucket filled with corn that had to be shucked.  It was a well run process.  Grandma cut off the ends in the kitchen and sent it back to us on the porch where we shucked it, cleaning off every little bit of cornsilk. Then we sent it back in to Grandma, who rinsed it and with her sharpest knife, cut the kernels off into a huge pot, where she cooked it and then put it in freezer bags for the winter.

Mama and Grandma picked anything anyone was willing to give them out of their gardens.  In addition to corn, they picked purple hulled peas, butter beans (the gray kind, not lima), squash, tomatoes or anything else they could can in jars or freeze.  Sometimes they dragged us out in the fields with them.  When there were pecans to pick up, we went for sure.  We picked up the pecans on halvesies.  We kept half of what we picked.  Then we’d have to bring them home and shell them.  It too, was a process.  Grandma would crack them with a huge monstrosity of a pecan cracker and then we shelled them.  They froze them too.

On the days that there weren’t vegetables to be canned, I usually walked up to McNeill to meet the bookmobile.  It was a traveling library from the big Crosby Library in Picayune.  I loved to read and would read about three books a week if I had the time, without even being told I needed to!  It was my window on the world outside of McNeill. 

If my cousin, Bridget, was staying with her Grandmother, she’d come over and she, my sister and I would go to the woods and build forts.  First we’d pack a big lunch and put Koolaid in a thermos.  Then we’d head out to the woods behind my Grandma Johnson’s house.  Sometimes we dug into the side of a bank that was from where a road had been cut years ago.  This would yield a nice little playhouse for a while.  Other times we would take hammers, nails and boards from my daddy’s shop into the woods and build forts in the pine trees.  My favorite area to build tree houses, though was my Grandma Polly’s Tung Nut trees.  But as soon as she found out what I had done, she would tear them down.  It was a futile effort. 

We never let my poor little brother go with us.  He was a nuisance.  He was four years younger than me and didn’t know how to build anything yet.  He had an imaginary friend named Balah.  Balah ate lunch with him everyday.  Yes, Mama played along and made a sandwich for Balah, too.  I think that might be why my brother was fat at that age.  He ate his and Balah’s sandwiches.   We didn’t let him play with us, so he invented Balah.  When he wasn’t playing with Balah, he was running his tricycle back and forth from our house to Grandma Polly’s house yelling, “Amamama! Amamama!” like a race car.  He was of no use to us.

Linda Ann and Bridget and I would stay in the woods all day unless a thunderstorm approached.  Then we’d hear Mama calling all our names frantically.  It could just be a distant thunder or two and she would go crazy until we got to the house.  “It’s comin’ a storm!” she’d yell as soon as she saw us coming out of the woods.  Then if it turned out to have lightening, she’d line us all up on the couch.  She would unplug everything in the house, including the air conditioner and fans and dare us to move.  “People have been struck by lightening moving around their houses during a thunderstorm!” she’d tell us.  “You stay right there until it’s over.”  And we did.  We weren’t even allowed to talk.  It was crazy, I tell you.  However, if there was no lightening and just rain, we were allowed to put on our swimsuits and run around outside, playing in the rain until it had stopped.

Picking Dewberries by the Railroad Tracks

I talked my sister, Linda Ann, in to going up to the railroad tracks to pick berries.  “Come on, go with me!” I’d said.  “If we don’t go now, they’re gonna spray that stuff all over and kill the berries.”  I was referring to the "stuff" the Railroad sprayed right from the trains to kill all the vegetation around the tracks every year.  Our house was right by the tracks in McNeill.  We were used to the whistles, the shaking of windows and the wrecks up by the crossing. 

Linda Ann finally agreed to go with me.  I loved to pick those berries by the tracks because they were the biggest and juiciest!  However, Mama had one strict rule, “Never go anywhere near the tracks!”  So we had to sneak up there with our buckets and then go a little further down so she wouldn’t see us from our back yard. 

We had our buckets about full, when we decided to cross the trestle.  It was a long trestle and as we approached the middle, we heard the sound of a streamline train.  It was the fast one, so we had to jump down to the banks of the trestle and hang on for dear life.  As we hung on to the sides of the trestle, the briars from the dewberry vines pierced into our skin.  When the train roared over the tracks we shook.  Straight over our heads, “baboom, baboom, baboom” went the train and it seemed to be endless.  Finally it passed and we dug our way back up to the top of the trestle to the tracks, bruised, scratched and half scared out of our wits.  Then we heard it, “Linda Ann!  Elizabeth Pauline!”  Mama was yelling both our full names.  “Holy hell,” I thought, “She’s gonna kill us!”

So we dragged our bleeding bodies back up to the house as fast as we could.  I could see the peach tree switch already perched in her hand as we came in the back gate.  She was pissed!  It didn’t matter that we had survived the train, or even that we had picked almost two full buckets of dewberries!  No!   We had scared her to death.  Mama had pictured us lying smashed under the train as it went by.  She told us so much as she was whipping us with the peach tree switch.  She wanted to teach us a lesson and it worked. 

From then on, we never went up to the railroad tracks to pick berries.  We just let the Railroad spray them with the “agent orange” or whatever they used and then they’d turn brown and die.

Hurricane Camile

Mama’s friend, Delphia had just died after a long battle with cancer.  Mama had helped take care of her for about a year.  She’d bring Delphia’s family’s clothes to our house once a week and wash them, dry them and then fold or iron them.  I would go out with her to take the clothes back,  but Mama would make me wait in the car.  She didn’t want me to see how sick Delphia was.  They buried her on that Sunday as everyone was scurrying around getting ready for the hurricane.  Mama, Linda Ann, Junior and I went to church that morning as usual.  Daddy went with us that Sunday and took us to lunch at Hank’s Snack Bar in Picayune after church.  As we sat eating our burgers, watching the weather become more and more tropical, we were talking about the hurricane they’d named Camile.  “It’ll probably wash her body right out of that grave,” Mama said, dwelling on the funeral that was taking place that very hour.  “It’s gonna be a bad one!” Daddy replied.  Although listening to their conversation, they actually thought it was going to hit New Orleans like Betsy (the one before Camile).  I remembered Betsy.  We stayed home and the wind blew down Daddy’s shed he had been building (for a long time!) .  He had the foundation and the framing for the walls up, but nothing else.  Mama had told him it was just as well.  My cousins Bridget and Pam and their family lived in New Orleans.  They had gotten water in their house during Betsy.  Worried for them again, we called them later that Sunday afternoon and urged them to get out of the city and come to Mississippi.

Bridget and Pam’s parents decided to stay in New Orleans, but our relatives from Slidell began to arrive that afternoon to stay with Grandma Polly and Grandpa.  I laughed at my sister, who suggested we stay over there too.  We were at the dinner table at the time, and the thought of staying anywhere but our house was funny to me.  We went to bed at our usual time, only to be awakened by Mama at midnight.  The power was out and the wind was really loud.  She moved us all into their room, where we stayed and listened to the little transistor radio.  At some point, the radio announcer said that the eye of the storm was about eight miles north of Picayune.  “That’s right on us!”  mama exclaimed.  Daddy was sitting on the side of the bed ringing his hands.  Mama began to cry, and we did too.  We all prayed together, harder than we had ever prayed, there in the floor holding hands.  The walls of my parents little room were literally breathing and we could hear the snaps of the trees as the wind bent them to the ground.  It seemed like hours that we were confined to their room.  I didn’t think we were going to come out of the storm alive and I don’t think Mama and Daddy did either. 

Then all of a sudden a “hush” came over us.  No wind, no rain beating against the house, not a sound at all.  Our ears strained to hear a single noise.  “It’s over!” I said.  “No, it’s just the eye,” Mama answered.  Then we all went into the living room where, according to the flashlight Mama was holding, there were leaves all over the living room floor and it was soaked.  We looked out the front door to my Grandma Johnson’s house to see if there were any signs of life and they signaled with a flashlight and called out that they were okay.  Then we looked to the left and saw that there were similar lights and sounds coming from Grandma and Grandpa’s house. 

“Let’s get y’all over to Polly’s,” Daddy said.  “I can’t tell how much structure damage we have had over here and their house is on a slab, so I think we’ll all be much safer over there for the backlash.”  So we all proceeded out the back door.  There were trees everywhere.  We had to climb over them and the fence that was now down and partially covered by trees.  It seemed like a really long trek for what was only a few yards to Grandma Polly and Grandpa’s house. 

Once in, Grandma lay quilts on the floor in her living room for us, beside the many kids that were already sleeping on other blankets and quilts.  But we wouldn’t get much sleep, because the winds had already started howling outside again.  I had lain awake until nearly dawn, making sure that the storm had passed and only then had I finally gotten a little sleep. 

I know what they mean when survivors of tragedies explain brightness and clarity after their events, because the next day was the brightest I had ever seen.  I don’t know if it was because of all the trees that were now either gone or void of leaves, or if I was just thankful to be alive.  That morning after Camile had hit, we gazed at the huge fallen oaks and pecan trees in our yard.  We realized then that they all had fallen just beside the house, missing our roof and the very room in which we had hunkered down the night before.  Had any one of the trees fallen on our house, it would have been a devastating tragedy for our family.  So we were indeed thankful to be alive. 

The task of cleaning up was an arduous one by itself, let alone the fact that we had no power for air conditioners or even fans.  Our freezers that were filled with the vegetables Mama and Grandma had been canning all summer were slowly thawing out and the food had to be cooked.  Thankfully, we had a gas stove, so Mama cooked and cooked.  We were very ill prepared, however, soon the batteries in the transistor radio had weakened and we had no outside communication with the world.  The last we had heard was that it would be weeks before we would see power in our area.  This meant that our pump could not operate to give us water and more thawing and more heat. 

In the evenings before dark, we took bath cloths, towels and soap and went down to Stanfield, the small stream near the house, where we bathed in our swim suits.  It was cold and refreshing.

But night seemed to come really early in McNeill.  There were no lights other than those of Mama’s antique kerosene lanterns, and that fuel had to last, so we used them sparingly.  Though we were tired from all the work in the yard, our nights were spent battling mosquitoes, who were drawn to us by the sweat on our bodies.  The screens on the windows had been destroyed by the storm, and there was no way to keep them from coming inside.

Hurricane Camile was a life-changing, humbling event for everyone in South Mississippi.  We realized just how little we really needed to get by.  And it was weeks before we got the news that the Gulf Coast, only about thirty minutes away, was completely destroyed by the hurricane.  Once our power came back on, we were able to see pictures of the slabs that were left where beautiful beachfront homes once stood.  Hearing that, we realized again, just how fortunate that we were to have our homes, even though they were damaged, and how fortunate we were have each other.  We took care of each other.  There was no FEMA or MEMA coming to our rescue, just the goodness of folks who sent food and clothing by way of the Red Cross.  There were no big trucks showing up with ice and no water given out.

When I think of Camile, I am reminded of similar words from Scarlet O’Hara, when I say that “I will never be unprepared for a hurricane again.”