GRANDMA IN FLORENCE
One day my son asked if he had dreamed
the Italian portrait of his great-grandmother
peeling from the wall of the small museum
that Florentine Summer of his sixth year
when we sped through Italy in hot July,
five in our family in a Volkswagen car.
It was not really my grandmother. He knew
I often make everything into family legends
for children waiting to see Leaning Towers.
In an alley of pigeons behind fake Pietas,
a building so small it doesn’t take dollars
stays perpetually open to lost Americans.
On flaked green and yellowing walls hang
pastel portraits of women without names,
drawn by artists suffering in poor light.
I whispered that the Woman in Red Bonnet
was Grandma Driggers, who posed before
touring in circuses on the European continent.
That lady sat stiffly among pale wild flowers,
clutching the scruff of her ugly, brindled dog
as her man in straw hat scythed the meadow.
For that one moment she was my grandmother
in gleaned cotton field, and I was no longer a liar.
(We had picked and filled our long cotton sacks
and emptied them weightless into soft heaps.
Her white dog Bruce stood guard, tongue out,
‘til Carolina buyers paid us penny a pound.)
No, she does not pose in that old world of women,
nor will she one day flake from green stucco walls
as Florentine masons rest and sip red wines.
Grandmother’s bonnet, from grey cotton sheets,
always framed her face in alternating light and
darkening shade, and her eyes were mysteries.
I pray my own three grandsons may lose their way
when searching through dark red Georgia roads
for me. As Blue Jays and Redwing Blackbirds
flush from underfoot, the three of them, fresh
from where they’ve been, will come to rest
and find portraits of a waiting man, tall and gray.
– Charles Brady
There is danger for those of us older than sin – in back-tracking to the “good old days,” because those days were often not that good and only a fool’s memory could make them so in some cases. But in a couple of previous columns, I spoke of the “old days,” which I have come to think of as the “Survival Days,” and therein, I often gave modern times and inventions their well-earned due.
I have written about, for example, single lane cross country highways and frequent breakdowns, the dad-blamed inner tubes that had to be removed from contrary tires after you used the contrary jack and removed the contrary lug nuts…and repeated the thing in reverse and prayed everything would hold; sometimes it did.
I did not have to contrast the modern auto and modern interstate highway. (I haven’t been halted by a flat tire in more than fifty years!)
But I see now that my reflections about the past were slanted and perhaps selfish because I did not include the impact of monumental decades of unimaginable labor required of women at the same time and place of my youth. Oh, I knew of those labors and appreciated them and once in a while alluded to them, but seldom gave a particular lady – my Grandmother Maude – her due.
Since it is now the long overdue era of the Woman, perhaps I should dedicate at least a column to that lady and to just one chore of the hundreds assigned by men and by society, by the times and perhaps by herself.
First, the Present! I want to address the act of “LAUNDRY” today. Here’s how an amateur does it:
I take the hamper down to the basement, throw the clothing into the AUTOMATIC WASHER, select “Large Load”, dribble in the proper amount of laundry detergent and push the start button.
You know the drill – total time five minutes max.
But that is not all of my oh so loathsome task! After one cup of coffee, I go back and throw the nearly dry clothing into the DRYER. check the settings, push a second button and go back to my newspaper.
I do have to go down to pick up the perfectly dry and beautifully clean-scented clothing. I usually just dump them on the bed since my wife is responsible for the more complicated folding and storing.
For old timers, some may think I have skipped a step or two, but I don’t have to remind you that, except in rare exceptions, there is no longer need to “sort by color” or starch and Iron.
I now take you back to the mid1930s in rural Bulloch County, Georgia. My Grandmother Maude Barrow Driggers has been abandoned by her husband Jim (see other poems and other columns), leaving her to run a tenant farm with the questionable help of two daughters, ages 13 and 10, three sons, Wilton and Walton, age 5 and Jasper, age 3. I was Grandmother’s “Bonus,” also 5, living with her while my mother was trying to support herself in far off Savannah.
That’s it. Grandmother organized and slaved, and although the rest of provided assistance, it was HER responsibility, and how she did it week after week is a mystery to me.
The rest of us did everything in the fields…getting the crops in, tended , and out. And in the process, we managed to get our clothing very, very soiled. (All of our clothing was work clothing).
And, now to the point of who did what on laundry day, and what was required and how in the heck did she do it. (Remember, Grandmother did have the help of two very young daughters to do the “women’s work”). As I remember it, all of us did our part, but granny worked her bonnet off!
What did “washday” look like back then and there in that one tiny spot on this earth?
First she gathered a ton of (I mean) filthy work clothes and took them outside to begin the back breaking chore which today takes little effort and time. There was no sorting – everything had to be soaped and boiled…and then had to be scrubbed cleaner on the “Scrub Board,” where knuckles became raw.
The other boys and I filled the huge cast iron boiler (a giant, rather shallow and open pot) from buckets of water drawn from the well. Then we cut the wood and built the fire under the boiler (which was also used in late fall for hog-killing)
When the water boiled, we threw in slivers of home made lye soap, along with the clothes.
(ASIDE: Grandmother made her own Lye Soap. I remember a little of the process requiring the mixing of LYE, GREASE and Soft ASHES. Somehow the soap “set” and was cut into cakes and used for all cleaning: Clothes, faces, dishes, everything.)
RINSING required removal of the clothing (by sticks – very hot) and placing them on a table. Then the dirty water was dipped out and replaced with clean, a process repeated. The clothing was placed back in and stirred.
When all was ready, everyone went to the boiler to remove and “WRINGE OUT” all the water we could. Wringing water from heavy clothing is a monumental task, and it cannot be done to one’s satisfaction – that’s why it took a long time to dry since that was the finishing act.
Finally, we hung the clothing on an extensive array of clotheslines. Hopefully, the sun would shine enough for the job and clothes would dry before they had to be taken in.
Long after sundown, clothing was sorted inside the house and some of it would be worn next day for our regular duties. In winter, clothing had to be placed before the fireplace in order to shape it for the putting on. It was never ending.
For the few items that needed ironing (for funerals), Grandmother mixed , through her magic, a starch concoction somewhere in the laundry process. Later she would heat the hardened steel irons by placing them – ironing surfaces to the fire – near the burning logs in the fireplace.
Today, on cold days in San Francisco, I sit longer than I have to in my new automobile, enjoying heat from a HEATER. I enjoy more than most the ice cubes removed from my freezer to put in my iced tea made by touching a switch on the electric kettle.
I appreciate the modern world because I know the older one.
However, I do not always remember, and therefore do not always give proper honor and respect to, the extraordinary sacrifices made by extraordinary women of earlier times. I’ll try to do better.
Postscript: In Saigon in 1969, Master Sergeant Jasper Driggers, Grandmother’s youngest, contacted me and we arranged to meet at the airport. Jap, a proud Paratrooper, was on his way home, having just been notified of Grandmother’s death. We were able to talk for about an hour before he had to leave. A few soldiers he knew were nearby and they got a kick out the obviously much younger Sgt Driggers being MY uncle.
