Charles Brady
I tend to put famous quotations and “old sayin’s” in the same box – accepting them as having some truth and liking their ability to stay in my memory. Will Rogers had little love for politicians, once observing, “If God had wanted us to have elections, He would have given us some candidates.” That seems timely, as timely and as true as a few other truisms and quotations from my Basic Training days of yore. Here are a couple posted in my first mess hall at Fort Jackson, SC:
“Do it right the first time!” Those who don’t learn this lesson tend to waste a lot of their days and minutes on this earth. One could have said, “Haste makes waste” to make a similar point.
“Clean as you go!” Although I first noticed this as a sign posted in the Company Mess Hall for those of us on kitchen police (KP) duty, I have come to accept over the years that this simple advice is good for every corner of life. In my military career, I valued the men and institutions over and under me who maintained clean quarters, uniforms, pots and pans and working areas. I can tell you flat out that a clean tank engine works better than a neglected one. Of course the military demands order, but it’s more than that. If you and your environment are clean, you know what is there and what is not, and you are always free to handle real situations from scratch. In college and graduate school, I saw that “clean as you go” is advice for one’s business and personal lives and for relationships and whatever is to come in this world.
This and other advice has always made sense to me. And so I guess I have become a true believer in “truisms” and “old sayin’s.” For me, there is a direct connection between posters on mess hall walls, to the wisdom of Yogi Berra and, finally, to the wisdom in the “old sayin’s” of my Grandmother Maude Barrow Driggers.
We surely have all heard, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, ” and there is pure wisdom in that sentence, attributed to Yogi Berra, for the sports world but also for every aspect of life. In the simplest terms, it states as truth that one should not give up, because despite odds, triumph may be just around the corner. I was reminded of that saying recently when I watched the finish of a marathon. The leader, who was clearly going to win, slowed a few feet from the finish line to lift his arms in celebration, only to watch in amazement as another runner jogged by to defeat him. Yogi, who originated the saying and quite a few more (although he famously said, ” I didn’t say half those things I said!”) was one of the most beloved sports figures of all time.
Yogi’s sayings touch our hearts in wonderful ways; they tickle us gently, and affect us in other ways because they make sense. When he says, “Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half physical,” we know what he means, and remember it, although literal meaning flew out the window long before he finished.
Yogi’s passing not long ago made me realize that he and those wonderful “Yogisms” were perfect in logic. I have long meant to write about the “old sayin’s” which were so much a part of the South Georgia farm life I was born into and where I remained, off and on, for 18 years. Those years grounded me in whatever I was to become in time. Today, a word or phrase, a TV commercial or a line from a newspaper or book will take me back instantly to rural Bulloch County where my Grandma Driggers was working alone to keep together her family of six kids (including me) under the age of twelve on an income of “not much” but on boundless strength and lots of garden vegetables.
Regarding the old sayings my Grandmother created and often recited to keep a family narrative going during days of hard-work and few rewards: She was a miracle worker who used her strength and humor to keep us alive at home and in the cotton and tobacco fields, in gardens, and for a short while she managed to keep most of us on school buses.
She was a firm and demanding lady who nevertheless found ways to sprinkle humor and grace into our long workdays. My favorite of her ways, because I could tease her when she found herself at a loss for words, (which was often) was by sprinkling in a few “old sayin’s “ when she talked to us. And, if she couldn’t think of a real one, she made up one on the spot and delivered it without thinking – and without considering whether it made sense. I remember one, which went something like, “Old sayin’ is, when you don’t eat when you can, you may not be able to afford what you wanted to eat in the first place.” This, we knew, was a way of warning that if we did not eat everything we had grabbed for our plates at breakfast, that food would go into the “safe” (a screened upright chest) and would become our supper.
Her old sayings often were made up to express disapproval of something my uncles and I had planned and weren’t aware that she knew about: “Old sayin is… if you want to go fishing before the crops are laid by, you have to catch the mules earlier than you meant to.” A few of her sayings were more serious and more universal: “Old sayin’ is we never had nothin’, and the government took that.” Or: “Old sayin is the Great Depression may have come and went, but our family never noticed it.”
I don’t remember her exact words for many of her sayins’, but I remember Grandma’s humor shining through after we all returned from a fourteen – hour day picking cotton and were washing up for dinner. She would stop by the back porch where the hand pump was located and where the various tubs contained the feet of a bunch of tired and dirty boys, to say something like (I’m going to make up what she may have said) “Old sayin’ is, when the feet get clean, the rest of the body is aching for the wash cloth.” I dearly loved that lady. (She is also in “The Riceboro Poems…..”
I attribute my own habit of creating “old sayin’s” to my love of my Grandma Driggers. I know that I often hear her voice when I am saying something she may have said. In particular, while teaching English and Creative Writing to generations of lively high school girls here in San Francisco, I often tried to take them out of their comfort zones by relating a bit of my early childhood. Using half-truth and outright lies, I may tell them that, “I wasn’t born in a shack, but we moved into one as soon as we could afford it.”
It was difficult for these young ladies, mostly from well to do families, to relate to my tales, but they were always supportive and would quickly get into the spirit of whatever mood I was in. Over the years I think they grew to believe and appreciate that I was sharing with them the gist of my life in my own way. I remember once, in response to a question about whether or not my generation in the rural South ever felt deprived, I found myself making up a Grandma Driggers “sayin. ’” I told them, “At least we had running water! Mother would hand me a pail and say, ‘Son, RUN down to the spring and fetch some water.” My students, all girls, voted the following as their favorite “Mister Brady Old Sayin’.” “We were so poor that one year, for a Christmas present, I did NOT get a whipping!”
Sometimes, when discussing 19th Century American literature, in particular literature of the Civil War, and when the mood in the classroom grew somber, the students would want to lighten things a bit and would want to hear an old sayin’. In earlier discussions, I had told of my Ancestry.com search into my family’s participation in the War. They knew that my Great Grandfather and his four brothers, all tenant farmers who did not personaly know a slave owner, had enlisted in the Confederate Army on the same day in 1862 and had all suffered along with other soldiers of the North and South. When they ventured into the sadness of the Civil War, I would quickly tell of my favorite scene in one of the movie versions of “The Red Badge of Courage” where the Confederate General, riding around on horseback to rally the various companies of his command, would yell out, “What are you having for supper today, men,” and from every unit, men would yell out, “sowbelly and beans, sir!”
As I knew would happen, that would lead immediately to questions about, “What in the world was a sowbelly?”… and I would be off the hook!
About Grandma Maude Barrow Driggers, I later wrote this poem:
STILL LIFE WITH COTTONSACK
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
fathers make everything into family games
for children waiting for the Leaning Tower.
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.
The 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 just that 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 came to pay 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 table wines.
Grandma’s bonnet, from grey cotton sheets,
always framed her face in alternating light and
darkening shade, and her eyes were mysteries.
Yet, I pray my young grandsons will 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 rest at peace
and find portraits of one gentleman, tall and gray.
– Charles Brady
