How does one tell a real, but less than beautiful, family story in a way that allows just enough feeling to get the story out, reveals his attitude about the story, and then winds it up and makes it palatable to the real family members who will read it?
Sounds complicated doesn’t it? When I was writing the poems for a book that would attempt to show the life and times of our tenant farm family in the 1930’s and 40’s, I decided early on that I would take the part of the speaker in all the poems in the book. That would allow me to tell the stories with some authority, but it would leave me open to criticism from those who wanted to keep unpleasant things hidden away.
I decided to tell the truth and let it lead to whatever would come from the readers.
One event and its aftermath I knew I HAD to tell was the story of my Grandfather – my Mother’s father – who did the unimaginable. He left his family one day and never returned, never stayed in contact and never provided a penny for the family needs.
I was six years old and residing with my grandparents at the time as they were farming “on shares”(Sharecropping) in Bulloch County, Georgia, in1937. He departed leaving my Grandmother, two aunts of fourteen and twelve, twin boys who were four months younger than I, and one son four years old. I was much older when I found out that he had departed for a farm widow who had a son and daughter.
Four the next three years, I stayed with my Grandmother and family and we all worked to keep up the family obligations for cotton, corn and tobacco crops. Afterwards, my mother remarried and “reclaimed” me and we went on to lead a vagabond sort of life all over rural Georgia.
Although she had no experience, my Grandmother proved adept at planning and at keeping the books. Over the years, she negotiated with several land owners and we – later THEY – became efficient farmers who managed to break even at the end of each cycle.
After I moved to live with my mother and step-father, I returned each year on the first day after school ended to help my Grandmother and aunts and uncles. The aunts married young, leaving the twins and younger son and yours truly.
So the family endured, just making ends meet, but my uncles and aunts work allowed them to complete the third or fourth grades. In the mid 1940’s, using money saved from an allotment sent home by an older uncle who was drafted and served in the European Theater, Grandmother bought a very old house on a small lot containing beautiful, bearing Pecan trees. She was then able to earn enough.
I entered the Military in 1949 and have been away since. The twins served four years in the Air Force, and Jasper, the youngest became a senior non- commissioned officer and paratrooper. He was killed in a military accident a fe years ago, but he and I managed to meet for a couple of hours at the Saigon Airport, as we were both serving in Vietnam at the same time.
All of the people mentioned above and in the three poems below are deceased.
Here are the poems written about my Grandfather and his Widow lady, and my Grandmother. I think the attitude of the Speaker is obvious.
JIM DRIGGERS
Before he drove off to Florida in his Model T Ford,
he was my grandfather who made split- shingle roofs
and dug wells with his bare hands and long-handled tools.
He would start morning fires then go out to tend the fields.
He would come when an uncle tolled the brass dinner bell
for dinner, or when wild mad dogs frothed in the yard.
He broke land and plowed furrows with matched white mules
as I scored parallel rows of his turned earth for planting.
Seed corn dropped through his fingers was perfectly placed.
But grandfather paused at the end of the row one eve
as the sun cooled and the day’s sweat crusted to salt,
and the night sounds came early to his anxious ear.
With the last rows of the garden grown full and green,
and weeds cleared from wire fences along the town road,
he oiled and stowed his good steel plows in the tackle barn.
He boxed carpentry tools in the back of his Model T
and drove off alone for some life he held clear in his head.
From Florida he never again came to work the white mules.
I saw him next when he was old and small, being led
by the hand through woods walked strong in his youth.
My Mother brought him home to fires she kept burning,
but I would not listen to his Florida, nor help him bridge
to the time spent with us in his young plowing days,
because of Grandmother’s shawl and the gray of her eyes
as she rocked on the porch through a long life built of nothing.
She moved herself just to the end of one dirt road and back,
and then to the cemetery for her only comfort through the years.
Now the fields once plowed with matched white mules are at rest,
and the greens of the past and deep wells dug, and shingles split
stretch out like maps to a Florida searched for and never found.
– Charles Brady
LOVIE MC COY
Lovie had a daughter
named Pinky
and a son with
an ordinary name.
But Lovie Mc Coy’s
claim to fame
was her hold on
Jim Driggers,
who plowed her fields
and dressed up
Saturdays
to haul her around
the hard dirt streets
of Metter
while she spat
Garrett snuff
between gapped teeth
and thought she’d won
something.
– Charles Brady
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 our grandmother. He knew
fathers make everything into family legends
for children impatient 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 my 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 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 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 wines.
Grandmother’s bonnet, from grey cotton sheets,
always framed her face in alternating light and
darkening shade, and her eyes were mysteries.
– Charles Brady
