The Last Ballad(17)

Tonight, your questions about your father and our family were serendipitous because I was thinking much the same thing after what I’d decided to do during my drive down to see you this morning. I have made the drive down from Asheville to Greenville many times in my life. I have seen the same trees and road signs and buildings many times. Perhaps I have grown numb to them in some way. Perhaps I have driven past the exit sign for Cowpens many times without fully recognizing what that place meant to our family, what it means to me, to you. That is where your father Otis was born in 1920. You probably know that. Your mother probably told you if your father did not, but surely he did. It is only a few minutes away from where you were born and raised in Greenville.

Cowpens, South Carolina: I always thought that was such a strange name for a town when I was a young girl and I would overhear Mother mention it, which happened rarely. She did not have good memories of it, but that’s where Otis was born just eighteen months after me, so I suppose she had at least two good memories of our time there. I do not know why my mother and father went there or why they left the mountains. I think my father must have heard something about the mills there, about how easy it was to get a job, and Mother did not know what else to do but follow him. She was pregnant with me when they left the mountains, so what else could she do? Cowpens is the first place I remember, but I was not born there. It is embarrassing to say this, but I was born in a mule-drawn wagon on the way down to Cowpens from up in the mountains around Bryson City. I grew up hearing Mother tell about it, and I can almost hear her tell about it now, all these years later.

Today, when I saw the exit for Cowpens, I pulled off I-26 and drove through town, thankful that I’d left home early not even knowing that I would have either the desire to see this old place or the cause to ponder questions like the ones you asked me tonight. I’m so happy that I allowed myself this one flourish of nostalgia because it brought back things I thought I had forgotten.

I wondered what I would see of the town, and as I suspected there was not much of it to see. Downtown is mostly a collection of antique stores and civic buildings. Nothing so different from any other little downtown. The mill there, the Cowpens Manufacturing Company, I assume it was the mill that Mother worked in almost ninety years ago, was closed. A chain-link fence enclosed the entire property, and the trees had grown so wild and thick that you couldn’t see anything on the other side. I wish I could’ve seen the mill though. It may have reminded me of Mother, may have reminded me of something about my life in Cowpens that now I will never know.

I was very young when we lived there. I remember a field, thick with strawberries, and I believe there may have been a strawberry patch near the place where we lived, and my father would take me out in the morning and we would pick strawberries and eat them where we stood.

Aside from the strawberries, I can recall apples, but I do not believe there were orchards near our house because most of the orchards are farther up in the mountains. But I remember apples, and it seems like I remember a man who delivered apples. I remember a man who gave me apple slices.

Mother would wake me up late at night when she got home from the mill. She’d make me something to eat because Daddy never learned to make anything. I can remember her doing that, cooking, preparing food. And I believe I can remember her being pregnant with Otis. She worked at the mill the whole time she was pregnant. My father did not work in Cowpens. At least I cannot remember him working. He never cared much for work.

Your father was born on April 10, 1920. I remember waking up one morning and a little baby boy named Otis just being there as if he had always been there. I slept right through it. I don’t know if Mother had any help with the birth. She may have done it all herself. Knowing Daddy, she probably did.

In South Carolina, Mother and Daddy were like they always were, like they always were no matter where we lived: she’d run him off, let him come back. Run him off, let him come back. My father was a good-looking man, and he knew it. He probably always had somewhere he could go. He was always into things he should not have been into, and for some reason I think that is why we left Cowpens not long after Otis was born.

I remember Mother waking me up and carrying me outside wrapped in a blanket and laying me down on a wagon’s seat while she and Daddy loaded the few things they wanted to take with them. I could hear the mule’s reins clink together when it shook its head. I could hear its feet stomp on the dirt road. They must have just purchased it from somebody because I do not remember us owning a mule. The night was cold and dark. Mother and Daddy did not say a word to each other. I remember hearing Otis cry out, and then hearing the sound of Mother soothing him back to sleep. She sat in the back of the wagon with your father in her arms, and Daddy climbed in beside me and took the reins in his hands. I remember laying my head on his lap and staring up at the silhouette of his face against the dark night sky as the four of us passed beneath it. I do not remember seeing stars up there, but that does not mean there were not any to see.

We went to a farm after that. Mother worked in the field there, and there were black people there, the first black people I had ever seen. Daddy did not want to be there because blacks worked alongside whites, and we all lived together in a big bunkhouse, all the women and the children, black and white, the older children taking care of the younger ones. The men lived in a different house, even if they were married.

Daddy left us there and went ahead to North Carolina to find somewhere for him and Mother to work, and it was just the three of us on that farm until he sent word for us to join him. I do not know how long we were there, and I cannot remember much about it except my surprise at seeing black people for the first time. I remember wondering if the color could be wiped from their skin, and then, when it warmed up, a bunch of us went swimming in a little pond that must have been somewhere near the farm. I wondered if the black children would turn white after they got wet, but of course they did not.