The Last Ballad(18)

The woman who owned the farm was an old woman named Miss Rose. Mother must have thought a lot of her because that is who my sister Rose was named after. Do you remember your aunt Rose? She passed when you were just a little boy, and none of us saw her very much because she lived so far away in upstate New York. But that is where her name came from: an old woman who ran a farm where blacks and whites worked together and slept side by side.

We were not there long before Daddy came back and got us. We moved to North Carolina. Lowell first, and then a few other small towns where there were cotton mills. Mother always worked. Daddy worked sometimes.

Mother gave birth to another baby boy when I was about five years old, which means your father was almost three. The baby only lived a couple of years. His name was Willie. I remember him, but not well. I can remember him crying, and looking down at his little red face, and I can remember your father pointing at him in Mother’s arms and saying, “Baby cry,” and Mother saying, “Yes, sweetheart, ‘Baby cry. Baby cry.’”

I don’t know exactly why Willie died. I was too young for Mother to explain it to me, and I do not know where we lived at the time, so I never knew where they buried him, but I think about him often, and I always feel a great sense of sadness sweep over me when I do. I am sorry to be telling you something like this in a letter, but it feels good to tell someone about it now as I am thinking of things with a sense of clarity and purpose with which I have not thought of them in a long time.

Your aunt Rose was born a few years after Willie died, and by then we had moved to Bessemer City, North Carolina, in a little community called Stumptown where our neighbors were all black. It was just like being back on Miss Rose’s farm, so maybe that’s how Mother thought to name this new little girl Rose.

The clearest memories of my life before Mother passed away are of the years that we lived in Stumptown. I know that Daddy lived with us off and on there, but I do not remember him as well as I remember other things, other people. Mother had another baby, her last one, in 1928 when I was ten, and he was healthy. His name was Joseph, but we always called him Wink because he blinked his eyes one eye at a time, and it always looked like he was winking. You have probably never heard of him, but your father just doted on him. That was his little brother, but they took him away after Mother was killed, and they sent Rose, your father, and me to an orphanage at Barium Springs near Statesville, North Carolina. None of us saw Wink for a long time after that. Years. By the time we saw him again he had no idea who we were.

There were five of us in a tiny, little two-room cabin there in Stumptown. Daddy would have made six, but he was gone much of the time, and before Wink was even born he left and never came back. I never saw him again, although I know he died in 1967. How I found out about it I don’t remember. I think your father may have told me. Maybe it was in the paper and someone showed it to him.

After my father ran off, Mother spent a lot of time with a man named Charlie Shope. Just how she met him, I don’t know. He was a mean little man, an awful sort. We all hated him. But I suppose Mother was lonely, and I understand that now in a way I did not understand it when I was a child. Maybe I know more about being lonely than I first thought.

Mother with four children to look after, one already passed away, working a full-time job at the mill there in Bessemer City, which back then meant she worked six days a week, probably seventy hours, maybe more sometimes if they needed her and she needed the money. She always needed the money. I don’t know how much she got paid, but I imagine it wasn’t much. We went hungry a lot, and we were cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

I did not mean for this letter to turn into a “poor me” letter. There were good times. We had fun, especially your father and me. We had to look after Rose and Wink because they were so little, but we still had fun. We would play games, swim in the pond out behind the cabin, fish, panfry whatever we could catch. Your father was always trying to lure the neighbors’ chickens into traps he made in our yard. He once caught one while Mother was at work. I scolded him, but he said it was the chicken’s fault for coming into our yard, and I guess it was. He killed it, and I fried it for dinner. We begged Rose to keep it secret from Mother. She’d have worn us out if she’d known we’d killed and eaten one of the neighbor’s chickens. More than anything, it would have humiliated her to know that her children were hungry enough to do such a thing, especially because our neighbors would’ve given us anything we ever needed if they had it to give. They looked out for us. We all looked out for one another.

My best friend, I guess she was my only friend at the time, was a little black girl named Iva Gingles. Her older sister Violet was mother’s best friend. If I was ten, Iva was probably twelve or thirteen. Earlier, I told you I was born in a wagon on our way from Bryson City to Cowpens. Can you even imagine that? When I think about it I think less about myself being born and more about Mother giving birth. Here she was, a teenager that had never left home before, had never been any farther from home than the church or the general store, pregnant by a man she could not have known that well, a man she may have never gotten to know. It amazes me, honestly. It always has. Everything about my mother has always amazed me.

She was never able to remember the exact day I was born. She never wrote it down. I know it is hard to conceive of that now. I remember when Owen was born and I visited Sarah and you while she was still in the hospital. I remember knocking on the door to her room, and while I waited for a nurse to finish up with something, I stood in the hallway and stared at the form you had clipped to the door with all of Owen’s information filled out on it. It was the form the county would use for his birth certificate. I have never told you this and I am embarrassed to tell you this now, but I was jealous of Owen because he would have a document detailing everything about the day he was born. I chose not to say anything to you about it then because the last thing new parents need is advice, especially the advice of an old woman who never had children of her own, but perhaps I will say now what I wanted to say to you and Sarah then: Hold on to that paperwork, that birth certificate. Make sure Owen sees it often, especially when he is young. Those official pieces of paperwork may not mean much when you’ve seen them and you know they exist, but when you do not have them it is easy to imagine yourself as being somewhat less than validated in this world. I know there will be a slip of paper documenting my passing, but there will never be anything that marks my beginning, and something about this feels so fleeting to me, and it makes my time on this earth seem all the more impermanent. That sounds crazy, I know, but it is something I have spent much of my life thinking about: what it means to be on this earth, what it means to leave it, what of us is left behind once we are gone.