Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Mama's Roots

My mama was born in Macon, Georgia on August 26, 1944. I think my grandmama must've been visiting someone down there because she talked about riding back to Kinston, NC on the bus when my mama was only a couple of days old. Mama was the third child in the family. My aunt Evelyn, who my grandaddy christened Butch because he wanted a boy, was the eldest and then my Uncle Cecil, who instantly became Buddy, came along a year later and a year after that my mama. There was another baby. A still-born baby that my grandmama told me was absolutely perfect except that all of it's orifices were covered over with skin. It's nostrils and ears and mouth were all sealed. She buried it in a shoebox out in the garden. Another baby -or maybe it was the same one, maybe I'm mixing up stories, but another baby was buried underneath my grandaddy. After the still-born child, came my Uncle Danny and my Aunt Joette. They grew up in east Kinston in a poor hardscrabble neighborhood where people grew their own vegetables and my grandmama took in laundry and my daddy worked as an electrician when he wasn't in jail for beating the shit out of my grandmama and their children. He was mean. Mean as a snake. Mean just for the sake of mean and it was all exacerbated by massive quantities of alcohol. I believe he was a gin man. My grandmama was beautiful. I don't mean pretty or handsome, I'm talking Ava Gardner gorgeous. When I was 20 or so, I met a man from east Kinston who, upon finding out I was Pauline Kelley's granddaughter drew back and said, "You're grandmother was the most beautiful woman I ever knew." Too bad it didn't get her any farther than five hungry children and a mean-ass drunk for a husband. For kicks, grandaddy used to make the three oldest kids fight each other out in the front yard. He'd make them literally beat each other up or else he'd beat all of them himself. Those were the choices. So, when my mama was eleven years old, grandaddy got thrown in the tank for beating the hell out of grandmama. Only this time, she'd had enough. She went before a judge and asked for a divorce. He agreed, but then he told her she'd better pack her kids up and leave or else my grandaddy would kill her. It was 1955.

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