Spoiled

On bananas and such: the stuff of early memories

Casting about for childhood memories, I have trouble distinguishing among what I remember, what I was told, and what I’ve seen in photographs. So I may be creating fictions here. Imagine that.

I do have early memories of the house we lived in. We were a three-generation household; my parents had moved in with my maternal grandparents before I was born. The red brick house with a side porch and tall junipers at the front corners. The cramped kitchen, the dining room table with a quilt thrown over it so I could play house, the one bathroom we waited in line for. My maternal grandfather sick and dying in the back bedroom, next to mine. (That’s a story for later.) The basement, carved out of red clay and braced with wood beams, jars of my grandmother’s jellies and pickles and canned tomatoes lining earthen shelves. Dark, damp, scary. The big green yard, the vegetable garden out back. A ramshackle garage with a storage room on one side and stall-like spaces behind it. By the time I came along, my grandmother no longer kept a cow, but she still had chickens. Here’s proof:

Chicken yard

The rope swing Daddy hung on the walnut tree north of the house. Walnuts on the ground, their hard outer husks turned black. Cool in that shade, no grass growing. The white dog named Pokey who followed me around. Nita, a large, soft Black woman who would put me in the stroller and meet her friend who was nursemaid to a little boy about my age, and they would stroll us all the way to town and back. I wonder now what they talked about.

Here I am. Unruly, curly hair. Chubby legs.

Bananas

In my hand, a sack of bananas. I would swear that my Uncle Jim, nearly 20 years older than my dad, had brought them. Bananas must have been hard to come by in rural north Mississippi in those days, near the end of WWII. I loved all my uncles—there were several—but Uncle Jim especially. He became a substitute for my paternal grandfather who died three months after I turned two. Uncle Jim was a big man who smelled of cigarettes. He cursed—a lot—but he had the biggest heart. A few years after this photo was taken, he plucked me from the path of a car.

Around the age of two, my parents took me to the Memphis zoo for the first time. This was a major outing—a two- or three-hour car trip—and I remember getting carsick in the back seat because of my dad’s cigar smoke. I remember a yellow sunsuit with brown stitching and ruffles on the seat. I remember a giraffe that sneezed on me. That made an impression! I remember eating popcorn for the first time. We ate in a restaurant on the way home.

Here’s that sunsuit.

Ruffles

And now: here I am, after so many, many years.

The story goes that my dad once told someone who dared to ask why he and Mother never had more children: “She’s all in the world we ever wanted.” I believe I knew, even at the age of two, that I was the center of the household. Spoiled? Yes, I’d say so. But Daddy had a high school diploma. He owned a service station when I was little, and later, his own auto parts store; he was a smart businessman. My mother had wanted to go to nursing school, but her parents disapproved—or did they say no because they couldn’t afford to send her? Regardless of the reason, she stayed home, met my dad, and married him when she was eighteen.

I didn’t realize until I was forty the pressures of their expectations. They hung their dreams on me.

And now here I am, trying to unravel history some 80 years (!) after these photos were taken. It’s all quite complicated, isn’t it?