Black and White

The house I grew up in. 

I wrote this over a year ago and just found it again in my files. It's a story that took a long time for me to put in writing, in black and white on a page in front of me. Time gives perspective, and also bring understanding and perspective. So today I bring you this personal story from the spring of 1967.

My mother wanted me to date Catholic boys, but I never did. Until Bob.

I was friends with many Catholic boys; after all, I went to a small Catholic school through the seventh grade. But those boys were more like brothers, we’d been together so long. None of them interested me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t interesting to any of them either. In the public junior high school I was surrounded by students of all faiths, a novel experience. Who knew that there were so many kids in our county! My graduating class from the Catholic school had 14 students; my class at the junior high probably had a couple hundred.

I wasn’t allowed to date, according to my father, until I was eighteen; still I managed to circumvent his rule when I was 15. But none of the boys I went out with were Catholic and my parents were not happy about that and did not like a single one of the guys I brought home to meet them. It took a pretty confident boy to come home with me in the first place. I had twelve siblings after all, and a strict, unfriendly father waiting at the door. Mom would be gracious but Dad was anything but, and usually had the poor fella squirming in just a few minutes.

In my junior year of high school I met Bob. He was different from the other kids. For one thing, he was older. He’d dropped out of school to work in his senior year, but had come back to finish up. He was working evening shift at a garage and going to school during the day. He had the hottest car, a Plymouth Roadrunner I think it was, a real muscle car. And he was drop dead gorgeous. He was half Mexican, I was told, which probably accounted for his dark good looks and liquid brown eyes. And wonder of wonders, he was Catholic! I fell for him, hard.

I could not wait for him to meet my mother. Dad was working evening shift so he wasn’t home. I brought Bob into the living room, and said, “Mom, this is Bob.”

Mom and Dad, probably taken
in the 1960's

Mom put on her best “English lady” look and voice. She used it to “put people in their place,” as she said. She had a fine English accent, and a warm loving way usually, but there were times when she would literally look down her nose at people, and the accent became quite pronounced, and well, superior-sounding.

“How do you do, Bob?” she said in that voice that I knew meant she didn’t like him already.

“Bob goes to our church,” I said hopefully. “He has a job but he’s also going to school.”  I could not understand why she was acting so unfriendly. She didn’t even invite him to sit down.

“Well, Susie, you have your work to do. Don’t you think you’d better say good-bye now?”

I walked Bob to his car and said good-bye, watching as he drove away. Then I went back inside, where I was confronted by a very angry mother.

“How dare you bring that…that…that…BLACK boy into our house!” She was so angry her face was red.

“Black! He’s not black! I think he’s part Mexican or something!” I was stunned. What was she talking about?

“I thought you’d like him, Mom! He’s Catholic, he goes to church every Sunday. And he works full-time even though he goes to school. He’s a nice guy.”

“He’s not our type, and he’s too old for you.”

“Well, he dropped out of school for a year. He’s only like 18 or 19!”

You will not see him anymore, is that clear?”

“But why…?”

“That’s all. You better hope I don’t tell your father about this!” She left the room, and I was left trying to understand what had just happened.

Perhaps a stronger-willed girl would have defied her mother and continued seeing the forbidden one. Perhaps another girl would have argued her case, or snuck around seeing her guy in secret. I didn’t. I was heartbroken but I followed my mother’s orders. I broke off with Bob, telling him that my mother thought he was too old for me.

I’ve never forgotten that day. I’ve thought about it and wondered if I should have stood up for my friend against my mother’s wishes. I wondered what my father would have thought if he’d ever met Bob, this young man with the hands of a working-man and a quiet, respectful manner. But Dad, I learned later, felt the same way as my mother. Anyone of any color whatsoever was not our kind.

Until that day I had not realized that my mother had an ounce of racism in her, but looking back I remembered the day we went to visit Sarah, the black lady who cleaned the church. Sarah was always kind to us, and often stopped to talk to Mom at our garden gate. One day she invited Mom and us girls to her home for tea. Mom must have been flabbergasted at the invitation but she accepted. We had to dress in our Sunday clothes, even down to wearing gloves, and Mom was nervous as a cat the whole time. We girls, on the other hand, were fascinated by Sarah’s house and by her incredibly beautiful flower gardens. I knew Mom wasn’t happy about being there, and seemed to worry that someone might see us. I was only nine or ten at the time so the reason for her discomfort didn’t register.

Later in life Mom changed her views. Perhaps it was because the world around her grew increasingly multicultural and those of other races became part of her everyday circle—doctors, nurses, priests, church members and even neighbors. Her heart was kind and compassionate and working as a nurse’s assistant brought her the reality that suffering and joy are the same for everyone, no matter their color. 

I wonder about Bob from time to time. I didn’t get to know him very well, so where he went in life I do not know. But in my mind he has remained darkly handsome, with those liquid-soft brown eyes, brown hair burnished with gold, and a smile that even today brings a smile to my lips. I hope his life has been as good as mine turned out to be.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Stories from Strangers: A Stink about Cow Chips

At lunch in Columbus, OH, during a library conference, I met a librarian from Iowa. I confessed I'd never been to Iowa, although I'd been close when we attended my son's wedding in Illinois, near the border with Iowa.



"There was nothing on TV when we got back to our motel," I told him, "except the Iowa State Fair, and they were televising a cow-chip throwing contest. Exciting stuff!"



Well, he said, one year there was quite a to-do.

"There was a real stink about the contest a few years back. Seems that there weren't enough cow chips in Iowa for the contest, and they had to be imported from California. People didn't like that at all!"



"Not enough? But why on earth...?"



"Everyone's growing corn these days," he explained. "They can make more money growing corn for ethanol than they can raising cattle, so there aren't very many cows left in Iowa. No cows, no cow chips!"



The things you can learn, talking to strangers. Who ever would have thought it? I tried to google this to verify his story, and here's what I found at http://www.senioryears.com/pat.html :

"About a year ago, the Des Moines Register ran a story headed Aw, poop! Fair uses imported cowpies, written by its Farm Editor, Jerry Perkins. "Here's a stinker," it began. "The cow chips thrown at the Iowa State Fair come from Oklahoma."It's not that Iowa's cow chips aren't good enough, fair officials say. It's just that Oklahoma cornered the cow-chip market years ago. In 1979, back when Iowa's dung discus-throwing contest began, the Oklahoma panhandle was the only place that sold the chips, said Kathie Swift, the fair's marketing director."


California or Oklahoma--either way, it's a great story!

Stories from Strangers: The Funeral with No Body

A lady told me this story at breakfast on Saturday morning:

She was at the cemetery, decorating her husband's grave. She noticed a hearse coming slowly up the hill, followed by a string of cars with funeral flags and lights on.

She was puzzled. There was no grave dug that she could see. She watched as the procesion pulled to a stop. People got out of their cars. Someone started singing. A preacher began praying. Everyone bowed their heads. There was no casket in view, and no open grave.

The prayers stopped, people got back in their cars. The hearse pulled solemnly away, followed the the rest of the procession.

"I could not believe what I had just seen," she said. "A funeral service, but no grave, and no body? What in the world were they doing?"

Her breakfast companion provided the answer. It seems the dearly departed had decided to be cremated, but still wanted a graveside service. Her family fulfilled that wish, and duly held the service while she reposed in the hearse, on her way to eternal fire. No grave, no body, but, as the lady observed, "a lovely service!"

Hurricane Hazel: October 15, 1954

It was Hurricane Hazel that I remembered in my Centreville ramblings. A quick search of the internet turned up lots of information about that storm.

Even though I was three when it struck, my memories are vivid. I remember the wind blowing us around--we thought it was fun. I remember Mom calling us inside and making us all sit around the table. I remember the wind shrieking around outside, and the sudden quiet. I remember the yard blanketed with hailstones that were as big as my little hand could hold. I remember laughing and licking the ice and being surprised that the hailstones tasted a little salty. I remember Mom's panic as she herded us back into the house--we'd been out playing in the eye of the storm, and it hit us again with renewed fury. We huddled inside as the house shook. Dad wasn't there and I don't think he came home for days because he was a lineman and he'd have been out working on repairs.

All that was recalled by that one mention of a hurricane in the Centreville post. Amazing.

There are many places to find out more about Hazel. One website is devoted to people's stories about the storm. Reading it now, I am astounded that our little house survived that terrible storm. Many others apparently did not.

Remembering: The Stuff of Personal Stories

The post about growing up in Centreville is an example of the beginnings of a personal/family story. It's full of memories, things I wanted to "catch" on paper before I forgot them. While not a story to be told as it stands, it is full of possible sources of stories.

For example, the story of the chemical toilet has become one of the most popular I tell; it's a fairly long story of 20 minutes or so, and winds from my parent's marriage to my fiasco with the toilet. It's a staple of my story bag because it can be modified on the fly for any audience, any age, and almost any length of time.

The story's roots are in my family's lore. I've been told the story so many times over the years that I can recall many little details. That's important, because repeated tellings bring more memories to the surface, or uncover related stories.

I wrote all the Centreville memories in one evening, just sitting at the computer and letting them flow. That was about 4 years ago. From those memories, I've developed one full story, but there are many others buried in those notes. I've added a few things here and there, and probably will continue to do so over the years. Eventually, I will develop another story from those years. Right now, it's germinating, and getting fertilized by more recollections.

Centreville

When I was a little girl, we lived in a small house my father built in Centreville, VA. Back then Centreville was a small place, not much more than a crossroads really. There was a hardware store, a general store, a diner, and a gas station. There must have been a post office too, but I don’t remember it. We lived on Beanblossom Road. The little house survived until about 10 years ago when it was finally torn down. Now it is impossible to recognize the place it stood.

That three-room house in the woods was a great place for kids. By the time we moved out of that house in 1956 there were six children, three boys and three girls. The house only had two bedrooms, but that wasn’t important because we spent most of our days outside, playing in the woods. Dad made us a playhouse, and we all had our secret hiding places under bushes, in gullies, or behind rocks. There were other kids who lived a short distance away, so we were never without someone to play with. Our house didn’t have running water and because the soil wouldn’t percolate we couldn’t have a septic tank. We had a chemical toilet, a sort of upscale outhouse. We heated with wood, and I remember there was a big vegetable garden.

The thing I remember most about Centreville, however, is my parents. They met in England during World War II where my father was stationed with the Army Air Force. After the war they lived with my father’s parents in Falls Church until the little house was finished. My mother was a beautiful English girl, with long auburn hair and a pretty cupid’s bow mouth. Every afternoon she would change into a clean dress and put on red lipstick before my father came home from work. We would all line up along the walkway to meet him. He would stride up the walk, looking so strong and healthy in his work clothes and with his lineman’s tools.

One year for my mother’s birthday Dad built her a rose arbor, painted white, with two seats built in. We loved to sit out there. Sometimes Mom would fix us a tea party, and we would sit like little ladies in the arbor sipping our tea. Other times we’d pick green persimmons for my mother, and she would put them in a wineglass on the table, telling us she would enjoy them later. We’d forget about them of course, and she’d quietly dispose of the puckery persimmons when we were playing.

Mom loved to braid our hair and wrap our heads in “crowns--Judy’s blond and shining like gold, mine with deep red lights in it, Mary—did Mary have braids? I don’t think so—she had black, curly, shining hair that bounced when she toddled around.

I was only five when we moved, but I remember so many things. A hurricane (what year was that? was its name Hazel?) that covered the ground with hailstones the size of shooter marbles. Mom lit a kerosene lamp and all of us gathered around the soft light shining on us while the wind and rain whipped the windows.

I remember:

• Playing in the woods—the pine needles a carpet of brown under our feet, pricking into my bare soles as I ran
• riding my Fire Chief car
• my secret hideout
• the playhouse where we got stuck on the roof and Dad had to climb up with his lineman's boots and rescue us
• the maroon-colored daybed with its rough upholstery that we slept on
• the pump in the kitchen sink (not a faucet)
• The chemical toilet outside, with it's half-door (there's another whole story about that little building!)
• the way the front door opened off one side of the house, hidden from the front and the road and very confusing to salesmen who would walk aroud the house, and even look underneath for a trap door
• Roses blooming
• visiting Dessie Deems who lived down the road with Nappy and his ancient pickup truck (see it in the picture above?)
• the way we’d aggravate the old neighbor lady woman by chanting naughty things about our underwear
• Joe cutting my hair, just one braid, leaving the other
• falling off the swing and cutting my knee open, how it looked, not really bleeding but more like the inside of an orange, only red.
• The ambulance ride, the hospital and my baby bottle that they took from me and put on a high window sill in some room (operating room? Emergency room?).
• Appendicitis--the old cellar on Signal Hill Road at Aunt Helen’s house (who was she, anyway? not my real aunt) with its slimy, slippery walls
• the green apple tree that hung over the cellar. I ate so many apples, I got appendicitis. What game were we playing when I went in there? Hide and seek?
• The path through the woods that went to the Moran’s house,
• rolling on 55-gallon drums
• putting the washtub on Mickey Moran’s head and banging on it with a hammer.
• I remember the soil being poor, with moss in the yard. But the roses did well, I remember that.
  
  All these memories, and yet I was only five years old when we moved. It doesn’t seem possible that I could remember so much, but I do. . We really lived in that house, you see; we lived like kids who were given the freedom to roam the woods, to play outside for hours because there was no television to keep us in, and to be alone outside because no one worried much about strangers in those days. Perhaps they should have, but they didn’t. We were free-spirited, full of make-believe games, and full of the joy of just being a little kid in a big woods in a tiny country community in the 1950’s.
  

Telling Personal and Family Stories

Grandson James telling me a story!

An old toy at a flea market makes us remember when we played with one just like it, fifty years ago. Tasting a certain food or passing a place from our childhood can recall good times--and bad--long past. These are stories that need to be told, that are as important in our lives as the stories we find in fairytale and folktale collections. They keep us in touch with our roots and allow our descendants to understand a little of how we—and they—came to be who we are today.

How can you find the story in a memory? Here are a few simple tips to get you started:

How Do I Get an Idea for a Personal Story?
Have a list of questions that ask about specific life events. For example:
Do you remember your first day of school?
What were you wearing?
Did you walk or ride the bus?
Did you know other kids or was it a strange and scary place for you?
Who was your teacher?
What was he/she like?
Were you afraid of them?
Was your teacher old or young?
What did you have for lunch?
How did you feel by the end of the school day?

Or:
How old were you when you learned to ride a bike?
Was it your bike or someone else’s?
What color was it?
Did it have training wheels?
Were you scared or excited?
Who taught you to ride?
How did your first bike wreck happen?
Did you get hurt?

These are just two examples of probing for memories that might become stories. Developing memories into stories takes time. Here are some suggestions to develop your basic story line:

Take the time to remember. We are all busy, and reminiscing takes time. It also requires talking to others who might have been there or might remember the incident you are trying to recall.

Make time to talk, call or email and ask them to share their memories with you. Have some specific questions to jog their memory and guide the conversation so that you get what you are seeking for your story.

Write it down. You might recall that the bike was a red Schwinn, for example, then two days later remember that it belonged to your cousin Harold who knocked out your two front teeth. Write it all down; when you begin to develop your story, some things will stay in while others don't make the cut. Save all of it, because there may be more than one story lurking in there.

Knowing What Stories to Tell
All memories might not be great stories to share or to develop for the stage. Ask yourself these questions:

What is important about the story? Why will other people want to hear it? Find the universal. Most people had a wonderful grandparent--what made yours unique? Add some vinegar to the sugar! No one is perfect and that is what defines character. Seek out the basic humanity that audiences can identify with. Did the sweet grandma who always held you on her lap ever drop her teeth in the commode?

So How Does a Memory Become a Story?
It probably won’t come to you as a full-fledged story at first. It will be bits and pieces that start fitting together when you have collected enough of them. Keep a notebook of ideas, thoughts, words, memories, and items from the time period of your story.

Give it time. Let it simmer in your brain, and add to it as you remember more details.

Write a timeline of events.

Seek the bones. The bones are the basic outline of the story, the important things that you hang the rest of the story on. Tell the bones to anyone who will listen.

Tell it over and over. Repeated tellings will hone your story as you discover what it is in your tale that appeals to listeners.

Resources for Personal and Family Storytelling
Telling You Own Stories by Donald Davis (August House, 1993, ISBN 0-87483-235-7)

Creating a Family Storytelling Tradition: Awakening the Hidden Storyteller by Robin Moore (ISBN 0874835658).

http://familyeducation.com/article/0,1120,4-10295,00.html
An article by storyteller Odds Bodkin on an ingenious way to start a family storytelling session.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/history/documents/7._jones_telling_family_stories.pdfResearch paper based on an interview with a woman born in 1913, and her memories of WWII. Includes some thought-provoking information about subjectivity in personal stories.