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Authors: Russell Baker

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BOOK: Growing Up
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At sundown the men drifted back from the fields exhausted and steaming. They scrubbed themselves in enamel basins and, when supper was eaten, climbed up onto Ida Rebecca’s porch to watch the night arrive. Presently the women joined them, and the twilight music of Morrisonville began:

The swing creaking, rocking chairs whispering on the porch planks, voices murmuring approval of the sagacity of Uncle Irvey
as he quietly observed for probably the ten-thousandth time in his life, “A man works from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.”

Ida Rebecca, presiding over the nightfall from the cane rocker, announcing, upon hearing of some woman “up there along the mountain” who had dropped dead hauling milk to the creamery, that “man is born to toil, and woman is born to suffer.”

The timelessness of it: Nothing new had been said on that porch for a hundred years. If one of the children threw a rock close to someone’s window, Uncle Harry removed his farmer’s straw hat, swabbed the liner with his blue bandanna, and spoke the wisdom of the ages to everyone’s complete satisfaction by declaring, “Satan finds work for idle hands to do.”

If I interrupted the conversation with a question, four or five adults competed to be the first to say, “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.”

If one of my aunts mentioned the gossip about some woman “over there around Bollington” or “out there towards Hillsboro,” she was certain to be silenced by a scowl from Ida Rebecca or Uncle Irvey and a reminder that “little pitchers have big ears.”

I was listening to a conversation that had been going on for generations.

Someone had a sick cow.

The corn was “burning up” for lack of rain.

If the sheriff had arrested a local boy for shooting somebody’s bull: “That boy never brought a thing but trouble to his mother, poor old soul.”

Old Mr. Cooper from out there around Wheatland had got his arm caught in the threshing machine and it had to be taken off, “poor old soul.”

Ancient Aunt Zell, who lived “down there around Lucketts,” had to be buried on a day “so hot the flowers all wilted before they could get her in the ground, poor old soul.”

When the lamps were lit inside, someone was certain to say to the children, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Uncle Harry usually led the departures, for he lived outside Morrisonville proper and had to walk a half mile to get home. Only a year younger than Uncle Irvey, Harry was Ida Rebecca’s quiet son. A dour man in sweat-stained work shirts, baggy trousers held up by yellow galluses, he worked in the fields, did some carpentry, turned up on a building job occasionally. He was gray, solemn, and frosty. A lonely man. His wife had died in childbirth twenty years earlier.

I knew he was slightly scandalous. Lately he had taken an interest in a younger woman who had borne an illegitimate child and been abandoned by her lover. Everybody knew Uncle Harry had “gone to housekeeping” with her and was devoted to her child, but he did not bring either mother or daughter to sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch. Morrisonville’s social code was rigid about such things.

Another person who did not join our evening assemblies was Annie Grigsby, Ida Rebecca’s next-door neighbor. Annie had been born in slavery, and this made her a notable citizen. Her log house was pointed out to travelers as one of the Morrisonville sights not to be ignored. “Annie was born in slavery,” the visitor was always advised.

“Born in slavery.” That phrase was uttered as though it were an incredible accomplishment on Annie’s part. Elsewhere, people boasted of neighbors who had tamed lightning, invented the wind-up Victrola, and gone aloft in flying machines, but we in Morrisonville didn’t have to hang our heads. We had Annie. “Born in slavery.” My mother told me about Abraham Lincoln, a great man who freed the slaves, and living so close to Annie, who had been freed by Lincoln himself, made me feel in touch with the historic past.

Annie was not much older than Ida Rebecca, who was born in 1861. She was a short, gray-haired, rotund woman of weary carriage and a dignity appropriate to her remarkable birth. Now and then she unbent enough to invite Doris or my cousin Kenneth or me into her dark kitchen for a piece of butter bread, Morrisonville’s universal treat. One afternoon I wandered into
her backyard to find her hacking the meat out of a huge, freshly killed terrapin.

“What’s that, Annie?”

“It’s a tarpon.”

“What’s a tarpon?”

“Tarpon’s big turtle, child.”

“Why’re you cutting it up like that?”

“To make soup. You come back over here when I get it done, and I’ll give you some.”

White Morrisonville’s hog-meat diet hadn’t prepared me for terrapin soup. I hurried back across the road giggling to my mother that colored people ate turtles.

“Colored people are just like everybody else,” she said.

Despite the respect accorded Annie, no one else in Morrisonville held my mother’s radical view. Nor did Annie. Only when there was death or sickness did Annie presume the social freedom of white households. Then she came to help in the sickroom or sit in a rocker on Ida Rebecca’s porch comforting a sobbing child in her lap. In time of crisis her presence was expected, for she was a citizen of stature. An historical monument. A symbol of our nation’s roots. “Born in slavery.”

For occasional treats I was taken on the three-mile trip to Lovettsville and there had my first glimpse of urban splendors. The commercial center was Bernard Spring’s general store, a dark cavernous treasure house packed with the riches of the earth. Staring up at the shelves, I marveled at the bulging wealth of brand-new overalls, work shirts, gingham fabrics, shoe boxes, straw hats, belts, galluses, and neckties and intoxicated myself inhaling the smell of plug tobacco, chewing gum, gingersnaps, cheese, leather, and kerosene, all of which Bernard Spring sold across the same polished counter on which he cut bolts of cloth for the women to sew into new dresses.

Nearby stood the Spring family’s mansion, the most astonishing architectural monument I had ever seen, a huge white wedding cake of a building filled with stained glass and crowned with
turrets and lightning rods. The whole business had been ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and erected according to mail-order instructions. Since Mr. Spring insisted on top-of-the-line in all his dealings, Lovettsville could boast that it contained the finest house in the Sears, Roebuck warehouse.

Just as wonderful to me was a contrivance my Uncle Etch kept behind his Lovettsville house. Uncle Etch, Ida Rebecca’s fourth son, was married to the town undertaker’s daughter and had inherited custody of a hearse, which he kept in his backyard shed. It was not one of your modern internal-combustion hearses, but a beautiful black antique horse-drawn hearse with glass windows on all four sides and elegant wood carvings jutting out hither and yon. It was a hearse fit for a royal corpse, but I never saw anything in it but a few of Uncle Etch’s chickens who enjoyed nesting down inside during the heat of the afternoon.

My cousin Leslie, Uncle Etch’s oldest son, much older than I, assisted in the family undertaking business and took part in one of the most appropriate buryings ever held in our part of the country. The customer was Sam Reever, the famous bootlegger.

For several months before their triumph Leslie and his grandfather had been unnaturally depressed. The cause of their sorrow was a unique coffin foisted upon them by their chief supplier of funeral goods. The thing was made entirely of glass. They hadn’t ordered it; the supplier had just had it delivered out of the blue one day. His covering letter explained that glass coffins were the wave of the future. To help popularize them, he was sending specimens to a few lucky customers for showroom display. Leslie’s grandfather had been selected to be among the few let in on the ground floor of the glass-coffin boom.

The price was staggering, and so was the weight. Leslie and his grandfather tried to move it but couldn’t.

“Lord, it’s heavy,” the old man groaned.

“Must weigh a ton,” Leslie grunted.

They had to step outside and corral six other men to help before they could position it tastefully in the showroom. Weeks passed, then months, and though death took its steady toll, there
were no customers rich enough to afford glass interment. Leslie’s grandfather sank into despair.

“We’re never going to be able to sell it,” he told Leslie.

Then, hope: news that Sam Reever had died. Everybody knew bootlegging was one of the richest businesses in the county. Leslie and his grandfather collected Sam and carried him to Lovettsville. Close behind came his widow, Liz, determined to put Sam away in dandy style.

“Now here’s a really wonderful coffin,” Leslie’s grandfather said, after showing her the pauper’s pine model to rouse her appetite for higher quality. “Look how heavy this glass top is.”

He and Leslie demonstrated that two men could scarcely budge it.

“And look all around the edge of the lid here,” Leslie said. “That’s a rubber gasket, just like you use to seal the cap on a Mason jar.”

“When you seal it up with that gasket in there,” said his grandfather, “it’s completely airtight. With a coffin like this, Sam’ll look as good a hundred years from now as he does the day you bury him.”

The widow would have nothing else. Maybe it was the gasket sealing the glass that sold her on it. Maybe she saw the esthetic beauty of burying Sam in the symbol of his profession. Like most country bootleggers, Sam bottled his moonshine in canning jars. When they took him to the graveyard the mourners approved of the fitting way in which Liz, as a grace note to his life, had him buried in the fanciest Mason jar ever sold in Loudoun County.

Beyond Lovettsville, on the outer edge of my universe, lay Brunswick. I first walked in that vision of paradise hand-in-hand with my father, and those visits opened my eyes to the vastness and wonders of life’s possibilities. Two miles north of Lovettsville, across the Potomac on the Maryland shore, Brunswick was as distant and romantic a place as I ever expected to see. To live there in that great smoking conurbation, rumbling with the constant thunder of locomotives, filled with the moaning of train whistles
coming down the Potomac Valley, was beyond my most fevered hopes.

Brunswick was a huge railway center on the B&O Main Line, which linked the Atlantic coast to Chicago and midwestern steel centers. Approaching it was almost unbearably thrilling. You crossed an endless, rickety cantilever bridge after pausing on the Virginia bank to pay a one-dollar toll. This was a powerful sum of money, but Brunswick was not for the pinchpennies of the earth. As you neared the far end of the bridge, its loose board floor rattling under the car wheels, the spectacle unfolding before you made the dollar seem well spent.

In the foreground lay a marvelous confusion of steel rails, and in the midst of them, on a vast cinder-covered plain, the great brick roundhouse with its doors agape, revealing the snouts of locomotives undergoing surgery within. Smaller yard locomotives chugged backward and forward, clacking boxcar couplings together and sending up infernos of black gritty smoke which settled over the valley in layers.

If the crossing gate was down, you might be treated to the incredible spectacle of a passenger express highballing toward glory, the engineer waving down at you from the cab window, sparks flying, cinders scattering, the glistening pistons pumping with terrifying power. And behind this hellish monstrosity throbbing with fire and steam, a glimpse of the passengers’ faces stately and remote as kings as they roared by in a gale of wind powerful enough to knock you almost off your feet.

Between the mountains that cradled the yard there seemed to be thousands of freight cars stretching back so far toward Harpers Ferry that you could never see the end of them. And flanking the tracks on the far side, a metropolis: Brunswick had electric light bulbs, telephones, radios. Rich people lived there. Masons, for heaven’s sake. Not just Red Men and Odd Fellows and Moose such as we had around Morrisonville, but Masons. And not just Masons, but Baptists, too—genuine dress-to-the-teeth-and-give-yourself-fancy-airs Baptists.

Three of my uncles lived there: Uncle Tom, Uncle Harvey,
and Uncle Lewis. They were expected to come back to Morrisonville and sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch too, but only on Sundays. As citizens of Brunswick, they had crossed over into a world of Byzantine splendor.

Brunswick had a department store and a movie house. There was a street stretching for two or three blocks lined with stores, including a drugstore where you could sit down at a round marble-top table and have somebody bring you an ice-cream soda. There were whole blocks of houses jammed one right up against another, the blocks laid out in a grid pattern on hills steep enough to tire a mountain goat.

Uncle Harvey lived with his wife and daughter at the crest of one such hill. He was one of God’s favored people, a locomotive engineer. I was in terror that he might try to engage me in conversation. When he heard a train whistle echoing off the valley below, I goggled in admiration as he produced his big railroad watch, studied it coolly, and announced, “The three-fifty-four’s running five minutes late today.”

BOOK: Growing Up
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