by Rick Bragg
Her sisters, Edna and Juanita, were fistfighters and fire breathers who would mix it up with the boys and win, or stone a snake, or tease a bull, “but I was little and weak and skeered of the world,” so much so that it seemed impossible she even came from a place such as this, from a deep woods populated almost solely with hog farmers, whiskey men, loggers, sharecroppers, and rough, hard women who handed babies off to their oldest daughters so they could pick cotton in the flatland and scrub floors in town.
The farthest she had ever been in her short life was the Coosa River ferry, or the Holiness church, and the most people she had seen in one place at one time would fit under a brush arbor. Now she was bouncing down a ragged ribbon of red dirt in her daddy’s battered Model A Ford, rumbling through pines, yellow broom sage, and white waves of cotton, on her way to a great adventure. He always drove fast, like he was afraid that he would miss something, that a thing that happened once in the world might be gone when he got there. When they hit the blacktop, he pushed the pedal to the floor, and the power lines flew by like fence posts, thrilling, as they rushed toward a metropolis of humming looms, ringing commerce, and hot steel.
They were only going to the feed store, to get a load of milled corn for Charlie’s Poland China hogs, but the word “town” gleamed with possibility. Rome, Georgia, was not a dusty crossroads where chickens scratched by the fuel pumps, but a real city, with pool halls and Coca-Cola and other great wickedness, not as big as Atlanta, Birmingham, or Chattanooga, but the biggest thing in between. It had risen from the foothills of the Appalachians in the 1830s, inside a triangle of rivers where the Etowah and Oostanaula came together to form the mighty Coosa. Because it was ringed by the low mountains, its founders named it for that City of Seven Hills.
The Cherokee left footprints on this ground. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his lightning cavalry fought the Yankee raiders here (William Tecumseh Sherman burned parts of it to smut anyway, sparing only the churches). Rome would rise from that destruction in time, and by the early twentieth century, its foundries and mills made it the thumping heart of the foothills on the Alabama-Georgia line.
They turned onto Broad Street, so wide that six cars could run abreast between the red-brick and the Art Deco storefronts, two and three stories tall. In better times, there had been an opera house, a symphony, even mansions. The Depression rubbed away some of the gilt, but Rome was rising again, and the old Model A quickly became hemmed in by traffic—traffic, in a small Southern city in the dying days of the Crash. On the sidewalk, paperboys in peaked caps and grimy faces, like something out of Dickens, waved headlines of a world heading toward war. The town ladies, their faces painted, shared the sidewalk with severe, disapproving old women in bonnets and plain dresses that swept the earth. Men in straw boaters and suits from Sears, Roebuck, balanced on one leg for a shine.
Her daddy loaded the sacks of corn himself at the feed lot, and they headed home. They retraced their route down Broad Street, the Ford belching smoke and wallowing low on its springs, and had not gone more than a block or so when the old truck shuddered, died, and coasted to a dead stop. It only took one broken-down Ford to bring traffic to a crawl in that swamp of cars, farm trucks, and occasional mule wagons, and the horns began to blow. “Daddy never had a truck that would run real good, that didn’t break down every other day, and it broke down right in the middle of town, right in the middle of all them people,” she said, thinking back. “And everybody was looking….”
He told her to stay in the cab, then crawled out, flung open the truck’s hood, and buried his head and shoulders inside. The truck’s starter had been dying for some time, and now it was smoking. This is perhaps her first clear memory of her father, half inside the hood of a broken-down truck, his overalls and boots specked with hot tar from the roofing pitch he used, thin and ragged under a sweat-stained, battered brown fedora. “I kept waitin’ for somebody to help him,” she said, but the world seemed fresh out of Samaritans.
With one hand on the wheel, to steer, and one on the door frame, he tried to start the old truck by pushing it off. He planned to jump inside once he got it rolling, slam it in gear, pop the clutch, and sail away. But the old truck was just too heavy, and the grade was not in his favor, and his worn-out boots slid on the asphalt as he pushed. The horns hurt her ears; people are brave inside a ton of Detroit steel.
Then, through that dusty windshield, my mother saw her coming. She moved not at a run but at a steady, rapid, thumping stomp, pushing down the sidewalk like a barge in wide white orthopedic shoes, her big arms and wide shoulders straining at her white uniform, the kind waitresses and cafeteria workers wore. Her reddish-brown hair was tucked under a black hairnet, and she cursed the rubberneckers, to their faces, as she came on.
“I’m comin’, Chollie,” she boomed, in a voice that would pierce fog. She did not slow down as she neared the small crowd gathered beside the car, and the little girl thought she was going to run them down. They parted at the last second like something out of Exodus.
“Hello, Cousin,” he said, like he was expecting her. “I am proud to see you.”
“Get in, Chollie,” she said, “and let me push.”
She bent her broad back to it, and slowly, slowly, the truck began to roll. “Try it,” she shouted, and my grandfather popped the clutch, and the truck lurched but did not crank, and the big woman cursed Henry Ford for all the misery he had wrought by building such a piece of manure in the first place, and cursed him again for selling it to poor and honest men. Then she pushed harder, pushed until her shoulders trembled from the strain. On the sidewalk, men in suits and ties must have thought it was funny to see the woman manhandle a Model A up Broad Street, and though no one came to help, an even bigger crowd gathered to watch the show. Sis noticed this, and turned her red face to them to curse them more specifically—for being pencil-necked sons of bitches too delicate to push a damn car.
She shoved the old truck a block or more, gathering speed slowly, slowly, till the engine coughed, caught, and roared to life. A cloud of black smut enveloped the big woman, who coughed herself, and turned her steel-gray, drill-bit eyes on the remaining no-accounts on the sidewalk, as if she was daring them to be amused by her. She damned them one last time, unafraid, then jumped on the back of the truck’s bed, thick legs swinging, and shouted: “Let’s go, Chollie!”
He drove her home—to her small house, on the outskirts of Rome, and they left her waving in the yard.
“Who was that, Daddy?” my mother asked.
“That was Sis,” her daddy said.
The Model A lurched and bounced across the unpaved road. He would go another year before replacing the starter. For a year, he just tried to park on a hill, or among friends.
“Sis is my cousin,” he said.
“She’s big, ain’t she?” the little girl said.
Her daddy nodded.
“She’s a lot of girl.”
“She cusses a lot, don’t she?”
“Got a mouth on ’er,” he said.
Within minutes, they were back in the trees.
He breathed easier in the trees.
“She cooks for a livin’,” he said. “She cusses for fun.”
“Can she cook good as Momma, as good as Edna?” She pronounced it “Edner.”
“She could cook a Lehigh boot,” he said, which left my mother mightily confused for a very, very long time. “And you could eat it, by God, with a spoon.”
As they rumbled home, he told her the rest of it, told her the legend of a woman loud, proud, and wide, who could outfight most men in a family that included some of the most profane and furious fist- and knife-fighters in the Appalachians.
“It was Sis,” her daddy told her, “that carried you around the house.”
The next time my mother saw her, months later, the clan from both sides of the river had gathered on the Alabama side, to celebrate a thing that she can no longer recall. But she remembers Sis, how she stomped into the yard with a
wooden case of Double Colas on her shoulder, and asked my mother, staring open-mouthed from the branches of a chinaberry tree, where the bleepity-bleep-bleeping ice tub was. She had on a flower-print dress and stockings rolled down below her knees, and carried a purse big enough to conceal a circus midget or a shoat hog. As my mother stared, glad she was high in a tree, Sis rummaged inside, handed her a stick of Juicy Fruit, grinned, and winked. It reminded my mother of a jack-o’-lantern. “Funny,” my mother said, “the things you don’t never forget. You don’t never forget people bein’ good to you. Well, I guess some people do.”
* * *
• • •
My mother stopped talking then, and sat quietly in her leather chair. Sometimes the story she is thinking goes on uninterrupted inside her head but does not quite make it to her mouth, like how a signal on an old radio with a shorted-out speaker wire will come and go. She does not always bother to start over when she begins to talk again, or even fill you in on the part you missed, like it was your fault for not having ESP, for being unable to read her mind. The frightening thing is, in that silence, my aunt Juanita seemed to be following things just fine.
“You were going to tell me about the dressing,” I nudged, gently, “and the teeth?”
“I am,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, and as I waited for more, the two old women just looked at me again, as if I might be slow.
“Sis was one of the Georgia people,” my mother patiently explained, and went silent again, as if that simple designation would tell me all I needed to know. “The Georgia people” is our family’s designation for kin born on the eastern side of the Alabama-Georgia line, and it makes them sound exotic, even European, as if they had a different accent or a sixth toe. The Georgia people had descended from the Appalachians in the early twentieth century to work in Rome and Cedartown, Georgia, but they never went completely tame. They were handsome, dark-haired people, but they would rather cuss, imbibe, and brawl than sit in the shade and eat peach ice cream.
“Was Sis a handsome woman?” I asked.
She hung her head.
“No, more square-headed,” my mother said, “more oblong.”
“But we loved her,” my aunt Juanita said.
They described a woman whose body had been machined by whipping giant spoons through pots as big as a fifty-five-gallon drum, deadlifting hundred-pound racks loaded with enough food to feed a platoon, and slinging around fifty-pound sacks of potatoes and flour and meal. She seldom had a job that did not involve the preparation of food, and for eighteen years cooked in the hospital in Rome. “She was big—not fat, but big and strong,” my mother said. “My God, she was strong. And always playing folly and laughing out loud. She wasn’t like nobody else in this world.”
She had one of those smiles that pulled people inside a kind of warm circle, the way you feel when you gather around a stove, but when she was angry her face took on a red-eyed, terrifying scowl that would make the dogs run under the porch. Babies, however, loved her; go figure.
But what my mother recalls most was her remarkable language, a cussing of such breadth and depth that kin who never even saw her, who were born a half-century after she passed from this earth, still tell stories of her as if they were actually there when these things happened. Everyone my mother knew, including some deacons, cursed a little bit, in a backslid, mild, biblical way. But Sis knew curses that no one else had ever used or even heard before.
“I won’t tell it like Sis said it,” my sweet mother said. “I’ll say ‘GD’ and ‘SB,’ and…”
“I understand,” I said.
People, in Sis’s view, were not just a plain, generic SB. They were a spindly SB, or a wormy SB, or a bandy-legged SB, or just a GDSB. She lived just slightly this side of folklore, and people, of course, built on her legend. “But Sis didn’t need no help,” my aunt Juanita said, “for people to remember her.”
“She saved Mr. Hugh Sanders’s life,” my mother said.
“How did she save Mr. Hugh?” I asked.
“With a number-2 washtub,” she said.
I no longer believed we would ever get back to the dressing.
I did not even believe we would get back to the teeth.
* * *
• • •
It was the damnedest thing, that friendship. One of the most fearsome people in these hills was fascinated by fairy tales, and by the man who told them. “She loved Mr. Hugh Sanders,” my mother said, “but ever’body did.” Mr. Hugh would become my aunt Edna’s father-in-law, but was like family even before then.
Mr. Hugh lived his whole life under the same battered fedora, and his hat had more stories than most men did. The ferryman at the Coosa crossing south of Rome, he was born in an age when old men still went to funerals in Confederate gray, and night riders rode through the pines under white sheets, torches in their hands. Mr. Hugh did his riding on old mules and on polished steel, with the hoboes, and traveled the mountains and far beyond, and found a story at every milepost. He fished, trapped, and hunted for a living as a younger man, and there was not a net he could not knit, a knife he could not sharpen, or a snake or a human he could not charm. But few could remember him as a young man, as being anything but grizzled and gray, with blue eyes that seemed to twinkle when he talked—or maybe we just wanted it to be that way. He lost his wife young, to sickness, and was adopted by pretty much everyone here. “Sis called him ‘uncle,’ but they wadn’t kin. She adopted him, too. She did that sometimes.”
People gathered at the ferry to fish and swim and cook their catch. The children swarmed around the old man to hear his tales about bears, deer, birds, possums, and raccoons, which could all talk in his stories, and outsmarted the evil snakes, panthers, and foxes. He sang to them that “the old gray goose is dead,” and they wept. Sis sat with the children and clapped her hands.
One day, as he held court, a fierce thunderstorm boiled straight down the river itself. A gray rain fell in sheets, and the Coosa, fed by storm water upriver, surged over its banks, sending the men, women, and children scrambling for higher ground. Mr. Hugh shooed the children away and went to secure his raft, his livelihood. It took longer than he had expected, and he was hip-deep in the roiling brown water when he could finally slog up the bank, toward safety. But the strong wind staggered him, he could barely see, the blowing rain was so thick in the air he could not breathe, and his feet could not find purchase in the slick mud. He fell to his knees once, twice, and the water still rose.
Through the gray curtain of rain, he glimpsed what appeared to be a giant turtle plowing toward him. Some of the Indians believed the whole world rode on the back of a giant turtle, and for just a second he thought maybe he was coming home. But as the apparition drew closer he saw that it was only Sis, waist-deep in the rising tide, with a big number-2 washtub covering her head and shoulders.
She placed the tub over the old man’s head and shoulders, like the hatch on a submarine, and, thick legs pushing against the rising river, half dragged, half carried him up the bank. He was finally able to breathe, but the raindrops hammered the top of the washtub like a million sticks on a bass drum, and by the time they made it to safety the old man was as deaf as an anvil.
“You’re safe now, Uncle,” Sis told him.
“What?” he said.
“You’re safe!” she shouted.
“What?”
* * *
• • •
“He said he never did hear good after that,” my mother said.
“But he didn’t drown,” Aunt Juanita said.
“No,” my mother said.
They nodded in concert again, and discussed whether it was better to be drowned or as deaf as a pine stump, and concluded that a deaf man could still read the Bible if he chose, and watch As the World Turns.
“The teeth?” I asked again.
“Well,” my mother said, “it happened at the eatin’ table,” which is kind of funny, if you think about it.
&nbs
p; “Tee-hee,” my aunt Juanita said.
The unfortunate husband was actually Sis’s second, a volatile, short-tempered man. Neither my mother nor my aunt Juanita could recall his name, but they decided it was unimportant to the narrative. He did not leave his mark on local history as clearly and sharply as Sis, but he is remembered for two things: one, he had abnormally large teeth; two, he was mean to her when he drank. They argued often and heatedly, and Sis, routinely and in front of witnesses, threatened to kill him, since cussing him out had achieved little improvement in his behavior. She armed herself for the inevitable.
“But, oh,” my aunt Juanita said, “how she loved that man.”
He would sometimes hit her when he drank, a thing Sis tolerated once, out of love, apparently. It was so out of character for her that people could barely believe it. But her patience was wearing out, and she warned: “If he ever even tries to lay a hand on me again, I will shoot him.”
The day it happened, Sis and her man were arguing again at the kitchen table. No one can remember what sparked it, but all agree that what happened next was entirely his fault.
“He should have known better,” my aunt Juanita said.
As they argued, he leaned across the table and drew back his hand.
“Better not,” Sis told him. “I’ll shoot you.”
“His name was Carter,” my mother said, suddenly remembering.
“No,” my aunt Juanita said, suddenly remembering herself, “it was Carson.”
“Carter,” my mother said.
“Carson,” my aunt Juanita said. “I’m sure. They give away some clothes after he died, and they had the name wrote on the inside of the collar—you know, from the dry cleaners’. Carson. C-A-R-S-O-N.”