On Growing Up Tough: An Irreverent Memoir

by Taylor Caldwell

  Th nurse came into the room and, instead of looking at us basket-cases, her eye lit on the boy near the door, whom I will call Jim. Immediately her eye flashed with loving lightning, and she bent over Jim, and, so help me, the following “conversation” took place:

  NURSE (crooning tenderly): Een-een-een?

  JIM (looking at his arm): Un-un-UN.

  NURSE: Oh, suh poo-poo-poo! (She patted his shoulder tenderly.)

  JIM: Awt tuh-tuh mum-mum.

  NURSE (really crooning now): Oohzi, oohzi, ahahhh.

  Jim got up and staggered out with Nanny. The aged gentleman next to me was dying by inches before our eyes, but he said to me, “Foreigners, eh?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They’re just ‘cummunicating’.”

  He reared back, glared, and examined me cautiously. “What?” he barked.

  “It’s the new Liberal jargon,” I explained. “Don’t you understand it?”

  “Me?” he said, outraged. “I’m gonna vote for Wallace!”

  The lady on my other side, who was drawing her final breaths—as I was—said, “I think they do it on purpose.”

  I don’t. I think they are just too ignorant or too illiterate—to talk “meaningfully” with anyone except each other.

  I don’t know how I get into these things, but occasionally I accept an invitation to a cocktail party composed mainly of Liberals, although I don’t know why I accepted this particular one. I saw at once on entering the house that it was a Liberal establishment. They were serving only sherry and a clam-and-sour-cream dip. I would have run at once but my husband was breathing down my neck and whispering, “Behave!” I figured, What the hell? It was only five o’clock and we could get out of there within ten minutes or so without the sherry and clams.

  Now, I was irritated, as I am always irritated at being dragooned under false pretenses into a situation where I am supposed to act civilized in an atmosphere that is totally uncivilized. When the hostess slinked up to me with her loving-loving smile and asked me brightly if she could bring me “something”—I got that one word anyway—I said resoundingly, “Yes! A double bonded bourbon, please.” She stared at me. “Oro, ordi, un un?” she asked.

  I thought she said ordure, so I said, hopefully, “Ordure?”

  “Quit it!” my husband seethed against my nape, and said to the hostess—he was always able to catch on—“Oro, un UN!”

  The hostess hurried off, her gold lamé dress rattling, and I said to my husband, “What is ‘oro, un un?’”

  “Clams!” he shouted, and immediately all conversation stopped, and everyone turned to us. They’d heard an English word and it was verboten, and they were annoyed. My husband, a sensitive chap, could not stand being stared at, and so he colored vividly, gripped my arm and said, “For God’s sake, can’t you take it for five minutes?”

  Well, why should I? Why should I waste my time listening to onomatopoeia? I out-grew that by the time I was eleven months old. The battle lust flared in me. The hostess returned with a small glass of sherry and two damp crackers covered with goo, and I said, “No thanks. This is a fast day.”

  “Unz?” she asked.

  I decided to get into the spirit of things. “Luntz,” I said, nodding gamely.

  “Awch,” she said, nodded wisely, and beetled off somewhere like a knight on the track of the Holy Grail.

  “Will you please …” my husband said. Then tasted the sherry and made a mouth like a dirty word. He put it down on a chair, where, I am happy to say, a fat lady in a white dress soon sat on it.

  I stood and waited, all anticipation to see what my hostess would retrieve somewhere in the house. She soon came back triumphantly—with a glass of water. Now, I have nothing against water—I like to bathe in it. I like to try to swim in it. I think it is very pretty. I even boil lobsters in it. Still, I thought, it might be vodka. I took a sip. It wasn’t! The hostess watched, all arch love. “Udd?” she asked.

  “Zint,” I said, and gave her the glass.

  Perfect communication, you see. My husband had a darkly sparkling eye and it was fixed on me now with less than conjugal affection. The lady in the white dress now sat down on his discarded glass, and there was an uproar of onomatopoeia, and we got out of there as fast as oiled eels. “You would!” said my husband, breathing fresh air outside.

  “Who put the sherry on the chair?” I asked. “And what—ak-chully—is wrong with communication? I think I made a hit with the hostess. Coming down to it, from the noise I hear back there, someone wants to hit you, too.”

  “I will never,” my husband vowed, “go anywhere with you again.”

  9 Pioneering in Kentucky

  Recently I found myself among a group of “knowledgeable” individuals who were engaged in a discussion on Appalachia and its problems and why the government must conduct a Welfare Program there. “I lived in Appalachia,” I said, “for nearly five years.”

  As none of the above had apparently set foot below the Mason-Dixon Line they stared at me blankly. Then one of them said “I heard you never lived anywhere except Buffalo and Rochester, New York, where you were born, and that you’ve never even been out of the United States or anywhere else, and that your name really was Janet Taylor but you added the name, Caldwell, because of a famous writer, Erskine Caldwell.”

  “No,” I said, “I’ve never lived in Rochester, and I was born in Prestwich, Manchester, England, and I was baptised in the New Bury Methodist Church there when I was six weeks old and christened Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell. Moreover, I’ve traveled almost everywhere in this world, and lived not only in Kentucky but in West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee.”

  They didn’t believe me, of course. One said, with an air of tender indulgence, “Now, why should you, a famous novelist, ever have lived in Appalachia? A government grant?”

  “No, I went with my first husband, a young Virginian. He wanted to get rich quick. He believed—and I practically agree with him now in these days of high taxes—that no one can get rich by merely working for money. The government will take care of that. So, he listened to friends of his in the oil-fields of Kentucky—far back in the mountains—and gave up his job as a construction engineer, and we moved South. We spent five years in the mountains of Kentucky.”

  They stared. Apparently they had not heard me. “Oh, you were a field worker!”

  “No,” I said, “I was a nineteen-year-old wife and mother of a year-old child.”

  “I bet you lived in one of those decayed Southern mansions with Negro servants.”

  “No,” I said, “I lived in a tent. Once or twice, when we were lucky, we lived in an abandoned log cabin, at least two hundred years old.”

  “Did you say nineteen? Why, that’s babyhood! You were just in school at that age!”

  “No, I was a wife and mother, and I was no baby. I was a full-grown mature woman, as all nineteen-year-old women really are, in spite of the ‘teen’ fad so sedulously cultivated in America.”

  “Why did your parents let you drop out from school and go into a sort of Peace Corps project financed by the government?” asked another.

  “A tent?” cried a lady. “How could you live in a little tent?”

  “It was a big square tent, about sixteen-feet square, with boarded walls half the way up, and screening and canvas curtains to the fly.”

  The last word made the ladies and gentlemen giggle.

  “The fly,” I said patiently, “is the cover over the main roof of canvas. It helps insulate against rain and heat and snow, through an air-space. Our big tent was furnished with two beds, cots really, a table and a bench, a commode to hold water and pails, a storage place for food and canned goods—my canned goods—and a kerosene stove for cooking and heating. I also had an orange crate for my dishes, pans, and blankets, and for what linen we possessed.

  “We weren’t financed by the government, and it was no Peace Corps or Job Corps. I was no high-school dropout. I had finished high schoo
l by going at night, from the time I had my first job at the age of fifteen. And I had gone to Appalachia to help get money to finance me through college and to help make us ‘rich.’

  “We had a mule to ride, when we could catch him, and a cow to milk, when I could catch and milk her, and one hundred chickens for their eggs and meat. I also had to learn to hunt rabbits and squirrels and raccoons, to supplement our miserable larder. I’m an expert at a rifle now—which may come in handy some day,” I added, looking at them meaningly, for I was losing my temper. But I went on, daring them not to listen.

  “I had to learn to grow vegetables for our table. I had a corn patch, and a patch of lettuce and carrots and radishes, and several hills of potatoes. That was in the mountains, forty miles from the nearest railroad, and five miles from the nearest village. Once a week, I gathered up my baby and my basket and walked those five miles over the mountains, across pastures, and streams, to the little village of Benton to buy staples such as coffee, sugar and salt. I made my own bread, on the kerosene stove. I cured my own bacon and ham in the smokehouse my husband built. We had a couple of sows and a boar, and a number of pigs. I couldn’t bear to have them slaughtered—I was a city girl—so I went to Benton for the bacon and ham most of the time. But when slaughtering time came I had to agree to it, and so smoked my own pork.”

  “And,” said a gentleman, “you had pot liquor, too.” They all laughed and looked knowing.

  “Do you know what pot liquor is?” I asked.

  They laughed again. “Oh, moonshine those Kentuckians make.”

  “No,” I said. “Pot liquor is the mingled juice of vegetables and sowbelly fat after you have cooked them for hours in an iron pot. The mountain people don’t like raw vegetables. After all, they are a civilized Anglo-Saxon-Celtish people. So they cook their vegetables long and hard, and the water in the bottom of the pot is ‘pot liquor’ and it’s very tasty, too. Good for babies.”

  “For babies!” shrieked a lady with horror. “Babies should have only pasteurized milk!”

  “My baby did very well on the milk of the cow, when I could catch her. She was half wild and I didn’t catch her regularly. And I did not pasteurize the milk. And my child drank pot liquor and ate the bacon and ham I smoked, and the vegetables and fruit I canned, and thrived without the benefit of Dr. Spock.”

  My husband, then twenty-three, had gone to the mountains ahead of me, to prepare things, as he vaguely said. He was a country boy. The country had no terrors for him. So when I was nineteen, I arrived with my baby at Paints-ville, Kentucky, the last outpost before the mountains. My husband had arranged for us to be met by a man my own age, with an open wagon filled with straw and drawn by four mules. It was a stormy February day. We rode in wind and snow and hail and rain, unsheltered, for two nights and two days, I, struggling with an umbrella to keep the worst off my baby. When we took shelter for a few hours of sleep it was in a barn or an ancient abandoned log cabin. And around us reared the savage black and white of the lonely mountains, with here and there a little ghost hamlet where I could buy bread and butter and some meat.

  The roads were only mud tracks, filled with four and five foot potholes, into which the soggy wagon sank regularly. The four mules struggled to pull us out. Sometimes my “chauffeur” had to get out and dig in the mud to release the wooden wheels. He could neither read nor write. But he was a courteous and manly gentleman, full of kindness and chivalry. He knew that land and the wisdom of it, and he knew I was ignorant of it all. He sang ballads to comfort my crying and very wet baby, and during the worst of the storms he found us shelter. Dear Donnie, I remember him well and with sadness, for only four months later he was killed by a wild mule.

  Donnie wrapped old blankets around us. He built fires near the woods and shot rabbits for us, and taught me how to skin and clean and roast them over the fires. He taught me how to make cornbread. Sometimes he’d go into fields and bring back potatoes and carrots and we’d have a fine mountain stew. Donnie gravely said grace before all our meals—out in the open winter storm—and for the first time, really, I knew the grandeur of religion and it was close to me. God was not confined to churches. He was omnipresent. He was beside our rain-soaked open wagon in the wilderness. He stood beside us when we slept. I had known this only academically in my short lifetime.

  Donnie, like all traveling mountain folk, had three iron skillets, the first I had ever seen. He cooked delicious meals. He had blue eyes and bright golden hair and a strong and masculine face, full of tenderness. He was all earth and verity. He talked of God as one talks of one’s close Father, gently and seriously, and with pride and respect. Nothing irritated him or annoyed him. He moved with confidence and surety. When he shot a squirrel or a rabbit for our meals, he would say, “God made them, and I hate to kill them, but nature is wild and all live on each other. But we shouldn’t kill more than we need; that’s a sin. And we should always pray that we haven’t offended the Father when we shoot one of his little ones. When we plant, we should ask the Father to bless our harvest.”

  Donnie knew nothing of “socio-economic groups.” He did not know he was “underprivileged, disadvantaged or culturally deprived.” But he did know the earth, and he knew gallantry and goodness and virtue and the protection of the weak. He had never heard of higher mathematics and “the problems of the adolescent.” But he knew when to plant and when to refrain. He knew natural poetry and grandeur. He was serene with the serenity only true men know.

  Donnie had a deep, strong, musical voice. He sang old ballads as if they had been written that day. He spoke the mountain speech, which is the speech of old England. He had never heard of Shakespeare, but he had Shakespeare’s mordant wit and rhythm of words. His family had lived in the mountains for over three hundred years, and he had been born in the log cabin his ancestors had built. It had only one large room. Donnie had not suffered for lack of modern conveniences. He stood over six feet tall and every foot was muscle and strength and manliness. His mother had never heard of vitamins and a balanced diet. Yet I’ve not seen, since Donnie, a young man his age so oak-like, so nimble, so utterly masculine, calm and knowing.

  He had nine brothers and sisters, and when I saw them later I saw that they were just like Donnie, proud, independent, full of courtesy and kindness. His father had thirty mean acres on the mountains, and he was content. It was enough for Donnie’s father when the sun shone and his young cows gave birth and his hogs thrived and his chickens had eggs, and there was a fire on the stone hearth and “the woman” was quilting busily and preserving the fruits of the field and the forests. His children worked in the patches, and what they produced was for the family and what was left over they could sell in the stores. The younger four were going to the school house. “Though,” said Donnie’s father, “what they need with book-larnin’ I don’t figure. Makes a man sick.”

  Donnie’s family never had much money, nor did most of the other mountain folk. But they had homemade quilts and bread, their own meat and pork, their stem and loving religion. They enjoyed life. They had pride. They helped their neighbors when help was needed, and were helped in return. When the circuit rider came around four times a year they had revival meetings, and the little log-church was filled to the walls, and everyone sang and rejoiced in the name of the Lord. Twice a year a doctor rode through “from the settlements,” but the mountain folk are hardy and rarely were sick. He took his pay in a cured ham or a bag of dried beans or a quarter of a freshly-slaughtered calf, or in flour.

  The women of the mountains made their own sheets of brownish cotton, which were later bleached white in the sun. They wove their own thick wool blankets. They needed nothing from the outside world but coffee. Many of them raised sugar beets or cane, and made their own ’lasses. They grew their own wheat and carried it to the miller to be ground. They never saw oranges or lemons or pineapples, but they grew apples and peaches and pears, such as we never see in our supermarkets. They grew grapes. They picked wild huckleberries
and blackberries and strawberries, and taught me how to find them and preserve them.

  They taught me to hunt, and to raise my own vegetables, and how to make clabber and butter and cornbread. They taught me to sew and to knit. They were kind and affectionate, though I was only an “outlander from the settlements.” They had never seen a train or a skyscraper. They had never attended a movie or a theatre or a ballet. They had never walked on pavements. But they were not “deprived.” They knew the terror and beauty of storm and the changing seasons; they knew when the river was full and what to do about it to protect their pastures and their fields. They were wise with the earth, and there is no wisdom greater. They would stand at sunset and look at the fire on their dark mountains and they would pray. Then they would turn homeward to their warm kettles and their kerosene lamps, to laughter and song and the sound of their guitars—which they had made, themselves. They returned to love and the warm night and security.

  Each Saturday night, in Benton, the mountain folk would stream down to the village to dance their ancient square dances in what they called “the barn,” which served as a church the next day. The women would bring baskets of food and the men would bring their “white mule.” The children were always there, also, to midnight. I have never seen such real gaiety as I saw then, with the women’s calico skirts flying, and the banjos and the guitars singing, and the heavy boots thudding on the plank floors. The faces were bright with simple joy and pride and affection. The evil cities were far away, with their crime and hatred and lust and envy and murder and lies.

  The Sheriff lived in Benton and had a big farm. He also had a one-cell jail which was rarely occupied.

  Man, woman and child, they knew the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for which their ancestors had fought and bled and died, and God help anyone who infringed on them! They lived the law and their religion, and they worked pridefully and thriftily. And they’d toil up the mountainside where we lived in our big tent and tell my husband, “We got worryin’ bout that big gal of yourn, and the little gal, and so my woman baked this bread and here’s a ham for you.”