Homesick (2 page)

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Ask any Southern woman to tell you about herself, and she’ll start by telling you about her people. The roots of my family tree run deep into the red dirt of Mississippi, and from the time I was born to the moment I left home for college, I was surrounded and sheltered by its branches: parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, Boswells and Wards. As a child I listened keenly to their stories, though I was shy and quiet and asked questions only rarely. Now, with so few of them left, I spend as much time in their company as I can, and I ask everything I can think of.

There have been Wards living in and around Meridian for six generations—since the 1840s, as best as my daddy can figure. His great-grandfather was the first Ward to live in this part of Mississippi; the wooden homestead he built still stands on its cypress-log pillars in the tiny community called Enterprise, eighteen miles south of Meridian on Ward Road. My daddy’s generation calls it Homeward.

The house is small by today’s standards, but once it was part of a six-hundred-acre plantation that extended to the banks of the Chunky River. Today the family holdings are a fragment of what they were, but Homeward is still there, home to Daddy’s sister Celeste and her husband, Fred. In the yard there are fig trees and magnolias, and lilies that Aunt Celeste tends like children. At the edge of the property stands a cypress barn that’s been there longer than my seventy-nine-year-old father can remember. At one time the field was filled with cotton and cornstalks, but it’s been many years since this was a working farm.

Though he lived in Meridian as a boy, my daddy, Granberry Holland Ward Jr., loves this land as if it had always been his. In a sense, it has. All his relatives lived in Enterprise. “I would go out to Grandpa’s house every time I’d go down there,” he remembers. “He was a justice of the peace for fifty years. They called him Judge Ward. He married just about all the couples in Clark County. They would come out to his house to get married. He had a wagon that was pulled by mules. He lived about three miles out of town, and when he needed to go into town he would let me drive, holding the reins all the way.”

When he was a teenager Daddy would ride his bicycle to Enterprise, up and down fifteen miles of hills, to see his cousin James; the two of them were best friends. “We’d go skinny-dipping in a little creek that goes through the town there. It had a kind of deep part in it, and we would dive off in the water, swim there.”

James was a popular boy in Enterprise. “He dated every little girl there, before he went in the service.” But he got into a little mischief now and then. “He told me the girls would sit at a certain spot at the school, and when they’d have a short dress on, you could see up their leg, you know?” Did Daddy succumb to the same temptation? “I didn’t ever know where that spot was,” he laughs. “I never did sit there. I was a good boy.”

Then, when Daddy was seven years old, came a day whose every detail he still remembers. He and his sister were outside at half-past four in the afternoon, laughing and dousing each other with a garden hose, when their mother came out to tell them their father had just died. It wasn’t a sudden death; he had suffered from encephalitis for months. But the news transformed Daddy’s life. For years thereafter, he recalls, “Wherever I was out playing, at 4:30 in the afternoon I’d run home and see if Mama was still living.”

The concept of orphanhood was familiar to Daddy’s family: his own first name, Granberry, came from the man who ran the orphanage where his grandmother—Judge Ward’s wife—was raised. After his own father died, Daddy says, “The lady across the street told my mother, ‘It’s too bad your husband died—I know you’re going to have to put all your children in the orphans’ home.’ That kept her all upset all the time.” That never happened, but their father’s death changed the family all the same: Daddy’s seventeen-year-old brother, Thomas, had to go out and find work to support them all, taking a job at a lumber mill during the day and at a drugstore until ten o’clock at night. It was Daddy’s job to bring his older brother his lunch every day; during the summer he hopped from lawn to lawn to save his bare feet from the sun-cooked sidewalks.

I remember, throughout my own childhood, listening quietly as Daddy and his kin told and retold stories about those times. It was the Depression, but “we didn’t know we were poor,” Daddy says. “We didn’t know we didn’t have anything, and for some reason it didn’t matter. People were closer because we were all suffering in the same boat. I don’t remember anybody feeling like they were better than the family next door. We had a big two-story house, and plenty of room to take others in. We took several children and their mother into our home when I was young, because of adverse conditions. It was no big thing.”

Daddy’s Aunt Margaret, his cousin James’s mother, was like a second mother to him. When I was a child Daddy and Mama would take us down to Enterprise visiting Homeward on Sunday afternoons, and at least once a month we’d stop by Aunt Margaret’s on the way back. I was so fascinated with her rambling yellow Victorian clapboard house. It always seemed dark to me; she never really had the lights on, and being there was like stepping back in time. The rooms were full of dark old furniture, embroidered settees, and stacks of handmade quilts everywhere; whenever I visited I’d find an excuse to go into the bathroom, just to stare at the porcelain pitchers and old-fashioned washbasins from the days before houses had running water.

What everybody remembers about Aunt Margaret, though, was her passion for canning. Her kitchen shelves were lined with all types of fruits and vegetables—relishes and jams, tomatoes and figs and sweet pear relish. “If you ever went to her house,” Daddy remembers, “you would always leave with something in your hand. She would give you some gift of food. She just loved people.” The same was true in my childhood, thirty years later. The figs and relishes I accepted politely, but I couldn’t wait to get hold of her blackberry jam.

Daddy may have been a carefree country boy, but he was fascinated with electricity. He started teaching himself the basics of electrical engineering when he was twelve. By the time World War II came around he’d begun working at AT&T, where he was given a deferment from military service in light of the value of his services on the home front. But that all soon changed. In 1943 cousin James stopped by Daddy’s house to announce that he was going into the navy. And as he he walked away, he turned back and told Daddy he felt sure he wasn’t coming back. Ten months later, he was training on a torpedo bomber off the coast of California when he was killed in an accident. My father’s voice still quavers with the emotion of that day. The loss was devastating to Aunt Margaret. “Every time she’d see me right after that, she’d start crying,” Daddy says, “ ’cause we had played together all our lives.” Not long thereafter, Daddy enlisted. “I went in because he got killed,” Daddy says. “I just couldn’t stay out after that.”

He spent a year and a half in the Navy, training with the Amphibious Corps in the South Pacific. As the best radar operator on his ship—and the only one capable of both using radar and maintaining the equipment—Daddy got kid-glove treatment. “When it came time to go into port and scrub the bottom of the boat and repaint it,” he chuckles, “I’d go climb in my bunk and take a nap. They wouldn’t bother me—they wanted me to be fresh for anything they needed on the conning tower. So I would get out of all that work.”

Daddy always marched to his own drummer, as his fellow crewmen were finding out. “We were donated a lot of records from a high school in New Jersey,” he remembers. “We took turns playing music for the whole ship. I would play classical music, although nobody else liked it but me and a few others. So when they heard Tchaikovsky or Chopin blaring from the speakers, they always knew who was in the conning tower.” The conditions of wartime sea travel also earned Daddy a nickname. “We didn’t have enough water on board; we had to make our own, out of salt water. And we couldn’t shave for long lengths of time. So everybody grew a beard. But at that age all I could grow was a goatee. And me being from the South, the guys nicknamed me The Colonel. On the PA system you’d hear,
‘Colonel Ward, forward to the conning tower
. . . ‘ The captain of the ship was only a lieutenant junior grade, so everyone really got a kick out of it.”

Colonel Ward and the rest of his troop of sailors were training for an invasion of the home islands of Japan. But when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945 and Japan surrendered, the invasion was scotched. When Daddy returned home he applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but postwar competition was fierce among the returning vets, and a single B on his transcript was enough to keep him out of MIT. Daddy went to Georgia Tech instead, earned his degree in electrical engineering, and came back home to Meridian.

In 1953, G.H. (as everybody calls him) met a dark-haired beauty named Annie Kate Boswell. She would become his wife, and not long thereafter my mother. And the story of Mama’s background affected me at least as profoundly as my father’s.

Mama’s brother Joe, six years younger than she, is an avid storyteller in the Southern mold, and many of his best yarns go back to the earliest years of the Depression—a time that hit the Boswells harder than the Wards. Their family moved all over Meridian in those years, going from house to house, trying to find a comfortable berth in a time when it must have seemed nearly impossible to keep a family afloat. “Every time the rent come due, we’d move, you know . . .” he laughs now. And their life was made doubly difficult by an accident that occurred when Joe was three.

“You know, everything back then was dirt roads, gravel. There were still teams of horses on the roads, you know, and the Coca-Cola Company used to pull all these cartons from Meridian all the way over to Alabama, forty miles away, by horse team. My mother was a
good
driver; she would drive that route all the time. But Daddy was driving that day.

“Now, this old guy that drove for Coca-Cola was driving a team of horses up ahead. And as Daddy passed him it stirred up so much dust, Daddy ran off the road into the ditch. Knocked Mother’s hip out of place. Today you’d just go to the hospital and they’d reset a hip like that, you know. But back then they couldn’t do anything like that. So for the rest of Mama’s life her one leg was shorter than the other one, and she walked on crutches.”

The trauma of the incident rocked my mama’s family, but what Uncle Joe remembers is the Southern stoicism of his mother—and the kindness of that old driver. “He used to come by the house and ask about Miss Annie,” he recalls. “He was crazy about Mama. He was so sorry that it happened. For years and years, he’d come and see Mama—you know, see how she was.”

That was my mama’s mama: Annie Raye Boswell. By all accounts she was an extraordinary woman, whose physical limitations seem never to have cost her an ounce of determination. “Bless her heart,” Joe says with wonder. “Raised all five of us kids during the Depression and everything, crippled like that—and never complained. Walked to work, all the way to town and back on those crutches, every day. That’s the kind of woman she was. Beautiful woman.”

And her husband, Joe and Annie Kate’s father, seems to have given her a run for her money for sheer tenaciousness. A sometime carpenter, sometime painter, he never met a job he wouldn’t take. “Daddy was a little old bitty guy,” Joe says. “Didn’t weigh but ninety-one pounds when he was twenty-one years old. But he had arms ’bout twice as big as mine, ’cause he’s hammering all the time. And he could build anything. He’d build a house from scratch—start at the bottom and go clear on up. Real confident, you know. They’d say, ‘Mr. Boswell, can you do this?’ ‘Why, hell
yeah,
I can do it. What do you mean
can I do it
?’ He never said he couldn’t do anything. Tough as a nickel steak.”

It was the early 1930s, and like many families the Boswells couldn’t afford their own car. “Didn’t have a truck, nothing. Daddy walked all over the town. He walked from this end of town to that end with a ladder on one shoulder, and a tool bag over the other. I’d be on the job with him in the summer, when I wasn’t in school. He’d be wearing a little worker’s hat, and sometimes we’d have to catch a bus to go ‘cross town. He’d have that ladder on his shoulder, right there on the bus. And you know how you get embarrassed easy when you’re that age. ‘This your daddy?’ people’d ask. And I’d say, ‘No.’ ”