True Grits

I'm no Hillbilly but I watched plenty of Hee Haw in my day.

We live in a decent sized city near the Gulf Beaches not far from Tampa. My Mom was raised here. My kids will raise their kids here. My maternal Grandmother was a bonafide storyteller. She had at best 4 years of formal education but she was smart. She could read, of course. She was in fact a voracious reader of any newsprint. Her favorite news story was anything related to human tragedy or the mistreatment of animals . . . "Authorities search home, find 30 starving dogs and a goat".

If there was a photo accompaniment, all the better. She would clip the story and the picture and present it to us when we visited... "will you look at this poor ol' womern"... or.."did you read about what they did to this poor ol' dog".


She mispronounced a whole slew of words and no one corrected her. "Vomit" was vomick... "I got sick and started a' vomickin". She had some pretty funny expressions, too. My favorites were "You make my ass want a soda cracker" and "Tell 'em they can go kiss Ol' Rusty".

She grew up dirt poor on a farm in central Florida and never learned to drive. She dipped snuff all of her life and thought it was a secret only known to my step-grandad and her daughters. She lived for over 50 years in the same house. The groves and dairy's and nursery's that made her homestead seem vast, gave way to retail business and housing and in time it was clear that all she really owned was a small lot with a small home planted on it. It might as well have been dropped from a plane and landed there. It didn't look like anything else around it. When I was bored on summer afternoons, I would hop on my bike and pedal over to her house and get her to spin a yarn or two.

She told about an old local midwife named Hattie that was considered to be a witch (for lack of a better term). She was a squatty gal who dressed in layers of croaker sack and cotton and wrapped thin strips of rags around her legs from the knee down. Often an old work horse would turn up with it's mane tied or braided in knots. That was Hattie's work, it was said, she was making "stirrups" to ride the poor animal through the night.



She told of a married couple who lived nearby and kept to themselves. Not much was known about the woman but she loved to sew on an old kick plate type machine, making clothes for a child they did not have. The woman died under curious circumstances, it was suggested that she had been murdered by her husband. He pretty quick-like upped and moved away, shutting the door and leaving everything as such. There was talk of noises coming from the empty house. My Grandmother and her brother ventured over one night shortly after the widower left town. My Grandmother told me that they did indeed hear a very rhythmic noise as they crept hand in hand up the old dirt path as they neared the house. Those old frame houses sat high of the ground, making to windows too high to look into if you were standing flat footed so she got my uncle Curtis to boost her up above the "winder sill" to get a better look. As she clawed for a better purchase and raised her nose above the bottom of the sill, she realized that the sound they heard was coming from the lonesome old sewing machine that was placed in the middle of the room. She could see the pedal plate a' bobbing up and down. She kicked her brothers hands away from her and hit the dirt running. They never told a soul about what they had done or what she saw.

She told me about an older sister (Thelma) who had come down sick and a drunken old Doctor who came by the house and spooned the ailing child out a dose of a tonic from pot ash and God knows what else. By the next day, her sister was twisted and paralyzed, unable to talk or cry and she lived out the remaining 20 or so years of her life in a small box that they had fashioned for her that could be pulled through the fields or propped against a wall. I saw pictures of her. "What caused it to happen to her?", I asked. "They tole us that whatever he give her ate at her insides and burned 'em out . . . poor 'ol Thelmer".

Me and my sister pulled these stories from her over and over again. If we heard them once we heard them a hundred times and she never once deviated from the original accounting of a single one of them.

She did not possess a gift of gab, was very reserved around strangers, and could not tell a joke worth a dang. The drawl and odd way she pronounced words, the way she always held her right hand up to her collar with a napkin wadded tightly in it's palm for blotting the corners of her mouth. She loved Lawrence Welk reruns and the Dallas Cowboys and drank tap water from metal cups.

She was taller than average and bony. She could have been the child of Granny Clampett and the Tetley TeaMan. She became reclusive and unwilling to leave her home. She stopped eating in front of anyone, citing her unsteady hands. She started forgetting things. She called 911 and then denied it when the paramedics showed up. She began calling my Mom in the dead of night to chat, unware of the time of day.

She forgot the stories we loved to hear her tell.