Papa and Mama taught us to be nice to our animals and taught us how to get Old Scotch to obey us. And there seemed to be no end to the little things they taught us how to do. In a jiffy they could cut a slot in the side of a pumpkin leaf stem and make us a horn to blow. They showed us how to put a chicken's head under his wing, swing him a few times and lay him down on the ground, fast asleep. Papa taught us how to tie a certain kind of a knot in a rope for one occasion and another kind for another purpose. And he taught us how to make a loop for roping calves.

We owed a lot to our parents for making our lives pleasant and exciting. They were among the most respected parents in our community. They were leaders-not in organizations concerned with business or big government, nor in local clubs, but they were upstanding church-goers with high standards of moral character and integrity. As in play, so in life, they wanted their children to abide by a set of rules which would lead them into a good life-a life of knowledge of the difference between good and evil, with a desire to do the good and shun the evil.

They may not have thought of G.o.d as some of us do today but I am sure they did what they thought was right, and they did it with consistency and sincerity. More than that we have no right to ask.

Some families have their own little unique customs. I suppose we were one of those families. When visiting with other families, it seemed odd to me to hear them call their babies by their given names. We always called our youngest one "Baby" until the next one arrived. Then we called the new one "Baby" and the one before him had to take on his rightful name.

This went on until my younger brother was born. Joel, just older than I, couldn't say Clarence, so he called me Big Baby and he called the new one Baby. No, he wasn't slow about learning to talk. You see, we didn't give him much time. He was only sixteen months old when I came along, and he was just three when the new one came. Another custom not common to all families was, we smaller ones wore dresses around home for the first three or four years of our lives. It made diapering much easier and saved a lot of laundering. Come to think of it, I never heard of diapers until I was almost grown. They were not diapers, they were breeches-in our family they were "britches." That's the only thing I ever heard them called until I was a mature man.

We were poor people, living the simple life. I wasn't any poorer than the rest of my family, but I was the simplest one.

We also had this custom of competing among ourselves. In most everything we did, there was an element of compet.i.tion and hurry. Our parents had a way of causing us kids to apply pressure to each other. They found that it worked better than when parents tried to force kids to work faster.

In the cotton patch you could hear us kids saying such things as, "I picked more cotton than you did." Or if we were hoeing you might hear something like, "Come on, Slow Poke."

The plan worked well. No one wanted to be outdone by a brother, especially a little brother. And if a little brother could outshine a big brother, even just once in awhile, that was a real feather in the little one's cap.

Oh, yes! There was hurry and there was pressure. But it didn't seem to get us down as it does some people today. We had no psychologists in those days to tell us that pressures would warp a kid's brain. We didn't know that compet.i.tion and hurry would drive us crazy until these educated people told us about it.

So we lived hard, we worked hard, and we played hard. Then we were able to go to bed and sleep hard. Never in my life did I ever hear Mama or Papa say, "I didn't sleep well last night, because I felt tense and worried."

There was really nothing to worry about like there is today. They didn't worry that we kids might go away from home and get into trouble. We didn't have to leave home to get into trouble. We kids made our own trouble right at home. We had a lot of fun doing a lot of different things. Most of our troubles were brought on accidentally, we didn't deliberately plan them.

There was no worry about the family losing anything, we had nothing to lose. No one would steal from us because no one wanted what we had. So, whatever pressures we might encounter during the day were dispelled during a night of welcome rest.

In the cotton patch Mama and Papa encouraged us to see who could pick 100 bolls first. The first one to pick his 100 bolls would call out, "hundred." Then each of the others would call out the number of bolls they had picked during the same time.

This compet.i.tion got more bales of cotton to the gin in a shorter period of time. But, as in all activities where kids are involved, we sometimes had little disagreements.

I had this thing of humming or singing a song while I picked cotton and counted my bolls. I found that the mental work I was doing was relaxing and it allowed my hands to do their work faster. And now, 65 years later, I learn that I was doing something a little bit kin to what they call Yoga.

At any rate, it really worked for me. I could pick cotton faster than a brother or two who were older than I was. Now, I didn't necessarily use my system in order to get more of the family cotton picked. I used it mainly just to beat my older brothers picking cotton, and that not for very long at a time.

But my little scheme backfired on me. One of those brothers couldn't stand to be outdone by a younger brother. He told Mama and Papa that I was lying and cheating, because he knew I couldn't count bolls while I sang a song. But he was wrong. I could. Anyway, nothing I could say would make him believe me. I began to become an outcast among some of my brothers early in life. I believe there were times when some of them would have been glad to "sell me into slavery" as Joseph's brothers did him.

But my parents didn't seem to doubt my word. I really believe they understood that I could do a thing or two that some of the others could not do-and perhaps were not at all interested in doing.

I believe little things like that were the beginning of a wee bit of an unconscious rift between some of my brothers and me, and at the same time, the making of a stronger bond between my parents and me.

Looking back, I remember many times when Papa and I were doing things together and there was no one else around. I really don't know why I was the only one there a lot of times. Maybe I just wanted to be in good company. I loved and admired Papa and I thought he was the best and nicest man in the world. Or perhaps I was with Papa because of my inquisitive mind concerning mechanical things, like,

"How do you shoe a horse?"

"How do you tighten a loose wagon tire?"

"How do you make a row-binder do what you want it to do when the manufacturer couldn't seem to do it?"

I watched him do all these things and many more. And many of the things he did fascinated me.

The situation was much the same between Mama and me.

"How do you churn milk and make b.u.t.ter?"

"How do you 'take up' the b.u.t.ter after it is churned?"

"How do you make those beautiful decorations on it later?"

"How do you weave a carpet on Grandma's loom?"

It seems I was always watching a lot of these goings-on while the other kids were somewhere else doing whatever they liked to do. And Mama and Papa were never too busy to answer my questions. I realize now how much more I could have learned if I had only known how and when to ask more questions.

It seems that my parents favored and petted me at times. I'm not sure they did. If they did, perhaps it was because they felt sorry for their little ugly duckling. And maybe I only imagined they were especially nice to me. Maybe they were that nice to everyone. Perhaps they were nice to me just to have me around handy when they needed me to help them just a little bit.

This latter seems to be the most reasonable argument, after considering some of my stupid exploits and my senseless reasoning throughout my life.

Yet, it just might be possible that they were partial to me on account of the wen, and later on, my paralysis-these factors coupled with the fact that within the last four years along about the time I was born, they had suffered the loss of a two-year-old son, a two-week-old daughter, Mama's favorite brother, Hugh, and Grandpa Johnson.

Who can measure the thoughts of loving parents as they view their newborn child for the first time, anxious to know whether he or she is beautiful and healthy and without blemish.

And who knows the anxiety of parents who, after seeing their child with blemish, must wonder how his condition will affect his relationship with others, how it will affect his outlook on life, and whether it might grow worse and shorten his days.

CHAPTER 4

SOCIAL LIVING; LOVING, LISTENING, LEARNING

There were so many little stories unfolding simultaneously that I am going to be unable to keep them all up to date as I go along. While I have been telling about some of our working habits and our little family customs, I find that the story of my love life has been neglected. I must go back a way now and bring some of my social living up to date.

Oh, yes! I had a sweetheart. Her name was Gladys, and I must tell you about her.

You see, when we moved to the Exum farm, I was a little boy barely five years old. But then, when we had lived there a year and a half, I was no longer just a little kid. I was getting to be a big boy, six and a half and going on seven. And my ears were getting bigger also. I began to hear about sweethearts. Susie was thirteen and was just the very one to explain it to me.

She told me once, jokingly, "A sweetheart is a chicken heart baked in mola.s.ses."

But seriously, what she explained about sweethearts amounted to something like this, "Sweethearts are one boy and one girl about the same age who like each other and like to go together and like to do things together. He is her sweetheart and she is his sweetheart."

Now the Flints, who had moved onto our old farm, had a bunch of boys and girls and we all played together. The one I liked best was Gladys. She was just my size, she was six years old, and she and I liked to go play together. So, when I learned what sweethearts were, I knew for a fact that Gladys was my sweetheart because we liked each other and played together.

Of course, I didn't tell anyone, not even Gladys. I didn't feel any differently toward her. We just went right on playing together as we had been doing. But I had this newly acquired knowledge that she was my sweetheart.

No more than I knew or could understand about it all, I wondered why boys and girls had sweethearts at all. They were just like other boys and girls except they were your own age.

I never heard of any parents who objected to their older boys and girls having sweethearts and dating. (In those days we called it "going together.") But in our immediate community, there were some pretty strict rules to govern their behavior.

The "good" people in our community didn't allow their boys and girls to dance. So, there were no dances in our neighborhood because there were no families that wanted to be branded as being "not so good." Instead of dances we had parties. Many a Friday night some good farm couple would give a party. These parties were always family affairs. The young people didn't go to the parties alone. Their parents took them to the parties and then the grown-ups took part in many of the games.

I remember two of the games they played. They were "snap" and "cross questions and crooked answers." There were many others but I can't recall them just now. I was only eleven when we moved out of that community, and we never had such parties at any place we lived after that.

One night at one of the parties, Frank's girl "snapped" me. (We didn't call them girl-friends as we do today, just "Girls.") But I was so timid I just backed away like the bashful country kid that I was. She told them she got "stood-up" and would have to pick someone else.