Chapter 1

I’ve only just come up the drive to the old house where we all grew up, and to see it as it is today, I can almost believe that with the sorry shape it’s in now, it looks again the way it must have way back in the middle 1930s. The way it appears today, with the yard gone wild and the house looking unloved, its condition must nearly be the same as it was the day Daddy took Momma to see it for the first time. They hadn’t thought of any of us children yet, it was right before their marriage and Daddy had fallen in love with the old place and hadn’t seen a thing wrong with it that couldn’t be righted. Not the way Momma did. I know because I had heard the story so many times when I was growing up.

Momma and Daddy are both gone now. Besides our own children, there aren’t many left except for JJ, Linda Sue, and Aunt Maggie and Aunt Bessie, Daddy’s sisters, Aunt Bernice, and her children, Adrian, Ian, Roberta and Della, and other various cousins. Aunt Maggie is old, but still going and tells me every time I see her she doesn’t want to be the only one left. She compares herself to Old Grammy, who was really my great grandmother who lived two weeks shy of her 100th birthday, and not related to Auntie at all except by marriage.

Standing here, waiting for my husband to join me, I feel a flood of memories rushing back. I’m not over losing Daddy yet with the funeral only two days ago and I wanted him with me when I meet up with the memories waiting inside. Even so, I can already see the ghosts of the children we were then, I can still see Linda Sue as a toddler and pesky Little Joe, JJ to us by then, both of them it seemed were always in my way. I can hear a little girl asking, “Daddy, is the war over yet?” I hear an older girl saying, “I can’t imagine loving anyone but Adrian,” some crazy defiance at that point over something Momma must have said. Whatever it was, I’ve forgotten it until now. I remember shortly after we were married, I walked to the back door and heard Momma shouting, “No, you aren’t! You’d best get that idea out of your head right away! You’re not fixing to go riding around in a car with boys!”

Momma was talking then to Linda Sue, who had been giving Momma quite a hard time in those days, but it was a familiar enough dictate from Momma, as I had heard the same directed at  me many, many times. Momma always said I was a trial and gave her many problems while I was growing up, but it was Linda Sue who started out one day in August to join the March on Washington the year President Kennedy was killed. It wasn’t that Momma and Daddy were against Reverend King and what he was trying to do, but they feared for their daughter and that she’d be harmed. They needn’t have worried, because the old car Linda Sue and her friends were riding in broke down somewhere in North Carolina, and in the end they called Daddy and he had to run up there to carry them home. The last anyone ever saw of the old jalopy was of it sitting near the ditch of a lonely road where tobacco grew on either side.

There’s the pine tree I pestered Daddy to dig up and plant for me. It always was too close to the house and looked rather silly there where it was, but Daddy never expected it to live and just shoved it in any hole he could dig quickly to quiet me down. We had been out in the woods around our house cutting down small trees to make posts for the fence he was building for my pony. Before we left, Momma had hollered out and asked Daddy to see if he could find any dogwoods small enough to transplant in the yard, so poor Daddy was attempting two chores with us young’uns running around, trying our best to drive him crazy, no doubt. I know because I ended up with a daughter who tried the same with me for years.

Anyway, Daddy was cutting and trimming the small trees for fence posts and had gathered a few little dogwoods for Momma too, when I spied a little pine tree standing off by itself, and to me it looked lonesome. I always loved a pine tree. You could pet a pine tree and I had done that many times. Yes, you can, you can pet a pine tree, and for any child as animal crazy as I was then, petting a pine tree doesn’t seem that odd. Has anyone else ever petted a pine tree? I don’t know. But I know back then I would stop and take hold of the lower branches of the small pines and I would run a bunch of needles through my hand over and over again. It always reminded me of a horse’s mane, the way the pine needles felt sliding across my palm, and I remember many times when I was very young, if Momma was out walking with me and I stopped to pet a pine tree, she would ask, “What are you up to, Alma?” She never could understand why I wanted to pet a pine tree. Sometimes she would say, “That’s the Tanner in you.”

I asked Daddy to dig up the pine tree for me like he was doing for Momma with her dogwoods. I know Daddy didn’t want to take the time for such nonsense with all the pines we had around the house already, but I kept at him about it so, that he just dug down quick and more or less pulled the little pine from the ground. When we returned to the house I told him we’d have to plant my tree too as we were doing with Momma’s dogwoods so Daddy just stopped where he was standing and dug a shallow hole and plopped my little tree into it.

I overheard him tell Momma months later he was surprised it had lived, he hadn’t thought it would or he wouldn’t have put it so close to the house, but I guess he was reluctant to dig it up or became too busy to remember. But later it was way too big to dig, and the only way to get rid of it then would have been to cut it down. It was even too big for that without some inconvenience by the time we came home from living up north and I guess no one gave it a thought at the time. It was just part of how the yard appeared by then.

And there it stands, tall and proud today, if not a little too close to the house, but to me, it looks like it’s standing sentry, protecting the house from harm. My husband laughed at that one day when I said as much to him and told me, “More than likely it will crush the roof if we ever have another bad hurricane. You and your imagination.”

***

As long as I could remember my father had played baseball. It was normal for us growing up to have Daddy leave on Saturday and Sunday mornings to play a game, sometimes taking Momma and JJ and me, and sometimes he would leave on a Friday night to play an away game. At first I thought everyone’s father did the same because my uncles played with Daddy and they were gone from home too. I was surprised when I began school and learned from the other kids not everyone’s daddy left them on the weekends.

It was part of our lives, Daddy off playing and then talking to Momma and us when he came home and telling us what Uncle Robbie had done, and what Uncle Charlie and Uncle Billy had done, and then later it was only Daddy because my uncles all went to war. Uncle Billy never came home again, but Uncle Charlie did, with an arm that was never much use to him from then on, and Uncle Robbie came home from England, and then brought Aunt Bernice and her sons, Adrian and Ian, back here to live with him after he and Aunt Bernice were married. Aunt Bernice always referred to herself as a war bride.

Daddy grew older and soon after the war was over, he quit playing ball. He said it wasn’t the same without his brothers and Uncle Billy playing with him. I remember the last day Daddy played and how everyone who came to watch cheered him and at one point, Momma and JJ and I had to stand up so the crowd could see us. I felt then that Daddy must have been as important to folks around Savannah as Joe DiMaggio was to the Yankees.

Daddy loved to tell stories and would entertain us all at the supper table with stories of the games he had played and stories about Uncle Charlie and Uncle Robbie, Auntie’s husband, Uncle Billy, when they were all young and growing up. In those days, I felt Momma must have loved to hear Daddy talk about baseball because she always sat and listened to him talk and sometimes it would be stories JJ and I had heard many, many times.

Some stories were his favorites and he’d tell them over and over again. There was one story he told that I really liked when I was just a little one. That was about the game Daddy played against the House of David, and he loved to tell us how he thought he lost the ball in the lights and then there it came, plop, right into his glove. Daddy always said we would have liked going to that game because the House of David team all wore beards and looked so different from the other teams they played. But when Daddy played the House of David, he and Momma weren’t even married at the time and none of us children had been even a twinkle in either parent’s eye.

I pictured in my mind that the men on the House of David team all looked like the Smith Brothers on the box of cough drops Momma would sometimes buy and I liked to picture them cavorting around the bases with their long beads flying in the wind as they ran and dove for a base.

Daddy told us other stories too, not all of them were about baseball. He was in a bank hold-up once and he told us about that many times, and when he would get almost to the end, Momma would always make the same comment. “You could have been killed,” Momma would always say and Daddy would reply, “I didn’t think about it at the time, but I could have been.” Then he’d turn to us kids and say, “Then you’d never have been here.” Daddy had only gone to the bank to cash his pay check and while he was there three men came in and told everyone to lay down on the floor and cover their eyes, but Daddy said he didn’t, he laid on the floor and watched the men rob the bank until one of them saw him looking and told Daddy if he didn’t close his eyes, he’d close them for him. Daddy knew the man was serious and he shut his eyes.

The G-Men, as the FBI was called in those days, came and talked to Daddy and tried to make him pick out pictures of the bank robbers, but Daddy couldn’t, he said after a while the men all looked alike. Momma said Uncle Joe was just a youngster then and when he heard that Daddy had been in the robbery, he thought it all was exciting and wondered if it was John Dillinger and his gang. Daddy said no, it wasn’t him, the men were not Dillinger’s gang and no one said thanks afterwards the way Dillinger was said to do. That’s when Momma always said Daddy could have been killed, and she’d tell us how Old Grammy worried that Uncle Joe would think Dillinger was a hero. Daddy told us that to many folks in those days, back during the Depression, Dillinger was a hero, a modern day Robin Hood, he told us, who robbed the rich banks and gave to the poor. But Daddy always added that most of the poor Dillinger gave money to was himself and that he had been shot dead in the end. Daddy’d look at JJ, wink, and say, “So don’t go gettin’ any ideas, son.”

Two other things I remember from my early childhood vividly are my horse and the war. I was born before the war, but was still quite young when it started. When I first became aware of what was happening around me, I learned that everyone spent most of the day talking about the war and what they couldn’t do anymore because there was a war on. It didn’t mean too much to me and I had no idea what a war was, but I knew the war took my four uncles away including Momma’s brother, our Uncle Joe, and only sent three of them back. We had to do without a lot of things, sugar for making cookies was one, and when I’d complain when Momma made something that should have tasted sweet and didn’t, she’d sigh and say, “There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s a war on and we have to make do.” The older folks spoke of the Duration, I remember hearing that phrase many, many times.

I couldn’t remember a day when Old Grammy hadn’t lived with us and she would scare me sometimes because she’d talk to Momma about the war she lived through and how some of her brothers and her daddy had been killed in it. She talked about the War Between the States many times, but she talked about the war we were in also, and she always got so mad and said it was a shame she had lived to see another. She spoke as if every day was going to be her last on earth, but she lived to be almost a hundred years old. I heard her say to Momma many times that she never thought she’d even reach forty and for years she felt she was on borrowed time. Grammy certainly looked old in pictures I’ve seen of her since, but when I was just little, she didn’t seem old to me. She would tell us stories about when she was a little girl and told us some tales too, that I reckoned her momma had told her. She told us all the Uncle Remus stories, just like Nana Tanner told us stories of Rose Red and Rose White.

When we were very young, JJ and I used to crawl up on Grammy’s lap and she would read to us or tell us a story. She and Daddy would fuss at one another sometimes, but they would laugh when they did it so we knew they were just funning one another. I had never noticed Grammy had only one eye until one day she said something about it and having a glass one she never wore and that made me look closely at her and I said, “Grammy, what happened to your other eye?” I was so used to seeing Grammy I didn’t know her any other way, but Grammy told me how when she was a young lady she had small pox and it took her eye. That day she took us to her room where she opened a drawer and pulled out a glass eye from the small box she kept it in.

I remember JJ and I pestered Grammy to let us hold her eye and I had thoughts of showing it to my friend Missy Boyle at school, but Momma said it was a terrible thing to carry around and wouldn’t let us play with it. She’d say, “Alma, put it away or give it back to Grammy. It gives me the creeps looking at it sitting in your hand glaring up at me. Grammy, you should wear your eye, I bet it would make you look right nice.”

But Grammy never wore her eye although one day she did relent and stuck it in where her real eye had been. She didn’t look like Grammy at all and we laughed and said she looked funny.

Grammy said that was a fact and put it back in the drawer. But when I’d have my little friends come visit, I’d always ask Grammy to bring out her glass eye and show it to them. We were just young’uns back then and used to act so silly, JJ was so young, I don’t think he even remembers Grammy’s glass eye or even if he remembers Grammy that well. But I remember her and I remember the day she died too. Poor Linda Sue was born after Old Grammy died, she never knew her at all, and I always had felt that was sad, sad that Linda Sue had no memories of Grammy.

It was gloomy a long time around our house after Grammy died. Grammy had been more like my best friend in those days and her passing on affected me quite a bit.

Grammy always talked about President Roosevelt. When I was very young I thought he was part of the family and wondered where he lived and why he never came to visit. When I got older and went to school, I learned about him and was a little disappointed to discover that he was only the president and not one of Grammy’s kin. President Roosevelt died too, not long after Grammy did. I wasn’t affected because I didn’t know him like Grammy had, but all the grown people were very unhappy and talked about President Roosevelt often and wondered if the war would go on.

I hoped the war would stop. I know it was just a young’un’s foolishness when I think back on it now, but back then I wanted the war to stop for a very selfish reason. Daddy promised he’d buy me a pony, but he said with the war on it was too expensive to buy horse feed. He promised to buy me a pony when the war was over. So I waited, if none too patiently, for the war to end and for Daddy to keep his promise. Daddy did keep his word even though there were times I though he felt I would forget about it, but I recall vividly how I’d ask him every night when he came home from work if the war was over yet.

My Uncle Robbie had been sent to England and flew bombing runs over Germany. While he was in England he went to see our English cousins and it was then he met Aunt Bernice. Maud was Nana Tanner’s cousin, Nana Tanner’s aunt married a man from England and went to live there, and Maud was their only child. Aunt Bernice had been married to Maud’s son Trevor who was killed in the war. My Uncle Robbie helped Aunt Bernice after Trevor died and I always thought the story was so romantic because he and Aunt Bernice fell in love. Uncle Robbie’s plane was shot down by the Germans and he almost died too, but he recovered and he and Aunt Bernice were married and right before the war was over, she came to live in Savannah with her boys and Uncle Robbie.

Even though some things that far back are hazy, I remember so clearly the day Aunt Bernice arrived in Savannah on the train. That was when I first laid eyes on Adrian. He was a little bit older than me, but that day he didn’t seem older, he seemed lost and he just stood there looking around at all of us who had gone to the train station to meet Aunt Bernice. I felt sorry for him standing there looking so confused that I uttered the first thing that came to mind, trying to make him feel welcome like Momma had said to do. I said, “When the war’s over my daddy’s gonna get me a pony!”

That brought a smile to his face so I said when the pony came he could come to my house and ride him. From that minute on, Adrian and I were good friends. After I did get my pony, who turned out to be a horse I named Giant, Adrian and I rode everywhere together and it seemed I had known him forever.

But I count the changes in my life from the day Daddy quit baseball because it seemed after that nothing was the same. My pet goat Nancy died the day after Daddy stopped playing and that made all of us miserable. Then Daddy got another goat for us, Daisy, and when she had her baby Momma let me stay and watch. I remember I spent the whole night in the barn with Daisy and baby Ashley and Giant. Not long after Ashley came, Momma went to the hospital and was gone so long I wondered if she would ever come home, but she did eventually, and with a newborn baby named Linda Sue. It wasn’t long after Linda Sue came to live with us that Momma and Daddy told JJ and me we were going to move up north. It was then our lives became really different but it’s always seemed to me that all the changes had started when Daddy quit playing ball.

The only thing I knew about up north was that Grammy said it was where all the Yankees lived. When Grammy wasn’t talking about the war, she was telling us a story or helping Momma in the kitchen, but she always complained about the Yankees and how they had burned down the whole state of Georgia during her war. Grammy hated the Yankees, she said they had messed up her life when she was young and she always said she wanted no truck with them. Grammy said Yankees were pushy and wouldn’t mind their own business. She didn’t even like the baseball team called the Yankees and used to boo the players when she’d listen to a game with Daddy. I told Momma one day that Grammy was in the parlor shouting at the radio and Momma said that the shouting Grammy was doing then was nothing like the way she used to rant and rave back when Momma was a little girl and Momma’s daddy and Grammy would listen to the Yankees. She said, “Grammy’s gotten calmer about a lot of things. You should have heard the ruckus she made back when I was a young’un.”

I told Momma I had never seen a Yankee and wondered what they looked like. Momma said they looked the same as us and the only thing she knew that was different about them was the way they talked. She said I had met several Yankees, my friend Missy Boyle was a Yankee and so were her momma and daddy and Mr. Berger and his family. Missy Boyle was always bossy that I reckoned that must have been why she was always in trouble with her teachers. Grammy always said a Yankee couldn’t mind his own business without messing in others’ too, but Momma would remind Grammy that it wasn’t always true. Momma said Missy Boyle and her momma were bossy and always finding fault, but she thought they would be like that even if they were born in Georgia and she told us of Mrs. Berger, who was married to the man who helped start up Daddy’s plant. Momma said Mrs. Berger was from New York and was the nicest lady she ever met and said she had manners as good as any Savannah-born lady. Grammy always said, “Humph,” to that and would continue the fuss with Momma about it. Old Grammy seemed quite funny to me sometimes.

Daddy made moving up north sound like a great adventure and he promised he’d buy a television for us when we got there. JJ and I had no idea what a television was and Daddy explained it was a box that showed moving pictures just like the movies we’d go to see on Sunday afternoons. The next time I saw Adrian I told him we were all going to move up north and he made it sound like it would be so much fun because he said we could write letters to one another.

I didn’t think too much about moving and couldn’t picture us living anywhere but where we were. I reckon I was too young to fully understand what it really meant, but Momma knew what it involved and she became very, very sad about moving and several times I’d walk into a room and find her crying. I have to smile to myself sometimes when I think back to those early days and how silly I was then, knowing we were moving away and yet thinking like I would still be living in our old house too. I don’t think it became real to me until the day the moving truck came and loaded all of our things and drove away. I think it was then that I realized we would be gone and I wouldn’t see Aan or Giant or anyone at home for a long, long time.

Momma seemed to understand how I felt, but she was so depressed in the days before we moved that she didn’t seem like our momma at all. I must have cried when we went out our driveway that day, leaving behind everyone who had come to say goodbye. I must have cried. I’m sure I did because it was so sad to us all.

If you see this, you do not have java enabled in your browser,
which is necessary for the shopping cart to function.

Click here to return to our home page!