Chapter One
The Family Farm
The story of Mama & Papa Hudgins
Belmont seemed like another world to me. It’s a little community near the Jackson County line, only about ten miles south of Gainesville, Georgia. Belmont was the home of my grandparents Mama and Papa Hudgins, officially Hattie and Barto.
Their world was so different from mine. I lived on hustling, bustling West Broad Street in Gainesville. Yessir, I lived in a big city. Nearly twelve thousand people lived there in 1950. We got our milk in bottles, delivered to the front door. A cow had nothing to do with it. We bought our cotton in clean rolls. But in Belmont, cotton had to be picked from a little bush, and it had crummy seeds in the middle of it. Why, in Gainesville, you could go to the store and buy bacon and fatback and all those exotic meats. You didn’t have to wait till cold weather came, as they did in Belmont, so they could shoot an old hog and cut him up into hams and shoulders and ribs and then cook his fat in a big, black pot till it produced lard for cooking grease and shriveled-up pieces of crisp-fried meat—cracklin’s, they called them. They were perfect for giving cornbread a heavenly flavor.
Belmont seemed like a thousand miles away back then. And just about every Sunday, we’d pile into Daddy’s 1941 black Ford, which he liked to say didn’t have a rattle in it, and drive that thousand miles to see Mama and Papa. And it was great.
Practically every adult who grew up in Southern Appalachia back then had a Belmont in his or her childhood. It wasn’t that long ago, really. But now small family farms are disappearing every year, leaving only memories for most of us.
I remember Belmont, Georgia, well. I remember when Belmont’s roads were paved with two different kinds of material: slick, red mud when it rained and dry, choking dust when it was dry. I liked the rainy-day material better because with it you could still breathe when a car passed as you walked along the road.
I remember that Mama Hudgins cooked on a wood-burning stove, and pancakes seemed to taste better cooked over wood. Her chicken and biscuits would have won any cooking contest. Mama sometimes cooked beans in a black pot over the fire. Occasionally, she would use a Dutch oven, which she’d also use to bake bread on the hearth. The house was heated mainly by two fireplaces: one in the kitchen, where everyone stayed during visits, and the other in Mama and Papa’s bedroom. Besides these two fireplaces, there were little kerosene heaters for the other rooms.
These were used when it got so cold, you couldn’t sleep. But I don’t remember seeing those little heaters lit. It never got that cold, apparently. Oh, it got cold, all right, but when you went to bed, your body literally sank into the feather mattress; you’d pull up eighty-two pounds of cover and you were warm. One thing you had to remember: You needed to get in a position you liked before pulling up the covers, because it took a lot of effort to turn over with all those quilts on top of you. The only thing that got cold was your nose. You had to keep your nose out to breathe. But only the nose.
Mama and Papa always kept a drawer in the pie safe full of heavy, cast-iron toys to play with. There were also empty old cans of Colgate tooth powder and Woodbury talc. These were much more fun than the toys Gainesville had. There was also an Uncle Wiggily game. It must have been fifty years old. And for the little girls, there was a Raggedy Ann, made from some flour sack or something. After Mama and Papa were gone, Raggedy Ann was still there, but even more raggedy.
Papa had mules. Sometimes he had one mule; sometimes he had two. But every mule he had, I remember, was named Bill. Or maybe it’s just that I couldn’t tell one from another. Anyway, I know that at least one of those mules, Bill, didn’t like to be ridden by little boys. He threw me off one day. Bill never did mind me when I hollered out “Gee” and “Haw,” but when Papa did it, old Bill would turn to the right or left just as pretty as you please.
Mama’s cows wouldn’t mind me either. They’d give milk for her, but when I’d pull on those things, just a drop or two would come out. Sometimes Mama would squirt milk into my mouth straight from the cow. It was fun, but it wasn’t good. Warm milk was for babies, calves, and sissy kids who caught colds. It wasn’t for me.
Mama and Papa grew practically everything they needed. About the only things they bought were the essentials they couldn’t grow, stuff like salt, coffee, sugar, cloth, and maybe a few seeds. Papa grew cotton, too, and my brother Kenneth and I helped him pick it, sometimes bolls and all for me, for a quarter a bag. I would have done it for nothing.
Hog-killing time was always fun. Well, the first part of it wasn’t. Somebody would shoot that poor thing in the head, and he’d squeal and bleed like crazy for what seemed like a long time. But soon as he quieted down, the rest was enjoyable. The men would cut up that old hog and lay the fat aside to be cooked out as lard and cracklin’s in a big, black pot with a fire under it.
During hog-killing time, we kids would play games to keep warm. We’d take a straw or reed and blow up the hog’s bladder like a balloon, tie it off, and then kick it around like a soccer ball, although nobody had ever heard of soccer back then. You couldn’t do that on West Broad Street in Gainesville.
Papa wanted to kill his hog on Thanksgiving Day, if the weather was cold enough. He and his sons would start early in the morning, about sunup, and by dinnertime, which in the big city is called lunch, Mama and her daughters-in-law would have enough food on the table to feed the whole neighborhood. Mama always killed a hen, cut it up, and cooked it inside the cornbread-and-sage dressing. The chicken and dressing would emerge golden brown and would sit out on the cupboard all day, along with everything else, until suppertime. No one knew until years later that even cooked food should be refrigerated between meals. Or so they say.
Mama and Papa didn’t always have a dog, but they always had cats. I don’t know where so many cats came from. And there wasn’t a tame one in the bunch. They’d sneak out of the cat hole in the smokehouse, tip-paw up to the food Mama had left on a big, flat rock, and eat as fast as they could.
Belmont had all kinds of great games. All it took was imagination. The cellar, where Mama and Papa kept perishables (until the Rural Electrification Administration ran power to their house), was cold and spidery like a dungeon. Then there was a little log cabin way off in the middle of a field behind my grandparents’ house. I imagined some famous person grew up in that cabin and someday it’d be a museum. Or maybe a very brave outdoorsman lived there, I dreamed, and he could outfight, outrun, and outhunt any man alive. I was extremely disappointed in later years to learn that two nice little ladies, Sis and Sarah Fowler, sisters, lived in the cabin. There went the museum.
Belmont Baptist Church was famous for its lemonade. I’m sure its members would like to be remembered for greater things, but I remember the lemonade. Belmont had homecomings, and people would bring food like they thought they were going to eat their last meal that Sunday afternoon. And, boy, somebody always brought lemonade, stirred up in a big, tin washtub with lots of ice in it. It was always a bit on the sour side. The first sip grabbed you and shook you all the way down to your shoe tops, which, incidentally, were freshly shined with Griffin liquid polish just for the occasion. The next sip was better, and from then on, it was great. Belmont Baptist Church made me believe in one thing, for sure: When you get thirsty in heaven, they serve ice-cold lemonade from a big, tin washtub.
Not all my visits to Belmont were fun. My brother and I were taken there in 1949, and it wasn’t to play kickball with a blown-up pig’s bladder. We were sentenced to two weeks at the farm just because we had come down with a bad case of the red measles.
That’s right. When our daddy found out that we were breaking out, he gave us two options: You can go stay with Mama Stevens at her house in the city, or you can go stay with Mama and Papa Hudgins down on the farm.
“Why can’t we stay home?” I asked pitifully. “You can’t stay here,” Daddy said firmly.
My brother and I chose the farm. The downside was that the farmhouse didn’t have indoor plumbing. Relief normally was a good seventy yards away in a little house behind a fig bush. But each of us had a little pot under our bed for quicker access.
Mama Hudgins put both of us in Aunt Gertie’s old bedroom, pulled the shades, turned the calendar toward the wall so we wouldn’t strain our eyes trying to figure out what day it was, switched out the lights, and shut the door.
No one called the welfare department to report two little boys being held against their will in a cold, dark room down on a farm. If anyone called to check on us, our grandparents wouldn’t have answered. They didn’t have a telephone. They didn’t have a television. They’d had electricity only a couple of years. As usual, the bedrooms weren’t heated—this was in March—but it didn’t matter. We had enough quilts to survive a Siberian winter.
Mama and Papa treated us well. Mama fed us homemade soups and other light fare, and as we got better, we graduated to country ham and gravy and biscuits and other delicacies Mama concocted on her wood-burning cookstove. When she decided our eyes were strong enough for the light, she taught us to embroider. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
If it hadn’t been for the measles, it might have been a pleasant stay. We weren’t forced to scrub floors like Cinderella; we weren’t beaten; we weren’t scolded. Like whitetail fawns, in our own good time, we simply shed our spots and were good as new. We were ready for civilization again.
Back at home, I found out why Daddy wouldn’t let us recuperate at our own house. Snuggled inside a little bassinet in our living room was our baby sister, Elaine, all pink and pretty and without a spot of red measles.
Both the farm and the community had changed a lot when I visited in the summer of 1972 to take a few photographs. Mama was living by herself. Papa had been gone since June 24, 1965. He died about a month ahead of his eighty-fifth birthday. An electric stove had replaced the woodstove and Dutch oven Mama used to cook on.
The two fireplaces had been cemented up, and Warm Morning coal heaters stood in their places. The road had been paved. There were no hogs or cows or mules. The smokehouse was empty of meat, but the old salt box was still holding up. The outhouse was still there, though the fig bush in front had grown bigger over the years and completely hid the two-holer, which Daddy or one of his brothers nicknamed Hoschton, after a town not far away.
The old garage was still there at the house—Daddy and his siblings called it a car house—but I don’t recall seeing a car anywhere around it. It was built for an A-Model Ford that belonged to Glen, the oldest boy. But the only evidence I saw that an automobile was once parked there was an old headlight. Papa never learned to drive. He didn’t need to.
The old hand-cranked washing machine still rested behind the smokehouse, just as it had when I was a kid. The log cabin in the field where the Fowler sisters lived had collapsed a little more in the past twenty-five years. The old Gainesville Midland steam engines that once stopped in Belmont to take on water and passengers were gone.
Mama was eighty-four in 1972. She hadn’t changed much in two decades. She was a little lady, maybe five foot two, and still wore her hair in a bun. I’d seen her let her hair down a couple of times, but only literally, never figuratively. Mama’s lace was straighter than a poker. She still worked in her garden, which son Herbert plowed for her, and she always wore a bonnet outside to protect her face from the sun. She still made the best tea cakes and apple pie this side of Appalachia, and she still stood and waved over the ferns and flowers that lined the end of her back porch until her visitors’ car pulled out of sight.
Belmont was then, as it still is today, a warm, friendly community that looks after its own. The town still holds some fine homecomings at the Baptist church and keeps farming in its blood with gardens and maybe a milk cow here and there.
Changes had been made in Mama’s house, but she probably didn’t see much need for them. After she started fading with dementia, a nursing home in Winder, Georgia, became her new home. She left one day and started walking down the highway. Someone who knew her pulled his car up beside her and asked where she was going. “I’m going home,” she said. The man convinced her to let him take her back to the nursing home.
Mama really wasn’t that unhappy, though. In fact, at the end, she thought all the other people at the home had come to serve her. “You know,” she said one day, “I don’t have to cook a thing these days. They bring me three meals a day.”
Mama had always been an optimistic person. She taught Sunday school for Lord knows how many years and made real wine for communion but wouldn’t touch the stuff any other time. I never saw Papa at church, although he was a deacon. Someone said the doctor told him to stay out of crowds because he had a heart murmur, and he took him at his word. Papa didn’t say much, and he wasn’t warm and affectionate, by any means. I saw Mama kiss him only one time, and that was when he was lying in a casket in the front bedroom of his home. But Papa was an honest man, a good farmer who provided for his family, a trusted justice of the peace, and a grandfather whose surname I am honored to carry.
Copyright © 2018 by Foxfire Fund Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
