When I was a child visiting my mother's people in the Tidewater was something I enjoyed very much, more than I enjoyed visiting my father's people in the Virginia mountains. My mother was the only girl and much doted on by all her brothers. I didn't really understand as a child how much of a special occasion our visits were, and how many of the things that I loved - like the huge multi-family outdoor feasts - were not typical, but held just because we were there.
There were so many special little moments that I remember from our visits. I mentioned above the feasts. Every time we visited there was at least one, and often more than one large gathering that might include several of her brothers and their children, and several of the great Aunts (Sue) or great Uncles (Wallace, Tom) and some of their grown children. The food was always amazing. My favorite was the fried chicken. My great Uncle Wallace once asked me how much fried chicken I thought I could eat (I was about 5 or 6 at the time) and I told him "a hundred pieces." He laughed and laughed. I've never really tasted fried chicken like that since I was a child, it was so crisp on the outside and so juicy on the inside. There was also ham, fresh corn on the cob from the field, potato salad, lots of fresh vegetables, beans, tomatoes plucked from the fields, biscuits that would melt in your mouth, and mounds of fresh butter on everything. The tables would be overflowing with food and we'd be outdoors under huge tall trees on a warm summer day.
There were the times that we would play hide and seek in the cornfields with other cousins who were visiting. We weren't really suppose to do that, because we might damage the crop, but no one ever punished us for the games. When I was about six or seven, I had a fear of dogs, and my great Uncle Tom decided to help me with that by having me help him feed his beagles. He had so many of them (he kept them for hunting), and they were so soft and cute and friendly, and eager of course to be fed. I pretty much got over my fear of dogs that summer.
The summer before my grandfather died (when I was eight), my mother and us three children stayed on for a long time after my father had to fly back home to go back to work. That was the first time we got more of a taste of the everyday rhythms of life there. Just before my father left we had gone to the beach, at the tip of the peninsula, so the body of water would have been the Chesapeake Bay. We had gone wading and I stepped on a broken beer bottle someone had thrown in the water and got two deep cuts on my right foot. So much of the rest of the time that I was there I had to stay still with my foot up while it healed. I learned how to go up and down the steep stairs of grandfathers house sitting on my butt, using my hands and one leg to push myself up, or lower myself down while my right leg stuck out straight. My grandfather had a big trunk full of old books brought down stairs for me to dig through and I spent much of my time reading. The best place to read was on the front porch in one of the many white wicker chairs, with their chintz pillow covers. From the front porch one could watch cloud shadows race across the fields of grain, or watch the slow approach of a curtain of rain. It was that summer that made me truly a reader and lover of books.
As a child I preferred my mom's kin to my father's because with my mother's kin everyone was amiable, no one argued, no one talked politics or sounded angry, no one talked too loudly, everyone took care of us, and treated us as special. It was not until I was an adult that I realized how much that was just a pleasant faรงade that glossed over a great deal of discord and disagreement, that tended to come out in underhanded ways. As an adult I also realized how much of southern gentility also was cover for a great deal of racism and fear of otherness.
These days I have only tenuous ties to my maternal cousins, as many of them, especially the one's that stayed down on the farm, have political and religious views starkly opposite my own. All but one of my mother's brothers has passed away, the only one left, uncle Tommy, is a great guy, but he is in his 90's now and probably will not be with us much longer.
The next installment (when I get to it) will deal with my Dad's side of the family, also Virginians.
