My parents, Jo (mom) and Carroll (dad)*, were Virginians by birth and upbringing. The first time Jo left the state of Virginia was when she married Carroll and went to live in Florida with him. Carroll had spent much of his adulthood traveling and working around the country, first in nearby states like West Virginia and North Carolina, but then to California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon. But for both of them Virginia was home. It was where their parents and most of their siblings resided. So as a child, when we flew we flew to visit family in Virginia.
We always split our visits between Jo's people who lived mostly on farms in the Tidewater along the Rappahannock River, and Carroll's people who lived in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia. Carroll's father Charlie Parks died when I was too small to remember him. Jo's father James Tyler (called Tyler) was still alive for the first eight years of my childhood. The photo above is me with Grandfather Tyler in his home. So I remember mostly going to visit Jo's folks first. The Tidewater was also much closer to Washington, DC and it was easier for her family to come to the airport to gather us up.
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Jo was the only girl in her family. She had five brothers. There had been another girl, the first child born to Tyler and Lillian, but she had died within days of birth. The picture above is her with her brothers probably in the 1970's at my cousin Lucy's wedding (from left to right is Howard, Jo, Tommy in the back, John next to Jo, Charles, and James). Three were older than her, two were younger. James Tyler II (called James) the eldest was already married when she was a young girl. James was a farmer and lived a few miles from his father. James' children Franklin and Turk ( James Tyler III) were just a few years younger than Jo and felt more like brothers than nephews. Next in line was John, then Howard just a couple of years younger than Jo, and the brother with which she was closest. Then there was Tommy, who was eight years younger. Their mother Lillian died within days of Tommy's birth.
Jo's father, my grandfather Tyler, could not see himself raising an infant or a young girl (she was 8), so Jo was sent to live with her Aunt Sue on the farm adjacent to her father's property. Aunt Sue already had two daughters one a little older than Jo and one the same age. Jo spent the years from age 8 to age 18 living with her Aunt Sue, and her cousins Mary Edna and Florence. Tommy was formally adopted by an uncle John and his wife, who had been unable to have children. John's farm was several miles away from Tyler. The photo probably taken in 1949 around the time of my parents' marriage, shows Herb, Florence, great Aunt Sue, Mary Edna and Hub, the family in which my mother grew up.
Jo had two other uncles (great uncles to me), who also lived within a few miles of Tyler, they were Tom and his wife Wade and Wallace and his daughter Nanny Florence who was Jo's best friend growing up. The photo below is great uncle Tom, great uncle John, grandfather Tyler, and great uncle Wallace, probably from the 1920's.
When I was a child visiting mama's (Jo) family included seeing her brother Howard and his wife Mickie first. Howard was in law enforcement and they lived in Rockville, Maryland. Howard was usually the one to pick us up at the airport. Howard and Mickie had two boys, Randy was the same age as me, and Ronnie (who as an adult goes by Scott) was the same age as my brother Charlie. We would often spend a day with them in suburban Maryland, which was not much different from the California suburbs where we lived. Then we would drive down to grandfather's house in the Tidewater.
For most of my childhood, in addition to my grandfather Tyler, we would also see my Aunt Sue and her husband Hub, her son Herb and her grown up daughters Mary Edna and Florence, my uncle James and his wife Wade, at least one of his sons Turk and his wife. Sometimes Franklin would bring his wife and children, Stuart and Becky, in to visit at the same time. We would also see Uncle John and Aunt Alene and their children Johnny and Lucy, great uncle Tom and his wife Wade, great uncle Wallace and Nanny Florence, and great uncle John and his wife. Sometimes Jo's brother Tommy would come from Newport News while we were there and bring his wife Gayebrook and their three children who were the same ages as my brothers and I.
This collection of dozens of relatives mostly living on farms all within a few miles of each other, seemed exotic to me as a child. I was growing up in a brand new suburb of San Francisco where all the houses were identical, and all the people in the houses were from somewhere else originally. I did not realize at the time that it was my experience in the California suburb that was unusual, and not the reverse. Everyone I grew up with had parents who had migrated to California for work from somewhere else. Many of them had come from crowded cities in the east, a few from mid-western farms or towns, but we were all from somewhere else, and no one had aunts or uncles or grandparents living within easy driving distance. I began to understand how unusual my childhood neighborhood was when as a sociology graduate student I began to read studies of urban communities like Herbert J. Gans Urban Villagers. I really understood it when I went to live in Johnstown, Pennsylvania where I had my first position as a college professor. But as a child, a world where dozens of one's relatives were close by and got together on a regular basis, where people lived in 200 year old farm houses, which did not all have running water, was very unusual and exciting.
While my grandfather was still alive we stayed with him while we were visiting. His house had been built in the 1700's. It was a wooden house that sat on piers rather than a foundation. A less than stellar drawing of this house, based solely on my memory at 74 (I did it today) is above. It was a two story rectangle, wider than it was deep. At some point, later than its original construction, a wide porch had been added across the entire first floor, and then even later had been screened in to block flies and mosquitos. It had a simple, but steeply pitched roof, the ridge ran horizontal to the front and back of the house, with a gable at each end. There were redbrick chimneys at each end of the house. It had been painting white at one time, and the functional shutters on the windows had been painted green, but it was all faded during my childhood. My father was an avid photographer and there are many, many pictures from my childhood, but for some reason, not one single picture of my grandfather Tyler's house.
The downstairs had two large rooms separated in the middle by a wide hallway that contained the steep stairs to the second floor. The hallway also held one of those gorgeous old carved wooden hall benches that had a large tall mirror, a seat to sit to remove boots, and many hooks for hats and coats. The hallway also had a single light bulb dangling and a refrigerator (probably circa 1948). Grandfather Tyler had the house wired for electricity in the 1940's but only downstairs, and only very minimally. There were dangling lightbulbs in the main living room which lay to the left of the entrance hall, and in my grandfather's bedroom which lay to the right of the hallway, as well as in the hallway itself. The electricity was used for the lights, for the refrigerator and for a large radio. The lack of electricity was quite the novelty for a child raised in the California suburbs. So was the complete lack of indoor plumbing. The house had no running water, no bathrooms, no sinks.
My grandfather's bedroom was strictly off limits and I have no memories of ever seeing past the doorway. But the living room was the center of all activity and most of our time was spent there. It was quite large. On the front side near the windows were a couch and comfortable chairs. There was also a piano, out of tune and very tinkley that I was allowed to bang on whenever I wanted. My grandfather also had his desk and his easy chair and multiple bookcases on the rear side of the living room. In between was a large table and chairs for at least six people, where most meals were eaten. Also standing a couple of feet in front of the fireplace at the far side of the room, was a metal stove for heating with coal, with a pipe for smoke that went into the fireplace and up the chimney. We were only ever there in the summertime, so the stove was simply an object in the way of running and play. In describing all the things in the living room, it makes it sound quite cluttered, but it was a large room and there was plenty of space for small children to run around and play.
At the far end of the living room, opposite from the hall entryway, was a door next to the fireplace. That door opened into a small, ramshackle, wooden passageway that had a solid wall on its back side and open screening on its front side. It was narrow and often full of spiders - which I hated with a passion as a child. In the middle of this covered passageway were two doors, one a screen door opening to the front of the house, and opposite it in the solid wall, a wooden door that opened to the back. There was a small wooden deck on the backside where work like washing clothes was done. That back door was also the access to the well in the back of the house from which all the water came, and to the outhouse, which was in ill repair and only used to dump the contents of chamber pots. No one wanted to sit in that outhouse unless you relished the idea of getting bit by a black widow spider.
Every day a fresh buckets of water were drawn from the well by the adults (they didn't trust small children not to fall in!), and one bucket with a metal dipper was left in the passageway for drinking water. If one got thirsty while playing outside, one could just step through one of the outside doors into the passageway and grab a dipper of cold water from the pail.
The passage connected the main house to a smaller building that was the kitchen. This is something that one can see in famous southern colonial times homes such as Monticello, a kitchen separated by some distance from the main house. As a child it was explained to me as being a fire precaution, and a way to keep the heat out of the house during the summer. Years later I also realized that it was a common arrangement in houses that were built during slavery to keep the slaves that brought in the produce, meat, etc. and did the cooking out of the main house.
The original owners of the house, built in the 1700's, had definitely been slave holders, not something I thought about as a child. I did know, probably more than most white working class children in the 1950's about slavery, and about Jim Crow laws. Jo and Carroll were very outspoken about how wrong the Jim Crow laws were, about how important voting rights and economic rights were and said on more than one occasion that one of the reasons that we did not live in Virginia near our relatives was because they did not want their children to be brought up with those prejudices. All the members of Jo's family referred to those of African American heritage as "coloreds" or used an even more distasteful word. We were quietly warned not to make an issue of it with relatives, but that we must never use those words and always use the "more respectful term of Negro."
[Unfortunately, my parents did not realize that the absence of Jim Crow laws and formal, legal forms of discrimination, did not mean that there was an absence of racism in California. The racism was just more hidden, swept under the rug. In Virginia as in much of the south, Blacks and whites lived alongside each other, in the same communities, with laws like Jim Crow and other forms of custom regulating their interactions to keep them socially separate even though they used the same streets. In California, real estate practices, some legal, some just customary, isolated Blacks, and other races into separate neighborhoods from whites. Our California neighborhood, was in the 1950's almost 100 percent white. Only when I went to high school did I learn about the other neighborhoods in the city where the Blacks, Hispanics and the very large Chinese- and Japanese-American communities lived.]
The kitchen was a very simple box of a room, probably not much more than 12' x 12'. A huge black cast iron woodburning cookstove dominated the room. Wood had to be chopped to fill it, and bringing in wood from the woodpile was a daily task. My mother was a good cook, she made really tasty but fairly simple foods, and was adept at using the wood stove for just about any type of food prep, including baking bread. The kitchen also had a good sized prep table and lots of cupboards and storage for dry goods and pots and pans. The big, galvanized steel wash tub, big enough for an adult man to sit down in was also stored in the kitchen. Bath time involved hauling multiple buckets of water from the well, heating them in huge stock pots on the wooden stove and filling the wash tub with hot water.
The same tub, placed on the back deck behind the passageway was used for washing laundry. Laundry washing also involved heating water on the stove. Also we used a large corrugated metal washboard, that one scrub clothes against to get out the dirt. Children could be give the task of "agitating" the laundry in both the wash and the rinse "cycle", with a large wooden paddle. We would pretend to be captains of boats paddling towards adventure while we stirred the clothes round and round.
The stairs to the second floor started several feet from the front door of the house and rose steeply across its depth. At the top the stairs opened on a narrow hallway, running to two large rooms at either end, one over the part of the living room and one over grandfathers bedroom. In addition there was a very small bedroom on the living room side between the stairs and the large bedroom. When we visited my parents, Jo and Carroll, slept in the room above grandfather Tyler, and my brother Charlie and I slept in the large room over the living room. When Frank came along he slept in a cot in the room with my parents.
Both bedrooms had very large, ornate metal bed frames with soft, squishy mattresses, and actual linen sheets. There were wardrobes rather than closets, and bureaus where linens and clothing were stored. One of the most important features of the bedrooms was the multiple chamber pots under the bed. All bodily elimination had to be done in a chamber pot. The pots were cast iron, but covered with white ceramic. They each had a fitted lid to keep the odors under control until they could be emptied. I did not like chamber pots. They hurt my butt! But at least as a small child, I was not responsible for the emptying and rinsing of the pots. If one needed to go during the day time, one had to climb up stairs to use a chamber pot. My grandfather had two in his bedroom, but we were not allowed in there.
My brother Charlie and I always had to share the bed at grandfather Tyler's house. We did not like this. We would fight and fuss, and someone would be yelling for my mother "he's touching me" or "she's touching me". Often my parents would lay a long bolster pillow down the center of the bed and tell us to stay on our side. This did not always help.
The last summer my grandfather Tyler was alive, I was 8 and Charlie was 6 1/2. Charlie convinced our parents to let him sleep in the little bedroom in between. That bedroom was full of things, trunks with old clothes, trunks full of books, all kinds of amazing treasures. The little bedroom also had the trap door that opened to the attic crawl space where other wonderful things were stored.
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*When people were introduced verbally to Jo and Carroll, they almost always misunderstood which name went with which person. This amused my mother and made my father angry. It was one of the many things about which he was very touchy.
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