The Unpainted House

ROAD TO MY BIRTHPLACE

The house where I was born no longer stands.   In 2010 I found the road that led to it.   The present owners of the property have placed a large metal gate across the road and it’s locked, so I didn’t get any closer than that.  While I don’t remember living there, I can recall that we visited it a few times when I was a child.  

It was just an old farmhouse without any paint on the walls.  Daddy was a sharecropper.  Sharecroppers’ houses didn’t have paint on them. I enjoyed reading The Painted House by John Grisham.  Grisham’s book describes life in Northeastern Arkansas during the fifties.   The continuing story line involves a seven-year-old boy who wants to see his mother fulfill her lifelong dream of living in a painted house.  Although we lived in that house in the thirties, I suspect my mother would have been a great deal like the lady in the home – longing for something better, but having to settle for a run down sharecroppers shack.

I was born around 10 o’clock in the evening and sometime after that they settled down to try to get some rest, during the remainder of the night.  My parents were too poor to afford a crib, so they placed me on a pillow by the side of their bed.  According to them, I almost fell off.  My crying woke them up and they rescued me.    That wasn’t the only close call I had during  the first few days of life.     I couldn’t tolerate my mother’s milk nor could I tolerate the milk from our family cow.   There was no formula available in those days, and if there had been, they wouldn’t haven able to afford it.  I was in danger of starving to death.  Infant mortality was high in those days.  My aunt Melba once told me that they were all poor, but my mother and father were poorer than most.

They did have farm animals, which included milk cows.  My grandparents also had  a milk cow or two, so they tried milk from their cows.  Whether my body got strong enough to accept cow’s milk or whether they found the right cow, I’ll never know.  I do know that I was finally able to drink the milk from my grandfather’s cow, so they simply traded cows.   Just think I’m probably alive today because of a cattle trade.