These thoughts were inspired by reading as much as by memory but are not focused on a book, so I'm putting them here, rather than on my main books blog. Also, they follow, at least partially, in some fashion, the previous post on this blog.
* * *
Again
and again, reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History
of Class in America,
I re-experienced scenes from childhood as memories surged forth. When Isenberg
noted that gardening as recreation was an acceptable part of postwar
middle-class life, but growing food on one’s small plot of land was not -- right
there, in a single sentence, I saw again the contrast between my two sets of
grandparents—my father’s father and stepmother in Columbus, Ohio, and my
mother’s mother and stepfather on the edge of Springfield, Ohio.
 |
| Springfield grandparents and baby me |
The
Columbus grandparents led an urban life, the Springfield people rural. Well,
kind of. In truth, both were in-between but in different ways. The Columbus
neighborhood had probably been a suburb in the city’s early days, and the
Springfield neighborhood was more a hodge-podge of poor folks outside the city
limits. Lots in both places may have been forty feet wide, but the Springfield
lots stretched back a long way from the road, and livestock and poultry were
abundant.
In
Springfield, the neighborhood had obviously grown up higgledy-piggledy, and the
streets – roads? -- were still unpaved in the 1950s. Clay dust squished like
talcum powder, deliciously, between bare toes. All up and down the road, in
white families and black, the children went barefoot. Some may not have had
shoes. I shed mine eagerly to be like the rest.
My
grandparents’ street in Columbus was paved, and there were concrete sidewalks,
too. Children did not go barefoot in public.
The
house in Columbus was solid and, to my child’s eyes, stately, a two-story brick
house with a painted concrete front porch the width of the house. The porch
featured a rolled bamboo shade for privacy and was always cool in summer.
Elements of the backyard were a luxurious lawn, a swing hung from another large
shade tree, a hammock, my grandmother’s riotously colorful flowerbeds, and my
grandfather’s prize tomatoes, of which he was inordinately proud. In the
bathroom, tile gleamed and sparkled. Bedrooms upstairs on the second floor were
filled with massive, dark, polished furniture, the beds so high we children had
to mount them with footstools. Everything in the house bespoke solidity and
respectability.
The
frame house in Springfield was a single story and very plain. Originally only a
large kitchen, small parlor, and two bedrooms, it had been expanded with a
newer, smaller kitchen built around the water pump (thus bringing water into the house), but there
was no bathroom at all. We washed at (or were washed in, when small) the
kitchen sink, and an outhouse reached by a brick path, laid herringbone style
under a long grape arbor, served other needs. The side yard was given over to
chickens, the back to fruit trees, raspberry patch, and Grandpa’s large garden.
Once the iceman came with his horse-drawn wagon and stopped in front of the
house. Slivers of ice for all the children!
My
Columbus grandfather was a high school graduate and a union member, engineer
first on a steam train and later driver of a diesel engine. His job paid well.
I remember my mother remarking once that my father’s family had had meat for
dinner every night through the Depression. My father’s sister never had to go
to school dressed in a flour sack. Sometimes cousins visited while we were at
the Columbus house, but no one ever dropped in unannounced. Visits were
arranged.
My
Springfield grandpa worked in a factory, and Grandma trekked to the farmers’
market in downtown Springfield to sell what food (eggs, fruit, vegetables) the
family did not need or put up for winter. Their house had no bedroom doors,
only sheets hung in the doorways, but their big dining table always had room to
accommodate neighbors who dropped in around dinnertime, and my grandmother
always found an extra plate and food to fill it.
I
loved all four of my grandparents, blood and “step” relations, and did not,
when small, differentiate between them on that basis. The differences in the
way they lived, on the other hand, were obvious from the start. Both households
had enough to eat and to share with grandchildren. Both grandfathers had jobs,
and both grandmothers kept house. Still, even as a child I realized they
occupied two very different worlds, and experiencing different ways of life from childhood is something I value in the way I grew up.
