Things My Grandmother Told Me

When my grandmother was little, times were very hard. Nobody had any money or jobs or security. It was the Great Depression, and my grandmother lived with her family in Red Springs.1

The Watsons had lots of children, and I can't even count all my great-aunts and uncles by heart-- there was Rose, my grandmother, but back then they called her Bessie; Isabel, Gay, and Dot; Earl, Donald, and David, and maybe a few more. Uncle David told me that I look a great deal like my great-grandmother.2

I don't know the world about my great grandparents, but I know that Mrs. Watson could play ragtime, wring a chicken by its neck, and love. Mr. Watson was a man who ran a tight ship, and dispensed whippings swiftly on disobedient children.3

There wasn't a lot to eat in those lean years; sometimes Bessie's friends' families would fix eggs with squirrel brains to make breakfast go farther, and the children didn't have many luxuries. Sometimes, though, my great grandmother would find a break in her day to play ragtime music on her piano, fast as she could go. Her children would come close and enjoy the lively music, so different from the dreariness of the day.4

One day, my grandmother told me, a sad occurrence hit the family. the Watson had to sell their Mama's piano. A man came to take it away, and Bessie's mother sat on the front porch and cried and cried and cried. My grandmother said "we were poor, and there's nothing you can say about it. That's just the way things were."5

There's a piano in my grandmother's house, but she can't live there anymore, and her hands have been too arthritic to play it since before my birth.6

Now I sit at the bench of the old upright, sorely out of tune, and I play, but I don't know the music like they did.