BLUE BELLE AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
One of my favorite childhood stories happened as the Great Depression deepened. It began on Christmas day, 1930 in Spiro, Oklahoma, where my father collected me at my grandparent’s home. This is where my two sisters, Sybil Lee, 6, and Marian Yvonne, 2, and I, 4 ½, and my mother, Grace, 28, had been staying. We’d traveled to Spiro 3 months earlier from Oklahoma City by train. My dad, Elbert, 30, had lost both of his businesses; our house and the Model “T” sedan.
Dad was on foot; traveling light, with only a leather satchel, hitchhiking and now he had me in tow with my portable typewriter size suitcase… Almost no one in a car passed without stopping and picking us up. And we were soon in Searcy, Arkansas (where Dad eventually practiced law and we had our home).
In Searcy, I was left briefly with his sister, Jo Morgan, a new bride, while my father set about making new arrangements for my keep until he could pass the Arkansas Bar of law and set up practice as an attorney there.
By April, I and my grandmother Matilda, 52, whom I’d just met found ourselves joining her two sisters, Alice, 56, and Adeline, 60. We were all to live in a two room and lean-to added, share croppers cabin, located on the property of and about ¼ mile downhill from the home of Alice’s son, Wiley Wilson and his family, in a place called Joy.
Wiley’s place wasn’t bad at all but we were not to be living there.
Our cabin was old and smelly. It was extremely small, cramped and had bare essentials: 2 beds, 4 chairs, a small kitchen table, a food storage cabinet called a safe, a small cast iron cooking stove and a wall hanging clock. The walls were both, inside and out, just dark vertical boards, 10”wide nailed on as closely as they’d go but there were cracks between through which daylight streamed. It was like a cave with vertical sun stripes. I had never even seen such a place.
Alice and Adeline slept together in the “big bed” (standard double) in the bedroom. Matilda and I slept in the “3/4” bed in the kitchen.
Matilda complained every morning that she couldn’t get her sleep because I kicked like a mule. For a very long time I wondered who Mule was until Wiley’s son, Harold explained that it was the rusty looking animal pulling the plow. I heard him say “Go Mule!” and I asked, “Where is he”? I laughed, picturing that great fellow in bed with Matilda in the ¾, whether kicking or snorting as he often did.
In about seven months, I’d removed from an above average living space in Oklahoma City in a family of five, to this scarcely enclosed but dark chicken coop for people, with a lean- to shed on the back side and a small raised front porch. Our front step was a very big rock.
There was no bathroom, not even pretence. If nature called, we went outside somewhere away from the cabin.
Here I was nearing 5 years old with three “old ladies” that I didn’t even know and I had no idea when or whether I’d see my folks again. I’d ask, always to be told, “Oh, directly, I suppose”. Which I interpreted to mean Never.
I cried all of the time. It was driving Alice “insane” as she insisted and she begged Matilda to walk me away from the house a bit so she could have a minute of peace and quiet without “that youngun” squalling. Matilda would walk me in the road towards Wiley’s place up the hill. Eventually, I began going by myself and a practice soon developed in which I’d pretend that when I reached the top of the hill, I’d see my mother and sisters coming to take me home. This always led to tears of disappointment at the top of the hill but at least I was mostly over it when I got back and Alice got some relief from my self help.
When aunts, Jo, Vera and Lucy came to check on us, they made a plan to save the colored comic pages from Sunday newspapers (they called them “Funnies”) and bring them on their next trip to help entertain me. This they did, about a month later. They brought a lot as they’d told neighbors and friends in Searcy and Georgetown of my isolated situation and they all helped by collecting them too… I loved those “Funny papers” and even after I had seen them many times, wouldn’t let them be burned to “start the cook stove fire” though the three widows insisted that more would be coming.
when my aunts came back.
Finally, the welfare commodities came. The main reason I’d been placed with the widows to begin with; under President Hoover's welfare plan, a child in the household qualified the whole lot of us for government sponsored relief. There was even a little cash for outfitting me for school. The cash caused intense envy on the part of Wiley's family, up the hill, because they “didn’t have enough cash to mail a 3 cent letter”. For the three widows it meant they could finally buy some snuff from the traveling store truck the next time it came by. To them the sound of the store truck horn was “music from the pearly gates”! All three of them craved snuff and when they were out, they were cross.
There was a lot more flour in the commodities that we received, than we were likely to use before the worms got in it. To make me happy and to make the inside of the house lighter they decided to use some of it to make flour paste and glue my “Funny papers” to the walls and ceiling in the kitchen where we slept. At first I resisted, not wanting to part with my “funnies”. When it was done, I was really grateful! When the Aunts came again and saw it, they went into gales of laughter. Besides it was less drafty and I was crying less.
Not long after we had papered our place with “funny papers” the field mice discovered the flour paste we used to do the job. The mice would get under the wallpaper and scrounge about at night making some very annoying sounds. Alice or Matilda, sometimes both, would get up and after lighting the kerosene lamp, they would locate the offender by the rumpling in the funny paper and whack him extinct with a hand held shoe heel. The next day, we’d have a cut him out operation, followed by a paste in a new piece to cover. Soon there was no consistency to my comic strips, just a great assemblage of brilliant color.
Alice’s pussy cat “Blue Belle” was left with one of her daughters when she moved together with us. This was done partly to save feeding it and partly because they were thinking of Blue Belle’s willingness to change her home. Alice requested that the cat be brought. She used a 1 cent postcard explaining to her daughter that we had a plague of mice… So one day the red haired daughter arrived with Blue Belle in her lap. She was riding in a wagon made from the chassis of what had been a Model T car. It had rubber tired wheels and all. She called it a “Hoover” after the president. She said many people had just put their Model Ts up on blocks to save the tires until the time would come they could afford to buy gasoline and lubricating oil again. When she left, we gave her part of our flour and a bucket of our Steam Boat sugar cane syrup. She said the family had been out of flour for a “spell” and tonight we’ll have biscuits, “thickenin gravy” and syrup. Her mules looked thin and moved slowly as we watched her leave. At first, Blue Belle jumped up took a long look, as she drove away, but came back and laid down by Alice. From then on she was ours, although she wasn’t the “please pet me” sort or the begging sort either… more the sort you had to look at and talk to but respect her space sort. She wasn’t always under foot either but was often out dealing with our mouse problem. Obviously she was a specialist and we respected that.
Soon it was school time and I was not yet six. Matilda felt a bit obligated to have me go since they had taken the cash to outfit me for school. The actual preparations had been that a field worker supervisor, Mrs. Mason, had visited and brought me a pair of high topped shoes. I hadn’t worn any shoes for months. She also included some long tan, ribbed stockings. Matilda had also sewn me a frontier style square collar shirt of sheet material that she had saved.
I was the only entertainment that the 3 widows had so up to the point of my entering that backward country school, I could already do the alphabet, read, write, tell time and had a good sense of directions. I knew the names of most plants, animals and birds.
So I arrived at the school after a long tiring walk in my cut off overalls with long ribbed stockings sticking out and my frontier shirt. Not only that funny look but I talked funny and didn’t use the right words or understand the nasty ones the country boys were using either. They took turns whacking the new city boy freak. Finally, I told my grandmother that I would not go back, so she let me drop out.
We had picked blackberries in early summer and after canning them in Bell jars, the three widows carefully didn’t tighten the lids on several jars of juice that was left after the berries were all carefully sealed up. These became wine by Thanksgiving and the ladies made a ritual of testing the juice with faulty seals and on Thanksgiving and Christmas most of the faulty seals juice had disappeared although all three widows were careful to keep me from suspecting they were “drinking wine”. I could tell they were much more upbeat than even a new bottle of snuff made them.
By March of ’31, the economy had become hopeless. I didn’t know any of this but many people did. A great number of our American citizens were hungry and on substandard diets. Our little bunch had had no fresh meat in months. All of our remaining whippoorwill peas were weevelly. Our oatmeal was long gone and our flour was wormy, requiring much sifting and picking. So did the cornmeal.
It was about 7:00 a.m. when we heard Blue Belle calling from across the gravel road where there were acres of open fields in every direction. When we got to the front door to see what she was calling about, we could tell her sound was muffled. Then we saw why. Blue Belle was carrying in a large, young, wild rabbit she’d caught and she was bringing it to us. Tildi promptly slaughtered and turned it into fricassee to go with a pan of biscuits.
This performance, Blue Belle repeated quite frequently on into the summer. Her call, too, became “music from the pearly gates”. She was old and we lost her in late August and when we buried her by the old pine tree, we had real tears…. In fact Alice almost said words. Elbert Webster Price
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