My grand dad Wiley, as I remember him, was a fierce preacher. When I was young, I remember seeing him get up behind the pulpit, barely able to see his shoulders above that sacred desk and he would expound on the Word of God convincingly bringing souls into heaven. But away from the pulpit he could be a character. He and my dad could carry on sometimes. I have pictures of them sawing wood with a cross-cut saw and just hanging out.
Grand Daddy Wiley
I remember times we’d get into the old Plymouth and travel the long road to Smithfield or Selma NC to visit. I remember it well, because I always got car sick and threw up. My mom would always carry something for me to puke in so we didn’t have to stop. Anyway, I remember one place they lived that had an old bus in the backyard. It was a treasure trove of things for a young boy to get into. It was so much fun. And the crickets were everywhere, especially in the house. I love catching them and playing with them.
Grand Dad Colie and me
My childhood was scattered with toys of all kinds from my granddad. I was the gleam in his eye. I remember a bread truck with a sliding door on it. It was metal and almost half as big as me. The toy of choice though was to have a tractor. I had rubber tractors small and large. I even had a pedal tractor. That was my pride and joy. I loved that tractor, although I couldn’t pedal it very far. We lived in what was called the “sand hill”. There wasn’t a lot of solid ground around and that left me with only a small area where I could “plow ground”. My mom threw me a birthday party when I was three, I believe, and I got 22 small hard rubber tractors. I became a big time farmer under the house where my farm happened to be.
Let me stop here for a moment and give some insight on where I grew up. It was, like I said, a small farming community by the name of Small near Aurora, North Carolina. All the farms were family owned and everyone helped each other. The doors on our homes were never locked nor were the keys removed from our cars and trucks, ever. We all had gardens to eat from. Canning was an artful chore done each summer so we would have food in the winter. Tomatoes, beans, pickles and all sorts of other vegetables were put away. “Hog killin’s” were a family affair as well. I remember all of us getting together early in the morning and granddaddy and my dad would cull out two or three hogs and shoot them and cut their throat and let them bleed out. They would then put them in a pit, cover them with burlap and pour boiling water of their bodies and then we could take a canning lid and scrape the hair off. Once they were cleaned up they were hung up by the heels on gambles, which were nothing more than pointed sticks that would keep their legs apart while they hung and the men would gut them out. Nothing was left to waste. Chittlings, cracklings, to brains were saved. There was nothing left but the squeal. The meat was separated into its cut. Hams and shoulders went to the salt barrel, ribs and such to their use. Some of the meat was ground into sausage with all those spicy herbs and such made to taste. Some was made into bacon and some just plain fat back put into salt. The ole smoke house would be full. I remember going in there and seeing those hams hanging from the rafters while they cured. Speaking of the brains though, the most odd of things was for me to watch my mom cook and scramble hog brains with eggs for my dad. He would eat it like it was the best thing in the world. It was not my forte though, so I never tried it.
This wasn’t the only meat we had to eat. My dad hunted deer and squirrel. During season we would have deer meat and occasionally squirrel. My grandmother usually cooked the squirrel. I remember one time during a hog killin’, for dinner that day we had fresh pork and squirrel on the table. Dinner, mind you, was the middle of the day meal. Supper was the late meal. We also had chickens. Lot’s of them, too. The pen, at grandmother’s house, measured something like fifty by seventy five with a chicken coop that was at least ten by ten. I used to go out there with a bucket and would walk through the pen barefooted getting squishy all between my toes as I went to the coop to gather the eggs. You guess what was squishy. Oh and we had something other than eggs from the chicken pen. I’ve watched my grandmother go out there on occasion and corner a chicken and grab it by the legs and watch her walk out into the yard to a stump where a hatchet was stuck blade into the wood. The chicken with her wings spread and flapping my grandmother would flop that chicken’s head across that stump, grab that hatchet and wack that chicken’s head right off. She’d then put the body down and it was so funny to watch it get up and run around for about ten or twenty feet until it bled out. She would then pluck it clean and clean it out and take it inside and cook it. Sometimes she fried them, sometimes she stewed them. In later years when I married mom and dad still had chickens and if we visited home my wife, Julie, would ask if it had been running around the yard that morning and my parents and brothers would laugh at her and she would get that look on her face. At that time in my family’s life with four other brothers my mom never cooked less than two chickens in those two seasoned cast iron frying pans she always used to cook in.
