Flights Through Life: With Wings Like Eagles

By Charles L. Harper

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 3, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465326348

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Copyright © 2003 by Charles L. Harper.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

SPECIAL

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

EPILOGUE

SPECIAL

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people gave me advice and assistance in the process of writing my story. Two people, however, deserve special recognition. My daughter, Kathy Greason, and her friend and coworker, Kathy Cutrara, provided invaluable assistance in the conversion of my handwritten and barely readable material into neat print. They suffered through many changes and additions without once threatening to abandon the project. Finally, they prepared all the graphics and other materials in readiness for the publisher.

Without their generous and gracious help, this book would never have gone to press.

PREFACE

This is my story, true to the best of my memory. Two reasons prompted me to write about my life. One has to do with my family; neither my children nor my grandchildren know the details of my early life. I hope, by reading this, they will appreciate the struggles I and my family experienced in those early years. Originally, that really was my only purpose in telling the story. But some members of my family who are close to me have persuaded me that others outside my family who are struggling through life may find hope and encouragement for themselves through my experiences.

I am especially indebted to my brother, Kearney, and sister, Christine, for helping me recall events and descriptions of our moves during my early childhood. In addition, I owe a great debt to my wife’s sister, Nancy, an avid reader, who urged me to write the story. She found the flights I have described to be, as she said, an amazing story. She also gave me valuable advice on how to make the story come to life for those who read it. I hope I have succeeded.

I should inform the reader that my story is not about airplane flights. Still, I think the flights I describe and the spirit that drove me will find identity with many whose struggle through life has been propelled by circumstance, faith, and desire.

CHAPTER I

Where the Flights Began

The date was June 17, 1927. The place was a log cabin on the J. D. Harper Farm. My parents, Dan and Nannie Harper were, in a sense, sharecroppers, along with two of my uncles and an aunt, on Grandpa’s tobacco farm.

This was a busy day on the farm. Tobacco was nearing its maturity. Suckering and worming by hand had to be done on schedule looking toward harvesting, or putting in the tobacco, as we called it. Papa put in his full day in the field. In late afternoon, Mama sent my older sister Christine and brothers Kearney, Carl, and Allen, up to Grandpa’s house for the night. Mama was left alone with only the midwife and her impending labor, her fifth child. There was no air conditioning or electric fan on this hot night—in fact, there was no electricity. There were scarcely any of the things we take for granted in a delivery room today. But somehow, Mama endured the labor and, as she had done at almost two-year intervals for the past ten years, gave birth to a healthy baby. After a first girl, this one made four boys in a row. She was yet to have another boy and another girl, and one stillbirth before her pregnancies were over.

That night, the midwife called Papa to the bedside, holding me up with some pride, and saying, You’ve got a healthy boy. Papa, who must have been prepared for another son, said, Welcome to the world, Charles Lindberg. In the morning, the other children were sent home. My sister Christine, secretly hoping for a sister, was somewhat disappointed; however, she was a loving sister, and although only nine years of age, was of immeasurable assistance to Mama in caring for me from then on.

I was not the last of Mama’s children to be born in the log cabin. About on schedule, two years later, she gave birth to my brother J. D. Poor Christine, this time when she was really desperate for a sister and not too happy to have either one, exclaimed to Mama, Don’t you do anything but have babies?! Mama’s answer is not recorded.

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Grandpa and Grandmammy Harper and Family. Charles’ father, Dan, second from left.

With a family of seven to feed and clothe and an income which could not pay off the borrowed money for the crop, life was miserable for Mama and Papa. To make matters worse, Papa was not a faithful husband, beginning with the first year of his marriage. Love had departed the marriage from the early beginnings, and it was only the determined will of Mama that kept the marriage together. As my sister recently said, She should have left him that first year, but then, where would we be? She had a good point. But my relationship with Papa is one of the great imponderables of my life as will be understood from the description of subsequent aspects of my growing up.

One could say that 1927 came on the threshold of the Great Depression of 1929. But we were already so poor that we scarcely knew when it arrived or what effect it had on the country. Had it not been for Grandpa and Grandmammy Harper’s generosity, we simply could not have had food on the table. i don’t know how we did it, but we survived. Mama is the answer. Her determination and strength were truly amazing; she held us together. Were it not so, Heaven only knows what would have become of us. She not only did the usual housework, and looked after us children; she washed clothes by hand and worked in the fields along with the men. She always felt a debt to Grandmammy and Grandpa, and used every fiber of her being to repay them.

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Mama and Papa with older sister Christine 1919

From birth until we left the farm when I was four, I have very few memories of being there at that time. There are a couple that stand out. They happened not long before we moved. One was a habit that my older brother and I had of crawling under the house, and locating the spot where Papa kept his rocking chair. Quite often he would drop coins from his pockets, which sometimes rolled through the cracks in the floor. Most of these were Indian Head pennies. Allen and I would sift through the dirt and redeem the coins. We saved these treasures for buying candy at my Uncle Clarence’s store, which was part of the farm.

Another event involved the well that stood in the front yard. A dug well, about four feet in diameter, it was covered by a section of a huge gum tree. The enclosure was about four feet high—just enough to tempt me to climb up to its top to peer down on the water. Mama warned me when she saw my first attempt—Never, never do that again. You could fall in and get drowned! Somehow the scolding didn’t register, and a few days later, she caught me trying again. This time I had moved some sticks of wood against the well cover to make it easier to reach the top. Before I reached the top, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mama coming out of the front door on the run with something unmistakable in her hand—a long switch. My first impulse was to jump down and take my medicine like a four-year-old should. My second impulse was stronger. I jumped down and ran like the dickens out of the yard. I headed south toward the crossroads that bordered the farm and where Uncle Clarence’s store was located. I figured that I could outrun her, as she was only a woman and not nearly so fleet-footed as I. I got about halfway to the crossroads, say, a quarter of a mile and I began to lose some breath. Not only that, I glanced back and saw that she was gaining on me. I had only one strategy left—to jump across the ditch that ran between the road and my Uncle Frank’s field. I figured she would have trouble jumping across the ditch. Bad thinking. I missed the other side of the ditch and slid into it. The next thing I knew, Mama was over me. With actions that spoke louder than words, she used the switch on my back as we walked back home. She didn’t kill me; she didn’t really hurt me that much. My pride and ego were hurt the most. I had lost the race. But I found the purpose of her warning and never again had an interest in looking down into that well.

As a young boy of pre-school age, I was not aware of the struggle my parents were having to provide food, clothing, and other basic essentials for the family. For this reason, all of the enjoyable things we did as kids, and these are numerous, have been magnified over the years, making memories of the farm a marvelous and indelible set of graphics in my mind.

Uncle Clarence’s Store remains on Grandpa’s Farm

So the farm, about fourteen miles south of Kinston, really began

To begin with, I thought it was the biggest farm there was. Actually, it was big, compared to other tobacco farms of Lenoir County, North Carolina. At one time, my brother tells me that Grandpa owned some 400 acres, but had to sell off about a third of it to pay taxes. This happened before I had recollection of the boundaries, since I was told that Ed Jones had bought everything Grandpa owned north of Beaver Dam Creek.

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at the Beaver Dam, where my older brothers and sister often swam. Beyond that the road climbed a high and curving hill which, oddly enough, we called Beaver Dam Hill. At the crest of the hill on the right was Grandpa and Grandmammy’s house. They had built this home in

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Charles’ Brother Kearney. Background: Beaver Dam 2002

1919, moving from the log cabin which our family then occupied. On down the highway, about a half-mile, was the log cabin. Beyond that, about a quarter of a mile, on the opposite side of the road, was Uncle Frank’s house. Another quarter mile down the road was the crossroads with Uncle Henry’s saw mill on one side and Uncle Clarence’s store on the other. He lived beside it and, in addition to running the store, had his share of the tobacco to tend. There were three tobacco barns for curing tobacco. The farm boasted four horses and mules who supplied the power for plowing and dragging logs from the new ground when woodlands were converted to fields. They also provided transportation everywhere the family went, pulling tobacco trucks, wagons, and the buggy. My sister recalls riding the fourteen miles to Kinston and back by horse and wagon on a shopping trip with Mama and Papa.

My fondest memories of the farm started after we left and moved ultimately to Kinston. As a boy from about eight to twelve, I frequently spent summers on the farms. My Grandpa was something of a Johnny Appleseed. He loved to plant everything and anything one could eat from a bush, vine, or tree. He had apple orchards, a mulberry orchard, peach and pear trees, many muscadine grape varieties, plums and peanuts. He always had a patch of watermelons and cantaloupes.

These summers were filled with joyous activities: climbing trees, eating from the trees, and partaking of everything as it ripened. Grandpa always put some limits—for example, not to touch watermelons marked with an X, because they were to be saved for next year’s seed. And not all of the time was spent in play and exploration, though I plumbed every spot and always discovered something new—like the fox grapes that grew up into a tree on the backside of the farm. You had to walk a dirt road, wade through a shallow creek that crossed the road, and walk through the edge of fields to a wood’s edge to find this treasure; and my brothers and I could climb the tree that it grew upon almost as easily as the squirrels could.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch, as it were, and we had chores to do and help to give to the grown ups at the tobacco barn. In those days, surrounding neighbors helped each other to harvest tobacco. No hired help was used, nor could it be afforded. Once I recall getting out of bed at daylight. I helped to hand the cured sticks of tobacco from the barn tiers to those stacking it under the farm shelter. After I helped hand the green tobacco, which had been put on sticks and stacked the day before, to the men in the barn straddling the wooden tiers, we were rewarded by going to Grandmammy’s wonderful breakfast. An example of the poverty we enjoyed was the food on Grandmammy’s table. For breakfast there was country ham, red eye gravy grits, hot biscuits, homemade jams and jellies, honey from Grandpa’s hives, and all the milk we could drink, and tea and coffee for the older children.

other chores involved bringing in firewood for the kitchen stove and for the bedroom heater. This always included some splinters or kindling from the pine tree stumps. One of my most recallable chores was helping my two aunts with the weekly clothes washing. This process will make any present day homemaker long for the "good