Kicking Against the Pricks

By Elizabeth Kizer

Wording in the King James version of the Bible
speaks of the rods that shepherds have used
to urge animals to go in a desired direction.
The phrase may also serve as a metaphor for
the barbs and punishing pricks against which a
person may have to contend while searching for
independence and self-actualization. Cultural and
gender socialization provide pricks that goad a
person to stay in her/his place in society.
Born during the Great Depression and then
becoming an Army Brat during World War II to
emerge as a young mother and ranch wife during
Texas long drought and fi nally becoming a college
professor, her account covers struggles and
transitions the author experienced through several
historical periods.
Kizer addresses the crises many have faced or
will encounter including the effects of divorce,
rootlessness, economic constraints, alcoholism,
mental illness, suicide, death, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781477142622

Elizabeth Kizer

During her twenty-six year career teaching at the university level, Dr. Kizer published numerous articles of an academic nature. As well she adapted a novel, “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French, and directed the Readers Theatre productions which included one for a national profession conference. In addition to this memoir she has also written an autobiography. Now retired from her career at the University on Missouri, Dr. Kizer and her daughter Jill live in Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin,Texas.

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Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Kizer.

ISBN:

   Softcover   978-1-4771-4261-5

   Ebook        978-1-4771-4262-2

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Index

Preface

My Pioneers

I Began

Next, San Angelo

And Plainview

Has Anyone Seen My Parents?

Frankly, My Dear

Daddy, Once My Pal

Everything’s Relative

The 1950’S

Changes Finally

Up And Away

The Campus Years

After Thoughts

The Refrigerator

A Collection,

Repository Of Memories

Appendix

Where Did You Go, Dr. Spock

Outline Of Residences And Schools

PREFACE

The King James Bible contains an account wherein the apostle Paul testifies to King Agrippa about his life-transforming experience. Paul, a devout Pharisee, was on a trip to Damascus to persecute the followers of Christ, who he saw as infidels. Along the way he heard a voice from heaven say, It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. The meaning was that Paul’s practice of persecuting Christians was in opposition to God’s will.

Oxen were used in such agrarian communities for tilling the soil and bearing heavy burdens, and the owner would use a goad to communicate with and control the animal. This staff resembled a cattle prod with a sharp point attached. The ox rebelling against the owner’s directions might kick against the staff and the point, or prick, would bite into its flesh.

Kicking against the pricks has become a metaphor for defying authority, any authority. And authority isn’t always right. Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, the patriots in the American Revolution, and many others are examples of those who have stood in opposition to authority, or kicked against the pricks. Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem are among remarkable others.

Today many women in other countries are rebelling against authority, kicking against the pricks, by casting off their berkas or seeking education. In my less dramatic case, I rebelled against social norms while moving from community to community. I didn’t always fit in. Then rejecting the submissive wife role, I sought my B.A. degree; refused to go quietly after being denied tenure; was replaced as elected department chair by the dean when I argued for the department’s self-governing policies.

My lifetime of kicking against the pricks is a part of me, my story, a story as I have lived it, experienced it, reconstructed it. My hope is to be truthful and fair in the recounting, never hurtful. While it is my story alone, it touches and affects others. It may not necessarily be the way others understand or remember the past. It is, after all, a subjective account affected by selective perception and memory.

Recently I read that photographs are a detrimental influence on memory in that they tend to replace multi-sensory memories with a visual image. Perhaps that is true. In my case photograph albums and scrapbooks and keepsakes have served to stimulate the memories associated with them. A review of such artifacts has helped me to reconstruct an outline of my life. Of course memories exist too without external prompters.

I remember some incidents, though not very clearly, from at least the age of two. As an example, although I cannot recall my grandparents living in a multi-level home I have a memory of going to visit them in a two-story house. I questioned that memory as something I might have imagined or dreamed, but when I was in my mid-forties my Aunt Flo related that my Mamma and Daddy Jim indeed lived in a large two-story house when I was two. It was vivid in her mind because as a toddler I placed a brick atop her firstborn baby lying on a pallet on the floor. Prior to little Jim’s birth, I had been the only grandchild. Perhaps I resented sharing the limelight with this young upstart. Or maybe I was tired of hearing him cry? And where would I have gotten a brick? Perhaps the brick was used as a doorstop. Like so much of the past, details are lost.

The memory of the two-story house existed for me without any photographic representation. Where possible, I have tried to check facts. It became fairly useless, in my compulsion to understand the past, to ask my mother for information. Either she didn’t remember or didn’t want to remember, or time and alcohol and Alzheimer’s Disease had wiped her mind clean. My father was helpful with some details, but he tended to remember dates and the costs of things. Such was his nature. Still, I am grateful for what he gave.

Many times my Aunt Mozelle would remark it was amazing I was able to be as sane as I was. Contemplating later, I considered that she might have seen me as not as disturbed as I might have been after undergoing the abnormal circumstances of my life. I thought of this when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was asked what she considered to be her chief accomplishment in life and she responded that she was proud that even while surviving crises she had been able to remain relatively sane. I am surprised when others say they cannot remember things that happened early in their life, certainly during preschool years, and in writing I hope to pay tribute to what others have given me, keeping me relatively sane through their love.

I began thinking of writing an autobiography when I was around 9 or 10 because I considered my life to be unique up to that point. My life was different from any one else’s I knew, unusual in the number and types of crises met. Already I had moved about six times, and that was far more adventure than anyone I’d met. As an adult, though, I came to the conclusion that I should put my story in print because it bears commonality with others. Our separate histories may seem unusually different or tragic or bizarre only because we don’t talk about them very much, or very openly or very often or with very many others.

I also want to voice something that I believe is true—that families, maybe all of them—have the same kinds of hidden skeletons and tragedies that many others tend to have. Talking with others, especially in classrooms and crisis counseling sessions, the idea emerges that it’s not unusual for individuals to think themselves unusual because of these incidences, or that they come from an aberrant family. Although maybe not obvious, such unspoken influences form shadows that play across a family’s face and fiber. Certainly that has been true in my family, and it would seem in general people more in common with others than differences. An example is featured in the book The Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.

As Kenny Rogers sings, you have to play the hand that’s dealt you. Reaching decisions and following through with them brings results and consequences that must be dealt with. But it’s also true that refusing to make choices also brings about complications. In my case, my existence has been like a soap opera of continuing crises, and I developed the habit of kicking against the pricks.

My appreciation goes to faithful readers including: Jill Davis, Judy Hayes, Gary Burns, Bobby Smith, Jan Baskin-Smith, Michael Mosley, Ray Carver.

MY PIONEERS

When I was a child I decided that I really should write a book, but I know that I cannot write about only my life, for it is inextricably intertwined with many. So this is the story of a family—my family—and the others I have loved. I will focus on that family and those persons who had the most influence on me. It is the story as I know it and is based on my memories and my perceptions rather than an attempt to represent everyone’s point of view or the gospel truth.

Who I have come to be is due to many influences, but early on it was my mother and her parents who played a major role in laying the foundation, followed shortly thereafter by my mother’s sister Vida. Mother’s parents, Jim Smith and Sallie Baskin, were from the sturdy common agrarian stock that settled this nation. Mixed in their veins was the blood of Scots, Irish, English, French, even the Cherokee tribe, and maybe the Basques. The generations who preceded them and helped to forge their characters were the plain people who pushed ever westward in search of something better than what they had known before.

The story of the Smith-Baskin family is one I grew up hearing and enjoyed exploring. The stories my grandmother related to me when I was a child have played an influential role in my self-identification. I would sit beside her and beg Mamma, tell me what it was like when you were a little girl. I gained the majority of personal information directly from these sessions with my grandmother; additional information was provided by other family members and through research efforts. For this reason the Baskin family is easier for me to visualize and reconstruct, especially with various photographs and other memorabilia I hold (see chapter entitled Collections).

My maternal grandmother Sallie was one to tell stories, and she was a fine storyteller. Maybe this was her Scotch-Irish heritage. She would repeat the stories to me, adding such vivid details that I never tired of hearing them, and we developed a deep relationship. People do show love in different ways, and maybe this is at least partly why I think that telling is part of loving.

She cared very much for her parents, her grandmother, and her brother and sisters. It was in telling her grandchildren about them that she kept them alive and vital. As a result, I know far more about Sallie’s parents, Thomas Jefferson Baskin and Docia Frances Shelton, than I do any of my other three sets of great-grandparents. Of all the stories I have heard, hers are my favorites, the stories I am most eager to preserve and pass on to others.

My grandmother’s great, great, great Irish grandparents William and Mary Stuart Baskin immigrated in 1731. The Baskins sailed from Ireland and landed in Philadelphia. They settled first in Pennsylvania, later moving from there to Virginia and then to South Carolina. Ever in search of better prospects, and as the case has been through the history of this nation, succeeding generations of Baskins continued to migrate further south and west in search of new land and opportunities. Sequentially they settled in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.¹

By the beginning of the Civil War, my grandmother’s Baskin grandparents lived in Alabama. Their fourth son, my grandmother’s poppa, was Thomas Jefferson Baskin. Naming a son after the former U. S. president, a Virginian who was highly influential in the founding of the nation, was widespread at the time. Despite his name, young Tom’s loyalty lay with his family and his home state of Alabama. When he was still but a boy of 14, and wanting to accompany his two older brothers as they marched off to defend the South in the war against the Union soldiers, in 1862 he followed his two older brothers William and Brown in enlisting in the Confederate Army. All three of the brothers survived the Civil War, but Tom sustained an injury from which he never fully recovered.

Sixteen years after the close of the war, in 1881 Tom and Docia Frances Shelton married when he was 33 and she was 22. My great-grandparents’ home was a farm in Mississippi. Two years later, Docia Frances delivered her first child, my grandmother Sallie. After that, Docia gave birth to a child nearly every other year.

Living with her parents and grandmother, Sallie was a very happy girl. She recounted climbing up on a little stool at night in order to crawl into the high feather bed she shared with her grandmother. As she snuggled close against her grandmother, before falling asleep she would hear the lonesome, distant whistle of a train as it passed through the countryside. Sometimes her grandmother would tell her that if she wasn’t a good girl, grandmother would get on that train and leave. So Sallie was very good. Always tender hearted, it did not take much to keep her obedient.

Nevertheless there was an incident when she misbehaved. Her grandmother had made a new dress for herself, and there was just enough fabric left for a companion dress for Sallie. She was so excited that she could hardly wait until the dress was completed. Sallie’s mother and grandmother tired of hearing her beg to try on the dress. That moment finally came. Just after the family had eaten dinner, it was agreed that she could put on the dress—but just for a little while. The women warned her that she was to be careful, not to go outside and get the dress dirty.

Mother and Grandmother busied themselves with cleaning up after the meal. They cleared the table, placed the leftover food in the pie safe, and began the process of washing the dishes. Of course their farmhouse had no indoor plumbing. Preparing to wash the dishes, the women had to carry water from outside into the house and then heat it on the kitchen woodstove.

While the women were busy, Sallie donned the dress and slipped outside. As she paraded around the yard, circling close to the house where she wasn’t likely to be seen, Sallie imagined how pretty she looked. She was so deep in thought about what a lovely picture she was making that she wasn’t aware of what was going on around her.

As was their custom, when the women finished washing the dishes they threw the greasy, dirty dishwater out the open window. Sallie happened to be passing under the window at that exact moment. She hadn’t anticipated or noticed the dishwater splashing out the window until it descended on her and her beautiful new dress.

For a moment she was speechless. She was drenched, and her new dress was soaked. The water trickled down and pooled in a muddy puddle around her bare feet. When she began to cry, her mother and grandmother came out to check on her. Sallie learned the meaning of the maxim, Pride goes before a fall.

Her grandson Bobby tells of another time she ignored parental instructions. She told him how she had admired the beautiful, bright red vegetables strung together and hanging from a wall outside the house. She decided to pretend this was a necklace although she had been warned not to touch them. Reaching up to take the string of drying peppers from the nail, she wrapped it in a circle around her neck. Very soon her delicate skin began to burn from contact with the chili peppers, and in her agony she had to seek her mother’s aid to quench her discomfort. Another lesson learned.

Just as she told me stories, Sallie’s grandmother related to her granddaughter some of the hard times the family had experienced during the Civil War. To keep the marauding Yankees from stealing the few valuables they owned, such as their plain tableware and any jewelry or gold or money, they buried them in the yard. I think this was when some Southern prejudices were instilled in my grandmother, biases in contrast to her otherwise sweet, tolerant nature. Of course her formative years were spent in a state where there still was much bitterness following the Civil War.

She heard too how her mouth was so tiny when she was born that she had difficulty nursing. Since she couldn’t live without nourishment, finally her parents decided that they had to do something drastic. They forced her mouth to open wider with a teaspoon, and in the process of making the opening larger the corners of her mouth were torn.

A Negro mammy helped to care for baby Sallie. One of her responsibilities was to chew small bites of food into soft mush at mealtimes and then to place tiny bits of the pureed consistency into Sallie’s mouth. Given that no prepared baby food was available for purchase, this mode of feeding to provide infants with digestible food was commonplace in the South.

Mississippi was a wonderful fairyland for a child like Sallie. She liked to play outside and talked of the pleasure of listening to birds singing and the wind gently moving through the trees. Sweet smelling blossoms, the fruits, and the animals made Sallie think that this was the very best, most beautiful, most wonderful place in the whole world. Sometimes she would pick blooms from a hollyhock stalk which, when held upside down, resembled ladies in full skirted gowns. Then with the gowned ladies parading before her she would make up stories much as little girls played with paper dolls when I was growing up.

No doubt she formed idealized memories of her years in her home state. But alas, life was hard in Mississippi during the Reconstruction period, and long after. Ever in the quest for a more prosperous location just a little further west, finally the family packed up what few possessions they could carry and boarded one of those trains Sallie used to hear passing at night. Sallie’s poppa had heard stories about how after the threat of Indians had passed settlers were finding opportunities and decided to join others who were flocking to Texas.

Not only did this move reflect a trend in that historical era, it also was a continuation of the history of westward movement. Following the example set by the Baskin family after the initial 1731 landing at Philadelphia, as a member of the fourth succeeding generation Tom decided to move westward in 1891 with the hope of finding a better situation for his family. Thomas Jefferson Baskin and Docia Frances removed their four children from their home near Tupelo. Going with the parents were Sallie, George, Lillian, and newborn baby Mary. They left one little baby boy in a grave.

At just 8 years old, Sallie had to say goodbye to the Old South, the beautiful home she’d loved. Later she would recount details she could remember of that unhappy long, dusty train trip with her parents and younger siblings, such as being nauseated with motion sickness and vomiting out the window of the moving train.

The Baskin family had moved from the northeast corner of Mississippi to the northeast corner of Texas, settling alternately in rural areas of Delta and Lamar counties. They were in an area not too far from the Red River that separates Texas from Oklahoma and, as we would think of the distance today, near the present Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Life in rural Texas, however, was not a great deal easier or more prosperous or less tragic than the land they had left. Two more children were born and two more died. Lillian, at four years younger than Sallie, Lillian lived to be 12 years old, dying eight years after they reached Texas. The parents themselves were Texas residents for only a decade until their deaths.

Sallie remembered an idyllic life in Mississippi. Perhaps in the innocence of her youth, she had not known that her family had experienced hardships. After their move, she became old enough to be more aware, and their existence seemed harder than it had been. They had sacrificed most of their few possessions to come to Texas, and with barely a pot to cook their beans in they scrabbled together a livelihood as best they could. The Baskins lived off the land, as their neighbors did, raised what they needed, and did without luxuries. In the 1800s, and into the early 1900s, a family farm meant that all family members were involved with the chores. Even the mother worked in the fields, if for a shorter period of time than other family members so that she could go back to the house to prepare meals and the like. Of necessity, farming activities were not as gender specific as they became later.

Because of her father’s war injury and advancing arthritis, and since there was no older son to help him with his work, as the oldest child Sallie became her poppa’s helper. She held no resentment that her assistance was needed with his discharging his responsibilities. She began to do what we tend to think of as boys’ work, to plow and plant, to milk the cows and feed the animals. Thus she grew up working outside with her father rather than to learn homemaking skills from her momma. Sallie adored both her parents, but she grew very close to her father perhaps because they worked together in the fields.

Contrary to what people from other parts of the country seem to believe, Texas is Texas and not part of the old South. Compared with what Sallie could recall of her childhood in Mississippi, Texas must have seemed a colder, bleaker, less inviting locale.

Not infrequently the northern parts of Texas are gripped by bitter winds, cold, snow, and ice storms. Too the area north of Dallas where the Baskins moved can see violent thunderstorms and tornadoes. Without natural barriers, the winter gales sweep straight down through the Great Plains, which form a wind tunnel from Canada to chill parts of Texas. The popular saying is that the only thing separating Texas from the North Pole is a barbed wire fence. Maybe Tupelo had a warmer and more compatible climate, or maybe it was just that Sallie remembered it that way.

Two of Sallie’s remembrances of this period were about violent weather. Sallie and her father were standing at a window during a thunderstorm just as lightning in the form of St. Elmo’s fire began to dance along the wire fence outside their house. Their cows were standing in the pasture on the other side of the fence. Included in the herd was the calf Sallie’s father had given her and which she regarded affectionately as a pet. Watching as what looked like balls of fire danced along the wire fence, to her horror Sallie saw her calf draw too near the fence. It was electrocuted.

At another time, and after relocating to the Texas Panhandle, Sallie and her adult sisters and their children were visiting together all crowded into one small house. The floor was covered with pallets for their beds. A tremendous thunderstorm struck to rake the house with rain and gusts of wind. Sallie was standing at the iron cook stove when lightning streaked down through the roof to hit the kitchen stove. She fell to the floor, rendered unconscious. The entire group was stunned by the electric strike, but all survived.

A photograph shows the unsmiling family group posed in their front yard. Gathered in are two little girls and a young boy, the parents with a baby boy seated on his father’s lap, and my grandmother at about age 16. The small house, which sits about a foot off the ground, probably was like the hardscrabble tenant dwellings that both whites and blacks lived in during the hard times after the Civil War. It resembles the slave shack displayed in the University of Texas Institute of Texan Culture museum in San Antonio. Often these small domiciles consisted of only one room and, for warmth the ill fitting walls might be papered over with old newspapers. Pegs were inserted in the walls from which clothing was hung. Little else is visible in the picture save a crude wagon. In addition to its other uses, that conveyance would play a critical part on washday.

The barren ground surrounding the cabin presents nagging questions. In the stories my grandmother recounted to me of her childhood in Tupelo, Texas vegetation paled in contrast with what she had been accustomed. Yet compared to many other sections of Texas, this area is luxuriant. From the background, though, the house could have been located in a desert, or at least in the sand hills of West Texas around Midland and Odessa.

Then and now water is precious in Texas and conserved. The carefully manicured lawns that are expectations in the suburbs today would have been an impossible luxury in that place and time and circumstance. Instead housewives on the Texas frontier would sweep their yards. As part of the daily chores, they used their brooms to clear away weeds, rocks, debris, and other clutter that the restless wind or children or animals would visit upon the yard.

And certainly keeping the place from being unsightly was more than a matter of aesthetics. Clearing the yard meant protection. Snakes, critters, and troublesome insects like tarantulas and scorpions couldn’t slither through the undergrowth to hide beneath the house if there were no vegetation to cover the dirt. Dangerous objects couldn’t lie hidden, creating possibly life-threatening accidents to youngsters in an area where medical assistance was difficult to reach and reserved for emergencies too complex for homespun first aid measures.

As well, water wasn’t available for dousing fires that on the frontier could spread unchecked, especially with prevailing winds. The necessity of building fires in the yard weekly for doing the laundry was another reason for keeping down the growth of weeds and bushes.

A hoe or a plow or a mule cost money. They were for use out in the field to grow crops, the annual provisions for the family, and to sell or barter for necessities they couldn’t produce themselves. But a broom, a tool that was distinctly the woman’s domain, was inexpensive. By using a stick or an old broken hoe handle with straw or twigs around one end, brooms could be homemade. Women’s work tools often were catch-as-catch-can; men’s work tools were seen as more necessary items.

One of Sallie’s domestic chores was helping her mother with the weekly laundry. As she described it, early in the day their wagon was driven to the nearby water source, a windmill or well if the family was lucky, or from further away if they were not. Someone would draw up buckets of water to pour into a barrel sitting in the back of the wagon and then driven back to the house. While this was happening firewood would be gathered in the yard and lit. A large wash pot would be suspended over the fire to heat. Filling the kettle with water from the barrel in the wagon was heavy labor. Hard bars of lye soap were shaved and then dropped into the water to dissolve. Next the dirty clothes were submerged in the water to soak.

Whites got washed first, and then colored clothes, and finally the dirty work clothes—all in the same wash water. Eventually each piece would be scrubbed vigorously over a metal rub board to remove soil and stains. While the laundress bent her back in leaning over the hot tub of water to scrub, firewood needed to be added below to keep the water warm. It was hot, grueling work. The next step involved replacing the soapy water in the pot with clean rinse water. After wringing the rinse water from the laundry, the linens were suspended from a clothesline to dry. On days of inclement weather the laundry would be hung from ropes stretched across a room in the house.

Water was not wasted. After all the clothes were washed and rinsed and hung to dry, buckets filled with rinse water then were brought into the house and used to scrub the wood floors, another use for the broom. The water would drip though the spaces between the wooden boards that formed the floor, and the soaked floor would slowly dry.

Washing was a laborious chore followed the next day by ironing, another back breaking activity. For this procedure, a flat iron was placed on the surface of the wood stove to heat. Called sad irons, those instruments were heavy and using them was a sad task. Since they were not mechanized, there was no instrument to control the heat of the iron. Care had to be taken not to burn or scorch the clothing being pressed. And since they couldn’t retain the heat for long, a second iron would be sitting on the stove to heat. The process involved a repeated exchange of one hot iron after another, heating the house as well.

Sallie did what needed to be done, what was expected of her, but what she liked to do, what she enjoyed most, was going to school. Like other rural school students, her attendance often was necessarily sporadic because of farm chores or weather. When she could she would walk to the nearby country school carrying her lunch, a cold slice of sausage folded into a biscuit, in an old syrup pail.

Pouring over her texts, a McGuffey’s Reader and the Blue Back Speller, she developed a great love of reading and learning that continued the rest of her life. She held to, was guided by, and taught the moral lessons she found in the McGuffey Reader. From a humble background, she was a proponent of education and often lamented that she had been privileged to go to school only sporadically through the eighth grade because her home chores demanded her time.

With the passage of time Sallie became a young woman. Social events and activities for young people were sparse, but Sallie found her soul mate while attending one. She met Jim Smith at a church social event, perhaps a square dance. He was a dashing young man, she a shy young lady. He cut a handsome figure; with her swept-up hairdo and her high-necked dresses she appeared very prim and proper. He stole her heart away when she was just eighteen. Learning of a tendency toward alcohol abuse in the Smith clan, before she would agree to wed Jim she insisted that he promise he would never again touch liquor. He took that vow, and kept it. So great was Jim’s love for Sallie that he kept that 1901 promise, to even many years later shunning the daily glass of wine his physician had prescribed as helpful for his heart condition.

On their wedding day the couple rode in a wagon to locate the preacher. They met him traveling toward them on the roadway and explained the errand that was taking them to town. He performed their uniting in the middle of the road while they were seated in their two wagons. With no witnesses and no ornate ceremony Sallie had a new name, Sallie Elizabeth Baskin Smith.

Her first married days were a time of trial and error since she hadn’t had the opportunity to glean very much from her mother about being a housewife. Once when she labored to make a set of underwear for her new husband, on seeing her handwork he laughed and told her that the buttonholes she had crafted looked like sow’s eyes. She was hurt; she had done her best, and he made a joke about her efforts. When she made some biscuits and had them waiting when he came in from work for the evening meal, he laughed again at her product. That night he got no biscuits for supper. She took the entire evening meal out and buried it in the yard before he had a chance to take a bite. She was very sensitive, very shy, very soft hearted. Years later she could laugh about her first experiences as a housewife and how she had cried when he hurt her feelings by teasing her. By then, though, she had learned that he had a great sense of humor—so long as he was not the butt of the joke.

After moving to Texas, Sallie’s parents had seen the birth of another daughter, Bertha. Next Leonard was born and died. Health issues, life stresses, repeated moves through succeeding years must have been very hard for the Baskins. After giving birth to yet another baby at 43 years of age, in 1902 life ran out for a very tired Docia. According to my grandmother, this was a change of life baby, and the baby also died. Tom followed her a year later, at age 55. The couple had produced 7 children, 3 sons and 4 daughters in their relatively brief 21 years of marriage. Two of the sons and a daughter died before reaching maturity.

Their lives of struggle had taken their toll; photographs of them not long before their deaths show both looking much older than they were. Her visage shows a sad, careworn face, the corners of her thin lips turned down, and she appears to be at least 30 years older than she was. His countenance seems deeply carved with sadness, perhaps reflecting the horror of the war and the hard life that followed. Yet he looks much more vital in his portrait than she although he was more than a decade older.

Sallie had not had time to adjust to being married and running a household at the beginning of the century when she faced a series of significant crises with which to cope. She was married in 1901; in 1902 when Sallie was 19 her mother died, and she lost her beloved her father in 1903. Left behind with the death of both parents were 13 year old George, Mary at 12, and Bertha, 8. The young married couple, Jim and Sallie, assumed the responsibility of providing a home for her brother and two sisters. From being the oldest in a household of five children, Sallie now became a newly married woman with three younger siblings added to her household. She felt ill equipped to assume the family’s maternal leadership role at just 20 years old. Then less than a year later, while lacking a mother to give her help or advice, in l904 and 1905 she gave birth to her first two children. The young married couple had quickly increased to a household of seven.

She would tell me that after they married they had been childless a long time and that they had yearned for a child of their own. I never thought to ask her to quantify what she meant by a long time, and was surprised when I finally discovered that what to her had been a long time actually had been three years. Maybe that seemed like a long time to her because she was eager to have a baby, or maybe because birth control methods were so limited then that other couples tended to have babies sooner. Perhaps Jim and Sallie yearned to start a family and when no baby appeared they feared there would be none.

When months passed with no pregnancy, in desperation and with the hope that this patent remedy would help her conceive, she decided to try taking doses of the popular women’s remedy, Lydia Pinkham’s tonic. Some claimed the concoction brought a baby in every bottle. Whether the tonic had anything to do with it, Violet, Sallie and Jim’s first child, joined the family in 1904. Their first son Elvin was born a year later, and five more children were to follow.

Her parents adored Violet and doted on her, but in 1909 disaster struck. Violet became ill with a fever during a typhoid epidemic. For days the parents tried everything they knew to break the fever. When the little girl grew so weak that she was unable to eat anything, her mother resorted to spooning the blood from raw meat into her mouth in the attempt to give the child strength to fight the disease. Five-year old Violet died after only a few days of illness.

In order to eliminate contamination and spread of the disease, the parents were instructed sternly to burn her clothing, her bedding, her toys, and everything that she had touched. They not only lost their precious daughter but also had to part with every remembrance item. Always law abiding, in her grief Sallie was determined to have something of her firstborn and kept a lock of Violet’s soft brown hair tied with a ribbon. That lock of hair is held in the family still.

Grief stricken, Jim and Sallie would recall endearing things this precious child had done. When her poppa came home after a day at work he would always find Violet waiting at the gate for him. Now was he approached the house at the close of the day he would be reminded anew of her absence. In the telling of this period, my grandmother made no mention ever of the son and daughter who survived their older sister’s demise, Elvin and Flo. It was as though in the enormity of their loss they overlooked the younger children. Elvin was only four when Violet died. Who can say what impact the death of his sister had on him. Flo was less than a year old.

They almost lost Flo about six months later as they prepared to make a trip to town on a windy day. No screens covered the open windows of their house. Sallie was stepping into the wagon just as a strong breeze blew through the house. A window shade was pulled through the window frame, and the sudden flapping of the shade frightened the horse. It bolted and the wagon pitched forward. Sallie lost her footing, and the baby she was holding in her arms fell to the ground. The wagon wheel rolled right over the tiny baby. Flo must have been young enough that her bones were soft, the ground beneath the wagon must have been loose or muddy, and the wagon must not have passed over her head or any vital organ. The mother was terrified but the baby apparently bore no injures.

Certainly in the space of four years Sallie faced an unusually large series of life crises. In our contemporary society most couples generally do not meet so many challenging circumstances in so short a time. In addition, at the turn of the century there were no crisis hotlines to call for help; indeed there were no phones, no walk-in crisis centers, no counseling conveniently available. When as an adult I have had times of stress, I recall the incidences my grandmother had dealt with and am amazed by her resilience. She saw no choice. She learned to cope. Others depended on her, and she had a strong spirit, responsive to need. She had faith and fortitude. She followed the example that had been set for her by her family and did what she had to do. With a strong sense of family and neighbors, she had Jim at her side for support.

After they had been married nine years, economic conditions worsened for the family. Sufficient income was not available locally, and in desperation Jim turned to what he knew he could do to provide for his family, coal mining. Jim and Sallie’s brother George went to jobs in the East Texas mines. To their deaths their hands were marked with bits of coal and coal dust that became buried beneath the skin as they labored down in the mines. Left with the children, Sallie picked cotton for income. Jim mailed a pathetically touching letter he wrote with a pencil on lined paper torn from a tablet. His fifth grade scrawl was almost illegible. Dated 2 October 1910 and addressed to Dear Wife and babies, he poured out his love and devotion and loneliness as he labored in an uninspiring job while being separated from them.² At least their separation didn’t last long.

In the letter he also expressed his desire to locate some farm they could rent in order for them to be self-sufficient. Socially and economically, white sharecroppers were just above ex-slaves as being proverbially at the bottom of the barrel and never able to get out of debt but tenant farmers could usually fare better. As tenant farmers, they could hope at least to break even at the end of the year.

Jim’s father-in-law, Tom Baskin, had explained his life philosophy to Sallie’s brother George as they walked along a river, perhaps to fish. The father used the occasion as a teaching metaphor. He pointing out to his son that a man can bob like a cork through life to float merrily downstream with the current. But to make something of himself he must turn and struggle against the current and swim upstream. Like Tom, George, and Sallie Baskin, Jim Smith had the moral fiber to do legally what he had to in order to provide for his family. Later as a father himself, George had passed this memory to his oldest son, Grady. The deeply held value that had such an influence on Tom’s descendants was verbalized again at Grady’s funeral.

As Docia and Tom Baskin had a daughter, and eight years later another daughter, and finally four years later the last daughter, so too Jim Smith had brothers similarly spaced. Six years after Jim and Sallie met and married, Elmer Smith and Mary Baskin married, to be followed in another six years by Otis Smith and Bertha Baskin. Soon all three couples began having children of their own. These three families stayed close, often visiting in Sallie and Jim’s home.

The three families retained their connectedness through the years. When Jim and Sallie moved to the Panhandle, they left the other two Baskin-Smith families behind. By l912, though, all three Baskin-Smith families had relocated, leaving the counties in the vicinity of Dallas and going further west to Hall County in the Texas Panhandle. They were still near enough to the Red River for the men to hunt and fish. Jim and Sallie leased and then bought land from a Mr. McMurray. Their economic conditions improved with lots of hard work, frugality, and determination.

My mother vividly remembered that, for surveillance, they kept guinea fowl. Not only do the fowl kill snakes but also with their characteristic squawk they serve as alert watchdogs for isolated homesteads. One of her unpleasant memories was the siblings being required to work out in the fields just as their mother had done when growing up. Using a hoe they would attempt to eradicate the invasive Johnson grass from the rows of growing cotton.

Meanwhile, there was no indoor plumbing, electricity or gas; no modern medical treatment, prescriptions, diaper service; no wash and wear clothing, and limited ready made clothing; no washing machines, detergents; no wall to wall carpeting, vacuum cleaners, central air conditioning; automobiles, telephone service, radios, televisions, or daily newspaper delivery; no supermarket shopping, freezers, microwaves, processed foods. Stock had to be fed; cows had to be milked; butter had to be churned; eggs had to be gathered; gardens had to be tended, and food preserved for winter; water had to be heated for bathing, washing, dishes, and the like.

Due to the Industrial Revolution of the 1880 and 1890s, domestic consumption had increased across the nation, but not so much in Texas, especially in rural areas where wise management meant that resources went for livestock, farm equipment, and land. The children wore clothing Sallie made from flour sacks, and they walked to school carrying their lunch in a syrup bucket just as their parents had. Lunch was still the cold biscuit and slice of sausage left from breakfast.

My mother’s description of a typical Christmas morning is an example of the simplicity of their lifestyle. Always the first to rise, as he stoked the fire in the stove Daddy Jim deliberately began to wake the family members with overly loud sounds. The children were forbidden to leave their beds until the house warmed. Captive, my mother and her siblings would listen with unbearable anticipation as their dad taunted them with noises such as jingling bells and crinkling paper. Finally they were allowed to enter the room where the scrawny Christmas tree stood. The cedar or pin pine tree would have been cut locally and hung with tinsel and paper or popcorn chains the children had made. The children were delighted with the apple, occasional orange, a few nuts, and the peppermint stick or a piece of hard candy they would find in their stockings. By stockings, I mean their actual garments were left under the tree with hopes that Santa would fill them with goodies. Gifts were sparse.

About this time mass production and the growing influence of advertising brought about changes. Catalogues from Sears and Montgomery Ward tended to create a desire for commercial goods. Acquiring possessions gave the owner pleasure, or a sense of personal gratification. When the catalogues were delivered to mailboxes, everyone would pour eagerly over the contents with wonder at the products offered for sale. When the new editions arrived at least twice a year, the old catalogues were placed in the outhouses and studied again as the slick pages were torn out and used as toilet paper.

Following her long day of work, Sallie would remain up to read issues of popular publications such as Harper’s Monthly or McCluers Magazine by the dim light of a kerosene lamp after everyone else had gone to bed. These publications contained news about contemporary issues, new products, and the like. Sallie liked pretties, and as the Smiths became more prosperous they too began to indulge in purchases for the household. When the farm produced a large crop, Jim would bring back from town such surprises as the curved front oak china cabinet and the tall fluted carnival glass vase that now sit in my dining room, as well as an oval framed art piece, a picture of a homestead at twilight.

Suddenly, though, the nation was involved in World War I. At 27 years old Sallie’s brother George became a member of the Army Field Artillery in 1916. He trained at Camp Travis, which was in San Antonio adjacent to Fort Sam Houston, and then his squadron was sent to Germany. Like his father, he sustained a debilitating war injury. The Smith farm was left shorthanded.

Several memorable and fortuitous things happened in l9l9. With the end of the War to End All Wars, George returned home. A huge cotton crop was another blessing. Sallie and Jim’s oldest child, fourteen year old Elvin, had been promised a bonus if he could break his record at picking cotton. Working hard and long, on 6 November l9l9 he did just that by picking the most cotton he had ever managed. Another celebration marking that day was the birth of Elvin’s little brother Earl.

Rural families often had to serve as their own physicians. They used such handy items as kerosene and turpentine as medicine. Once when the children were outside playing, Flo idly chopped at a wooden stump with an ax. Her little brother Earl stood by watching. Aiming at the stump, Flo dropped the ax just as Earl reached toward it and with a sharp whack, she cut off the tip of his finger. The children ran screaming into the house. Sallie calmly put turpentine on the tip of Earl’s finger, and fastened the severed joint back where it belonged with a strip of cotton as a bandage. The nursing completed, Sallie then made a trip to the outhouse where she vomited while sobbing. Amazingly, Earl’s two finger parts grew back together, a little crooked and bent, but Earl grew up with an intact finger.

The years after the war were prosperous ones. Farmers held their bumper crop of cotton with hopes that the price would rise. Jim sold their cotton at the peak of the market. Then, profit in hand, he decided this to be a good time to leave farm life and pursue his ambitions. Traveling a little further south, but still in the Texas Panhandle, he came to the little town of Plainview to investigate possibilities.

With the goal of being an independent merchant, Jim bought a vacant lot and built himself a store on the main street just a few blocks south of the railway depot. Family members left behind, such as Mamma and her young sons, would travel back and forth between Hall County and Plainview several times during the period of transition. The Santa Fe and Fort Worth and Denver lines ran through Hale County, and soon railroad personnel were making trips to the Smith Café and Grocery from the nearby depot.

Leaving rural life and Jim’s brothers and families behind in Memphis, in 1925 the family finally relocated to Plainview to live in a rented house on Broadway. While moving from the category of farmers to small business owners, they couldn’t afford to buy or build a home and remained renters for several more years, in fact for more than a decade. From the first rented house they moved to a house on Cedar Street where some family members suffered smallpox. A house on Baltimore and 9th Street became their next abode. Eventually the other two Baskin-Smith families joined Jim and Sallie in Plainview along with brother George.

For the next 18 years Jim was a merchant at the original location that in the beginning included a small diner but finally only a Red and White franchise grocery store. As the farm had been, the store was a family business. It was here that Sallie ceased being a stay-at-home mom. When a girl living with her parents she had worked in the fields, then as a young woman had married, raised her siblings, given birth to children, contributed to the family economy through her efforts on the farm, and then moved to town reluctantly to assume her place beside her husband in the business.

In reminiscing, Mother and her big sister Flo recalled that whatever other compromises Jim and Sallie made, that family always had plenty to eat. The girls in the family were assigned to do the housekeeping and care for their younger brothers. With parents too busy to worry about meals, my mother remembered being sent down the street to buy hamburgers for family meals. Perhaps this compelled the three sisters to learn to cook.

A vacant lot next to the grocery was crisscrossed with paths. Folks would walk through there to get to Broadway, the main drag. That lot was also used as a playground for Earl and James. Sallie and Jim reasoned that even as they worked they could keep their eyes on the younger children there. It was here that James got spanked for climbing on a building under construction. When he fell, he broke his arm. Nevertheless, he was punished because he disobeyed his parents for being on the building. Another time when the boys were having fun in breaking bottles against the brick wall, a flying shard of glass caused injury to James’ eye, leaving a scar on the lid. At least he didn’t lose his sight.

According to Earl’s memory, you’ve never had a whipping unless it happened in the back of the store when it was filled with shoppers. When he transgressed some rule, his dad would use his belt to administer punishment and then tell him to quit frowning and get on out there. The Smith children agreed that their parents were extremely strict.

Playing hokey provided another reason for having their dad’s razor strop applied to their backsides. Earl was skipping school one day when his dad happened to see him on the street. Driving the delivery truck, Jim pulled up beside Earl and offered him a ride. He drove Earl straight to school and left him there to dread the application of punishment that Earl knew would occur later. Once when Thelma skipped school to go to a movie, she too got a licking with the razor strop.

When the boys became old enough, they drove the store’s delivery truck. Even before that, they would be taken on deliveries. As youngsters they would climb in and out of the pickup to carry customers’ orders to their doorsteps. Once there was an accident when the brakes failed and James was thrown through the windshield. By the time he was 14, though, James was driving the delivery truck himself.

It was in Plainview that Sallie and some other family members caught smallpox. Her case was the most severe. Even the soles of her feet were covered in blisters, and she had to walk on pillows, stepping on one while she reached behind her to get the spare one to swing around and place it in front of her for the next step. She would describe how painfully she suffered. Many people caught the disease at that time and suffered deep scarring. Miraculously, because of meticulously following the instructions and medication she