Booger Town and the Sycamore Tree

By Princess Pretty Eyes

This is a story about incest, child molestation, rape, suicide, bullying, physical abuse, murder, and multiple pedophiles and ghosts. Pedophiles, rapists, and murderers have been around since the beginning of time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524575908

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Copyright © 2017 by Princess Pretty Eyes.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2017900456

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-5245-7592-2

                             Softcover                   978-1-5245-7591-5

                             eBook                         978-1-5245-7590-8

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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Rev. date: 11/16/2017

Xlibris

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This is a story about Incest and child molestation, rape, suicide, bullying, physical abuse, murder and multiple pedophiles and ghost. Pedophiles, rapist and Murderers have been around since the beginning of time.

Introduction

Grandma Giselle would rise up early at 5:00 a.m. every morning then she would put a percolator on the wood stove to brew steaming hot coffee for Grand Pa Wilton before he would leave out for work early in the morning before sunrise. I could hear it whistling all over the house, the ground coffee aroma smelled so good. Grand Pa Wilton would hurry to put pieces of coal and kindling into the wood burner to get the house nice and warm. Grandma Giselle would make flat bread cake, and we would sap it in our coffee the same way we would sap gravy with her delicious buttermilk biscuits. One morning my older brother Milan who was only five years old, reached up and pulled the percolator of water off the wood stove onto his head. Thank God Grandma Giselle had just put cold water in it, or else it probably would have scalded him to death. He scared the daylights out of Grand Ma. The day before my Uncle Everett was killed in a car accident, we were all sitting around in the living room listening to him plucking a few tunes on his guitar. Uncle Everett was working two jobs to take care of his wife and children. He had gotten married when he was around twenty-two years. Uncle Everett laid that guitar away and paid on it every week until it was finally his own. He was the smartest son out of all the eleven children Grandma and Grandpa had. School president and Valedictorian, Uncle Everett was well known and very popular. On his days off he would come to Grandma’s house to give her and Grand Pa a few dollars to help with his younger brothers and sisters. He paid for all of his brothers and sisters school lunch at Paradise High School. It was fifteen cents a day back then in the fifties and sixties. In the same year that I was born in nineteen fifty-eight, Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed by a woman in Harlem New York. He somehow survived the attack and went on to be one of our greatest Civil Rights black leaders in American and Black History. All of my mom’s brothers had a skin rash called eczema really bad. Uncle Everett had it so bad that, he didn’t graduate from high school until he was twenty years old. His skin would itch so bad that he would scratch it until it would bleed. One morning I heard a loud noise coming from the living room as I climbed out of bed. It was just Uncle Everett playing his guitar loudly in the living room. He had one foot, propped up on the rollaway bed. He didn’t live with us, but would often stop by to visit after working the graveyard shift. Uncle Everett carried his guitar everywhere he went. The rollaway bed was there in case a family member wanted to spend the night. Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle got married in 1934 one year before Uncle Everett was born. Grand Ma worked for a lady named Mrs. Flowers doing domestic work cooking and cleaning her house. Mrs. Flowers encouraged Grand Ma and Grand Pa to get married. She even made Grand Ma Giselle’s satin and laced white wedding gown, because she loved Grand Ma Giselle so much. They had a beautiful wedding. The church was packed with their family and friends. Grandma Giselle only had a fifth grade education, but she was very intelligent, hardworking, loving and kindhearted. She could read every page of the local newspaper and she would read scriptures in the Bible every day. Cooking and canning fruits and vegetables was her specialty. She would pick all of her fruits then can them, putting them into Mason Jars. Grandma Giselle picked blackberries, green apples, pears, strawberries, plums and persimmons, she loved making jelly and fruit jams. She would even kill chickens and turkeys, by ringing their necks with her bare hands. Grand Ma Giselle would sing a song saying, Everything’s chicken but the Beal, look at that right straight, Its still chicken. On Saturday’s and before every holiday she would cook big dinners that would wow the chef’s channel in this day. Southern Fried Chicken, Ham, turkey, chitterlings and hog maw’s, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, corn bread, potato salad, and a big pot of her homemade creamed corn, fried fatback meat and a table full of her homemade pies and biscuits. She baked Sweet potato pies, egg custards, coconut pie and blackberry cobbler and even apple and peach cobblers. Uncle Tony her youngest son loved her homemade coconut cake. Sometimes Grand Ma Giselle would let him help her make one from scratch especially just for him. Grand Pa Wilton would sit at the head of the table at every meal and would say a special prayer thanking God for our many blessings and for the food in which we were about to receive. On weekends and holidays Grand Ma Giselle would straighten her seven daughter’s hair with a hot straightening comb. Then she would curl their hair with a Marcel curling Iron, just like the one at Mrs. Sweetie’s beauty shop. Back then on Sunday’s Grandma would make you get up by six o’clock in the morning in order to get everybody’s hair done before going to church. She would grease our scalps with Royal Crown hair grease and sometimes you could hear it frying when she would straighten our hair with the hot straightening comb that she always put on the hot front burner on the kitchen stove. Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle were Presbyterians, they went to church regularly. Their eleven children couldn’t wait to get home from church to eat the big dinner Grand Ma Giselle had prepared for them the day before. Grandma had a beautiful dimple in her chin and face. She was only five feet tall. Grand Pa Wilton worked in the cotton mill as a cotton bailer, for forty three years. He was handsome and tall with smooth red tanned skin. He was part Cherokee Indian and part Black Hawk Indian. Grand Pa Wilton would pull his own teeth with pliers for fear of going to the dentist. Sometimes it would take him all day to get it out. Finally he would show us the big long tooth with the root and all. It almost looked like a big dogs tooth. Grand Pa Wilton would go house to house in the neighborhood to pick up slop for his pigs that he was raising for his family. After the pigs would grow to a decent size, Grand Pa would slaughter them by tying their feet together and hanging them upside down in a tree and then slitting their throats. First he would put them in a big black wash pot filled with boiling hot water. Then Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle and his brothers would clean all of the hairs off the pigs. Then they would chain the pigs feet up and pull them up in a tree and slit their throats. Grand Ma would always prepare for the slaughter by putting big tubs to catch all of the blood. She would take all of the guts and clean out the intestines what we call chitterlings. Grand Ma Giselle would make sausage and Liver mush and souse meat. She added all kinds of seasonings such as sage and salt and pepper. Grand Ma and Grand Pa were hardworking people. Grand Ma Giselle’s parent’s killed pigs for the white man that they lived with. They were the masters that owned slaves that were my Great Grand Parent’s Lark and Fannie. Their names were Mr. and Mrs. Price and they had a daughter named Violet. White folk’s gave black folk’s the guts to eat after they slaughtered the pigs for them. The Chitterlings, pigs feet and pigs tail are a delicacy to the black family. Even when the white man gave only the stem of the collard greens to the black man it made them stronger. That was where the most important nutrients came from. My Great Grandfather Lark and Great Grand Ma Fannie taught Grand Ma Giselle how to kill pigs and chickens and how to grow fruits and vegetables when she was a very young girl around ten years old. Great Grand Ma Fannie died in Grand Ma Giselle’s arms. She had pneumonia and was in the hospital when Grand Ma reached down to hug her, that’s when she took her last breath. Grand Ma Giselle taught Grand Pa Wilton how to kill pigs and chickens. Grand Pa never wanted to kill the baby pigs because he felt sorry for them. But, Grand Ma Giselle would slit the baby pig’s throats in order to have food to feed her family. She was tough and strong. Grand Pa Wilton would just drop them in the big black wash pot filled with boiling hot water. Those baby piglets would always try to jump out of the scalding hot wash pot but, Grand Ma would run after them and catch them before they could get away. Sometimes I would cry until my eyes would turn blood red and snot’s would run out of my nose begging them not to kill the baby ones. They were my friends and I played with them every day. But Grand Ma Giselle would sit me down and explain to me that if they didn’t kill them we wouldn’t have food to eat for the winter. Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle would make homemade sausage and liver mush. Then together they would slice pork chops, ham, pig feet, pig tails, hog maws and chitterlings. It would be enough meat to get them through the winter and spring months. Grand Pa would also hang Streaked Bacon and fatback meat in their pantry and pour salt all over it so, that it would keep for months. Grand Ma used them to season her beans and greens and all kinds of vegetables. Grandma Giselle and Grand Pa Wilton’s house burned down twice in the same spot in North Paradise, North Carolina. The first time the house burned down, Grand Ma was ironing clothes for her youngest children to go to Children’s Day practice at church. Grand Ma and Grand Pa had taken the children to the church to practice biblical verses for an Easter program. They had only been gone for a couple of hours when, Grand Pa Wilton’s brother Uncle Frank came running in the church to tell them their house had burned down to the ground. Grandma Giselle had forgot and left the iron on. At least that’s what she thought, but speculation among blacks in the neighborhood was that the Ku Klux Klan or racist neighbors in North Paradise burned the house down both times. In May, 1957 Grand Pa’s company that he worked for gave them a brand new house and put it right back in the same spot the old house was in. Fortunately Grand pa Wilton’s employer Fieldcrest Mills thought that he was an awesome worker and knew that Grand Pa had a wife and eleven mouths to feed. The second time their new house burned down, Grandma went to get a cigarette from Uncle Everett’s wife Gloria. She smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. In the 1950’s cigarette’s with filters were very scarce. Winston’s and Salem’s were Grand Ma and Grand Pa’s choice of cigarettes in the 1960’s. Their oldest son Uncle Everett and his wife Gloria lived right next door to Grandma Giselle and Grand Pa Wilton in North Paradise when they first got married. Grandma Giselle had lit the three burner oil stove in the kitchen and walked over to her son’s house and forgot about the stove. The stove caught the kitchen and living room on fire. When she came back, smoke and fire was pouring out of the kitchen window. Grand Ma had to wake everybody up and get them out of the burning house. No one knew where Uncle Audrey was. In a frantic hurry Uncle Everett had to go back in and get Uncle Audrey out of the burning house. He was just standing there looking in a daze. A few more seconds and he might have died from smoke inhalation. Uncle Everett and Uncle Audrey are my mom’s two older brothers. When they were kids and teenagers they always had each other’s back no matter what. Even when Uncle Everett got his first job driving Paradise High School’s school bus, he made sure Uncle Audrey got hired too. In the nineteen fifties, after my grandparent’s lost their second house they had to move to Paw Creek, North Carolina with some relatives for a few months before finally moving to downtown Paradise, North Carolina in a neighborhood called Booger Town. During that time is when my mom met my dad. She had already had my oldest brother in June of 1957, by a guy named Elroy, who denied in court that he had ever been with her. He even paid witnesses to lie for him to keep from paying my mom child support. Two of Elroy’s best friends swore on the bible in court that they had been with her also. Mom told the judge they were flat out lying. She was a sixteen year old virgin when Elroy convinced her to have sexual intercourse with him. Unfortunately, there was no DNA testing in those days or years. Mom was just a venerable young teenager. My dad whose name is Dwayne was just coming home from the United States Army. He was stationed in Stuck Guard, Germany. Dad had been a medical doctor while serving in the military. He had on his green Army uniform with all the decorative medals that showed his accomplishments while he was enlisted. Even though dad had won three scholarships to go to college, he forgot to enlist in the United States Military at the age of eighteen in January, 1956. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1956, although he was already enrolled in college in 1955 at the tender age of 17 at the State University in North Carolina. The United States Military pulled him out of college and drafted him into the army anyway. Dad was supposed to be going on a double date with his best friend Popsicle. He was bringing his friend Popsicle to meet my Mom and then they were going to pick up a girl named Nadine for my dad. But, when they got to Nadine’s house her father met them at the door with a shotgun. He quickly fired the shotgun in the air and told them to get away from his house, his daughter wasn’t going anywhere with them! That’s when my dad started to call my mom after things didn’t work out with him and Nadine. They exchanged phone numbers one day at a basketball game mom was playing at Paradise High School. She was a star forward on the girls’ basketball team at Paradise High School located right in the heart of Booger Town." Those old rotary telephones were some of the first phones that were invented by Southern Bell. My mom thought that Popsicle wasn’t as attractive as my father. Dad was a six feet five stallion. Mom had no interest in Popsicle at all. She thought my father was very good looking. Everybody called my dad Dwayne or his middle name Gibb short for Gilbert. Little did Mom know that looks can be deceiving, and that you can’t judge, a book by its cover. Mom was wearing one of her oldest sister’s dresses when dad first asked her for a date. She was walking to Mrs. Buyer’s Home Economics class at Paradise High School. She had on black and white oxford shoes with Barbie socks just like the cheerleaders wore at Paradise High School. Dad visited Mom in North Paradise a few months before their house burned down. Mom’s parents decided to move to Paw Creek with some close relatives to help them get back on their feet after their second house burned down. This time they lost everything. Finally, after living with family members that were very poor and having no floors in their house, Grand Pa Wilton saved up enough money to move to downtown Paradise. By then Mom was pregnant with me in 1958. Dad was going to be a father. After mom’s parent’s house burned down in North Paradise, dad influenced them to move in the house across the street from his parent’s house. He desperately did not want mom living in Paw Creek because he didn’t have a car and neither did my mother. But that big old house had been empty for many years. The house was full of rats, big giant rats that were just as big as cats. Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle had a fight with rats on their hands the first night that they spent in that big old scary house. Grand Ma first encountered seeing big rats was when she cooked her first dinner. She encountered a giant rat diving into her barrel of flour. It scared her so bad that she ran outside and grabbed the axe to protect them with. When she came back there were at least twenty-five rats or more on top of the kitchen stove and in the kitchen sink eating her entire dinner that she had prepared. Some of them stood 3 feet tall and their legs looked like Kangaroo legs. That’s when Grand Pa Wilton got mad and said I’m going to put an end to these darn rats! But these mean rats would wait until everyone would go to bed and then start running from room to room squealing and tormenting us all night long. They would chew up our shoes and bite holes in the corn meal and Grand Ma Giselle’s bags of sugar and rice. They even bit my Uncle Tony on his feet while he slept. Finally the next day Grand Pa Wilton bought a block of cheese and lots of rat and mouse traps. He also bought four big cats from the local dog and kitten pound. Later on that night I could hear the traps going off and the cats running through the house meowing and fighting with those rats. Those cats also ate the baby mice. There were hundreds of them everywhere, in the walls, under the beds and even behind the stove and refrigerator. Everyday Grand Pa Wilton would put rat poison around the walls and behind the sofa and every room and closets. They would kill those nasty rodents with sticks and baseball bats and Grand Ma Giselle would throw bricks at them killing them with all of her might. Grand Pa and Grand Ma would pick the dead rats up with shovels and put them in foot tubs. Then they would carry them to the field behind their new neighbor’s house Mrs. Beatrice. That’s when Mrs. Bea started to yell and scream at my grandparents. Help! Help! There are snakes in my back yard and they are coming towards my back door! Every kind of snake began to invade the field behind her house. Snakes are known to eat rats and mice. Those snakes were even in the trees. Black snakes, green snakes, yellow snakes, brown snakes and even red and orange snakes. There were Pythons, boa constrictors, and even some water moccasins that came from the pond in the neighborhood. They were having a feast eating those ugly rats. You could hear bones cracking and I could see the Pythons swallowing those big rats whole. Grand Pa Wilton had to put moth balls and lime around our house and Mrs. Bea’s house to keep those slimy slithering snakes from coming into our houses and yards. After they had filled their stomachs with those stinking rodents, all of those snakes slithered their way back to where they came from. Except, for the black snakes and the green snakes, they love to hang around humans in trees and in the grass. It took over sixth months to finally rid that house of those ugly rats. Except for a rare occasion we would see a dead one that had gotten caught in a trap or in one of my Grandparent’s cat’s mouths from time to time. Grand Ma Giselle named her cats Fancy, Lizzie, Lulu, and Frisky. Fancy and Frisky were Siamese cats. They were absolutely gorgeous with big green eyes and silky gray fur. Lizzie was all black and Lulu was all white. They also had big beautiful green eyes. Once my Dad knew that Mom had moved across the street he convinced Grand pa Nelson to buy him a 1957 blue and green Chevrolet. Dad was a spoiled child having only one younger brother named Dudley. His parent’s tried to give them the best of everything. Finally, after Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle moved right across the street from my dad’s parent’s house. My dad and Mom began to have child after child. Mom’s parent’s front porch faced the back side of Dad’s parent’s house. It was a big old house that had red tar for its siding and the glitter in it sparkled when the sun was shining. We were lucky to have both sets of grandparents living so close together. Mom had a six month old son named Milan James when she first met my dad. Dad got my mom pregnant with me when she was eighteen, that same year I was born in September, 1958 on Labor Day weekend. They named me Sicily Marie but, the nurse that wrote my name on my birth certificate added an a to the end of Marie instead of an e. My real name on the birth certificate is Sicily Maria. Marie had been passed down from generation after generation. I was supposed to have my dad’s Mother’s name Marie for my middle name. When Mom asked the doctor to fix my name on the birth certificate, he called her a nigger and told her that she was making false accusations against the head nurse and if that was the name she put on the birth certificate, so be it he said angrily! I’m not going to change it and that’s that! By November of 1959 Mom had three young babies that were born one year apart. Dad was back in college at the State University after serving two years in the United States Army. He was able to go back on the scholarships that he won for basketball, football, and baseball at Paradise High School in Paradise, North Carolina. My Dad was unable to be at the hospital when his first son was born because of football practice at Elizabeth State University. Even though mom was sad, she still gave my brother dad’s middle name Gilbert. She named him Charles Gilbert.

By then Mom was only nineteen and a high school dropout. She was supposed to go back to school after she had me in the fall of 1958 but, found out in the early months in the spring of 1959 that she was pregnant again by my father.

Mom played on the Girls basketball team at Paradise High School and dad played Basketball as well as football and baseball. Every team or sport at Paradise High School was called the Rams. The girls Basketball team was called the Rams as well. Mom and Dad were very talented and good looking. They were just two young hearts that fell in love. Mom could sing and Dad loved to dance. He loved to imitate Harry Belafonte the famous actor and theater dancer. Dad would oftentimes sit on my Grandparents porch just staring and watching mom’s every move. He graduated from high school at the tender age of seventeen and went to college before he turned eighteen. Dad was possessive jealous of Mom. He was the boy next door. Mom’s parent’s never really liked dad because they thought that he was a real lady’s man and dad’s parent’s never really liked mom because she already had a baby out of wedlock and they wanted him to meet a woman with a college degree. He did make his parent’s wish come true when he married a young lady he met while at Elizabeth State University named Elise. But, before Mom found out, Dad had an annulment claiming to have been drunk. Although two of Moms children were by my father, we were still living in the house with Grand Pa Wilton and Grand Ma Giselle. Grandma Giselle was better known as Mom Ma Giselle to her eleven children and thirty-nine grandchildren. There were times when sisters would get into arguments about Grand Ma Giselle babysitting for Mom all of the time. Grand Pa Wilton would warn Mom about getting pregnant and not having a husband and having her own house to raise her kids up in. He would threaten to put us out if she got pregnant again. But, Mom wouldn’t listen and she got pregnant two more times before Grand Pa Wilton had had enough of crying babies and toddlers running and playing in the house. They had raised eleven of their own. By then I was getting close to being seven years old and mom was pregnant with baby number five. That’s when Dad asked his father to let us move into the family house in back of them after Aunt Sylvia had passed away. She was Grand Pa Nelson’s sister. But right after she died my dad’s parent’s house burned down to the ground and they had to move in Aunt Sylvia’s house. Dad’s Mother Grand Ma Marie worked for a Catholic College and they gave her a brand new house to replace the one that burned down. Aunt Sylvia’s house seemed to be full with demons when we got there. There were ugly vampire bats swarming around the chicken house in the back of the house. Then a big black cat ran up the steps in a hurry and climbed right through the opened window in the front of the small white house. Finally after we were brave enough to go inside the two bedroom house, Mom began to search for anything that had no business living in the same house that we were about to move into. That’s when Mom heard a squeaking noise under a carpet rolled up in a corner by the refrigerator in the kitchen. She was armed with a big stick that she picked up in the front yard before we entered the front door. Then we encountered a big rat that sat there on top of some baby mice that had just been born. Mama rat didn’t even try to run or attack us, she seemed to be talking to us to let us know that she was just feeding and bonding with her babies. Mom told us to find a box to put them in. My brothers were glad to help the rat family. But as soon as they began to move the family of rats, Poppa Rat came running from behind the refrigerator and jumped right in the box with his little family. We put them right outside on the back porch so that my brothers could feed them cheese and milk every day. Mom finally bought a cage for my brothers to put them in so that the cats wouldn’t eat them up. Once we got settled in, Dad finally came home smelling just like a liquor barrel. I called him Dwayne because he and Mom weren’t married yet. Sometimes he hung out at Buster’s Supper Club all day and most of the night. He and Buster had been best friends all of their lives. Mom would constantly worry about Dad because something had changed about him after coming home from the military. It seems like any little thing could tick him off. She would pace back and forth looking out the window to see if he was coming home. Mom was such a loving Mother that she would never leave us in the house alone. Mom didn’t know that her world was about to be turned upside down, and so was ours. Buster was enabling Dad to drink alcohol by letting him have a charge account. Dad was suffering from Posttraumatic stress disorder. The only good thing left was that we lived right beside Dad’s parents, and across the street from Mom’s parents. We had a sofa bed in the living room and two sets of bunk beds. Grand Ma Giselle gave the rollaway bed she had to my oldest brother Milan. Even though my brother Charles was a sleep walker and nose bleeder, he wanted the top bunk in our smallest bedroom and I slept on the bottom because I was the only girl in the house with four boys before my three youngest sisters were born. Mom and dad had the master bedroom. They had space for the other bunk bed and even a baby crib. By the time my seventh birthday came around in September 1965 Mom was pregnant again with child number six. This would be my fourth and youngest brother Tony Mitchell. Mom had just had a daughter born a little over four months before Tony Mitchell was conceived. She had two babies born eleven months apart. Mom’s sister who could not have children had begged my Mom for my first born sister. I was devastated because I was the only girl having to play and share with three brothers at the time. Mom ended up having eight children by 1969 and she ended up having four girls and four boys. Even though our sister Janice was being raised up by Aunt Phyllis, she knew that our Mother was her real Mother and that we were her siblings. Aunt Phyllis always brought her back to see us on holidays and weekends. In the beginning of June when school let out for the summer, I got up at six o’clock in the morning to go blackberry picking with Grand Ma Giselle. She could pick two five gallon buckets in just a couple of hours. Grand Ma Giselle was used to picking cotton back in the twenties and thirties during "The Great Depression. Just like blackberries, cotton was full of sticker briars too. You could see the permanent sticker briar marks on her hands, they looked as If she had picked cotton and blackberries all of her life. We would walk up the train track to get to the blackberry field. Then we would go deep into the bushes, picking dew berries and blackberries across the street from Paradise Abbey College where all of the Catholic Priest lived in the Monastery and students from all over United States went to a Catholic College. Some of the students that came from Islands like Bermuda and the Bahamas and Jamaica had never seen snow until they came to Paradise, North Carolina.

Sometimes in late May and early June we would leave out early before the weather would get too hot and pick buckets of blackberries then Grand Pa Wilton would drive us to North Paradise to a Plum Orchard. We would pick and eat plums until we would have a stomach ache. Some of them were big yellow ones and there were red and even purple ones and some were still green. There were rows and rows of plum trees as far as you could see. What a beautiful colorful site to see. Grand Ma Giselle wasn’t afraid of snakes or bees or any type of wild animal that we would encounter while we were in the blackberry sticker briars. She would always wade through the bushes with a big long stick. If she saw a snake, she would just take the long stick and lift him up and throw him far into the bushes. It was almost as if she knew all of the snakes and animals and they all knew her. But, she always warned us about a snake called a Whip coach. It was the kind of snake that would stand up and chase after you. Then it would bite you until it would kill you Grand Ma Giselle told us. I would always wear long sleeve shirts and long pants with rubber bands tied around my arms and legs to keep from getting jiggers in my skin. They were tiny bugs that would get in your skin and make you itch yourself to death. Grand Ma Giselle would rub you down with kerosene or alcohol to help stop the itch. She would help us to sell our plums and berries to local businesses in down town Paradise. My mother being the fourth child born was named Rhonda Mae. Grand Ma Giselle told me that my Mom started walking when she was only seven months old and at the age of two she was already singing songs in front of just about anyone who wanted to listen to her.

This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine oh! This little light of mine she would sing over and over again. Grand Ma was pregnant with my Mom in her stomach during World War two. During World War two, four of Grand Ma Giselle’s brothers were drafted into the military during the 1940’s. As a little girl my Mom was a tom boy who was hard headed and loved to wrestle with her siblings. She played just as hard as the boys. Mama could sing and she learned to pluck a few tunes on Uncle Everett’s guitar as well. Grand Pa Wilton saved his money to buy Mom her own guitar. One day, she put her youngest brother Uncle Tony up in a pear tree and left him on a branch. The branch broke and Uncle Tony fell down hitting face first and broke his nose. Grand Ma Giselle tore her legs up and put whelps all over them for leaving Uncle Tony unattended in a pear tree. She was only six or seven and he was almost two years old. Mama wouldn’t even cry when Grand Ma Giselle would whip her with hickories, she was very stubborn. My Grandmother Giselle actually had thirteen children in all, two of them died as infants. I can remember her telling stories of how one of the infants had teeth when it was born, and the other one could say some words like mama and daddy by the time it was two weeks old. Grand Ma Giselle believed in superstitions and old remedies that her ancestors had taught her. She would say that the babies were born with a vale over their faces, which meant they would grow up to foresee the future or they were able to see ghost. Grand Ma Giselle believed that she heard a loud noise in the back of the house the night before Uncle Everett got killed in a car accident. She called it a token. It meant that death was getting ready to take place or if you heard an Owl hooting it meant that someone was going to die within that season. The night before Uncle Everett died Grand Pa Wilton was sitting by the woodstove warming his hands and feet when all of a sudden a big giant bulge pushed its way out of the wall. The flowered Wall paper began to split and crack as if the whole wall was about to burst like a big balloon. Thinking it was some type of sign and looking at it as though it were a figure of a human being. Grand Pa Wilton didn’t quite know what to think of it until Uncle Everett was killed the next day in a car accident. To him it was some type of sign sent from God to let them know that death was very near. If you would get stung by a yellow jacket, Grand Ma Giselle would spit on a piece of tobacco to make it wet then put it on the bee sting to draw out the sting. Also if you got a big cut or gash, she would take soot from the fireplace and put it in the cut. If you had a crook in your neck, Grand Ma would tell you to tie a panty hose stocking around it to stop the pain. Within two days there would be no more pain, nor would it be a crook in your neck. If you had a boil then she would say crack an egg and take the white stuff that’s stuck to the inside of the egg shell and put it on the boil. The boil would be gone within three days. Grand Ma even believed if a black cat ran in front of you going to the left, you would have bad luck and if he was running to the right of you, you were going to have good luck. If you swept over their feet with a broom, it meant that you are going to jail. I wondered what would happen if someone mopped over your feet then what? Grand Ma Giselle would make Sassafras Tea when she would notice that we were coming down with a cold. It tasted just like peppermint tea and she gave it to us hot inside of a coffee mug. She cooked all types of wild plants that you could find growing right on the side of their house, like wild green onions and Polk salad. Polk Salad looks like a cross between Collard greens and Romaine lettuce and a sprinkle of red cabbage. Folk’s always said that Polk salad was poison until you pare boiled it and put it in rags afterwards and squeezed out all of the poison. Then wash it again and again and again then put it back in the pot, let it boil with fatback meat, salt, pepper and wild green onions, then you had yourself a wonderful green leafy vegetable to eat. During the winter month’s Grand Ma Giselle would always stand in front of the blazing fireplace with the back of her dress hiked up in the back. Her pecan tan legs looked like they had been sun burnt from the fireplace scorching the back of her legs for many years. Grand Ma Giselle had a big fat ba donka butt hanging outside of her slip when she hiked her dress up in front of the blazing hot fireplace to keep warm during the winter months. It was Grand Ma’s favorite place to stand when she wanted to get her body nice and warm. Way back in the nineteen forties when my mom was a little girl, she crawled up under a train and almost got killed. She was only six years old playing on the train that came through North Paradise every day. Then all of a sudden! The train began to move! She tried to jump from the train but, her sweater got caught in the wheel. The caboose was dragging her down the train tracks. The train was beginning to move fast, she got terribly scared. She was screaming and yelling for help, but no one heard her screams. Then all of a sudden! Her pet pig Squiggly came running from Grand Ma’s backyard to help her get loose from that big dark scary train. Mom had to use all her might to tear the sweater off while the train was moving and Squiggly held onto her feet with his strong little huffs. Finally she was free and with tears rolling down her face as she scooped up Squiggly and thanked him for helping to save her life. Mom even named the train Puff because it always blew white smoke out of its pipe when it passed by their house. She never told Grand Ma Giselle or Grand Pa Wilton about her almost getting killed by Puff the train for fear of being beaten by Grand Ma Giselle with long hickories platted together. When times got really hard Grand Pa Wilton killed mom’s pet pig Squiggly and cut him up for the winter so they would have meat to eat. They had to make mom think that he just ran away or else she would have had a plum awful fit. Grand Pa Wilton replaced squiggly with eight more piglets that looked just like him but, mom knew that none of them were squiggly. Those tiny little tiny piglets loved to wallow in mud but, squiggly just liked for Grand ma Giselle to spray water on him with the Garden hose. At night, in my grandparents red tar, tin roof top house as it rained heavily I could hear splashes, inside those five gallon tin buckets, inside every room in the house. The house had so many leaks in the ceiling. They also had pee pots in every bedroom. Sometimes it smelled very strong because there were six adults, five teenagers in which most were females and four small children living in the three bedroom house. We were fortunate to have an inside toilet, many families still had outside toilets in the nineteen sixties in the south. We had an outside toilet and an inside toilet as well. Most of the family hated to get out from under the covers in the winter months because Grand Pa Wilton would let the fireplace and the woodstove go out at night to preserve wood and coal for the next day and for cooking and keeping the house warm all day. The house was big and cold, the ceilings were very high. Seems like all the heat went straight to the ceiling. Mom kept our beds packed with quilts and all kinds of covers to keep us warm. I slept in the same bedroom with my mom and her three younger sisters, Aunt Monica, Aunt Cynthia, and Aunt Diane. They were all less than ten years older than me and my brothers Milan and Charles. Aunt Diane used to act like she was a horse and would ride me on her back. They were like my big sisters instead of my aunts. I slept on the bottom bunk at Grand Ma Giselle’s house, and one night I kept smelling, this horrible smell under my pillow. Finally, I lifted it up and there was a dead black rat as big as a cat under my pillow. I screamed and Grand Ma Giselle came running to see what all the fuss was about. When she saw that big ugly black giant rat she quickly wrapped him in a newspaper and took him outside and sat him on fire, so that we didn’t have to continue to smell that ugly black dead rat. If it had not died under my pillow, I may have been bitten by his big sharp teeth. We also had Chinches in our mattresses that were stuffed with the same cotton that my Grand Pa and Grand Mother picked when they worked on the plantation. It was the same kind of cotton at Grand Pa Wilton’s job where he was a cotton baler. My brother Milan and I would sometimes wake up with red bite marks all over us from chinches or what some folks call bed bugs. They were some type of small red bug that had teeth that would bite flesh. Grand Ma Giselle and Pop Pa Wilton would sometimes just throw the whole mattress set away to keep those ugly old chinches from biting us anymore. Grand Pa Wilton and my Uncle Rayvon chopped lots of wood to keep us warm in the winter. They stacked piles and piles against the side of their old country home. We had a fireplace and a coal stove in the living room. Grand Ma Giselle would cook Pinto Beans and all kinds of soup on top of the coal stove. The house would always smell so good because she really knew how to cook. We ate pig’s feet, pig tails and sometimes pig ears. I didn’t like pig ears because they looked just like a pile of gristle. She could make the best flat cake bread and delicious buttery biscuits to go with the pinto beans. Grand Ma Giselle and Grand Pa Wilton also had a ringer type wash machine that sat on the screened in back porch. It was one of her wedding gifts from her mother and father Great Grand Pa Lark and Great Ma Fannie. They were Grand Ma Giselle’s parents. Grand Ma Giselle used to let me put wet clothes through the two rolling pins that squeezed the water out of them. Grand Ma would always say, Watch your fingers or the machine will smash them off! Then she would rinse them out in a big black wash pot full of hot scalding water. Then we would put them back through the ringer to squeeze out the water once again then hang them on the clothes line to dry. Grand Ma Giselle would always let me wear one of her colorful aprons full with clothes pins. Her white sheets would fly through the air once the wind would blow through them, they would dry in no time at all and they would smell so clean. Grand Ma Giselle made her own soap called Giselle’s Satin bar soap. The folks in the neighborhood would buy it three bars for fifteen cents. Grand Ma Giselle would also iron and fold all of the clothes once they were all taken off the line. Sometimes she would do domestic work for white families in the neighborhood. She would straighten some of the white girl’s hair with a straightening comb just like she did to her own daughter’s hair. They would scream and cry because they were tender headed and Grand Ma would sometime burn their ears with the hot grease and hot straightening comb. Grand Ma Giselle was a hard worker and would work from sun up to sun down five days a week. On Saturday’s she would oftentimes help with the bake sales at the church she attended, then afterwards she would cook her Sunday dinner on Saturday. Sundays was her day to go to church with Grand Pa Wilton then afterwards serve dinner to her family.

One of their sons whose nickname is Ray was the third son born out of eleven children. He was named Rayvon after Grand Pa Wilton’s middle name. Uncle Ray was a dog lover and couldn’t stand to see an animal tied up or be put in a cage. Uncle Ray had a big black dog, his name was Blackie. He had one small white spot under his neck. Blackie was a very special pet to Uncle Ray. He was almost like my uncle’s first child. Uncle Ray fed and bathed him like he was a human being. They went everywhere together. Blackie would always run to meet Uncle Ray when he would see him coming home from work. He would be so excited to see Uncle Ray. Blackie would jump up and down then he would roll over and over causing Uncle Ray to rub his belly. Uncle Ray would take him hunting with him. When they would come back they would have four or five dead Squirrels, birds and rabbits. Sometimes Uncle Ray would shoot them with a BB gun and sometimes he would set traps for them. He would hold the ones inside of the cages down on the table and chop their heads off with a hatchet. Then he would take the dead ones he shot with the BB gun outside on the picnic table that he built then he would skin and gut every one of them. I would just stare at him when he would pull out