Space Enough for God, Mama Hattie, and a Whale (Part Two)

This post continues the story of my Appalachian-born grandmother and the magic of summers spent in Pickens County, Georgia. The first part appeared on the blog last week. This essay was reprinted in the anthology Appalachian Mountain from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, a collection of contemporary prose and poetry that captures the region’s past and present.

Mama Hattie stood a scant five feet. She never learned to drive. She didn’t go to college. She stuck around the community—a cluster of houses, a gas station, a general store, a dry goods store, and an old hatchery alongside a bend in the road.

Mama Hattie was “big” on family. Born in 1901, she and Pawie produced five children in rapid succession, while their life, until the 1930s, plodded at a horse-and-buggy pace.

A car passing on the yet-to-be-paved road was the event of the week. If the folks in nearby Fairmount spotted a car, they phoned the general store in Hinton to announce its imminent arrival. Then a crowd gathered by the side of the road to watch it jounce by. Old Doc Weeks owned the only radio (powered by Delco batteries) in the county. He set it in the window on Saturdays so men could gather in his yard to listen to baseball games and prizefights.

My grandfather taught school, farmed, and ran a general store that went bankrupt because he wouldn’t collect on his neighbors’ debts. Mama Hattie gave birth at home, did her washing on a scrub board, and stitched quilts and most of the family’s clothes. She canned, pickled, dried, or preserved whatever came from the garden. Hog killings didn’t faze her; she was grateful for the meat. My dad milked the cow, and a local gristmill ground their corn, wheat, and rye into flour. Water came from a 40-foot well and firewood from blackjack oak and knotty pine.

Despite these dawn-to-dusk struggles, Mama Hattie delivered babies if the doctor couldn’t make it and sewed clothing for families that couldn’t afford it. Whenever the Friendship Church bell rang, alerting the community that someone had died, Mama Hattie comforted the family and laid out the body. Pawie and his friends dug the grave, and a neighbor, Lem Moss, made a pine coffin, which my grandmother lined with a bed sheet.

When chained convicts worked the roads, Mama Hattie worried whether they were hungry. She wrapped up biscuits and bits of food, precious packages delivered by her children.

During our summer visits, she tended to fret—most of all about the graying, splintering “whale house” just steps outside her kitchen: “Don’t let me catch you even so much as touching it.”

Sneaking outside one morning, Mary and I studied the boarded-up door. We didn’t hear anything and concluded the whale slept by day. We speculated that Pawie changed its water at night and marveled that its tail did not lash the walls or slap water through the cracks, until we realized how Mama Hattie’s voice crawled through words—“yeller” for “yellow” and “aigs” for “eggs” and “whale”
for “well.”

A mini version of Moby Dick in the backyard? No such luck.

Routine overtook myth that day. Pawie rocked on the gray-painted porch of the white gabled, green-shuttered house, never talking but always watching for trucks headed to Atlanta. They rumbled on Highway 53, honking until he shot
up his right arm in salute to a world bypassing his. A braided rug hung on a side balcony, waiting for a beating. Mama Hattie took us fishing at the muddy pond across the road and baited our hooks with worms dug up from the yard. Not a lot of bites. We mostly dangled our lines in the water and talked.

At twilight, we chased fireflies on the front lawn, more like a strip of pasture, and trapped them in Coca-Cola bottles. They glowed until smothering under greenish glass—our July torches.

If she wasn’t fussing about the well house, Mama Hattie obsessed about misadventures that risked life and limb. Sometimes she had cause to fuss, her apron blowing in the wind and her calls hitting high pitches that could have broken glass: “Your mother is going to kill us for sure when she finds out what you’re up to!”

The truth is, we almost killed ourselves. My sister Martha tried to do circus tricks on a horse, including headstands at a trot. Mama Hattie screeched the loudest when we lit out on horseback during a thunderstorm.

Being from the city, we weren’t too smart.

When my grandmother took us to explore a chicken house, we swiped a few warm eggs. During her nap, we borrowed cooking pots, lined them with freshly mown grass, and hunkered down, trying to hatch chickens. At mid-afternoon, Mama Hattie found us. She clapped her hand over her mouth and then drawled, “Y’all are a sight. I could burst from laughing, sure as the world.”

After Pawie died, Mama Hattie still showed up at church, same time, same pew, with her best friend Maggie, who came by the house so they could zip each other up in their Sunday dresses. They took off in Maggie’s monster sedan, their heads barely poking above the dashboard.

My grandmother spent her last days cradling the core of her diminished identity, a doll she called “Baby.” After she died, my dad placed it in her arms before they closed the coffin and wept.

At her funeral, the preacher read the familiar words: “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions. . . .” Mama Hattie probably asked for a modest room. “Don’t worry, Lord. I can change my own sheets and scrub the floor. And if you got any babies that need holding, I’ll keep them safe till their mamas get home.”

To order the anthology Appalachian Mountain, contact pmsg.journal@gmail.com.

* * * * *

A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith (People Inc.), Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). The above essay is an excerpt from a book in development, so please comment if it resonates.

If you have a friend who might enjoy these posts, freely given, please share. Many thanks for reading!