On Pungo Creek

On Pungo Creek 

When we stopped in front of the church Mama stayed in the car. Uncle Benjamin took her elbow. “Come on Rose. We need to go in now.” Mama allowed her brother to walk her into the church. She was stone faced. Her fists were clinched. So were her back teeth. I could see her jawbone moving in and out like she was chewing gum. I edged up to Daddy’s coffin grasping Mama’s hand tightly. “How will he breathe when they close up his coffin, Mama?”

“He doesn’t need to breathe anymore, Clara.” As if to prove once and for all that Daddy’s breathing days were behind him, she closed the lid.

An old lady came up behind us and wrapped her arms around Mama. “You’re back home, Rose. You’re back home with the family that loves you.”

“Oh, Sarah. I just don’t know what I am going to do. How will I take care of the girls?”

“We’ll do that together. I’ve got their room all ready for them.”

Mama’s people had been living on Pungo Creek since Rufus and Harry Foreman settled there before the Revolutionary War. For Mama, Pungo Creek had always meant security and family but now, with Daddy gone, it was just a last resort. With no work and no husband, she uprooted her family and moved us 130 miles down the road to Pungo Creek to live in the house where she was raised.

Mama’s family seemed very strange to me. We moved in with Aunt Sarah. She was the oldest person I had ever met. She was even older than Mrs. Evans. Aunt Sarah had an enormous bosom that started under her wrinkly chin and kept going all the way down to her belly. She refused to wear trousers. She always wore flowery dresses covered up with an apron and she smelled like Vicks Vapor Rub. I learned to tread carefully around her house. Aunt Sarah wasn’t particular about she put her spit can. The spit can had been around since before we arrived and it had the right of way. Aunt Sarah spit Peach Tree Snuff. When she wasn’t spitting Aunt Sarah polished her three remaining teeth with a “toothbrush” she has gummed into a functional device from a green twig. “This is what the Indians used to clean their teeth,” she explained to me as I stood a safe distance away. When she wasn’t polishing her teeth, Aunt Sarah kept her “toothbrush” in her Bible. She was never far from her Bible or her spit can. Aunt Sarah was very proud of her needlework but she never sewed on Sunday. Once she caught me doing embroidery on Sunday and just about had a conniption. “Every stitch you sew on Sunday, you will take out with your nose on judgment day.” 

Uncle Benjamin and his family lived up the road from us in a fine white house with wide porches and flower gardens. I could see the house from our front porch. His daughter Kate was a little older than me. His son Jess was in high school. Aunt Sarah encouraged Ivy and me to make friends with Kate, but she warned us to be careful. She told us that Kate was “slow” because of the tumor they had to cut out of her brain. “When they took out that tumor they cut too deep and they damaged her brain.” Aunt Sarah warned us to be careful playing with Kate. “One blow to her head – especially here” she touch the spot where my neck met the back of my head. “Just one tap here could kill her.” I knew exactly where she meant. I’d seen the ugly scar that crawled up Kate’s neck and never completely disappeared in her thin, fine hair.

I was very careful around Kate – never raising a finger against her. Not even when she chased me down the road and stabbed me in the back with a rake

It seemed like Ivy and I were always over at Kate’s house. Uncle Benjamin spoiled his daughter rotten. She had a playhouse, her own horse and more clothes than she could ever wear. She took piano lessons and dance lessons and bragged that when she was older she was going to charm school. Kate didn’t have to ride the school bus like I did. She rode in with Uncle Benjamin in his green Plymouth and had breakfast with him at the bakery every morning before school. I wondered why Uncle Benjamin didn’t have a wife. When I asked about it he laughed. “Women have ruined my life. I’m better off without them.” 

My uncle walked with a limp. We had been living on Pungo Creek for almost a month before I realized he had a wooden leg. Aunt Sarah told me about his accident. “If it hadn’t been for your Mama, he would be making old bones now. She saved your uncle’s life that day. She kept a cool head that day.” 

 

Uncle Benjamin didn’t talk about Aunt Pearl at all and if Ivy or I mentioned her, he made a face like he was sucking on a lemon and got real quiet. Mama said I was imagining things again. “You are so much like your Aunt Pearl. She lives in her own world just like you do. You need to accept the fact that this is your home now. There is no Aunt Pearl to coddle you and you had better get used to it.”

I soon realized that Mama’s kin had always looked down on my Daddy. They never passed up a chance to remind her that she had ruined her life by marrying him and now he had added insult to injury by leaving her a widow. Uncle Benjamin never missed a chance to say mean things about Daddy. 

My uncle was a wealthy man. In addition to being a barber and a deacon in the Baptist church, Uncle Benjamin owned most of the land around Pungo Creek. He had it planted in tobacco and took on sharecroppers to work the land for him. Uncle Benjamin even hired me to work tobacco for twenty-five cents at day. Sometimes I worked as a hander. Sometimes I tied the tobacco. The hander gathered up three or four leaves of the green tobacco, putting the stems together and handed them to the person who looped the string around the stems before knotting it around the pole. When the pole was full we started a new one. It was somebody else’s job to carry the full poles to the tobacco barn where they would hang until the leaves were dried out and ready to take to auction in Durham.

Uncle Benjamin hired Mama to work for him full time. He paid her more than he paid me, but expected her to work right alongside the colored field hands. She took her break with them at the store at the end of the road. Uncle Benjamin let Mama charge her snack to his account. She usually brought home most of it to Ivy and me.  We could split Pepsi Cola right down the middle. The top half didn't end at the line around the equator of the bottle but just under the line that said "bottled in Jacksonville, NC." Ivy would drink it down to that line and I would finish the bottom half.

Aunt Sarah didn’t approve of our steady diet of Pepsi Cola and Hostess Cupcakes. She would make us “cut-up” eggs when I got home from school. I collected the eggs myself.   She let me dip my bread in the molasses can with a lion’s head on it. She also made it her business to see that both of us ate a good supper. She fried up the perch or croaker that we caught in the creek and served it with collard greens and biscuits with quince preserves and chocolate cake. Aunt Sarah was full of old sayings like “The older I grow the more I know because the more I know I don’t know” but she didn’t have much original to say.

 

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[Raven Starhawk]

There is a beauty here. It slowly peaks but never wanes. It is amazing how you have the gift to compose these endless wonders.