1929: Mother's Day At Our Sharecropper Houses

By Grace Cash © 1996

Issue: Spring, 1996

Editor's Note... The following is one of a series of articles written by Grace Cash. She lives in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Watch for more of her stories in future issues.

Mother's Day has been a colorful part of my life ever since we moved to The Hill in 1924. I didn't know a day had been set aside to celebrate mothers til I started going to the Chestnut Mountain Baptist Church. I participated in the Mother's Day programs, and later on I wrote poems for recitation, and for others, if I had charge of the programs.

I "made up my church-speeches," in which I included a few sentences about Ann Jarvis of Philadelphia, who started what we call Mother's Day, in 1907. Then in 1912 a Mother's Day Association was formed, and it was marked by a church celebration, and on that day everybody wore white carnations. Sometime thereafter, it became customary that the people whose mothers were still alive wore red roses on the set aside day, if their mother was deceased they wore white roses. By age sixteen, I considered Mother's Day as second in importance to the Sabbath Day, an occasion to be observed religiously.

On Mother's Day a mother usually received store-bought gifts, wrapped in crisp colorful paper and tied with bright ribbons, but at our house we made Mama's gifts. All of us girls could make up rhymes, and we would write a short poem and decorate the paper or card with flowers and crayon. When I was fourteen, I used a penny post card, on which I pinned a pink ribbon bow and a flower from the yard. All of our gift poems were handwritten, dipping our ink pens in a bottle of blue ink as needed for writing.

On Mother's Day when we handed our gifts to Mama she would smile, showing the gold center filling in her front upper teeth. When she was a young girl gold centered fillings were admired for their beauty, and Mama was accused of laughing a lot to show her decorated teeth. I didn't know she kept our homemade gifts till after she died in 1972. She kept our sentimental poems with prized letters from Grandma Deaton, and from her kin on the Miller side in Arkansas. Mama got letters from a sister and two brothers who settled in North Carolina in the 1920's. The letters and Papa's shells, used in his double barrel gun hanging over the door facing, were kept in the till of her round lidded metal trunk.

In 1936, I was twenty-one, a 1934 high school graduate, and I was still unable to get a town-job, which would have been at one of the mills, or clerking in a store. I was rather busy doing household chores and engaging in church and community activities, waiting out the Great Depression - President Hoover's Depression, folks said. That year I published my first short story entitled "On Account Of Tom" in the Gainesville Eagle, coming out from the county seat. The plot and characters seemed so naive, after having published over a million words of fiction and prose, polished by years of hard work and study, I can hardly bear to read it, but it is about Mother's Day. At that time the highways were worked by convict gangs, dressed in circular striped uniforms, which the 1980's jumpsuits might have been patterned after. Each convict wore a steel ball and chains on his feet to keep him from running away. The convicts with their fear marked, suffering faces, their lives spent in the shadow of tough armed guards, furnished the characters, the locale and the motive for my first story.

At their widowed mother's farm house Bad Bill engaged his younger brother Tom to assist him in highway robbery, which resulted in the shooting death of a motorist. The brothers were given lifetime sentences in the chain gang, and their mother, grieved past bearing, died suddenly of a heart attack. The convicts were transported each workday on heavy highway trucks, each truck manned by an armed guard, to their place of work. About the middle of May, Tom started fretting about his mother, and exacted a promise from Bad Bill that he would work out a plan for them to take a bouquet of red roses to their mother's grave on Mother's Day. Only minutes later, as they sat side by side at the end of one of the benches, the truck lurched and threw Tom from the vehicle, and he died instantly. Bad Bill and their guards got the red roses for the mother, and they went with him to the graveyard on Mother's Day. He left the roses on her grave, except for the one he plucked and carried with him into the church, where the guards led him down the aisle to Tom's casket. He bent down and whispered a few words to his brother, vowing eternal devotion to their mother's memory. Then he pinned the red rose on Tom's stripped convict's uniforms. Now he knew everything would be all right "on account of Tom." The "Bad Bill" character's sole purpose was to tell the reader that those who didn't honor their mothers would be saddled with a gnawing conscience.

When I was ten years old, my fifth grade teacher selected me to recite the poem "Which One Loved Her Best?" by an anonymous author. That night Miss Ola came out behind the closed stage curtains and straightened the box pleats and the white Buster Brown collar of the blue linen dress Mama made for the exercise. The dress matched the knee socks she bought for me at Jake Sikes Store. Only seconds before two high school students rolled back the stage curtains, Miss Ola slipped backstage, and I stood there facing the staring eyes of hundreds of people.

I saw Mama sitting on a bench holding baby Frances, and she was surrounded by other mothers and babies. I noticed how worried Mama looked when she smiled at me, showing the gold centered filling in her front teeth. Her look conveyed a last time message that she expected me not to get scared and not to miss a word. All of it together made me think I had an important message to deliver and I recited the five stanzas word from word:

"'I love you Mother,' said little John;

Then, forgetting his work, his cap went one,

And he was off the garden swing,

And left her water and wood to bring."

The second stanza described "rosy Nell" who teased and pouted all that day. The third told how Fran promised Mother, "Today I'll help you all I can," and the fourth stanza praised Fran for rocking the baby to sleep and sweeping the floor and tidying the room. Then I finished off the fifth stanza, like a blasting crescendo:

"'I love you Mother,' again they said,

Three little children going to bed.

How do you think the Mother guessed

Which one of them really loved her best?"

Audience applause followed every performance on the stage at a school commencement, but that seems vague now, almost totally forgotten. When we got home I do remember that Mama said, "The women turned around and asked me, 'Is that your little girl?' I never was so proud." I know now I should have told her what I thought then, that no mother looked like a happier mother than she did holding her baby.

In 1988, rummaging through my souvenirs I keep in a steel locker, I came across the penny post card I had given Mama in 1929 on Mother's Day. Nearly sixty years had passed, spent in rented sharecropper houses, then at last, in 1941 - the year President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Germany and Japan - the family moved to the farm Papa bought which became Papa's Homeplace. The old metal trunk had kept the card well but time had rusted the straight pens that attached the pink bow ribbon and the flower to the card. The flower had faded to a brown crisp. The blue ink I had dipped from the little square ink bottle as I wrote my poem with an ink pen had held up perfectly, every word distinct, and so did the bottom line I had forgotten I ever wrote: "Mama, I love you very much."

Anne Jarvis of Philadelphia taught us all how to set aside a special day to honor our mothers. We can tell her then, if only in writing on a post card, that we love her. May there always be in every year a Mother's Day!