<< Guns and Racism for family protection >>
In my grandparents’ house there were guns all over the place, laying on the floor in the middle of the room sometimes. There was a gun under every bed. “Don’t touch the guns!” someone must have warned me hundreds of times, which may be why I’ve had a phobia about being around guns my entire life.
Every night, while sleeping on that upstairs screened porch, just across the highway from the railroad tracks, I would lay beneath the covers, listening to my grandmother’s frail and shaky voice waking my grandfather from his peaceful slumber, “Bill, Wake up. Bill, I hear something outside. I think someone’s out there.”.
“Oh, Goddamn it, Eva, It’s nothing. Now go back to sleep.” Papa would bark at her. But she would prod and prod until he’d finally sit up, throw his legs over the side of the bed, grab a gun, lean against the screen and begin to threaten the empty darkness that he had a gun and would use it. “Alright, I hear ya out there. You better be on your way, cuz I gotta gun and I’m gonna use it!”
My grandmother had peach trees all over her front yard by the side of the highway and she had tied ribbons and strings from branch to branch, attaching little bells here and there to serve as alarms, in case someone tried to steal her peaches. And she was convinced that someone did steal them almost every night. She hung a sign among the strings in the middle of her orchard that read, “We know who you are and the police know who you are. So, be on your way or we will help you on your way.”
My grandmother used to tell us violent stories. She carried knives and diamonds in her bra and guns in her purse.
She also made fresh homemade rolls every day. I can’t believe I never asked her how to do it, or watched her closely enough to learn. On her kitchen counter there was always a mound of fresh made dough, lying on a thick blanket of flour, and covered with a tea cloth. I was in my late 30s and she was in her eighties when I found myself watching her in amazement as she worked with her big pillow of dough, swirling it around in a cloud of flour, as skillfully as she had done in my childhood. Her rolls that day were just as tender and fresh as they had been for the past 30 years.
Grandma Mimi could also, in her eighties, still bend over, squat down and weed her large vegetable garden with no seeming stiffness and no complaint. She was, scarily, almost in better physical shape than I was. The same could not be said for her mental condition. I’m certain she suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, despite that it was never diagnosed. She hallucinated, heard voices, imagined plots against her.
My grandfather was not my real grandfather. He married my grandmother the year that I was born and he adored me the first few years of my life. He had no children, so he treated me like his firstborn. Once I’d lost my cuteness, his attention waned however and I was replaced by younger sisters, which was fine with me, because I’d kind of outgrown the need to be coddled so much.
I also began to learn that he was a cruel man. When my two little sisters would visit him, I was told, he would compare their kisses and tell the younger sister that her kisses were sweet and tell Marilyn that hers were sour, in an attempt to pit two sisters against each other at a very young and undeserving age. They were only two years apart.
<< * Mimi’s illness *>>
My grandmother worked as a nurse from the 1920’s through the mid 1970s. She was a struggling single mother for all of my father’s childhood, only marrying again after my Dad had a family of his own. She raised him with no child support or family support, all on her own, and I’d like to respect her for that but she did so many mean things it’s difficult to look at the balance when you weigh the good and the bad.
What she did to sabotage the day nurse, who she shared a job with while working as the night nurse, was horrifying, and I don’t know why I feel compelled to share it except that I believe it’s a part of the human history that gets swept under the rug. And when things like this are swept under the rug, innocent people are hurt. Rinsing his drinking glass out in the old man’s urine and then putting it back in the cabinet. Yikes! This was my grandmother and she bragged about it! She was convinced that the day nurse had been giving her drinking glass to the “n-word” who worked in the yard and this was her form of revenge. She was racist, delusional, crazy and dangerous. I was not having a good awakening as a child in many respects.
<<*>>>*<<<*>> Kay Z. Enters my Life <<*>>>*<<<*>>
By the time I was ten I was a little unenthusiastic about visiting the grandparents and I complained to my mother when it was time for the summer visit to their home. She suggested I bring a friend, so we went down the list of friends and invited all the typical ones we could think of, Karen A., Lala S., a couple of others.
No one could go, or wanted to go, and I was ready to give up in exasperation when my mother suggested Kay Z. I barely knew her, I said. She wasn’t going to want to go with me, I whined. But my mother insisted, so, I picked up the phone one more time.
“Hello, Kay Z?”
“Yes.”
“This is Kay T. Would you like to go to my grandparent’s house in Waelder with me?”
I hear a loud bang, and then a silence. She has dropped the phone, I realize.
More Silence.
Then I think I hear a distant screaming. I become sure of it when the screaming gets louder, but then it fades away again. I hear the screams get louder again as she makes a second run around her house, down the halls and back again. She is excited and squealing in joy.
For the next two years I have the time of my life with this vivacious girl made of pure exuberance and courage and joy. She lead me into many unknown and unplanned adventures with a fearless spirit. We explored every creek and vacant lot in the town of Seguin not to mention the many special places at my grandparent’s farm.
We lay on top of gravel hills beside the railroad tracks as the thundering trains roared by. We would scream at the top of our lungs just to delight in the wonder of not being able to hear our own voices, deafened by the sound of the train. We would look at each other screaming soundlessly and laugh, rolling around in the gravel while the train’s screeching metal wheels smashed our pennies and bobby pins into thin, shiny, oddly shaped pieces of metal.
We stayed away from our grandmother’s vegetable garden, because of the copperheads, despite it’s temptations, being the size of a small town block.
But no one told us to stay away from the old abandoned cotton gin that stood at the very back of Papa’s property.. . It’s with Kay that I finally found the courage to explore that mysterious part of Papa’s land.
The cotton gin was a large cavernous structure that had been abandoned long before I got there, with ladders that led to the rooftop, and huge broken shafts and spindles, leaning against walls, wedged so firm we could climb upon them. There was something haunting and spooky about the place and I don’t recall wanting to return after a few explorations. But it wasn’t until I was sitting in my college history class, 35 years later, that it dawned on me what all of that property of my grandfather’s represented. And sure enough, when I looked it up on the internet, the Kolar family was in the cotton gin business from earliest days, which means there were slaves in the history.
<<*>> My first best friend, circa 1956 <<*>>
And I thought of a young black boy I used to play with back there on the farm, before the time of Kay Z, when I was much younger. When I saw that he loved to go barefoot like me I thought I had found my own soulmate. It never occurred to me, until decades later, that he probably went barefoot because he was shoe-less. Jesse was my primary playmate when I went to my grandparents’ house, the first few visits that I remember. He and I stayed within the perimeters of the immediate, fenced in back yard, climbing every tree and exploring every plant and animal, while his mother worked inside and outside the house.
One day my grandmother took me over to his house, to pick up some new bantam hens to add to her brood. When we entered Jesse’s neighborhood, driving up and down the tiny dirt hills speckled with cute little shacks here and there, chickens running wild and vegetable plants spilling over rickety fences, I thought I was driving through a story book and was charmed.
I was so excited by the time we arrived at the shack that she told me was Jesse’s house, I went bounding out of the car and up to the shack, bursting through the door to discover at least a dozen black people, standing there and looking terrified, in this dark and sparsely furnished shed. There were beams of light shining from behind the group of frightened souls, lights coming through the wide spaces between the boards of the wooden shed. I could see the outdoors, the grass and trees, from behind them. There was nothing else in the shed. Just the people standing there, looking scared and defenseless, and maybe a table It wasn’t the kind of a home I’d ever seen before.
I stood at the doorway, looking at them, mouth gaping open, frozen in shock. I felt I’d committed a terrible crime, or rather, thrown back the curtains and exposed one. This is all that I remember. I don’t recall a single thing after that initial moment of shock. I don’t recall ever seeing that house, the neighborhood or my friend ever again, after that experience, and sometimes I still wonder about him. He would be in his 70s now.
<<*>> Slave Row <<*>>
On the western side street that bounded Papa’s property was a row of tiny sheds that always intrigued me as a child and I’d try to peer inside of the tiny sheds whenever we drove by. Some of them were occupied, with black people sitting on the porch. And I wondered how they could fit themselves and their entire lives into those tiny boxes on the side of the road.
I finally realized, also decades later in a college history class, that what I’d been looking at in my childhood was the the remnants of slave row. There it was, one hundred years after slavery, and black people were still living in those tiny little sheds. While visiting the grandmother’s house, I’d been walking and playing on the very grounds where slaves were once used for their labor, and beaten, and worse.
Both he and my grandmother used the n-word profusely, make no mistake that they were racist to the core. And yet they depended on their labors and products. It was a contradictory world to be living in, not to mention exploitative and hypocritical.
In the end, no one ever robbed or harmed my grandparents. But their gun, which was meant to protect them, took my little sister’s life instead, and a big chunk of mine and several others. Marilyn had succumbed to schizophrenia and she thought that aliens had created an after life and all her loved ones were already there, replaced on this earth by impostors, so she put a gun in her mouth to go and join her real family. She thought she was being told to do it. That’s what I call love.
“She was messed up anyway.” An old friend said just after her death. (George C., to my great disappointment)
“Her death was for the best. “ My step-sister, Karen, said in an effort to comfort. She had never had anything but a cold heart for my sister, Marilyn. She would have been happier without any of us existing. Her words of consolation repulsed me.
Just as she had been neglected in life, so Marilyn was neglected in death as her notes lay in a box, unread for 40+ years. I can’t begin to explain the depth and length of crying that came with this discovery of her final suicide notes. She did it to be with us. And none of us ever knew it.
………………………
This was supposed to be about my old best friend, Kay. About her later…
Papa went to the police station and demanded the gun back just a couple of days after Marilyn died and I never got over that. I always wanted to get my hands on that gun so I could melt it down. I still do. I never found it. They say it’s still in the family somewhere. The only thing I ever asked from the family, literally, was that they destroy that gun… And getting rid of every gun in the family would be an added benefit, but I never demanded that, just suggested it. You never know what might happen with your gun one day. You may have a Marilyn. It was not worth it. Not a single one of the dozens of Taylor guns every protected anyone … instead it devastated an entire family, for generations.
Papa asked me to visit shortly after Marilyn’s death, and I declined without giving a reason. “But why?” Papa asked. I wanted to say ‘because I was told my sister lay in a pool of blood on your kitchen floor, gasping for her last breaths of air, with her brains splattered all over your ceiling’, but I didn’t, of course. I didn’t want to hurt Papa. I hadn’t heard yet that he had gone and gotten the gun back. It devastated me when I did hear of it.
So, I don’t remember what I said to PaPa when he pleaded with me to come over. I only remember his response when he realized it was because of Marilyn that I could not visit his home, “Oh that! Oh that kinda thing happens all the time. Why just the other day a young man jumped off the Congress St. bridge and killed himself,” he said.
I wanted to love my grandparents and I still do in a way. Sometimes it is difficult to love others when you see in them the capacity for such stone cold hardness.
Fortunately, I was moving to New Mexico where I wouldn’t see my Papa again for many years, because I found his indifference to my little sister’s death difficult to forgive.
It was the same with my grandmother, “You children are making your daddy grieve for too long.” she said to us as we sat in the car at Marilyn’s grave a couple of weeks after her death, while Dad got out ahead of us.
It was my grandmother who had left the gun out on the kitchen counter and then sent Marilyn in to go slice a tomato. She never voiced any regret. No one voiced any blame. They said it had a hairpin trigger, a large gun with a white handle. I remember it well. I’d seen it laying around the house all of my life.
I’ve never seen it since my sister’s death but the family says it is still around. The fact that I wanted the family to be rid of it is what caused the original rift that would turn into a permanent tear between my little sister and I. I wanted to melt the gun and pour it on my grandmother’s grave. She insisted her husband have it. Neither one of us ever found it, that I know of, but I lived in fear that my father would discover it while I was staying with him.
Since that time, my sister stands up at funerals and reads tallies of who gave the most time out of their lives to “the elders”. She leaves out a lot of data. She is resentful that they moved next to her the last several years of their life, and despite all the benefits that entailed, free horse stabling and pony stabling for years, free storage for their extra lumber and equipment, free riverfront access, free pet sitting for their dog, cat, rabbits, plants, without ever having to make any arrangements. Free babysitting.
My daughter moved close and took advantage of the situation, which angered my little sister even more. She called me and complained about everything my daughter ever received and apparently held it against me, despite the fact that I had no control. Money controls most people, I’m sorry to say, and I never had any money.
Sister, Lisa, never had a kind word for step-brother, Ronnie, who was one of the sweetest guys that I ever knew. He’d suggested that her husband could be more helpful with the parents and Lisa never got over her resentment for that. Ronnie died at the young age of 60. Lisa stood up and read a tally about his life, how many years he’d helped out with “the elders”, so I was told, as if “taking care of the elders” was the purpose of his life. Did she ever recognize that “the elders” got over 20 more years of life than Ronny did? How did that work out in her tally? Doesn’t that mean that Ronny gave much more to them than what he received from them?
Shortly after he died I heard that my sister was calling his widow a gold-digger. She was angry about what she was doing with the money and spreading gossip among the family that I no longer communicated with. Here it was, almost a decade after the death of our parents and step-parents and she’s still furious that she doesn’t control all the purse strings of the family.
I’m so disappointed and shocked to finally realize that she always had such empty, petty values … what damages she was willing to cause because she felt cheated somehow. Convinced herself no one deserved anything but her, and never stopped carrying on about it.
She was driven to distraction, for decades, that her 2 best friends from camp were financially better off than her. She would know no peace in her life if that were never resolved. I’ll never know or care how all that turned out. It’s yet another reason she resented the fact that I inherited close to 1/5 of the wealth in the will. Nothing would ever be enough for her nuclear family.
She took everything she could, not just from me, from her nieces as well, after both parents died within the space of one year. I would not be surprised if she had pilfered from everyone, so petty she has revealed herself to be.
“Whatever you do, don’t let Laura have a single piece of Juanita’s china.”, so sister Beth told me she had been admonished by Lisa a number of times.
Why Lisa thought she was more entitled than Nancy’s children I will never know. She sat there with a dirty look, never saying a word, every time I told her I was including the children of our deceased big sister to make sure that they received their mother’s portion of the inheritance.
There was never a child more devoted to our father than his daughter, Nancy. On top of that, no one suffered more years of systematic emotional abuse from his wives, both Juanita and Nan, than Nancy had suffered. She tolerated it, endured it and rarely defended herself. How could Lisa think her daughters deserved nothing for that sacrifice?
That she managed to hide her true face to them and then use them to throw at me the accusation that both of my nieces, who were not there for one second of our lives together, affirmed to her that I cared about nothing except the money. She turned my big sister’s children into traitorous back stabbers. How proud she must feel.
Nancy would have protected her father’s legacy and all the trash talking that was done about him between my mother and Nancy’s daughters. Nancy would have been heart broken and appalled at how they treated Dad like he didn’t exist in his final years. I would not be surprised to learn that there were others that Lisa betrayed. I never would have guessed she could be so spineless, so selfish, so cruel, so dishonest. (*Beginning with telling complete Lies about me to Michelle)
))((*)) Austin Texaco ((*))((
By the time I took this photo, Papa owned a Texaco Station in Austin and the only remnants he had left from his Kolar Motor Company were the calendars, which now hung on the walls of his Austin Texaco. To me they were a reminder of sweeter and simpler times. My grandparents had become sour after moving to Austin, or maybe I was just more aware of it, because by then I was in my teens.
Credit cards were a new phenomena and Papa wasn’t happy with it, so he’d run around from gas pump to gas pump yelling at customers, “Cash customers first!! Cash customers first!!” Some people would get angry and drive away. One day a man grew impatient, got out and tried to pump his own gas. Self-serve stations weren’t in existence yet so this was unheard of. Like all gas station attendants, Papa wore a starched Texaco uniform and no one was allowed to touch the pumps except the attendant. Papa told us that he ran into the station and got his gun but by the time he got back outside the impatient customer had driven away. My heart stopped when I realized that my crazy grandfather had almost killed someone. I am just very grateful that it never happened. But then again, it did.
My grandmother had, by the time of my teens, now taken to hanging out the window of her Austin home and calling into the darkness that she had a gun and would use it. She, again, had peach trees, embellished with strings, bells and signs in her Austin orchard.
Mimi described to me how she played chicken with her car and a teenage neighbor girl who she felt was walking too far into the road. “I didn’t move over for her one inch.” she boasted. I feared for many reasons that my grandparents might one day hurt someone. For some reason it never occurred to me it would be someone in my very own family. Word of warning to anyone in a similar situation.
A new sign was on their front door, made from cardboard and written with magic marker:
“If you are too yellow, or too red, to fight for this country, then be on your way or we will help you on your way.” It was the Viet Nam war.
I guess I always blamed them for making the gun available but never said that to them, of course, and I don’t believe they’re the only ones who enabled this to happen, not by a long shot. I’m convinced that all of us who were older than Marilyn bear blame in some form or other. In more than one way, each of us let her down, but none of us ever discussed her again. I tried…. once …. I found a letter I wrote as evidence that I tried. Doesn’t matter. Everyone deals with loss and failure in the way that they choose. This is my way.
You can’t say I wasn’t forgiving because shortly after Marilyn’s death I took my grandmother on a cross-Texas trip, at the request of my father. Dad needed a break from her and begged me to take her, so I took her to visit my sister, Nancy and her two young children, some 300 miles north of us, in Stephenville, Texas and to Aunt Maudie’s house, a couple hundred miles back south.
<<<Taking this long road trip alone, with my delusional grandmother, after having just been hollowed out by the loss of my little sister and being three weeks pregnant, was no picnic for me.>>> (Lisa, please make sure to put this on your tally that you now read at everyone’s funeral, you self centered, miserable human.)
So I was looking forward to making contact with another sane person when I pulled in front of Aunt Maudi’s country home. I’d never really known her, or anything about her. But, within minutes of walking in, I realized Maudie was as mental as my grandmother. So I sat in her darkened living room, with every single ray of outdoor light blocked out by her thick, black, heavy, oversized curtains, secured with cowbells tied to thick ropes, and I detached from the two sisters’ paranoid conversation, letting my thoughts wander. The cowbells, Aunt Maudi explained, were her burglar alarms.
I suddenly recalled the only other time I’d been to Uncle Joe and Aunt Maudie’s house. We were very young and they tried to force us to take a nap in the back bedroom. I suppose we weren’t cooperating because Aunt Maudie opened the door and said if we didn’t get quiet that Uncle Joe was going to come in and shoot us all.
I looked up and saw the profile of my Uncle Joe sitting in his big chair in the living room, loading up his shotgun. So I lay in the bed, frozen and quiet, eyes squeezed shut, pretending to be asleep, trying not to breathe, waiting to be killed. For some reason, he never came in. And that is why I’m here today to write these stories.
<<<***>>>
Oikos 