lizzie
by raven hail

I have never been able to sleep in complete darkness. My earliest memories are of a gaslight in the back yard and another in the front yard, which kept all the rooms in the house well lighted all night long. We lived on an oil lease, and this gas was flared in the daytime as well as at night, just to get rid of it.
We used natural gas for cooking, lighting and most of the heating. Gas lights required a very fragile mantle that was shielded by a glass globe and Mama was always yelling, "Shut the door!" For any draft or wind would destroy the mantles and we'd be left in the dark. Much, much later, when I was studying the French language in college, the phrase, "Je t'adore!" (I love your!) always reminded me of that forceful vocalizing we had engaged in, which was in truth our own language of love.

Way back, before gas ranges had pilot lights, Mama used to leave one burner on low, to avoid striking a match from mealtime to mealtime. A large box of wooden kitchen matches cost five cents, but remember that gas was free and five cents then was equal to five dollars now. I could see the economy of this as long as we lived on the oil lease. Five cents would buy a small bottle of peppermint oil at the candy store. It was kept tightly capped between times, but when it was opened, everyone dipped in the used wooden matchstick and went away sucking at the spicy peppermint flavor.

Strangely enough, when we moved to the city, where the price of natural gas was out of sight--Mama continued to practice her old habit of economy. And no matter how many times I explained to her the change in this situation, she continued to leave one burner on, as she had learned to do in her youth.
We had no alarm; in fact we had no clock at all--and didn't need one. Everyone was always up and around in plenty of time. Mama baked biscuits for breakfast every morning. And here a very odd situation arose. Our friends, the neighbor children, just loved to come over to our house and eat those fresh-baked biscuits with country butter. And we just loved to go to their house and eat sophisticated, store-boughten, white lightbread. We had just never seen anything like it before in our lives! Mama, never one to be outdone by the neighbors, started baking lightbread at our house. And absolutely no one can doubt the superiority of that crusty end slice of a loaf of bread fresh from the oven--drowned in butter, of course.

Every other morning it was my job to go and get home-churned butter from a nieghbor who lived half a mile away. I cut across the field instead of taking the road and detoured by way of the apple tree in another neighbor's back yard, long before any of the apples got ripe. (It is not true that green apples give you the bellyache; it is true that getting caught stealing apples will get your bottom beat.)
We had two milk cows, but since I was a seventh child, and the youngest, there was barely enough milk for drinking. When there was any milk left over, since we had no refrigeration of any kind, it soured and then clabbered, and we drank the clabber milk with great gusto. (We didn't know that that was yogurt and very good for you.) On those very rare occasions when there was clabber milk to spare, Mama put it in a saucepan on a low gas burner and heated it until a kind of cheese settled out at the bottom, leaving the whey, which we drank. The cheeese was somewhat like cottage cheese, but so tough you had to chew it. Our milk was straight from the cow and could be used in this way. The homogenized milk we get now at the grocery store only sours and goes rancid. No fun at all!

July was blackberry-picking time. Mama and I put on our overhalls and big straw hats and headed for the briar patch. These berries grew wild, with no tending whatsoever. We only had to beat the birds to them. In an hour or so we had both our baskets full. But long before that time my hands and clothes and especially my mouth were stained a deep purple. Those berries were delicious! Warm from the sun, and bursting with juice from the early rains. There were bees and wasps to fan away; there could be snakes anywhere underfoot. We never killed a snake. I always made plenty of noise to let them know I was coming, and if I saw one, I stood stock-still and gave it the right-of-way no matter which direction it took. If you leave a snake alone it will leave you alone. Although I have spent much time wandering through fields and forests, I have never once been bitten by a snake.

Immediately we got home from the berry-picking, I got out the No. 3 washtub (galvanized) and took a bath in salt water to get the chiggers off me. If a chigger escaped the salt bath, I rubbed vigorously with dampened table salt until the itching went away.

It was then my job to pick out the debris, pinch off the stems and wash the berries so that they were ready to serve, sometimes with cream and sugar and sometimes not. Or to cook and can for future use. Or to make into jam and jelly and preserves. I wish I had a dime for every glass Mason jar I washed and got ready for the canning! I also went with Mama to pick strawberries and wild plums in season. What a beautiful site when all those glass jars of yummy food were lined up on the plank shelves in the storm cellar. Mama was always afraid of storms. She always recited the magic formula to drive away a storm first; but to make assurance double sure, she then bundled us all into the cellar, complete with blankets and pillows, preparing for a long stay. I had the comfortalbe feeling that if we all got trapped down there for days, there was no danger of going hungry. Sure enough, some years later a tornado ripped through that area and leveled all the buildings to the ground. What a way to go!

Mama taught me to gather lambsquarter and wild onions in the early spring, and pecans and black walnuts in the fall. I was over-eager to get at the walnuts before the tough outer hulls had dropped off; my hands were stained dark brown from the juice, but it all wore off by the second Saturday night bath.
At the dinner table in the evening, we all gathered around the large round oak table and dinner was served family style. No one ever said, "Eat your carrots or you can't have dessert." The fact was, if you didn't look alive, the carrots would all be gone while you were making up your mind. I could serve my plate with any amount of anything I wanted at any time; the hard and fast rule was that I must eat everything I took out on my plate. Mama wouldn't allow any wasting of food. She would say, "Remember those starving Armenians!" I always wondered where Armenia was and only found out a few years ago when I had a friend from Armenia who assured me they weren't starving anymore.

Mama was never one for "all work and no play". After dinner, when the dishes were done, we all gathered around the potbellied stove in the dining room to be entertained. Sometimes we had visiting itinerants--men who came and temporarily worked for room and board, who played instruments
and sang and told stories. A guitar player, for instance, almost always put his right foot on the seat of a ladderback kitchen chair and rested his guitar on his knee while he played and sang folk music. When I started to play the guitar it was some time before I learned that that was not the accepted position for a lady guitar player.

Mama played the guitar, the violin and the piano; she sang alto in the choir. She could sing "shape notes" by sight. She entertained us children with delightful little ditties like "Twenty froggies went to school, down beside the rushing pool...." And she recited penny-dreadful dramatics, such as "Save the Lightning Express! Hang out the red light! There's death at the bridge, on the river tonight!" Radio, Movies, and Television, which caught up with me much later, were never half so exciting as those real, live, on-the-spot performances.

I wouldn't want to leave the impression that everything in those days was sunshine and roses. Both Mama and I were glad to leave behind the outhouse way out in the back and the long walk to the cistern to carry water.

But all that was so long, long ago. Mama—Lizzie—is gone now. And I live in a push-button, plastic world.

Raven Hail is a noted Cherokee author, storyteller and editor. Her work ranges from essays, to poetry, a play, and even a children’s coloring book; she is listed in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians. Two anthologies of her work, The Remembered Earth and The Clouds Threw This Light, are among the earliest and most important collections of Native American writing. Born in Oklahoma, Raven Hail now lives and writes in Asheville.