Ham Biscuit on a Green Glass Plate

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We moved back to Senath, Missouri, midway down the western edge of the Bootheel sometime in 1952. Both sets of grandparents lived there and aunts, uncles and cousins; too many to shake a stick at, as the saying goes.

My mom's parents, Emma and Francis Dale, were known as Ma and Pa to all the grandkids, probably because of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. They lived in a farmhouse about four miles out of town. We stayed with them for a month or three after moving back from California.

Ma was a tiny, dark-haired lady of German and English ancestry, distantly related to Robert E. Lee by family legend. In recent years, I found out that this was indeed true, just as it was true that my father was related to the James Boys. You have to go back almost to when the first boat landed in Ma's case and nearly to the American Revolution in Dad's but the connections were there. Odd how such things survive orally when the documentation to prove it is rather difficult to dig out.

Pa was a tall man who looked a bit like a bald Stan Laurel dressed as Jed Clampett. Stan was a particular hero of Pa’s and he would often do his impression of the famous comic. To me as a child, it was just something funny Pa did and it wasn’t until twenty years later I recognized it for what it was when my brother did the goofy smile and hand over his forehead from behind and I couldn’t tell if he was doing Stan or Pa.

They lived in a wide wooden house on the edge of some property they leased for farming. There were only four rooms, each very large. The toilet was an outhouse out beyond the chicken coop, water came from a pump on the back porch and baths were taken in galvanized steel tubs with water heated on a wood burning stove.

Mom and Dad used the back bedroom and I slept either with them or with Ma and Pa in the front bedroom, or lying on a pallet in the living room, “parlor” if cousins were also staying. Uncle Ross and Aunt Ava lived down the road about a half a mile and their three youngest often stayed with Ma and Pa, too, either all in a group or one at a time.

Kay was two or three years older than me and very smart. She had started first grade at age five by simply running away from home to follow her older brother Robert to school and refusing to be sent back. She had flaming red hair, bright blue eyes and one enormous freckle that covered her entirely with tiny patches of bright pink skin showing through. She made a good role model for a little girl when she wasn’t being too bossy.

Roger, called Bud, was her middle brother, two weeks older than me, exactly. Roger didn’t talk much, his three siblings and both parents being all chatterboxes, he probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He stood half a head taller than me, a sturdy physical sort who took it upon himself to show me how to hide in the corn rows, or under the house, or in the grain bin or the root cellar. Hiding was fun with Bud but sometimes we got into trouble. Not too much trouble, we were only three and a half.

Roland was the youngest of this batch of cousins. At less than two years old, he had only just started walking. He talked, though. He talked a lot and most of it was funny. For a toddler, Bill, as he was called, had a sly streak and a clever way with words. Still in diapers, he had an accident in Ma and Pa’s bedroom. Not wanting to find an adult to change him, Bill cleaned his own diaper out and left the detritus on a crocheted cloth rug beside the bed while he went on with his playing.
Pa confronted him when the evidence was discovered. “Bill,” he asked, “how did this pile of turds get on the rug?”

Bill stood up in the middle of the floor and started out of the room. “Pa,” he said as he left quickly on his chubby little legs, “I ‘spect some cat done crept in, crapped and crept out.” He made his escape while Pa laughed and laughed and laughed.

It was great having the cousins stay over but my favorite mornings during this time were ones when I’d wake up alone in whichever bed I had climbed into the night before. My father, if he had carpenter work, would leave before daylight and get back after dark, this was in the winter. My mom would go to the fields with Pa, digging and clearing for the spring crops to be put in, if Daddy was gone. Or she would milk the cows, a task she enjoyed and was good at. Ma would stay around the house, cleaning, baking, tending a winter garden, pumping water, mending clothes and feeding the chickens.

The garden was on the southern side of the house, near the pump and the backsteps onto the porch and into the kitchen. Ma knew she would hear me when I got up but for kids on a farm, it’s never too young to show a little self-reliance.

I would get up, use the thundermug if I needed to and wash up in the basin of warm water next to the stove. Then I’d go into the kitchen and open the lower cupboard next to the long dark oak buffet. Inside this door I knew I would find a homemade biscuit, all fluffy and crumbly, and a slice of ham, bacon or fatback on a small green glass plate sitting on top of a tiny green glass bowl of oatmeal with a pat of butter melting in it.

The plate and bowl both came from inside boxes of Quaker Oats at the time, as did the green glass of milk I knew I would find in the icebox. It was a real ice box with ice brought by an iceman two or three times a week. Ma and Pa had a refrigerator, too, but fresh milk from your own cows tastes better if it is kept in the icebox; refrigerators are too cold.

I would get my own spoon from the lower drawer of the buffet and I would climb up and stand on one of the sturdy oak chairs to eat my breakfast on the table. I felt very proud. I even put the sugar from the sugar bowl on the oatmeal myself. The biscuit and cereal were warm, the milk cold, the meat salty and sweet. I don’t think any meal in my life ever satisfied as well and I ate like that three or four times a week whenever I stayed over.

Ma always came in from outside before I finished and she always asked, “Did you get enough to eat?” She’d fuss with me, straightening my clothes, moving me to a different chair that would hold the booster seat Daddy had made, or kissing me extravagantly on the ears until I giggled. Then she’d have a task for me like sorting buttons while she sewed or feeding the chickens while she worked in the garden.

It was a great time and place to be a little kid.

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Did you see on the news?

Ken Burns is doing a four hour special on the Dust Bowl and the people of those times. He has been out in the Oklahoma Panhandle this week recording oral histories from the people who lived through it. Think it's supposed to air this fall, ought to be fascinating.

I remember the days when dishware came with the laundry soap, and the kitchen clothes were made from flour sacks. We still had a fair number of flour sack towels with the designs printed on the fabric, courtesy of my grandmother on my father's side. I hardly remember her, except as being ancient when I was a kid. But I do remember that nothing was ever wasted if it could be fixed, nothing was ever thrown away if it could be used.

BTW: my father's side of the family all came from the east side of the bootheel, not far from Cape Girardeau. My father is buried there, my mother soon will be, and there is one last spot that I'm to have in time. That will be our last connection to that family tree, my brothers have all put down roots elsewhere.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

The Bootheel

erin's picture

Do your relatives speak with that Missouri accent that is common in the Bootheel? I haven't heard that in years, most of my relatives spoke with Arkie hillbilly accents but the softer drawl of the Bootheel always sounded more polite.

Last time I was in the area was about 35 years ago and it was sad. Senath had been a bustling little city when I was younger but in 1977, it was less than half the size I remembered it being. Mechanization of the farms and the closing of the shoe factory had left few people with a reason to live in such a rural area.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Thanks for the comment :)

erin's picture

I know you grew up in a totally different place so the details are different, but I think the feeling of being a small child who is enjoying a bit of safe independence must be nearly universal.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Independence ...

... is something we all enjoy. I'm a littler older than you and there was a war on when I was 3 1/2 with rationing and blackouts and bombs falling not too far away. I lived at the family shop with a much older orphaned female cousin, grandparents and parents so I guess I got spoiled, especially as the other grandparents lived in another shop just up the main street.

Before I even started school, Dad would draw a little map of the nearby streets and set me off exploring our small town. Of course there was almost no motor traffic partly because people couldn't afford cars but mostly because fuel was strictly rationed so I guess it was much safer then. Perhaps he followed me at a discreet distance but I felt pretty independent.

Lovely stories, Erin

Robi

Can't make up my mind...

Andrea Lena's picture

...I don't know what's more appealing. I can close my eyes and 'feel' the plates. I can smell the fresh biscuits and even the Quaker Oatmeal(cooked...they didn't have 'instant' back then)I hear the sounds of bowls dragged across the table and the sizzling of ham. But what's most appealing is returning at least in some small way to the familiar safety of some moments. The return to innocence, and maybe the longing for something so special that I never received? Being kissed extravagantly on my ears until I giggled. What a warm and inviting and utterly sweet story. Thank you!

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

Ma Dale

erin's picture

Ma wasn't a super-talkative person and I regret that I never got to hear her talk about her own childhood. She was the youngest daughter of Dona Lee and is mentioned in the book about her mother but only once as a three-year-old herself. I'm sure she was a delightful small child, she was certainly an affectionate grandmother.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Best picture I could find

erin's picture

Though that is a picture of slightly the wrong kind of biscuit. I couldn't find one of a ham biscuit on the right kind of plate.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Childhood memories

These stories bring back childhood memories of growing up in the 1970's in the heart and "wilderness" of South America. Thank you for sharing them with us.

Jessica

That sounds interesting

erin's picture

Do you plan to share?

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Thundermug? Dugans' man and Seltzer

Your reminisces of life in a rural community in the early 50's are quite foreign to me, and thus in some ways quite exotic. However, growing up, in a N.Y.C., Queens suburb, also produces memories of a simpler time.

Most folks had milk delivered in glass bottles, by the milkman, who left the botttles in an aluminum box either on your stoop or by one of the doors. The cream came to the top, and I fought with my brother to open the bottle and drink the cream.

Bread and cakes were also delivered, and if your from the NYC area, you remember the Dugans’ man. Seltzer, in the classic seltzer bottle and soda (pop) were delivered in big wooden cases. All the kids played on the street together without the need for much if any adult supervision.

Times were simpler and less hectic. Maybe we feared the bogeyman of the U.S.S.R. and in school practiced tuck and cover drills, but we never feared going outside to play or walking to a park because a neighbor might be a child polestor.

By the way what is a Thundermug? Never heard the term before.

RAMI

RAMI

Thundermug

erin's picture

Night jar; it was an enameled pot with a lid, used to relieve oneself in the night usually but being a little kid, I got to use it right when I first got up on the idea that I would never make it out of the house and across the 70 or 80 feet to the outhouse. :)

We seldom had milk delivered when I was growing up but a few times we lived in town and did not have cows. All our delivered milk was always homogenized, though, only experienced the cream part with homegrown milk. And the cream was usually saved for making butter.

I'll talk about delivery men in a later installment.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Ah yes, the outhouse and wood stove.

My extended family purchased what had been a homestead in rural Oregon and we lived there until 1959. It had an ancient farm shack on it that was built of pine poles with the bark on them, and then sided with the edge of sawn logs from a mill. Inside, the walls were covered with very flammable "Fir-tex". It had electricity and most of the wiring was exposed knob and tube. We were told not to touch the wires and it only took me once to learn why. It was only 110 volts.

The only running water in the house came from an exposed pipe out doors that ran right through the wall into the sink, and the sink drained back through the wall and hit the ground about a foot from the house.

The outhouse was in back of the house, and the only way to get to it at night was to light the Kerosene Lantern and walk out there. I was a very young toddler and the whole idea terrified me, so instead, I wet the bed. My stepfather would not permit the use of a can under the bed, and it was so cold in the house in the winter, who'd want to get out of that warm bed?

The wash machine was at first powered by a gas engine, but Mom badgered him into an electric one very soon.

The house burned down in 1954, and I was nearly killed.

You should write up your memories as stories

erin's picture

They sound interesting. I never lived in a log cabin or survived a fire but I can relate to the rest of your post above. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

My grand mother had a full

My grand mother had a full set of the green place settings, dinner, bread, cereal bowl, and two sizes of glasses, one for juice.
She called them carnival glass, but I think she got them with a coupon. Strangely, no tea or coffee cups and saucers.

Karen

Great story

Erin:

You seem to write effortlessly, regardless of the subject. You are very good and I would love to see even more from you.

BS