A Family Allegory of a Journey from Darkness into Light
My father, Archie Daniel Tingle, Junior, was born in Indian Territory, Oklahoma. When he was still a toddler the family moved to Pasadena, Texas.
My grandparents lived in a white frame house I still see clearly in my mind, for it was in that house I received the worst whopping I ever got in my entire life.
My Aunt Bobbie did the honors on my backside. I had dragged a dining room chair into the living room and scooted it real close to the television set, just like I had seen my grandmother do. I watched television for about an hour, then decided I needed a drink of water. I dashed to the kitchen at the back of the house. Grandmother—Mawmaw, I called her—always kept a big jar of cold water in the refrigerator. I made sure nobody was watching and drank several deep gulps straight from the jar, then wiped my lips on my sleeve, just like my dad always did.
I had just shut the door to the refrigerator—we always called it an ice-box—when I heard a scraping sound, then a loud crash, coming from the living room. It was my grandmother, stumbling over my chair.
Along came my Aunt Bobbie. She was big and strong and everybody said you didn’t want Aunt Bobbie mad at you. She scooped me up by the arm, the tender part by the armpit, and hurried me out to the back porch, where she proceeded to whip me good!
“Don’t you ever move furniture from one place to another without putting it right back where you got it!” she said between swings. “Not in this house!”
She finally turned loose of me and I stood there crying, too afraid to leave, too afraid to even say, “Yes, ma’am.” I just stood there sniffling and sobbing. I thought about wiping my runny nose on my sleeve, then decided I better not as long as she was there. My dad always wiped his nose that way, but I figured he probably wouldn’t if he’d just got a whipping from Aunt Bobbie.
As soon as she was gone, I ran to a wooden bench in the grape arbor. I sat there for a little while till Mawmaw came out and sat beside me.
“Whooping’ll go away, boy,” she said. “Whooping goes away.” I didn’t think it would ever go away—it stung bad!
“That was some kind of saltypie from your Aunt Bobbie,” Mawmaw said. “That was sure enough some kind of saltypie.”
There always seemed to be a quiet laugh on the other side of my grandmother’s words. The sting didn’t exactly go away, but with my grandmother there, it was sort of like dipping my bottom in warm bathwater. It felt better.
We sat together for a long time. That was Mawmaw’s way. Then she stood up and in that shuffling way she had of walking, she moved towards the chicken house, calling over her shoulder, “Chickens need afeedin’.” She knew I would follow right along behind her, for feeding the chickens and gathering eggs was one of my favorite things to do. She had taught me how to scootch those hens out of the way and move your hand real quick before your hand got pecked.
We filled a tin bucket with eggs and carried them to a dark room in back of the garage, where my grandfather had built a light board. It had once been a porcelain table with wooden legs. Pawpaw had removed the porcelain top and replaced it with a glass pane with light bulbs under it. A black electrical cord ran from the table to the wall socket, snaking across the dirt and sawdust floor. When the switch was flipped, the room filled with shafts of yellow light lifting from the table to the ceiling.
We had to see if any of the eggs were fertilized, meaning they wouldn’t be any good to eat. Fertilized eggs had little flecks of blood and you didn’t want that showing up in your fried eggs. Mawmaw would place the eggs on the table, one at a time, and I would roll them over, looking closely for any sign of a red spot.
“Look real good,” she’d say, “and don’t you trick me!”
“I won’t trick you, Mawmaw.”
If I saw a fertilized egg, and there were plenty, I’d say, probably way too loud, knowing how I was, “There’s one, Mawmaw!”
“Where?”
“Right here it is!” She would take the egg and move it real close to her eyes, like she was verifying, then she’d throw it in a 50-gallon oil drum she used for a trash can. The egg would smash into white pieces of eggshell and yellow and red insides and ooze down the side of the oil drum.
Mawmaw would laugh that quiet funny laugh, like there was so much more to laugh at than you would ever know. “That’s some kind of saltypie for those chicken eggs, boy,” she would say. “Some kind of saltypie.”
My grandmother was a strong woman, a special woman, even I knew that. My big brother might get away with calling me “Ignurnt!” at home, but when I was with my grandmother, I felt safe. Our family, the Tingle family, it was her family. Those five boys and two girls, my dad and his brothers and sisters, they were her children, there was no doubt about that.
I used to imagine what it was like for her, that first day in Pasadena, that first day in her new home, after the long trip from Oklahoma. There she was, parting the white lace curtains on the front window and catching her first glimpse of early morning comings and goings in her new neighborhood. She timidly eased the door open and stepped out on the front porch to greet the dawn.
She never saw the boy that threw the stone that cut her face. It sent her stumbling and reeling inside, slamming the door behind her. That white cotton dress she wore slid against the surface of the pine door and she crumpled in a heap on the floor, sobbing. My father was two at the time; he ran to see what all the commotion was. There he saw his mother sitting on the living room floor, her hands covering her face. It looked like the peep-eye game to him.
He crawled into her lap and saw shiny red juice squishing from between her fingertips. It looked to him like sweet and sour cherry pie filling bubbling up from the criss-cross crust of Mawmaw’s pies. He reached his finger to her face to get a taste of it, then touched his fingertip to his lips.
“Saltypie!” he said, spitting as he said it. “Saltypie!”
Mawmaw pulled her hands apart and looked down at him. She was crying and bleeding everywhere, on her dress, all over her face and neck. She saw the ugly face he was making, his lips red with her blood.
“Saltypie,” she said. “That is sure enough some kind of saltypie.” She held him close to her chest and went to laughing and crying, rocking back and forth and all the time saying, “Sure enough, that was some kind of saltypie, with those rocks. Some kind of saltypie, boy. Sure was.”
She was still laughing about it at the supper table that night, when she told my Pawpaw why she had a bandage across her cheek. She had to grab his arm and plead with him not to go out into the neighborhood, ’cause he wanted to find out who it was and go whip somebody’s daddy, but it wouldn’t have done any good—she never saw the boy that threw the stone that cut her face.
I really loved my grandmother, but I didn’t give her the respect she deserved, not really, till I was eight years old. I had talked my Pawpaw into letting me have my very own cup of coffee to saucer and blow like he did. We sat at a circle of a table in the kitchen, seven grown-ups and a few children crowded around. I sat right next to Pawpaw, ready to have my first cup of coffee at breakfast. Here came Mawmaw filling up the cups.
She had what I thought was a disgusting habit. Mawmaw would put her thumb in the empty cup, just over the rim, and pour the coffee till it reached her first knuckle, then shake the hot coffee off, lick her thumb to cool it, and put it in the next cup. When she came to me, I put my hand over the cup and wouldn’t let her put her thumb in.
As soon as I did that, everybody stopped talking. My Pawpaw was reaching for the butter, but instead of picking the butter dish up, he slowly moved his hand back to his lap and looked down at his plate. Nobody moved for what seemed like a long time. I slid my hand off my cup, but whatever I had done, I knew it was too late to take it back. I heard a chair scrape and looked up under my eyelids. It was Aunt Bobbie. She was looking right at me as she walked around the table and I could see she was rolling her sleeves up as she walked.
In my mind, it was Saturday morning and I was Roadrunner outrunning Coyote, laughing and blowing dust in his face. That daydream lasted for about three seconds. It was Saturday morning all right, but I wasn’t outrunning anybody. I was frozen in blood-curdling terror.
Aunt Bobbie scooped me up and carried me to the screened-in back porch. I anticipated a whipping to end all whippings, one with the added disgrace of being the morning’s entertainment for cousins and aunts and uncles who would joke about it for years. Aunt Bobbie positioned me in a corner, nodded to let me know which way to lean, then she squared her feet just the right distance from her target. She gripped my arm hard with her left hand and lifted her right hand. I made a scrunching face and squeezed my eyes tight shut.
Nothing happened. I opened my eyes and glanced over at her feet. She hadn’t moved an inch, so I made the face and squeezed my eyes shut again. Still nothing. I felt her loosen her grip on my arm, so I sneaked a peak at her raised hand, the striking one. It was still poised, right in the middle of mid-whoop. I wasn’t out of this one yet.
“You don’t know, do you, boy?” she said.
“No, ma’am, I don’t know. If they try to tell me, I won’t listen, I promise. I don’t want to know.”
Aunt Bobbie laughed and looked me over like she was seeing me for the first time. She let go of my arm and I stood up real slow.
“Bless your heart,” she said. “All these years and you don’t know. Your grandmother is blind, boy. That’s why you have to help her with the eggs. That’s why you get in trouble for moving the furniture around. That’s why she uses her thumb when she’s pouring coffee, so she’ll know when the cup is full. Mercy, boy, you didn’t know.”
Mawmaw and grandchild on the front porch at the old house
She swatted at me playful-like and I jumped like I’d been shot.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, son,” Aunt Bobbie said, laughing and smiling and shaking her head. “Just go on back there and let your grandmother do what she has to do.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was eight years old and I didn’t realize my grandmother was blind. That night at the evening talking time, when everybody sat under the trees in outdoor chairs and on the back porch steps and drank their favorite beverage, I asked my uncle how come Mawmaw was blind.
“Cataracts,” he said, “that’s what the doctors say. Cataracts. But some people say her eyes have never been exactly right since she got hit with those rocks. That was some kind of saltypie, with them boys throwing rocks at your grandmother.”
“Who was it? Do we know ’em?” I asked.
“No, I don’t reckon we’ll ever know who did that. Some things are just too cowardly to even brag about.”
He sat without talking for a long time. We listened to the sounds of the chickens roosting and the distant whisper of cars driving by on the asphalt road. I smelled the blooming gardenias that Mawmaw kept tucked real close to the house.
“Why did they do it?”
“Your grandmother was Indian. That was enough back then,” my uncle said. A mosquito buzzed around my ear. I went to slap it but a little breeze blew up, carrying the mosquito off to draw somebody else’s blood and washing the backyard with the soft music of rustling corn stalks. At our house the mosquitoes would eat you alive outside at night, but they never were that bad at Mawmaw’s.
It always seemed if you waited long enough and quiet enough at Mawmaw’s house, you would know things that ought to be known. If you got in a hurry, you’d go away and leave those things behind and maybe never know ’em. I was always glad when I could stay awake long enough to listen to those secret sounds you only heard at Mawmaw’s.
Aunt Bobbie brought me a blanket and wrapped it tight around me. “What is saltypie?” I asked her. She stooped over and touched my hair.
“It’s a way of dealing with trouble, son. Sometimes you don’t know where the trouble comes from. You just kinda shrug it off, say ‘saltypie.’ It helps you carry on.”
I fell asleep that night and didn’t wake up till my dad was carrying me to the car for the hour trip home.
The years passed by taking forever. We went to Mawmaw’s less often, then almost not at all. Sometimes it seemed the only thing that made any sense was the sweet feel of my leather basketball. Whatever happened at home, I could always go outside and dribble and dribble, thump, thump, thumping all through junior high and high school. I could make seven of ten free throws with my eyes closed. It was my game, all I knew or would ever need to know.
Then somewhere in the midst of all this dribbling and jumping, I realized that if I wanted a home anything like Mawmaw’s, I would have to make it myself.
I was a junior at the University of Texas in Austin when I got the call we all know is coming some day.
“Your grandmother is in Ben Taub Hospital, downtown Houston, fourth floor. Come right away.” The note was tacked to my door when I got home from classes.
In ten minutes, I was on the road. I drove the four hours to Houston and found the parking lot to Ben Taub Hospital, near Hermann Park Zoo. I dashed inside and took the elevator to the fourth floor waiting room. It was filled with people, cramped together and sitting and standing everywhere. I looked around for a familiar face. Then it dawned on me—they were all familiar faces. The whole Tingle clan was gathered together.
They told me my grandmother was undergoing one of the first eye transplant surgeries in the city of Houston. We were all there to support her. I found a corner and settled down to listen. Most of the stories floating around were about my grandmother.
Relatives who hadn’t seen each other in a few years caught everybody up on what they’d been doing. I heard somebody say we may be waiting for days before the doctors would know anything.
We did wait for days, four days, going through the entire gamut of family emotions. We laughed, teased, fought, then laughed all over again to see that nobody had really changed, just grown fatter, skinnier, and balder. Some folks took shifts with other family members, a husband going to work, a wife leaving for a half-day to feed the dog and do errands, but by the evening of the fourth day, we were all there waiting for news.
About an hour before sundown, the doctor stuck his head through the door and said, “We’ll know soon.” A quiet but remarkable shift occurred in the room. The light streaming through the window took on a copper color, bouncing and reflecting off downtown skyscrapers till it floated above the green waiting-room carpet. It reminded me of the late afternoon sun filtering through the live oaks and settling on the thick Saint Augustine grass in Mawmaw’s backyard.
The spirit of who we were as a family, as a people, was coming alive in the room. It was palpable and alive—as alive as the unseen cicadas that hummed their night music in the Choctaw river bottoms from whence we had come. The stories continued, but there were fewer words now and much silent nodding. Many heads were bowed to the moment. In the common gesture of long-remembered ritual, the youngest to the oldest began to speak.
Aunt Mary told of Mawmaw making her go to school when she played sick.
“She always knew!” she said, and everybody laughed.
Somebody else talked about her homemade ice cream and how they used to sit on the freezer while one of the older boys cranked. Somebody told about how hard it had been for Mawmaw at boarding school—Wheelock Academy in Oklahoma—especially after her father died and there was nobody to take her home for Christmas.
I told about helping Mawmaw feed the chickens.
We listened like we were all sharing the same sweet dream for over an hour, till everybody had spoken except my father. He stood up and took his welding cap off, twisting it in his hands in front of him. He was shy and he kept us waiting for a long time. The doctor looked through the small windowpane on the door and motioned to my father. They spoke in the hallway and my father returned.
I have never been so proud of him as I was that day. It was so right that my father, who had given us this word 50 years ago in a moment of childhood misunderstanding, would take it away in a moment of enlightenment. He lifted his eyes and spoke.
“No more saltypie,” he said. “Mawmaw can see.”
It seemed like everything my family had gone through had led up to this moment.
“No more saltypie. Your grandmother can see.”