ACT & College Preparation Course for the Christian Student

The forest near my mother’s childhood home was hardly a forest at all — it was a tangle of bush-size trees — and since it was warm and dry enough on the western edge, cane rattlers loved to slither in the shadows of bushy ash trees to escape the torrid Arkansas summer sun. On the eastern edge, joining the sewage reservoir, moccasins hissed warnings at mockingbirds, snapping turtles, and inquisitive little girls. My mother learned very early the advantages of limitation and constraint. She learned to measure each step carefully, always looking at what was in front of her. Controlling, as much as possible, where her next step would land.

Not all snakes were my mother’s enemies. One huge black and red king snake named Uncle Roy, lived under the old piano. Actually the piano didn’t carry a tune at all. Big Momma kept it around to house Uncle Roy. An aggressive king snake brought all sorts of advantages to my mother’s family — mice were noticeably absent. And no moccasin would dare bare his fangs near Big Momma’s abode! Yes, reticent Uncle Roy, who would never bite a homo sapiens, was absolutely deadly murder for scores of unfortunate reptiles who invaded his territory. And, thankfully, was so proprietary that his domain was snake-free for most of my mother’s young life.

Uncle Roy particularly enjoyed sleeping behind the family toilet during the inferno Arkansas afternoons. We all knew this and, as a result, mom and her siblings learned to look behind the toilet before they did their business. However, once, when Big Daddy was finishing his business and his Field and Stream magazine, Uncle Roy affectionately licked Big Daddy’s right achilles’ tendon, angled back to the right of the toilet.

Such unfeigned, if unsolicited affection was even too much even for Big Daddy, Uncle Roy’s most fervent supporter. While his admiration for Uncle Roy’s rodent venery skills were second to none, he could not tolerate this violation of his most private savoir faire. Advancing with no thought of modesty, Big Daddy, in all his sartorial splendor, quickly hopped out of the bathroom into the dining room where the whole family was gathered for supper. Then, with his pin-striped railroad overalls around his legs, he ignobly fell to the ground with his uncovered derriere signaling his unconditional surrender to man and to reptile alike. Uncle Roy coyly retreated behind an old ceramic garbage can.

With surprisingly little compunction, Big Daddy banned Uncle Roy not only from the bathroom but also from the house.

A king snake, however, was too valuable a thing to lose permanently, so Big Momma skillfully won forgiveness for Uncle Roy by depositing half-dead mice behind the ice box, which she had acquired from mouse traps. Eventually, Uncle Roy sullenly returned to the back of the ice box — a true ice box, full of block ice from Mr. Badgett’s ice house. From this newly acquired launching point Uncle Roy effectively protected his and my mother’s domicile. He occasionally protruded his nose from under the ice box, but only on the rarest occasions, like when a large roach wandered by. The naturally reticent Uncle Roy could not resist this delicacy. The family hardly knew he was there — although when the new kitten disappeared Uncle Roy allegedly was the miscreant who disposed of the feline pet. However, this was never proven and a good king snake was more difficult to replace than a kitten.

Despite Big Momma’s approbation of reptiles, the downside of having Uncle Roy in the family was the growth of a pervasive herpetophobia that appeared in all my mother’s clan.

My mother’s childhood home was an old army officer barracks house, moved by huge six-wheeled trucks from a World War I Greenville, Mississippi, airfield. Placed incautiously on eight concrete cinder blocks, it was a nature refuge for a menagerie of unwelcome visitors. Nonetheless, during the Great Depression years, this abode was more the rule than the exception.

Unceremoniously, the movers had deposited this old barracks hut on hard buckshot ground by Macon Bayou, which also was the city sewage. The house was mortally wounded and exhibited a quarter inch crack all the way across its middle portion. During the winter, when the ground swelled with moisture, the crack closed. In the summer, when the buckshot soil cracked, so did the house. Over the years, the winters grew drier and the summers hotter until there was a permanent crack behind Big Momma’s china cabinet to the edge of the screened-in back porch.

A generous house for most families, the old army barracks was never big enough for my mother’s family. Three boys and five girls lived together in three bedrooms. Big Momma and Big Daddy lived in one room, the boys in another, and the girls in a final room. Gender, not chronology, determined commorancy. Mercifully, there were more girls than boys.

Ruth chose her God over her home. She understood that home is where we find sustaining relationships, not a place or location. I hope your home is a place of succor and hope. I hope the Lord is the Lord of your home. I hope also that you are fortunate to have a good friend like Uncle Roy living under your piano!