Houses have always been important to me and we lived in four different houses by the time I was five years old. My first memories are of Grandad and Grandmother Stokes house—not really memories—just sensations of dark brown walls. At that time, Mama, Daddy, Elberta, Billie, Sarah and Mary lived in Lynn County, outside of O’Donnell, in a four-room house on a hill up above Grandmother and Grandad Stokes old home place. Daddy was farming for Granddad for a share of the crop. I was born during that time and came home to that house on the hill.
But Daddy was a hard-working dreamer; he always had a plan. This time, he found an old shotgun house and moved it onto some land in neighboring Gaines County. And my first real memories are of that Old Black Tar Paper House that sat on a draw outside of Higgenbotham.
Daddy and my sisters first covered the house with tarpaper and chicken wire. The plan was to rock the outside since the land grew mostly mesquite bushes, shinnery, catclaw bushes, sticky grass, and white cliche rocks. Inside, we had a yellow icebox and a black wood burning cook stove in the middle room—the kitchen. A wood burning heater was in the center of front room/bedroom for Mary, Grandmother, Elberta, and Sarah. I slept in a baby bed in the kitchen and Mama and Daddy had the room on the other end of the house.
By 1951, the house had been moved to the Cope place 12 miles west of Seminole. Sarah, Jack and their son Richard lived there and their daughter Norma Mae was brought home to the black tar paper house in November 1951 when she was born.
Memories of a three year-old…
the gritty, dusty concrete floors…
sitting alone under the dining table on the criss-crossed boards as the sun moved down the walls in late evening, not knowing where anyone was, feeling afraid…
discovering that I could hide behind a door…
feeling guilty for playing with a new doll and ignoring my older rag doll...
dreaming again and again about making mud pies and them magically becoming chocolate...
wondering why Mama laughed when I asked her why the cows were wearing “high heels”…
the crows, Joe and Dan who came and took the ribbon out of my hair – Mama pointing out crows’ nests in trees...
Someone picking Mary up for school in a woodie wagon…
the excitement when Daddy and Jack went down to the border and came back with a truckload of little red apples to sell by the side of the road…feeling the disappointment in the house when the plan didn’t work out…
watching my big sister Elberta, beautiful dreamy Elberta with her tightly curled hair and her red lips putting the same red color on her cheeks...
and many, many years later, writing a poem.
