A Yonder Piece From Here

When she was about 12, my grandmother's father, aka Papa, lost his arm to a sawmill blade.  I think it was Nana herself who described to me the one detail she remembered from that day: How Papa's coworkers burst into their house and heaved his bloody body onto their kitchen table. How the blood dripped everywhere. No kid would forget that moment, and its description stayed with me, too, eventually becoming the inspiration for an Walnut shell basket, whittled by my great-grandfather, Andrew Davidson early scene in my book: It happened too fast even for Leola to drop the half-peeled apple and knife. Too fast for Mama to move away from the window, where she’d gone to see what the racket was: Cart wheels on packed earth and men shouting and boots a-clattering across the porch. Too fast, even, to open the door, for the men from the mill kicked it in themselves, Dell Meeker and Ralph Newsom hefting Papa’s body onto the kitchen table, scattering the beans Mama’d ...

11-yr-old cotton picker, 1911 Growing up, I spent many summers and holidays on my grandparents' farm in northeast Texas.  Nana and PawPaw Joe's house, built by his grandfather, was surrounded by cotton fields.  Cotton was King in the south at one time, and still was an important crop when I was a child. I remember walking through the fields, the black earth crunching beneath my feet, "petting" the fluffy cotton sticking out of the prickly bolls, even taking some plants back home to New York for show-and-tell. PawPaw Joe's family had owned land in Blacklands Texas for a long time. They were far from rich, but they weren't "dirt poor," either.  They had plenty of that rich black earth to go around. Nana, on the other hand, endured serious financial hardship into her young womanhood. Though her father, Thomas, was a teacher, it wasn't a well-paying field, to begin with, and schools were usually closed through much of harvest season--which...