Red (necks), White (bread) and Blue (collar)

By Pam Lepley, Director of Religious Education

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Winston-Salem, N.C.

July 3, 2005

Pam Lepley grew up near Dallas in Gaston County, close to the Lincoln County border, the setting of this memoir. “Gran and Popi managed to save enough money to send me to college - a family first - and I graduated from Wake Forest in 1992. I worked as a crisis counselor at the battered women's shelter in Concord for eight years. We moved to High Point five years ago and I worked as a foster care social worker for DSS in Greensboro for a little over a year before

coming to UUFWS.”

I am a redneck woman, born and raised. I’m proud to be from a blue-collar family. Being raised in a poor family in the South has given me more advantages than one might imagine, and an interesting perspective on life.

When you’re raised poor, you’re not scared to work hard for a living, because that’s all you know and what you expect. I’ve met some folks who work harder trying to figure out how to get out of work than they would just doing the work to begin with. I think maybe it’s because they have an idea that working hard is demeaning. But it’s not – it’s one of the most uplifting things I can think of. Plowing a field all day and planting rows of vegetables is hard, hot and dusty, sometimes monotonous. Tending those seedlings, watering them during droughts, praying for rain, fighting insects and small animals to keep your crop – it’s exhausting. But how rewarding to see that first sprout push up out of the dirt; how awesome to stand in a field and teach your son or daughter about crop rotation and good signs to plant under; and what satisfaction in feeding your family the food that you have grown with your labor. There is pride in doing your job and doing it well.

My grandfather worked in the cotton mill until he lost his sight and had to retire because he lost his driver’s license. But he didn’t quit working. He could see just well enough to keep planting his garden, working on projects in the woodshed, and tending his grandchildren.

My grandmother worked in the same cotton mill until she got a job working at Mary Jo’s cloth store. Gran worked there for 44 years – walking and standing on hard concrete for up to 10 hours a day – hauling bolts of cloth sometimes weighing 50 pounds. Her knees and feet are ruined from that hard work, but she has yet to utter the first complaint. She retired eight years ago, and only then because my grandfather was so ill that he needed her with him almost constantly. On the day she retired she was making $18,000 a year. I was almost too embarrassed to tell her what I am making now for the work I do. I did tell her, though, and she is as proud of me as I am of her. This is part of what she and Popi, and my mom, worked so very hard for – for me to have a better life. It’s not a better life, I think, just different from the one I grew up knowing.

I have a small, close-knit family, but I can’t go too far back on my family tree. But what I do know is pretty interesting. For instance, my mom’s brother Joe is also my dad’s brother Joe. Kind of mind-boggling isn’t it. Well, I can explain it – a bit like a fairy tale:

Once upon a time, there were three sisters, Lilly Mae, Mary, and Isabel. Lilly Mae was known as something of a light skirt – a vivacious woman who could sing and liked to dance and have a good time. Mary wanted adventure and married an Air Force man so they could travel. And Isabel married a strong, dependable man and settled down not too far from where her momma lived. Well, Mae had four children – Eugene, Roger, Rosetta and Joe. She was married to Mr. Winstead when Gene was born, so folks kind of figured he was the daddy. But that marriage didn’t last too long. No one knows for sure who fathered Roger, Rosetta or Joe, ‘cause Lilly Mae didn’t kiss and tell. Mae would swing in for a bit and leave the kids with Isabel while she went out catting around – more often than not they were with Aunt Bell. Lilly Mae died when Rosetta was three, and the kids were left needing a home. Isabel took in Gene and Rosetta. There was a man who thought he might be the father of Roger, so the county gave Roger to him. And Mary took in the baby, Joe. Now Mary’s husband Pap had been married before and he had a 13-year-old son named Paul Everett. So Mary raised two adopted sons, Joe and Paul. And Isabel also raised two adopted children, Gene and Rosetta. They had family get-togethers, as families do, and the children all knew one another. When Rosetta was 16, Paul was 26 – and they decided that they were in love and they got married. So, Joe is Rosetta’s biological brother and Paul’s adopted brother. That story sure made plotting out the family tree pretty difficult in junior high school!

When you don’t have a lot of money, most of the time you have to be self-reliant and resourceful. I don’t remember going to the doctor a lot when I was a child. Most every minor ailment has a home remedy, and usually Gran would just fix us up at home. For a chest cold, she’d rub Rawleigh salve on our chest and neck and cover it with a warm flannel cloth. If it was really bad, she’d make up a poultice with cooked onions and put them on too. A bee sting required a spit of tobacco juice after pulling out the stinger. The cough remedy was my favorite – a tablespoon of 90 proof mixed with brown sugar and cooked in a spoon over an open flame – good stuff. Pulp from an Irish potato cures a boil, and if you’ve got a wart take a walk out in the woods in spring and break a small branch on a tree, leave it hanging and when it falls off the wart will too. Sweet oil and warm breath will cure an earache.

And if you got burned, everyone knew to run quick to Isabel’s and she’d blow the burn out for you. Now you may be skeptical, but I assure you from first-hand experience that it works. Gran learned how to blow out burns from a man she knew working at the mill. It’s a learned gift that is passed from man to woman and woman to man. She’s blown out burns for her children and grandchildren and almost every child in her neighborhood. One day the Linebergers came hurrying to the house because Lewis had been burned bad when his dad accidentally spilled some hot soup on him. Steve had just taken the soup off the stove and was going to the table. When he turned around, he ran right into Lewis, who had walked up behind him. His chest was covered in burns and it looked really bad. Gran sat down with him, cupped her hands, and blew her hot breath on the burns. Oh, how it hurts when she does that – I swear it feels like you’ve been lit on fire and the burn throbs. Lewis cried and it took a long time, several hours, but when Gran was finished Lewis was fine and never had any scars.

Gran has blown many burns for me – one time I was putting something in the oven and managed to burn my hand on the hot rack. I jerked back quick, but still had a white welt pop up. Gran pulled me up close and closed her eyes – she took a deep breath and breathed it out, deep and rhythmic, sounding something like Darth Vadar in the Star Wars movies. Heat poured onto my skin, the burn lit up and tears started running – but when she finished it didn’t hurt anymore and it was like it’d never happened. I can’t explain how it works but I know it takes faith – faith in the gift by the giver and receiver, but beyond that it is a mystery to me. Gran says she doesn’t really do anything – that God does it-- she just says a Bible verse over and over while she blows breath over the burn. I guess it’s something that would be hard to believe if you hadn’t just grown up knowing it was true. Matthew doesn’t believe it, and he’s my husband!

Pop and Gran never went to the doctor much either, until recently when Gran had some issues with her balance and walking. One time Popi was out working in the woodshed, cutting some planks for some project or other, and he just zipped the end of his finger right off. He had some old rags lying around, so he wrapped up his finger and kept working. When he came up to the house for supper, Gran had a fit but said that there probably wasn’t anything the doctor could do about it then anyway.

Gran was pretty funny about that stuff herself. One time she was cleaning brush and pulling up some old fence out near the blackberry bushes and managed to get some old rusted-up barbed wire wrapped around her leg pretty good. She got it pulled off and came up to the house to clean out the holes the barbs left. I came into the kitchen to find her scraping the holes out with a pocket knife while she squirted alcohol into them to kill the germs. She couldn’t see the back part of her leg good enough so she handed me the knife and told me to dig around in there to make sure all the rust was out while she kept on squirting that alcohol. Well, I tried, but I was pretty clear that I’d never make a doctor ‘cause I just couldn’t root around in there like she wanted me to. Now I asked her to let me take her to the doctor, since I could drive then, and at least that was something I could do for her. But she said no, weren’t nothing they could do and she thought the alcohol had pretty well killed anything that was left. That woman is something else.

Most routine maintenance for the car and house was done at home. Usually what Popi couldn’t do or fix, Gran could. Popi built a grease rack up under the car shed and we used that to change the oil, grease the wheels, and replace belts and hoses on the car. I learned how to change and rotate tires before I learned how to drive. One time the alternator went out in my car and there was no money to tow it to the shop. Gran and I took an old blanket and laid it out on the ground beside the car. We took the parts off one by one, laying them out in order, until we got the alternator off. We paid the guys at the shop $16 to replace the bushings and bearings, and then we put it back on the car ourselves.

Gran has replaced the wiring in her house three times since she and Popi built it and replaced the plumbing twice. When they first built the house, there wasn’t an indoor bathroom, just an outhouse and the johnny pot. I’ve had occasion to use both – and the outhouse is still standing and fully functional with a fresh roll of paper just in case.

Now as far as we were concerned, there were three socioeconomic classes when we were growing up – dirt poor, poor, and rich. My sister and I knew that we were in the middle because we knew kids at school who had a lot more than us. We qualified for reduced lunch, and for a while we got reduced lunch prices. Back then, when you got your lunch, you either handed the lunch lady your money or you had to say “free” or “reduced.” Some of the other kids made fun of us and said mean things about our family, so my sister and I quit eating lunch. I think the teacher called Momma after a while, because she found out. When we told her why, she cried, but the next day she handed us both the money for lunch and we never had to say “reduced” again. I can’t imagine what she gave up to give us that money.

But we also knew that we weren’t dirt poor, because we’d seen that up close. Our Great Aunt Elvie lived about five minutes away, down an old dirt road. If it was dry, you could get about two-thirds of the way down before the ruts got too bad. But if it was wet, we’d park up at the edge of the paved road and walk down to keep from getting stuck in the mud. Aunt Elvie had electricity, but no indoor plumbing and no running water. They used the outhouse and drew up water from the well outside to drink, cook and bathe. If they wanted hot water, they had to heat it on the stove. Elvie’s daughter Rosie was Momma’s best friend, and they spent an awful lot of time together growing up. Rosie told us last year after Momma died that she and her brothers and sister thought that Aunt Bell and Uncle Perv were Santa Claus because every year at Christmas, Gran and Popi would bring them new clothes and shoes, a new toy, and candy.

There were always lots of animals around – some out of necessity and some just for fun. We had chickens, cows, rabbits, goats, ducks, pigs, and of course cats and dogs. My first pet was a rooster named Charlie. He was great, a big colorful cocky fella who knew he was king of the barn. Now if you’d ask anyone else in my family, they’d tell you that Charlie was a mean son of a gun. But really he was just precious and I loved him. He’d follow me around like a dog, and I loved to hold and pet and feed him. My family claims that Charlie was vicious and attacked them for no reason, but I’m sure that they had to be doing something to antagonize him. For some reason, one day Charlie decided to move way out into the country to a real farm where there were other roosters. At least, that’s what my family said.

I learned how to milk a cow on old Bossie and gather eggs from the hen house without getting pecked. We learned about birth and death from the animals – watching a rabbit have her babies or a horse foal is a wondrous thing. And tending a sick animal and grieving when it dies teaches you a lot about the cycle of life and the interdependent web.

Growing up poor in the South brought many culinary delights. Having a garden in the summer was essential – we had to can and put up vegetables and fruits to have them in the winter months. We never bought vegetables, and buying fruit was rare – often coinciding with Christmas. Gran and Popi would plan and tend row after row of beans tomatoes, potatoes and corn. Other staples included cucumbers, squash, okra, cabbage, turnips, and mustard greens. Crowder peas, watermelon, cantaloupe and strawberries were scattered about. . . peppers and spring onions, a patch of rhubarb, grapes in back of the shed and some blackberry bushes down in the holler.

Popi would make a couple batches of grape wine every summer and put it up in mason jars to share with relatives and friends who’d drop by. My mom loved it and would hide it in different places so Popi couldn’t give it all away. When she died we found a couple of quarts and a one-gallon glass jar of the stuff hidden in a cabinet. Popi hadn’t made a batch in years, so the stuff has to be ten or twelve years old – it was good stuff.

Gran would make great blackberry jam, and if we were really lucky, blackberry dumplings. An apple and pear tree stood proudly out in the old cow pasture – Gran made pear preserves, apple jelly and apple betties with those. Popi would pick beans and we’d help string and break them a couple times a week. What a chore! We’d moan about it when really we had the easiest part. We’d eat beans five out of seven nights a week in summer, and Gran canned enough so’s we’d have them at least three times a week in winter. Gran made sauerkraut, tomato juice, canned tomatoes, and made just about any kind of pickle you can think of – bread and butter and mustard pickles are the best.

Turnip beans, pinto beans and cornbread were a regular meal in our house – Popi would sometimes just eat cornbread crumbled up into a big glass of buttermilk, and more than once I’ve seen my mom eat a big slab of cornbread slathered in mustard and stuffed with a slice of salted sweet onion. Most meals just automatically included biscuits or cornbread – white bread was almost unheard of in our house until I was a teenager – and still it was used sparsely, mostly for sandwiches when we went on field trips with school.

I learned how to cook from my gran – well, some things I learned from Mom, but mostly Gran was the one to show me how to do things. I can make fried chicken from start to finish – and I mean from raising the newly hatched chicken to seeing about his end-of-life experience to breading him up and laying him out on the kitchen table. Now, I’d prefer just to pick him up at the Food Lion, but needs must and I’m fully capable of doing it from scratch. Whipping up supper from practically nothing isn’t too difficult, as long as you’re not too picky about what you eat. Most summer nights growing up we ate whatever was fresh from the garden – we’d pick it in the afternoon and eat it at night. Fried squash, fried okra and sliced tomatoes were my favorites. You didn’t have to turn on the oven to cook so it didn’t heat up the house too much. About once a week we’d make biscuits and slather them with mayonnaise to make a tomato sandwich – or we’d make a cake of cornbread and have an onion sandwich. I think my husband would die if he walked in one night to a cake of cornbread and some sliced-up onions. And my kids would probably petition the state to take them. . .

This spring when we were home for one of Gran’s doctor appointments, Alex got to go on a trek with Gran. It brought back a lot of memories for me. They went on a hunt for poke salad – a weed that grows wild in the country. Lots of country folks go picking poke salad in the spring. So Alex and Gran went out and found a mess of poke and brought it back home. As they washed it up in the sink, I listened to Gran tell Alex about it just as she’d told me about it 30 years ago. Poke salad is poison – before you can eat it, you have to boil the poison out of it. You have to boil it and pour the water off three times; then you can fry it in a little grease or cook it up with some scrambled eggs. Now why, you may ask, would someone even bother to eat something like that? Well, in the wintertime, if you ran out of vegetables that you canned in summer, then you were out of vegetables. There was no going to the store to get some more – you were just out. By springtime, folks were ready for something green to eat, and poke comes out early. I don’t know how folks first figured out about boiling out the poison, but it is pretty good if you do go to the trouble. And it’s fun going on the hunt too.

There were lots of fun things to do. We made playhouses, built forts and tents, wandered down into the holler, ransacked the barn and old pig pen house, and sometimes we went up to explore the old Fancy Hill graveyard. The favorite thing, though, was to roll down the hills in inner tubes and old tires or to ride the mud buggy down the hill beside the house. Now the mud buggy was an invention of my favorite cousin, Marsh. Basically, it was an old red Radio Flyer wagon, kind of beat up and rusty in spots, but still pretty workable. We’d sit in that wagon, one or two at a time, and push off at the top of the hill. We’d go flying down to the bottom, over a couple of humps until finally we’d jump over a little hill and land in the back garden. In summertime we wore that hill into a solid dirt track, and summer showers brought the mud – thus the name, mud buggy, because a little bit of mud didn’t keep us off the dirt track and by the end of most days we’d be covered from head to foot in red clay.

On the weekends we’d do something special as a family – take a walk down through the woods or head over to the bottoms to cool off. Know what the bottoms is? The bottoms is a place down at the river – you could go fishing or swimming – our version of hanging out at the pool. We also went to church at least three times a week. Church was a big part of our lives – we went to Sunday school and preaching on Sunday mornings, youth group and service on Sunday nights, and on Wednesday nights we had Girls in Action or Acteens when we got older. Sometimes on Friday or Saturday night the youth group would go witnessing somewhere. It was a lot of fun and I still remember my youth group leaders, Roger and Pam.

I remember our preacher too, the Reverend Fain Farmer. He was very charismatic and had an altar call like you wouldn’t believe. Some Sundays the whole church would be down front rededicating their lives to the Lord. I was baptized by Rev. Farmer in the baptismal pool at Hardin Baptist Church. The baptismal pool was up in the front of the church, behind the pulpit and above the choir loft. Being baptized was serious business – you wore a special robe and stepped down into the pool where Rev. Farmer waited. He stood facing the congregation, and the person to be baptized stood facing the side and grasped Rev. Farmer’s arm. Rev. Farmer would then place one hand behind your head, and with the other he placed a handkerchief over your nose and mouth. Down you went, backwards into the water while Rev. Farmer prayed over you. I think I must have needed a few extra prayers, because it seemed to take forever and I came up gasping for air and seeing stars.

Every year, Momma would take me and Marla on a vacation somewhere. More often that not, I got to pick where we went. No, it wasn’t fair to Marla, and no I don’t know why I got to pick, I just did. Our summer trips always started out the same way, no matter where we ended up. The first stop was always at the Firestone on our way out of town, so they could fix whatever was wrong with the car before we left – because Momma’s old car was always so broke that we just couldn’t fix it at home. And, we took several staples with us always – a case of motor oil, two gallons of water, jumper cables, a jack and tire iron and an eight-inch deer knife in the dashboard. It was the odd vacation when we didn’t use most of those before we made it home.

One summer we drove up to Kentucky to see the blue grass – any of you ever seen the bluegrass of Kentucky? No? Well, me neither – as far as I could tell the grass was just as green there as it is right here in North Carolina. That would have been a wasted trip except we ran across a horse farm where they raised and trained racing horses. And then we got turned around on the way home and ended up in Indiana – which was cool because that was one more state we could say we’d been to. Another time we went to Pigeon Forge to go to Dollywood. We got as far as the front gate and Momma realized that we didn’t have enough money to buy tickets – so we left and just wandered around Gatlinburg and ate in a nice Italian restaurant called The Best. It’s still there, right on the main strip in Gatlinburg, and I’d recommend it to anyone visiting the area.

We went to Williamsburg one summer and didn’t have enough money for tickets to either Colonial Williamsburg or Busch Gardens. So we ended up just going to the visitor’s center and souvenir shops at Colonial Williamsburg – and then we ate at a good Italian restaurant before heading home. (I can’t remember what that one was called, though.)

It didn’t matter how broke Momma was, we went somewhere every summer. I was talking with Gran about it recently and she said she didn’t know all of that, but that she’d have given us the money to go in those places if she had known we’d needed it. I laughed and told her that she had given us money every summer for our trips – money to stop at the Firestone and get the car fixed so we could go in the first place.

My husband says it’s sad, but I don’t think so. Remembering all the places we went and things we did, or almost did, is a lot of fun. I love telling those stories to my daughter Alexandra. It was a lot of fun to tell her these stories while we got ready for our own recent trip to Dollywood. She was so perplexed and asked, “Momma, why didn’t you just take more money with you?” I realize how different her growing up is from mine, because I could tell that she just couldn’t understand that there wasn’t any more money to take.

The last thing I want to talk about this morning is race, because I don’t think you can talk about growing up in the South without at least bringing it up. I can tell you that I had more in common with poor black folks than I did with rich white folks. I can tell you that I learned derogatory names at school and that some of those names were for black folks and some of them were for poor folks.

I remember very clearly the first time I heard one very nasty derogatory word. Our kindergarten class was out on the playground and I was playing with my friend Tara. A couple of little boys in our class started kicking dirt at us and taunting us. When one little boy first said the word, calling my friend a name, she and I were confused. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew it wasn’t good because of the way he said it. I yelled back at him and told him to go on and leave us alone – and then he called me a name too. It broke our hearts that day and it still breaks my heart. I wish it had never happened.

I can tell you that I had lots of friends in school, but I only invited white friends over to my house. And likewise, I was never invited over to the homes of my friends of color. There was some unspoken rule about that – we didn’t talk about it, it just was. Everything about that felt wrong to me, but I didn’t have the solution then. And I still don’t – but I know that we have to talk about it. There are still invisible walls between races and classes, not just in the South, and not just in our country. I think we have to talk about that – about our experiences – and we have to listen, too. Then maybe we can see that we all have more in common than not.

So, if you’re over in High Point one day and want to talk some more about it, stop by the house for supper. I’ll make us a cake of cornbread and slice up some onion. . .