The Cross Timbers (5 page)

One day George and I, while looking for wild grapes in the woods, found a “bee tree.” It was a large hollow post-oak tree with numerous bees coming out or going into a hole about halfway up its trunk. We marked the tree by cutting a cross in the bark and a few days later our brother Tom helped cut it down. The hollow trunk burst open when it fell, revealing a large quantity of honey. Our father made a “bee hive” and Tom, who had half-a-dozen hives of bees and knew how to handle them, helped us to get them into the hive after they had attached themselves in a huge cluster to a branch of one of the nearby trees.

This started our bee keeping, but we later got three or more hives of bees. We “robbed” them about twice a year and so always had plenty of honey for our own use and some to give to our friends. It was put in stone or glass jars that were then placed on shelves in the cellar. Here were also put the large flat “crocks” of milk, as well as butter, pickles, jam, jelly, preserves, and canned fruit or anything else that should be kept cool. Sometimes a jug of buttermilk would be lowered by rope into the well, for although we could not drink the water it was quite cool!

Although there was a certain amount of sameness about the food of all the families in our community, no two housewives served their families meals that were exactly the same. The basic materials might be the same, but the blending and cooking brought differences. The McCarty's made salt-rising bread, which could be smelled by any visitor as soon as he entered the house.

Every woman made biscuits using the same ingredients, which were flour, buttermilk, lard, a little soda, and salt, but no two
women's biscuits were alike. Some were large, tough, and of a bluish tinge; others light, dark brown, and flaky; some were streaked with soda, and others with too little soda were heavy and flat. They varied in size, too, but were usually of fairly generous proportions. All were made with sour milk and soda, for baking powder, sometimes referred to as “yeast powders,” was considered not healthful, and the sour-dough biscuits of the Cow Country and Alaska were unknown in the Cross Timbers.

Dining rooms were virtually unknown by rural families. Everyone ate in the kitchen and there were no dining chairs. When visitors were present they sat in the living room until the hostess announced dinner. The host then asked everyone to bring his chair unless he happened to be sitting in a rocker. The straight chairs were of various types. Some had seats of rawhide, others of cane, and still others of wood. Along the wall behind the table in most homes was a long wooden bench, on which some of the children sat.

If several visitors were present there might not be room for the children at the table, so that they had to wait until their elders had eaten, which might seem a long time. Because screening was unknown one child would be given a leafy branch of a tree to wave back and forth above the table to keep flies away. Guests usually deplored this and urged that it was not necessary, for “everyone could mind his own flies.”

Any youngster assigned to such a task fondly hoped that his parents would agree and relieve him of this tiresome duty. Having to wait was bad enough, but it was immeasurably worse when the child was in a situation where he could smell the food, see the choicest pieces of chicken disappear from the platter, and
hear the shouts of the other kids, who were outside playing “black man” or “town ball.”

When the summer was extremely hot my father would build a brush arbor just outside the back door of the kitchen. Beneath this he would put the dining table, the bench on which George and I sat at mealtime, and any chairs that were not needed in the house. It was far cooler to eat out there than in the kitchen that was heated by the big wood stove, on which the meal had been cooked. In case of rain the table would be brought back to the kitchen but it was taken outside again when the skies were clear.

Almost everyone in the community covered the table with an oilcloth except on Sunday or when company was present. Meat of some kind was served at almost every meal. In the summer the vegetables might be green beans boiled with a slab of salt pork, or mustard or turnip greens—again with salt pork. Green peas and new potatoes were boiled together and seasoned with butter and a little milk.

In winter navy beans were boiled with a ham hock or a piece of salt pork or bacon, or lima beans were boiled and seasoned with butter. Sweet potatoes, which were baked in the oven, were available in several varieties, but pumpkin yams were our favorite type.

In bitterly cold weather my father liked to roast sweet potatoes in the ashes of the fireplace in the living room. A dessert was seldom served on weekdays unless visitors were present but the molasses pitcher was on almost every table three times a day and virtually every meal was “topped off” by molasses.

One day when supper was a little late John Clark dropped by while we were eating. When asked to sit and eat with us he
refused, saying that he had already “et” his supper. After a few minutes, however, he remarked, “I believe I will taste of them molasses.” He picked up the pitcher and poured a little of its contents into a spoon, assumed a judicial attitude as he turned his head to one side, and finally said, “No, they're not quite like ours. Mighty good though.”

Upon another occasion Lucy's nephew, Charlie Robinson, and his father, who was county assessor, stopped at our house about noon and were persuaded to sit down and have dinner with us. Charlie was slow of speech and still slower of action. After everyone else had finished Charlie continued eating until Mr. Robinson grew impatient to get back to his work.

“Come on Charlie,” he said sharply. “You've eaten enough. Let's go!”

“Why Pappy,” was the response, “I ain't tetched the molasses yet.”

Although syrup was usually considered sufficient for an everyday meal, most families canned a considerable quantity of fruit, largely peaches and blackberries. It is a significant commentary, both on the size of the average family and the capacity of the youngsters for food, that almost every housewife bought half-gallon glass jars for canning instead of the quart or pint sizes commonly used today.

“Law no,” one of our neighbor women once said to Alice, “I allus buy half-gallon jars cause a quart wouldn't go half-way 'round at our house.”

Fruit jars cost so much that few families felt able to buy a sufficient number to serve canned peaches or berries except on Sunday or when “company” came. At other times, if any fruit ap
peared on the table it was likely to be dried peaches or possibly dried apples. Because our orchard was large we had a great quantity of peaches to dry every summer. We also made a great deal of blackberry jam and peach preserves. In some instances these preserves were made with sorghum, which was far cheaper than sugar.

My father was more “forehanded” than were most of the neighbors. At hog-killing time we “rendered out” many stone jars of lard, and we always borrowed a big sausage mill and
usually ground a washtub full of sausage. George always turned the mill, while my duty was to feed it with the meat Father had trimmed from the hams and shoulders, together with the tenderloins, putting in two strips of lean and one of fat.

After the meat was ground, it was seasoned with salt, black pepper, sage, and a little red pepper. Two or three sausage cakes were then fried and eaten in order to determine whether it was properly seasoned or needed a bit more salt, pepper, or sage. Once it had been approved, it was packed tightly in long cloth bags about three inches in diameter and hung in the smokehouse.

Sometimes part of it might be packed in gallon jars of stoneware, with melted lard poured on it to a depth of a couple of inches. These jars were then put in the cellar along with the stone jars of lard, honey, preserves, pickles, jelly, and jam, and glass jars of canned fruit. A jar or two of headcheese, sometimes called “souse,” was made and placed in the cool cellar.

With these resources produced on the farm plus an ample supply of milk, buttermilk, eggs, butter, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and dried peaches, perhaps my father was justified in feeling sorry for any family that “lived out of paper sacks.” It is doubtful if there were any of these in our part of the Cross Timbers but most of the wheat farmers on the nearby prairie might be so classified.

Although our daily fare throughout the week was plain and sometimes lacked variety, it was substantial, nourishing food calculated to “stick to the ribs” for several hours of hard work or active exercise. Almost without exception, the same was true of our neighbors. Most of them would have viewed with horror what is now called a “Continental breakfast,” consisting of a sweet roll and coffee. A man who was to split rails, chop cotton,
or plow from around sunrise until noon wanted meat, eggs, hot biscuits, gravy, and maybe pancakes!

Getting the children to eat is today a problem for many parents. This was not so in the Texas Cross Timbers in my boyhood days. Then the problem, if any, was to fill them up. The kids seemed perpetually hungry. Even getting them up for breakfast was no chore when they were awakened to smell the savory, sagey odor of frying sausage or of country-cured ham, and knew that eggs, hot biscuits, and plenty of butter and syrup or peach preserves would also be on the table.

If the weekday meals were substantial but plain, the “vittles” served at Sunday dinner or to any expected visitors were of such nature that they might be called “fancy.” Because of the lack of refrigeration the type of food served to “company” depended to a considerable extent upon the season of the year. In the summer the meal was likely to include a big platter of fried chicken with a large bowl of cream gravy, green peas cooked with new potatoes, mustard greens, radishes, onions, and perhaps other vegetables from the garden. Dessert would be cake, custard or peach pie, or blackberry or peach cobbler.

In the winter the meal might consist of either boiled or baked ham or baked chicken with dressing, candied sweet potatoes, cabbage or turnips, lima beans, pickles, and the usual dessert of a fruit cobbler, pie, cake, preserves, and jelly. Chicken and dumplings might be served at any season and always there was butter, strong coffee, milk, and buttermilk. In the late fall or early winter the meat at a dinner for company might be baked spareribs or roast pork.

While a white or red tablecloth was spread over the weekday
oilcloth, I cannot recall having seen napkins on a table more than two or three times in ten years. They were of cloth, for if paper napkins had been made before the last decade of the nineteenth century they had not reached the Cross Timbers. The dishes in our home were ironstone china made by Meakin in Hanley, England, while Tom and Lucy's were Meakin lusterware, now eagerly sought by collectors willing to pay a high price for a lusterware plate or platter.

The children were usually taught “table manners” with great care by their parents, who diligently sought to “practice what they preached.” It must be admitted, however, that some of these elders were at best a bit old-fashioned in their eating practices. Hot coffee would be “saucered and blowed” by some of the oldsters, and more than a few senior citizens who visited us used a table knife not only for cutting but as a “common carrier,” just as did the writer of this old-time verse:

I eat my beans with honey

I've done it all my life

They do taste kind of funny

But it sticks them on the knife.

Such a person, however, thoughtfully put the coffee cup on his plate while he drank from the saucer in order to avoid staining the tablecloth and was careful to wipe or lick his knife clean before reaching for the butter!

Looking backward over three-quarters of a century, I feel that the vittles of the Cross Timbers dwellers were often more palatable than the food served today in many swank restaurants, where it costs a dollar or so to sit down and a great deal more to get up.

4. Reading: Common and Preferred

From the time we had stayed with Mrs. Blodgett, I began to feel that George and I were not quite like the other boys of the neighborhood. This did not mean a feeling that we were better or worse than the other kids of the community but only that we were
different.
Just how or why we were different never occurred to us, but it seems clear to me now that because we both read a great deal we lived, to some extent, in a make-believe world, into which few of our boyhood friends could enter.

Just when I learned to read with some degree of fluency would be hard to say, but it must have been by the time I was five or six years old or possibly even earlier. At any rate, when I entered school at the age of eight the teacher put me in the fourth-reader class and in a few weeks advanced me to the fifth-reader group.

My father read almost nothing except the Bible and his church paper,
The Signs of the Times,
devoted to the Old School Baptist cause and published in New York by Gilbert Bebee. Father knew the Bible almost from cover to cover, however, quoted passages from it constantly, and applied it to daily life.