Easter at Pop's House 1966

Martha, Rachel and John, hamming it up (pun intended!).

These pictures go with an entry I posted on May 7, 2007.

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Black Magic, Black Dress; My Childhood in Clothes 2

Ach, Mutter,This old, black dress, I have been embroidering French flowers on it. [1]

When my mother was a little girl, my grandmother worked as a tailor at the Sears and Roebuck factory down by the Mississippi River, a job she held during the Great Depression and for many years after. She became an expert seamstress.

Mamaw’s hands, gnarled with purple and blue veins and hard pointed fingernails that she filed regularly, were not rough, but they weren’t soft either. Sometimes she painted her nails a soft pink color, but most of the time her hands were busy—hanging clothes on the line—a continuous supply of socks, shorts, and smocks worn by me and my four brothers and sisters, chopping onions, peeling hard-boiled eggs, making the beds with box corners, rubbing our croupy chests with Vicks Vapor-rub, and always—sewing. Her brown wicker sewing basket was always nearby.

She seemed to be constantly patching pants, replacing buttons, darning socks, or embroidering a new face on an old stuffed animal. Her stitches and her imagination could transform something plain into an item of beauty. She made Barbie doll clothes out of fabric scraps and matching night gowns for my rag doll and me. But the most amazing thing she did was to make her stitches disappear while she sewed.

I sat by her on the couch many times as she wet the tip of a long thread with her tongue, then deftly passed the end through the eye of a needle, pulling the two thread ends even with each other, then wrapping them swiftly around her finger and into a secure knot. Into the fabric the needle went, and out again, up and down, every stitch disappearing as she worked. "Over, Mamaw! Let me see the back!" But the backs were always void of stitches too, and Mamaw always laughed at my perplexion. Many times she tried to show me how to sew, but my stitches glared from the fabric like the cracks on the school playground. I felt special whenever I wore something she had made. Store bought clothing just didn’t have the same feel and I began to wonder if Mamaw was magic. But like all Southern women of her time, Mamaw followed the social rules of etiquette, even when sewing, the same rules that governed how a lady looked, acted and even felt:

1) Never wear white in the winter
2) Black is for funerals or adult formal wear, not for children
3) Always wear gloves to church, or carry a pair if you haven't had time to wash them
4) Never carry a purse that doesn’t match your shoes
5) Always carry a hanky—one with your initials embroidered on it if you’re lucky
6) Always wear clean underwear in case you get in a car accident and have to go to the hospital
7) Before you leave the house, make sure your slip isn’t ‘showing.’


One Easter, Mamaw bought matching dresses of yellow and white dotted swiss for me and my younger sister. I don’t know if she was too busy to sew, or the dresses were on sale, but I knew it was supposed to be a privilege to wear store bought. Our yellow dresses screamed "Springtime!” They were delicate and lacey but the feeling wasn’t there.

When we returned home after Sunday services, the rain had stopped but water was still flowing down the gutter. The air smelled sweet and felt balmy and clean. We were leaving soon for Easter dinner at Mamaw's house, and Mama warned my sister and me not to get dirty, but we just wanted to float boats down the street—curled leaves and some empty walnut shell halves, pretending that fairies were going for a ride down a wild river. Fifteen minutes later, my mother’s face crumpled into disappointment when she saw the mud splatters on our new dresses. She hurried to get a rag and soap, but the stains didn’t come out completely.

When Easter came the next year, I was surprised when my grandmother pulled a piece of black velvet from her sewing closet and began measuring me. By the end of the day, I was wearing a beautiful new jumper over a white blouse, but something wasn't right. I turned slowly for my grandmother while she looked the dress over with a crease in her forehead. She tugged on the hem, pulled the dress at the back to test wiggle room, smoothed the jewel neckline. “It fits, Mamaw, it feels perfect!” But she continued to frown. “Aha!” she said a moment later, and reached for her mysterious sewing basket. I watched my grandmother’s hands while she rummaged through various containers: a miniature Whitman’s chocolate box that still smelled like chocolate even though it was full of snaps; an empty mayonnaise jar filled with buttons of every shape and color; a cigar box fraying at the edges, the mysterious contents of which were always changing. Mamaw's sewing basket not only held needles and thread, but zippers, rolls of ribbon and lace, rosettes, hooks and eyes, iron-on patches, thimbles and various small tools—contents that kept me entertained when I was little, and continued to fascinate me later.

Suddenly as from thin air, she held up two pink rose appliqués, one in each hand. “Ohhh!” I had never seen anything so beautiful. I fingered their soft raised texture. Within minutes, Mamaw had sewn one to each shoulder of the dress, the stitches disappearing with each prick of the needle. I viewed myself in the mirror. The pink roses glowed like the first tulips of spring. I smiled at my grandmother's soft expression and she smiled back. Now I had proof positive. I was going to wear black velvet. In the Spring time. To church. On Easter Sunday. My grandmother was indeed, magic.
[1] Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), U.S. poet. “Explanation.”

Three or Two in Aqua Blue; My Childhood in Clothes, 1.

It was a store-bought dress. I don’t know how I knew that at such a young age.

The little dark-eyed girl's favorite Sunday dress was a pale aqua dotted swiss with a smocked bodice and short ruffled sleeves, like fairy wings with white lace on the edges. She felt like a butterfly when she wore it, and every week in the old Presbyterian Church in downtown Memphis, someone always stopped her mother or father to comment on how beautiful she looked. Her mother would smile down at her, sometimes placing her white gloved hand on the top of her head gently, or reaching out to touch her if her father was holding her in his arms. The little girl thought she had the most beautiful mother anywhere.

The chapel was large with three sections and it sloped down toward the front. The little girl, her parents, and her older brother and sister always sat in the same place, the right side section, fifth row from the front. The little girl liked this spot because whether she was sitting or standing, she could see all the beautiful stained glass windows--the tall elegant ones in the front above the altar, and the more simple but still pretty ones on each side of the big room. She never got tired of looking at the blues and reds and yellows, the intricate designs and the way light through the glass made patterns on the opposite walls. She especially liked the stained glass window of Jesus with a kind look on his face, holding a little lamb, and when the sun was in the right place in the sky, it shined through the stained glass, lighting up Jesus in a way that made people stop and stare.

The little girl thought that the tall, dark benches they sat on every week always smelled like lemons and the same smell that came from the crack between the cushions of her grandmother's couch. She had to stand up to see over the backs of the benches, and her mother let her do this because she was a quiet child, obedient and sweet. The big round woman sitting on the row behind the little girl's family always raised her eyebrows and held out her large wiggling fingers to invite the little girl to sit on her ample lap. The little girl was rather shy and she'd smile and look away, but she was fascinated with the strings of shiny round beads hanging around the woman’s neck and down the front of her clothes, so she'd look at her again when she thought the woman wasn't looking at her.

There were many colorful hats in the congregation too, soft pink or green ones with little nets that hung down over the women's foreheads, or hats with beautiful flowers on the front or back. The little girl thought the hats were very pretty and she’d spend time looking, comparing one hat to the next. She thought some hats looked funny, especially the ones with feathers sticking up, but she always loved the tight simple little hats her mother wore that matched her dresses perfectly.

About the time that the little girl began to grow bored, the little girl's mother would say, "Look! There's your daddy!" while one by one, the choir members came through a special door in the corner behind the pulpit. It was a small round door like the one in a fairy tale. It opened in the wall, and many of the men had to duck to walk through it. The little girl's father was rather tall and she thought he looked so handsome standing in the back row of the choir in his long blue robe. One time she waved and said, "Hi Daddy!" real loud. Her father laughed, but her mother whispered in her ear that she had to be quiet in church. The little girl noticed that her father would always smile at her, but once the music began, he put on his serious face and watched the choir director. He sang with his mouth open wide like an egg and little lines in his forehead. Then the choir members would go back through the little door and after a few minutes, the little girl's father would appear next to her in his dark suit. Then the minister would stand up, walk to the pulpit and hold on to it with both hands. When he began speaking, the little girl’s mother and father would sit up straight and encourage her to listen. But the little girl didn't understand all of the minister’s big words and she would soon lose interest.

Sometime later, another man would walk down the aisle with a large silver plate in his hands. The little girl knew that people put money in the plate and sometimes the little girl would watch her father reach in his pocket and give a few coins to her older brother or sister, who put them in the plate just like a grown-up. When her father passed the plate across her to her mother, the little girl would look quickly to see the shiny nickels and dimes. She always wanted to play with the tray and its contents, but this was not allowed. So she would stand up again and watch the plate going from hand to hand, down the rows, around the room, and listen to the little plinking sounds as the coins were dropped.

After awhile, the little girl would fall asleep leaning against one of her parents with the sound of her father's warm, rich voice and her mother's sweet clear soprano singing: "All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia! Alleluia..." Later, the little girl would wake up for just a moment, long enough to know that someone, usually her dad, was carrying her out to the car to go home where a delicious Sunday dinner was waiting.