Papaw did not suffer fools gladly,
and even a momentary lapse or a minor infraction could earn you
a cutting remark. If you were lucky you would get off easy with
a contemptuous look. He was alternately baffled and irritated
by children, and as a result I gave him a wide berth when I spent
time with him and my grandmother throughout my early childhood.
As the years passed and I took on the recognizable form of an
adult (to whom he could relate) I became less intimidated and
he became more personable and affectionate.
I remember a humorous incident one summer at
the Henderson home on Kivett Drive in Greensboro. The front corner
of the ranch-style brick house aligned with a grassy bank which
dropped off sharply (about six feet) just by the basement doors,
while the front lawn tapered off gently down the hill. A narrow
sidewalk ran along the front of the house and ended at the front
steps. I decided it would be a fun thing to pedal a small tri-cycle
down the walk in front of the house at as high a rate of speed
as was possible, and see if I could get up enough momentum to
run off the end of the walk, speed through the short stretch of
grass, and cut a hard right at the corner of the house in order
to go airborne over the steepest part of the bank. (I was very
small...and it worked on television…) I got up a running
start, pedaling like a fiend, clattered off the end of the sidewalk,
spun through the grass, and, to my disappointment, what happened
when I swung over the bank had more to do with being trapped inside
a clothes dryer than soaring gracefully through the air. I remember
seeing sky, and grass, and tire spokes, and gravels, and then,
at very close range, my grandfather's polished shoes. I sat, up,
pushed the tricycle off me, and shook my hair from my eyes to
see that he had backed his car out of the garage and had been
leaning beneath the upraised hood inspecting the engine. I had
come barreling around the corner and tumbled down the bank like
a maniac to land in a pile at his feet. For a moment we stared
at each other in surprise. Even at that young age, I could appreciate
the startling scene from his perspective. I burst out laughing
and the corner of his straight-set mouth finally quirked up. "Well,"
he sighed, "at least you can laugh about it."
Papaw had an impressive garden and raised
a variety of vegetables and fruits. He had raspberry bushes in
neat rows and when the berries were ripe, I would slip away down
to the garden and sit between the low hills of rich red dirt,
scooting systematically from bush to bush, stripping each one
of even remotely ripe berries. He sometimes let me ride along
as he plowed the garden, and I would sit on the fender of his
old farm tractor, or stand on the running board, breathing in
the smell of summer sun and freshly turned earth.
One of the highlights of my grandfather's
life was a trip he took to "the Holy Land". I think
this trip must have happened in the late 1970's, and I believe
he may have gone with his brother, but I do not remember the specific
details (although he showed me many photographs of the bleak,
arid landscape and crumbling stone structures which he infused
with spiritual significance). He brought back with him a small
bottle filled with water from the Jordan River. I believe he also
brought me a small, beautifully dressed doll (I want to say, though,
that the doll came from Greece, and not Palestine, but I can't
remember).
My grandfather's parents had been Methodists,
so I don't know how he and my grandmother came to attend the Society
of Friends except that it was the closest church to their house
on Kivett Drive. (He did come from a long line of early Quakers,
but my grandmother's folks were German Lutherans.) I would occasionally
attend services with them, but the services were very different
from what I was familiar with, and I was typically uncomfortable
at my grandparent's church. Papaw sometimes did duty passing the
collection plate from aisle to aisle during the service, which
I found novel and interesting, but I was usually stultified by
the time the service came to an end. My parents and I sometimes
attended Christmas Eve services at the Concord Friends Meeting,
some aspects of which I did enjoy. The contemporary building's
lights were dimmed, allowing flickering candles to cast shadows
on the soaring ceilings. Festive, colorful lights and decorations
adorned the halls and the sanctuary. A choir sang, and small presents
were exchanged. It sit momentarily transfixed as the pictures
crystallize, reassembling themselves in a colorful mosaic of memories.
Christmas lived at Papaw and Granny Henderson's
house. Carolina Christmas's in my lifetime have rarely seen a
flake of snow, but December air had a chill that even the brightest
winter sunlight could not dispel. When it was time to go hunt
for a tree, my cousin Stephanie and I were bundled up in coats
and mittens and herded out of the house to trot cheerfully along
through the woods behind our purposeful, ax-wielding grandfather.
We left puffy clouds of breath trailing behind us as we hurried
to keep up with his long-legged stride, but somehow the magical
fairyland of sparkling frost and the white-hot sear of the frozen
air in my nose and lungs had enough time to make a lasting impression.
Some fine, tall specimen of fir would die that day, sacrificed
to the doubtful honor of our decoration. Styrofoam popcorn balls.
Copious amounts of silver tinsel. Rainbow strands of clumsy, fat
little lightbulbs. Onto the tree they all crowded as Stephanie
and I tortured the piano into coughing up Greensleeves and Silent
Night.
Papaw spent all of his working career that
I am aware of in the service of the Greensboro Fire Department.
I believe he retired as an Assistant Chief. He had a sharp mind
and he once showed me sketches of ideas he had for inventions
and improvements. I have one newspaper article with a photo of
him, crisply uniformed, cranking a fire hose around a hand reel,
an invention with which the article claims he was credited.
Another brush with fame came back in the 1950's,
I think, when he rescued a man who had fallen from a radio tower
and was stuck, suspended about halfway up. The article I saw in
a Reader's Digest-like magazine had another photo of my much younger,
bare-chested grandfather grappling his way up the tower scaffolding
before a crowd of onlookers. He was the hero of the day.
When I was about eighteen I finally decided
to start pursuing my genealogy in earnest. I turned to Papaw
and began to pepper him with impertinent and probing questions.
He was more than willing to oblige my interest (which he shared)
and we fell into an easy camaraderie of Saturday afternoon visits
and Sunday drives to see the landscapes of his childhood.
He had a number of family heirlooms which had
been passed to him from various family members. A few of the many
things I remember:
- a very early model of washing-machine (a
generous description) which had belonged to his mother,
- a gold-headed walking stick which had been
given to his father by the railroad (after my gr. grandfather
lost a leg on the job)
- a spinning wheel which had belonged to my
grandmother Jessie's mother or grandmother
- a set of portraits of his mother, Esther,
and her first husband, Bill Phillips
- a pre-historic shark's tooth as big as a
man's hand (not an heirloom, but something I remember, nonetheless)
As we motored around northern Randolph County,
he would point out spots of interest, including the homestead
of my grandmother's family, the Low's (now owned by Dorothy Shepard
Low). He told me stories of the occasional antic perpetrated with
his brothers, but there were not many of those. His father was
a strict disciplinarian and was no more approving of "foolishness"
and high jinks than my grandfather himself was. Papaw once confessed
to me that he feared he had been too hard on his own children,
but that he was much less so on them than his father had been
on him and his brothers.
Thelma Henderson Schoolfield's baby
shoes.
|
Papaw's mother had died relatively young (in
her forties) of complications arising from an amputated leg. This
left my great-grandfather, Artemas, alone with three barely-adult
step-children, and five children of his own. Of these five, all
were boys except for the youngest, Helen, who was about six years
old at the time. The children had to step up and shoulder the
considerable burdens of daily life which had theretofore been
borne by their very able and talented mother. This loss had to
have been hard on my teenaged grandfather, of whom much was already
expected.
Papaw graduated from Nathaniel Green High
School. A graduating class photo shows a handful of individuals
lined up on the front steps of the school in two or three very
short rows. Papaw looks dapper, but intense and unsmiling (photos,
it would seem, were nothing to smile about in those days). Another
photo from his school days shows his basketball team assembled
on the same steps, a gangly collection of jug-ears and spindly
limbs protruding from oversized uniforms that hang at unbecoming
angles. Papaw stands in the center, holding a basketball in front
of his midriff with both hands. Despite skinny legs and knobby
knees, his arms were well-developed, a by-product I would guess
of a never ending grind of chores and labor.
It is unclear to me how he met my grandmother.
I have been told that their mothers met at the Methodist church
and became fast friends, and it was through their mothers that
they met, but I never recall him mentioning any specifics. I know
they dated for a number of years before marrying. Perhaps one
or the other of them was trying to make up their minds, though
the few surviving letters I have from him to her reveal a surprisingly
sentimental nature; he often referred to her as "Cotton Blossom".
He was a few years older than Granny, and in
the tiny microcosm of backwater "society" in which they
lived, I believe it was generally acknowledged that his family
had staked out higher ground on the social steppes. In retrospect
any social distinction between the families of the small rural
community seems laughable. While the Hendersons may have existed
in grander circumstances before The War (and I do not mean either
of the World Wars), there was not much left to puff up about by
the time the 1930's rolled around. Nevertheless, Charles "dressed
to the nines" to go calling on a farmer's daughter in his
flashy little roadster. His future father-in-law, Cyrus Low, thought
Charles was "quite the stuff" with his polished looks
and manners.
What my grandfather did not tell me, and what
I was to learn many years later from a member of my grandmother's
family, is that my grandfather's oldest half-sister was adamantly
opposed to his "marrying beneath himself". So much so
that she offered to pay his way through medical school if he would
forego the marriage. It is a testament either to my grandfather's
stubborn Henderson nature, or my grandmother's charm, or a genuine
mutual affection on both parts, (or some combination of those)
that the offending offer was rejected, and they married on the
16th of December, 1933.
When I was a very little girl Papaw and Granny
Henderson took me to visit the remains of the Henderson family
plantation near Silk Hope (Chatham County, NC, formerly Orange).
I mentioned that the Hendersons had been a degree grander before
The War, but all that remained of that grandeur for me to see
five generations later was a graying two-story "plantation
house" (a glorified farm house, really) collapsing under
its own weight. The property was over-run with weeds and thickets,
but I do recall a huge tangle of wisteria dripping with resplendent
lavender-blue blooms. In my fanciful imagination I thought that
if I climbed through the gnarled, thickly leaved vines, I would
emerge in another time. But the wisteria was about the only thing
of grace and beauty left. The corpse of a decaying dog lay near
what had once been the slave quarters. The magnificent interior
had been stripped and scavenged. The floors and stairs were rotting,
the porch roof sagged dangerously in spite of the best efforts
of a once-grand colonnade which strained to support it, but it
wasn't hard for me to imagine my antebellum ancestors fanning
themselves on the verandah in the Carolina twilight. Sadly, this
picture in my mind never fails to dissipate into the post script
of the Civil War, the death of Isaac Henderson and the subsequent
impoverishment of his family.
Papaw was one tough bird. He survived
two bypass surgeries and a stroke before his death in 1990. The
stroke left him blind in one eye, and partially paralyzed on one
side of his face. The paralysis bothered him, I think, more than
the blindness. He dabbed self-consciously at his mouth with a
handkerchief. Even with his impairments, he continued to be out
and about, and I tried to see him as often as possible.
The last time I saw him he was cheerful as we
made plans for my next visit, but in an extremely uncharacteristic
gesture, he stopped me at the front door as I was leaving and
embraced me. He cleared his throat and spoke quickly, gruffly,
"I love you." Startled, I drew back and stammered, "Well…uh...I
love you too, Papaw!" As I guided my car out the drive I
saw him still standing at the glass storm door. I grinned and
waved and he waved back at me and then I rounded the curve and
drove away…and he was gone forever .
