The Little House essays are just one of series of essays that collectively tell my personal story.  I introduced the whole life story in an introduction to the entire series that include the series on the Shorter School, Huntingdon College, Marriage and Family, Law School, Law Practice, Work as a Judge, Judicial Education, Return to Law Practice, Alabama Politics, Church Work, Civic Work, and Retirement ant Gardening. 

The earliest years are some of most formative.  I lived the first eight years of my life at the Little House.  They were good years.  Some of my fondest memories take me back to that simple life in a very rural setting.  We were very poor, but almost everyone that we knew was poor.  It was a very different way of life.  It deserves recollection.

I will describe the Little House in some detail in the second essay that tells of my birth there. In this introduction, I am more interested in pointing to the way of life that it involved, and that I will try to describe, both directly and indirectly in these essays.  These essays are but one part of my story, but in many ways, it is the most important part.  As I said in the main introduction to these essays, I will present my evidence of a way of life that I feel was important in short essays, descriptions and anecdotes.  The path that I have followed in life has led through fascinating landscape, and has always been interesting.  The essays, descriptions and anecdotes are snapshots depicting the view from the path.  The landscape may be familiar to some, but I believe that my particular vantage points will create new and different impressions. and it starts at the Little House.

On this website, I also tell the story of Mary Christine DeBardeleben, who was also born in Macon County.  She was a remarkable person, in the first graduating class from the University of Alabama that included females who lived on campus. She was truly a missionary, trained as a missionary and chose to do missionary work to Blacks in the south.  Her career with Methodist missionary work continued until her retirement years, when she returned to Macon County to teach at the Shorter Public School that I attended.  I now realize that she was still engaged in missionary work to her own home area.  The way of life described in these Little House essays is the exact way of life that she returned to minister to in 1945, when I was three years old.

The saga that I want to describe continues with the Shorter Public School essays.  It was a very small white school in an overwhelmingly Black county.  The need that the school was meeting, the circumstances with which it was dealing, may shed a new and different light on events that occurred.  There needs to be a description from a different point of view than any that is currently available.  And the understanding starts with the way of life with which the school was dealing very successfully.  And I present that way of life in these essays.

As indicated in the general introduction, the essays, descriptions and anecdotes will be presented as free-standing entities.  They can be read separately from each other, with meaning.  But like a collection of snapshots, they collectively portray a larger reality.  They will be factual, and facts always give rise to multiple epiphanies.  The descriptions, anecdotes and essays will point to a larger reality.  But I will just tell the stories in anecdotes, and present the ideas in essays, and largely leave to the reader the application or selection of the appropriate epiphanies and concepts. 

The essays in this Little House series are not presented in any particular order.  They all have to do with descriptions of events that occurred and things related to the Little House during the eight years that I lived there.  However, I have used the linking capability of the website so that you will have many opportunities to jump from one post to related posts that are not sequential.  Also, at the end of each essay is the opportunity to link quickly to the next essay in the sequence that I have presented them.  To the extent there is any pattern of organization of it is geographic.  I started at the Little House and gradually spread out in the presentations of descriptions.  There are a few essays that deal with multiple topics, but for the most part, there is only one “point” to each essay.  As for as organization is concerned, you might say that, remembering them from seventy years later, I presented them as they came to mind!

Four short months after the “day that will live in infamy” I was born in the Little house.  The Little House was a two-room shack near the north edge of Calebee Swamp, close to a branch that led directly to the swamp. 

This picture of Daddy, Mama, Wade and me was made on June 20, 1942. I was less than two months old.  Wade is in the overalls!  It was made in the front yard of the little house. Mr. Frank Pierce’s house or barn is in the distant background. The school bus would later turn around in the area to the left of the drive, just beyond the sweetgum tree, and the small oak tree just beyond the sweetgum.  the wysteria–in the trellis–got out of the trellis and engulfed the sweetgum by the time I actually remember it.

Dr. Philip Malcolm Lightfoot delivered me, and my parents named me Philip Dale Segrest (Dale).  The Doctor asked if Philip would be spelled with two “l”s or with one, like his name, and of course the response was one. A year later there was a note from the Doctor enclosing his picture.  The event occurred on April 25^th, 1942, which happened to be my Granddaddy Mote’s birthday.  From the time that I remember, I spent all my birthday nights with him, to the time of his death in 1958. 

My older brother, Clinton Wade Segrest, (Wade) had been delivered by the same Doctor in the same shack four years previously, on July 7, 1938.  My younger brother, Forrest Chandler Segrest Jr., (Chan) would arrive on the same scene four years later, on August 3, 1946, while I sat in Granddaddy Mote’s car in the yard.  They couldn’t make me stay over at Grandma Segrest’s house across the branch to the East.  I was a mama’s boy.  Wade was eight by then, and he stayed over at Aunt Runie’s with Montez and Zenoma.

Mama and Daddy, pictured above, (possibly their wedding picture) were married by the Macon County probate judge in 1936.  They built the Little House, with help from his brothers (he had four brothers and three sisters) in 1936 or 1937.  The front room in the Little House was on the north side, a fairly nice sized room with two double beds, a baby bed and a cot.  It was also the sitting room with a couple of rocking chairs.  The bigger rocking chair had one rocker broken off just where the rocker left the chair to the rear.  It occasionally turned over, if anyone sitting in it had something particularly important to say.  One such incident involved Vesta, a black lady who occasionally came to help mama do stuff like washing—but I’ll get back to that later. 

The fireplace was in the front room, which we actually called the living room.  Uncle Buddy had engineered (i.e. laid the bricks) for the fireplace, and everyone thought it was a wonderful fireplace.  And it was wonderful—the only heat in the house except for the kerosene stove in the kitchen, which was used for cooking, not for heat!  There was a knothole a little bigger than a quarter that went right through the floor right in front of the fireplace.  When I got big enough to crawl under the house, I found lots of stuff that I had put through the knothole, including not only marbles and tinkertoys, but also mama’s favorite butcher knife!  But, after all right in front of the fireplace was the best place to be in the winter time—a wonderful place to try to whittle. 

The fire poker was a bent piece of solid iron that was about as big around as the metal used keep concrete from cracking, but I have no idea as to its origin.  Probably had something to do with a wagon.  But it could make the sparks fly when Daddy poked the burning logs with it.  Mama whitewashed around the fireplace and on the hearth with white mud.  (White mud is a little like red clay, but it is white and slick.  I went with her up to the big road, just below where Chan’s house now stands, and we got white mud out of the ditch there.  She put it in a bucket with a little water and painted the fireplace with it, from time to time. 

The front door was fastened securely at night with a piece of wood about six inches long and an inch and a half wide (called a latch, I think) on the wall next to the door with a single nail through the center, so that it would rotate.  At night, we turned it on the nail so that one end held the door shut.  

If you went out the front door, you were on the front porch.  It had a tin roof, like the house itself, that was supported by rafters.  There was nothing under the rafters—the were exposed.  What we called bumble bees—really carpenter bees—loved to burrow into the rafters, leaving a little pile of sawdust on the porch.  It was important to learn to distinguish the a “bumble bee” from a “steady john.”  We thought that a bumble bee would sting, and a steady john would not.  Actually, a “steady john” must have been what is actually called a drone bumble bee.  And actually we didn’t ever learn enough about the difference to avoid an occasional sting anyway.  The best plan was to leave them all alone! 

Speaking of buckets, the water bucket was on a shelf in the kitchen.  It was just to the right as you went through the door from the living room.  Everybody drank from the same dipper, of course.  A “wash pan” sat next to the water bucket.  Everyone washed their hands in the wash pan before eating.  

The kerosene stove was also in the kitchen.  The kitchen was a smaller room.  There was also a table in the kitchen that Daddy had made.  It had an oil cloth table cloth.  Mama and Daddy liked to tell the story of Wade’s billy goat getting in the back door and pulling the cloth from the table.  Broke the salt dish, or something like that.  The kerosene bucket—a brown five gallon can with a spout—sat in the corner.  The chairs were cane bottomed straight chairs, but when the canes wore out, Mama wove new bottoms with baling twine. 

When I arrived on the scene in 1942, there was no running water—not even a well.  We got water from the branch, or from the well at Uncle Earl’s, who lived across the branch about a quarter mile to the East.  He and Grandma Segrest lived together there, and he didn’t marry Aunt Daisy until 1948, which was the year Grandma died.  There was no electricity and no telephone.  We had no motor vehicle. 

Kerosene lamps provided light.  The Aladdin lamp was very nice.  It had a mantle—some kind of fabric that you had to burn, leaving only the ashy filament.  When you lit the lamp, the kerosene burned up through the mantle and put off quite a bright light.  And it had a shade, ling more modern lamps.  But the best idea was just to get to bed early, especially in the winter time.  When the fire died down it got cold in there.  Sometimes the water froze in the bucket! 

But once you got to bed, everything was fine.  Two, three, four, or even five homemade quilts.  Everything was fine, that is, until you had to get up.  Even after Daddy built the fire in the morning, it was still cold in there!  

Speaking of quilts, I “pieced” a quilt top myself.  Did most of it before I started to school.  That’s what all the old women were doing, so I decided to try it.  Mama quilted it for me.  (Put it on the quilting frames and put a solid sheet for a bottom, cotton in the middle, and sewed simi-circular arcs about an inch apart through the whole thing.  Chan did one too later on, but he cheated—used the sewing machine.  He was always pretty smart. 

I mentioned before that there was no running water, and you may have wondered about the bathroom.  There was none, either inside or out.  One went “out of doors” to relieve oneself.  (“I’ve got to go out of doors,” usually meant the equivalent of “I have to go to the restroom”)  Of course, when we were very small, there was a little pottie that went under the bed.  Baths were another question.  One did not take an “all over” bath every day.  Usually one used a bath cloth—often just a small piece of scrap cloth from clothing or an old sheet or sack—and sponged off with water in the wash pan referred to above.  The bath cloth was appropriately called a “wash rag.” 

When I was born, there was a dog named Smokey who lived with us at the Little House.  He was old, and I don’t remember the details of his death.  But his collar, effectively called “the dog belt” survived him to good purpose.  It hung on a nail next to the door into the Kitchen, and was Mama’s instrument of choice for punishment! 

Mama was not born in Macon County.  She was born at Morris in Blount County.  She was the Daughter of William Dee Mote and Myrtie Stubbs Mote.  She was part of a large family with five brothers and five sisters.  Grandmother Mote’s family—the Stubbs family—was a large family, mostly in the Birmingham area, and we never knew them very well.  Grandaddy Mote’s—the Mote family—was also a large family, mostly in the Birmingham area, and we never knew them very well, although there was and still is a Mote family reunion that we sometimes attended after we were almost grown.  Grandmother and Grandaddy moved around a bit.  Granddaddy Mote had been a coal miner in Birmingham, and a truck farmer operating from Shades Mountain.    Granddaddy sold his interest in the farm on Shades Mountain to his brother, and bought a four-hundred-acre farm in the Blackbelt region of Macon County.  The family moved to Downs, in south Macon County in 1934, near the Bullock County line.

Mama was born January 12^th, 1918.  The boys in Mama’s family included Dee, Wiltshire, Hickman, Archie and Emmette.  All the boys remained in the general area of Macon and Bullock Counties.  The girls were Sue, Maggie, Mama—whose name was Ella—Martha, and Tally.  Aunt sue studied nursing in Birmingham, and married Sam Sommers, a Jewish doctor, and wound up in New York.  Aunt Matt (Martha) joined the WAVES in World War II, and met and married Adam Goetz.  They lived in Baltimore for a time, but wound up in California.  Aunt Tally, visited with Aunt Sue in New York, met and married Joseph Abdallah, who was of Assyrian descent, and lived in Brooklyn.  Aunt Maggie married Berry Spratlan, and they lived in Hardaway, near Downs, in south Macon County.  There was another Sister, Tommie  Her clothing caught fire from an open heater at the old Shorter School after they moved to Macon County, and she burned to death.

Mama and her family had lived on Shades Mountain before coming to Macon County.  She told us about Uncle Dee and Aunt Maggie finding buzzard eggs under a rock on the mountain.  She said she would take us there, but never did.  We visited Shades Mountain after becoming adults, but didn’t see any buzzard eggs in the flourishing upscale housing that had developed there.

She attended Shades Cahaba High School while living on the Mountain.  She didn’t finish, and didn’t finish at Shorter High School in Macon County either.  Instead, she fell in love with one of the bus drivers.  That was Daddy.  She was eighteen when they married.  Daddy was twenty-six.  They married in 1936, and built the Little House after marriage.  Wade was born two years later.

Mama was cheerful enough, especially publicly.  But she was quite intent on doing whatever was necessary to get by.  She was very frugal, and managed to get by on whatever Daddy managed to earn.  Income was always limited.  She was strict.  She was the main practitioner of the dog belt, the hung between the rooms in the Little House!  But she did nothing more with it than was needed.  She more than made up for it with  with her cooking.  We ate well, on limited means.  But I’ll come back to that. Mama read to us.  There wasn’t that much to read at the Little House.  But she came up with Heidi, Tom Sawyer, and a few other books.  She read us the funny papers from the Montgomery Advertiser, and funny books.  One book—it must have been a dictionary—had two pages of pictures that I remember, and I knew right where to find them.  One was a page of dogs.  I liked the Great Dane and the Chihuahua—the biggest and smallest.  The other was sea creatures.  I liked the sea horse.

She was a hard worker.  She worked in the home, and she worked in the fields, chopping, hoeing and picking cotton.  She worked in the garden, raising and picking vegetables:  Butterbeans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, irish potatoes, hot pepper, bell pepper, watermelons, cantaloupes, eggplants, okra, just to name a few.  And she “saved” the vegetables.  She used a “canner”—a pot with a pressure top, that would process and seal seven jars of vegetables or fruit at a time.  When refrigeration arrived, years later, she froze vegetables.

She was an intense, protective mother.  She saw to it that we behaved.  She insisted on school attendance.  She helped with homework, a little, but fortunately I don’t remember any of us needing much help.  She monitored our conduct and our companions.  It was a lot easier to get into the branch to play than to visit with other children.  She was determined to make things work for the best, even in difficult circumstances.  She was cheerful, smiling a lot.  But she could get up tight, even if it was just about getting housework done.

Mama’s flaw in those days was that she smoked.  Grandmother, of course, never knew that Mama smoked.  But she did.  She smoked Prince Albert.  Rolled her own with good “PA!”  the ad on the Grand Ole Opera said, “Roll your own with good PA, and take a puff or two, you’ll get that extra smoking joy Prince Albert brings to you.  The tobacco came in a red can with white writing, and Prince Albert himself was pictured right on the front.  Made great targets for the BB guns. 

Daddy’s family was a major influence in my early years.  His parents, Grandma and Grandpa Segrest were both still living when I was born.  Grandpa died two years later, in 1944, and a vaguely remember him.  He apparently liked to lay on a bench in the front yard at what I always knew as Uncle Earl’s house, just across the branch to the east of the Little House.  That’s where he and Grandma lived, and, of course, Uncle Earl, who was not married then lived there too.  I actually remember the old man, lying on the bench, in the front yard. 

Fermor Chandler Segrest and Minnie Braswell Segrest 

Daddy—Forrest Chandler Segrest, Sr.—was born December 27, 1909.  He was born about three miles east of the Little House, on a place that he called the “Dunne” place.  His brothers, Marvin Lynwood (Uncle Buddy), Ralph Verner, (Uncle R.V.), Robert Earl (Uncle Earl) and James Woodrow, (Uncle Jody), always lived nearby.  And his sisters Carrie Mae Slay (Aunt Carrie), Willie Reese Butler.(Aunt Willie), and Verla Ruth, Haney (Aunt Verla), were not far away.  We knew all of them well.  Uncle Buddy, and his wife Aunt Runnie, Uncle R.V., and his wife Aunt Ruby, Aunt Carrie and her husband, Uncle Pink, and Aunt Willie and her husband, Uncle Raymond all celebrated over sixty years of marriage. Only Uncle Earl and Aunt Daisy, Aunt Verla and Uncle Wylie had fewer than fifty years.  Mama and Daddy were married for fifty-six years before Daddy’s death on December 19, 1992. 

(Standing) James Woodrow Segrest, Sr., Robert Earl Segrest, Sr., Forrest Chandler Segrest, Sr., Willie Reese Butler, (Seated) Verla Ruth Haynie, Ralph Vernon Segrest, Sr. Carrie Slay, Marvin L. Segrest 

With both parents from large families, I had lots of first cousins—Uncle Buddy and Aunt Runie had eight children—Mae, Vernon, Juanita, Virginia, Aaron, Franklin, Montez and Zenoma.  Aunt Carrie and Uncle Pink had six—Pinkston, Frances, Warren, Grady, Ruth, and Alton.  Uncle R.V. and Aunt Ruby had five—Ralph, Donald, Joyce, Bob and Bill.  Aunt Verla and Uncle Wylie had only one—Charles.  All of those were older than me.  Uncle Jody and Aunt Ella had four—James, who is a year older than I, and Fay, Roy and Betty Jean, who are younger.  Uncle Earl married late, and his three—Murray, Robert and Terry, were all younger than I.  In the early years, there were foot paths connecting to all of Daddy’s brothers houses by the shortest route, so you didn’t have to go “around the road.” 

Daddy had two great granddaddy’s who were enlisted soldiers for the Confederacy in Civil War—Grandpa Braswell and Grandpa Segrest.  Both fought at Chickamauga, among other battles, according to family tradition.  One was part of the Army of Northern Virginia, for some reason.  I think that after Chickamauga, the both walked home.  I know nothing of any slave ownership, and am certain that they were not “plantation” owners. 

Everyone that I have ever met who spells their last name S-E-G-R-E-S-T can trace ancestry to Macon County, Alabama.  The Segrests arrived in Macon County soon after the Indians departed if not before.  There were three brothers, and the came from Orangeburg District, South Carolina.  They were prolific in Macon County.  There were lots of them there in my early days.  It was probably the most common name in the County.  And to the surprise of many outsiders, we were no longer closely related, although genealogists could trace the family tree, easy enough.  Family tradition had the family originating in Germany, but from what I have been able to learn, I suspect that our name bearing forebears were from the Swiss Alps. 

While all of my Segrest ancestors since the 1830’s were Macon County residents, I do not know of a real “home place.”  Daddy’s immediate family probably identified the place where Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Earl lived as a sort of home place, I don’t think they ever owned it before Daddy bought it in 1934.  My ancestors seem to have moved from farm to farm, but always calling Macon County home, or returning there after sojourning elsewhere. 

When I was born, I believe that Daddy’s sole occupation was farmer.  Previously, he had been a school bus driver.  While we lived at the Little House, about 1946, he drove a milk truck, picking up cans of milk and delivering them to the milk plant in Dadeville.  He then worked as a carpenter, along with Uncle Earl and others, for Conner Brothers, who owned a lumber supply store in Tuskegee and engaged in construction work.  He helped Granddaddy and Grandmother Mote build their new house at Downs in 1952.  He drove a tractor with a mower to cut grass and weed for the County on Road rights of way, and went on to work as a bulldozer operator.  Then he became a road crew foreman, and retired from that work.  The common thread was that he was practically always driving something, and prided himself in his driving skill. In his old age, we had a heck of a time getting the keys away from him, and had to actually disable the tractor! 

Daddy was a lively, well loved man.  He  was well read, although he went no further than the 7^th grade in school.  He didn’t start to school until he was about 9 year old, and could already read.  He was promoted to higher classes very quickly, and probably spent three or four years attending school, at the most.  Mrs. Rossie Pierce, who taught me first and second grade, also taught him.  He read the Montgomery Advertiser everyday. 

I don’t remember Daddy ever reading to us.  But he told stories.  He told about the three little pigs, and I am sure there were other traditional stories as well.  But our favorite stories were his stories about fishing.  As a boy, he had fished on Calebee creek with the Richardson boys, as well as the Jordans, who were his cousins.  And he either remembered the events with vivid detail, or was a creative story teller!  Based on the numbers of initials that we found carved into trees close to the Creek when we began to fish and hunt there, I think he probably had a lot of story material to work with. 

Daddy lohttps://dalesegrest.com/biospheric-faith-consciousness/3-stages-and-sources-of-faith/ction/ved to buck dance.  He danced for us occasionally.  I never understood how he did it.  It was a lively dance, and it didn’t look to me like his feet were touching the floor. 

In those days, Daddy smoked Camel Cigarettes.  I guess everyone smoked in the days of World War II, if you can believe the War movies.  He smoked a lot.  Later in life—I guess when he learned that smoking is bad for health, he quit.  But really, he just switched off to Blue Tip Cigars!

When we were small, Daddy told us lots of stories about his young days, and catching fish from Calebee Creek, which was about a mile south of the Little House.  Based on one incident that I remember, that happened when I was very small, I know that Daddy’s fish tales were not just tales. 

Daddy and Uncle Earl were working on a pasture fence in Calebee Swamp for the cows.  The cows were allowed to wander around in the swamp, for some reason, even though we didn’t own the land.  They were working on a fence next to the creek.  Of course, they had hammers with them for the fence work.  It was summer time, and as usual, the water in the creek was low.  One of them saw a school of drum, and edible fish species, near the edge of the water.  The fish may have been a little oxygen starved, but to Daddy and Uncle Earl, they looked like supper!

Into the creek they went with hammers flying!  They threw the fish out as they killed them with their hammers.  When they had finished, they had landed twelve or fifteen very nice fish. we had fish for supper that night!  It was important to take advantage of such opportunities in those days!

There were no lawns at the Little House.  Grass was not allowed in the yards.  The yards were keep clean with a “brush-broom”.  A brush-broom was made of bushes that grew down in the branch head.  They were cut off at the ground, the bottoms were bound together in a bundle, and the bushy tops used as a broom to sweep the yard. 

There were trees in the yard.  One was near enough the front porch so that you could climb right up on tin roof of the house, and, of course, we did.  The house had a tin roof and we had a radio.  Daddy figured out that if he hooked the radio antenna to the tin roof, reception was improved. But somehow electricity was involved. So, sometimes when we climbed the tree to get on the roof, we got a little shock!

If you went out the back door of the Little House, and turned to the right, you were looking at the “bus body.”  Daddy had been the school bus driver, and owned the bus.  When he quit driving, he took the body off the chassis, to use at the Little House.  He had built a brick furnace in it to build a fire to keep baby chickens warm.  There was also a brooder and a run pen, and I don’t remember exactly how all that worked, or if there were different operations at different times.  But the bus body was a fine place to play, and behind the bus body, well, that was “out of doors.”

The most interesting story about the bus body concerns a rat.  Daddy had some fine half grown chickens in the bus body.  Then at night, something started getting in there and killing them.  Daddy got some kind of wire trap, determined to catch the varmint.  He did, and it was a big ole rat.  Daddy was furious.  At that time, before I was born, he had some kind of vehicle.  Mamma’s sister, Aunt Maggie was there visiting, and got to see and tell about it all.  Daddy decided that the rat clearly deserved not only execution, but punishment.  So, Daddy devised a scheme to hook the wire trap, rat and all, up to the spark plug wire on the vehicle.  Only problem was that he couldn’t see the rat dancing!  He suggested that Mama hold the contraption up with the rat in it!  Fortunately, Mama had better sense, but Aunt Maggie really got a charge (of a different kind than what Mama would have gotten) out of the suggestion! 

The bus body was used for chickens before we had a chicken house.  The chicken house was built, at least in part from old material salvaged from Aunt Pinini’s house.  But I haven’t told about Aunt Pinini yet.

If you went out on the front porch, and looked to the right, you would see the Orchard.  There were lots of peach trees, a few apply trees, and a couple of pear trees.  One of the pear trees lived for many years, long after we departed the little house.  Switches off the peach trees were a convenient alternative to the dog belt.  But Mama never collected an arsenal of peach switches and leaned them in a corner for convenient access, the way Aunt Runnie did for Montez, Zenoma and Franklin!

To get to the garden, you had to walk out in front of the house, veer to the west, around the top of the branch head valley west of the house.  The garden was on the other side of that draw.  That’s where butterbeans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, radishes, peppers and lots of other great vegetables found their origin.

One year, Daddy cleared new ground for a watermelon patch down at the bottom of the hill below the garden on the other side of the draw.  He broke it up, plowed a deep furrow, filled the furrow with manure from the cow pen, and covered it over.  He planted Black Diamond watermelons and cantaloupes.  The hills (the place where you planted the seeds) were six or eight feet apart, and after the seeds were planted, were covered with newspaper with a rock on top to keep rats from digging up the seeds!  Watermelons were an important part of social life, as I will explain later.

Uncle Earl’s house was across the branch, about a quarter mile east of our house.  But there was a well-worn footpath that went straight to it.  You left the side yard of the Little House, went down the hill just south of the orchard, crossed the pasture fence, and went through the pine thicket to the branch.  There was a board that spanned the branch, so you could walk right over, pass just north of the cow pen, go up the hill, cross the pasture fence again, into Uncle Earl’s yard, just south of his smokehouse.

There was also a road that went to Uncle Earl’s and from there turned left and went almost straight to big road, about a half mile away.  The road from the Little House to Uncle Earl’s followed an arc out onto Mr. Frank Pierce’s place around the top side of the valley that contained the branch.  A spring the gave rise to the branch.  It was down below the road to to Uncle Earls, to the south.  The road followed the contour of the land, and was about level, all the way to Uncle Earl’s.  It had two ruts, worm by wagon, and the occasional automobile or truck and the school bus, that was driven by Mr. Maudie Pierce, the first grade teacher’s husband.

Right in front of the Little House, across the small front yard, was the sweet gum tree.  Its rosin was a decent substitute for chewing gum.  Mama made homemade tooth brushes from the twigs.  She worked the fibers around, so that the end of the twig was a little like a brush.  We couldn’t afford real tooth brushes, and didn’t like them anyway.  I remember defiantly breaking one that Mama got for me. Dog belt time!

The sweet gum tree, and a small tree—oak I think—just beyond it hosted a wisteria vine.  In the spring, the blue blossoms of the wisteria, hanging a little like grapes on a grape vine, were absolutely gorgeous. 

Christmas at the Little House was a greatly anticipated event!  The living room was decorated fully.  There was holly.  Sometimes mistletoe. The Christmas tree would be a cedar.  All the greenery came from nearby woods.  Decorations were well planned, and carried over from year to year.  I mentioned that Daddy smoked camels.  Inside the pack there was foil, lined on one side with white paper.  You could burn the paper off, and leave a shiny sheet of bright aluminum foil.  A little work with scissors, and there were icicles!

Mama would pop popcorn, and use a needle to thread through and make a nice decoration.  Sycamore balls were good.  I think they were rapped with foil, sometimes.  There were no electric lights in the early years—no electricity!  There were some glass trinkets—balls on a wire hook.

The tree was nailed to a board, and stood upright on the floor.  I think a wire held it upright, but the board may have been nailed to the floor.  The tree always stood by the front door.  Those icicles glistened reflections of the fire, and caught whatever other light there was.  Excitement blended perfectly with absolute joy!

A gold star topped the tree.  I think that Wade still has it.

On Christmas morning, there would be presents.  Cap pistols.  Balls to play with.  Apples and Oranges and candy.  An a little later bb guns.  Daisy bb guns.  (We hunted birds with those bb guns, but before Harper Lee had gone to print, Daddy gave us to understand that we were not to shoot mocking birds.)  Tinkertoys.  It was hard for us to contain ourselves on the night before, and the event itself was never disappointing.

When Uncle Hickman or Uncle Dee Mote showed up in a car to take us to Grandmother Mote’s for lunch, the emotions were always mixed.  We had to leave the toys!  But, looking forward to seeing all the Mote cousins helped overcome the disappointment!  We always went to Grandmother Mote’s for Christmas.  The excitement would build as we neared the destination.  We always had turkey.  And dressing.  And Ambrosia.  And always told and heard the same stories, but never tired of them.

But in the very early years there was a strange custom.  Everyone could not eat at the table at the same time.  There were too many.  But the old folks ate first and the children had “second table.”  Thank goodness, that custom, which I suspect was very general in those days, didn’t survive.  It probably ended by the early fifties.

After a wonderful day of food and visiting, we got our bag of apples and oranges from Grandmother, and got to ride in a car back home.  It always felt good to get back to the toys and Christmas goodies at the Little House.  But we will visit Grandmother and Granddaddy Mote’s place for my birthdays, before we finish writing!  I was born on my Granddaddy Mote’s birthday!

Well, although I had lots of aunts and uncles, Aunt Pinini was not actually one of them.  Her house was there when Daddy bought the place, and I don’t know how long she had lived there.  She was there before Daddy and his family built the Little House, and she probably had been there a long time.  Even then, the old southern tradition of calling elderly black people Aunt and Uncle as titles of respect was fading into the twilight.  But the house was there, right behind the Little House, maybe thirty yards away, and everyone called her “Aunt Pinini.”  A field road located right in front of her house led from the Little House to the field that everyone called Eleven Acre—“lemacre”, (an unrecognizable contraction of the actual words “eleven acre”) was what they actually called it—and we still do.

Aunt Pinini had daughters, Honey and Annie, but I don’t really remember them.  I vaguely remember Aunt Pinini.  She would give Wade and me sugar biscuits.  But according to Wade, she always made sure to tell us that the biscuits came from Grandma Segrest’s.  Apparently, there was some taboo that she did not wish to violate.  She may have done something about taking care of Grandma—I really don’t know.

Aunt Pinini’s house was a very small one room shack.  I remember very little about either her or the house.  She was very old, and apparently her health began to fail.  Honey and Annie came to get her, and she went to Birmingham to live with them.  After she moved away, the house was torn down, and the salvage Daddy used the material to build the chicken house.  He built the chicken house between where her old house had been and the Little House—a little to the east.

Daddy built the chicken house from the remnants of Aunt Pinini’s house.  It was down the hill a short distance from the house, to the southwest. It’s main door that faced down the hill, so you had to go around the chicken house to get to the door.  Once you entered the chicken house through that door, you faced the back of the chicken house and the chicken roost.  At night, the chickens went in there and slept, on the roost.  There were nests up on the roost, and I think under the roost on the ground, and the chickens also went in there to lay eggs.

But sometimes, a chicken snake would get in there and swallow the eggs.  Mama said the snake swallowed them hole, and he must, because after he swallowed them you could see the outline of the egg bulging its fairly slender body.  You could count the eggs!  Mama said the snake would jump off the roost to break them, but I not so sure about that.  The eggs that the snake didn’t get—and Mama beat him to most of them—were very good.

There were different kinds of chickens.  There were white leghorns and red leghorns.  In those days you could order the little chickens and the post office would deliver them.  I bet they couldn’t do that now!  Those are the only two kinds I remember us having.  But Uncle Earl had some black and white spotted chickens called domineckers.  We didn’t have any Domineckers.  I don’t think you could order them. I think Uncle Earl hatched and raised them.

But that is the other way to get little chickens.  You could have the old setting hen hatch and raise them, or you could just hatch them from eggs.  The easiest way was to let the hen (an “old setting hen”) set on them.  After a hen had a nest full of eggs she would “go on the nest.”  Old setting hens were right mean.  They would get after you.

Hatching them without the help of the setting hen was more tedious.  There was some kind or hatchery—a box that you could keep warm, and put the eggs in there, and you had to know when to turn them, like the old setting hen did, and after so long a time they would hatch.  The old setting hen would look after her biddies (the little chickens), but if you bought the biddies, or hatched them yourself, you had to put them in the brooder, where a light bulb kept them warm.  But that was after we got electricity!  I mentioned the bus body in another essay.  Daddy raised chickens in it.  He built a little furnace in there to keep them warm, but I don’t actually remember it in operation. 

But in any event, before long, if they lived, they would get to be “fryin’ size” and that was a great time for us!  That is, unless they were in the bus body and a rat got to them first.  But we had chicken killings.  You could either “wring their necks” or cut their heads off with an ax.  Then came the picking, after you dunked them in hot water.  And if they were young, there would be “pin feathers.”  Pin feathers were little black, pin like, immature feathers.  They could be pretty hard to get off of the chicken.

In today’s world of technological games, and sophisticated toys, one might well wonder how kids could possibly entertain themselves in the environment that I have described.  We enjoyed ourselves greatly, and the games may have stimulated imagination just as much—maybe even more–than today’s gadgetry.

Playing cars was one of the biggies.  In the sand, in the brush-broomed yard beside the Little House, there were, at times, extensive roads for “cars.”  Right after Christmas, we might have had a toy car or truck, but for the most part, we improvised.  Sardine cans, cut just right, made excellent trucks.  If the top remained intact on one of the short sides, the rest of the top could be folded to make a wonderful windshield.  Blue milk of magnesia bottles were luxury cars.  Vanilla extract bottles, up on their sides, with indentations, would pass for motorcycles.  Spam cans were the bulldozers that built and repaired the roads.  The list could go on and on.  And there were cows, mules, houses, barns and other imaginary representations, to support much simulated adult discussion of the entire operation.  The conversations, of course, were in the vernacular of the day, and involved make believe visits to neighbors, building projects and the like.

Cowboys and outlaws and Indians were standard fare.  Sticks, like the ones used to make brush-brooms, made excellent stick horses.  The reins, made of string, went around the big end, and the little end just tapered off.  The “horse” went between the legs, and our legs did the galloping.  In retrospect, it probably looked more like riding a snake than riding a horse, but that was no obstacle to our ready imaginations!  The tails of the horses would wear off smooth from dragging the ground.  And at night, the horses were hitched to the front porch.  Great battles occurred, often with imaginary opponents.  The Christmas cap pistols would last a while, and then be replaced by wooden weapons fashioned by Uncle Earl.  The discussion of clothes pens is yet to come—that fits in with wash day—but the spring loaded clothes pens, tied to the back of the handle of the wooden pistols, made a fine way to hold rubber bands, and fire them, after stretching them from the front end of the barrel.

Usually, there would be worn-out tires around the house, even though we had no vehicle.  They were great for rolling.  It was a bit messy when it rained and water got in the tire, and I never quite understood how it got in there, but it did.  Some of the tires were tall and then, not much like the short fat tires today.  I had a big tall firestone, and have no idea where it came from.

Automobile tires were not the only things that rolled.  We didn’t roll wagon wheels, but once the wagon tore up, there were wonderful parts.  The hub of the wheel that received the axle was made of wooden pieces that were bound together on the outer edge of the rim with a band of steel.  Perfectly round.  You could take a stiff piece of wire, make a crook on the end of the wire, bend it to a right angle with the rest of the wire, and push the band with it.  Once it got started, it was easy.  Now I know that it operated on the principle of a gyroscope, and that made it stand up as it rolled, and by tilting it you could turn it.  The faster you went, the better it worked.

Then if some of the cousins around, there were games you could play together.  Like Hellover, where you threw the ball over the house and the kids on the other side tried to catch it.  And bum bum bum, here we come.  Kids in one line said that, the opposing team s “What’s your trade” and the response was “Sweet lemonade” and then “What’s your initials” and then “Well get to work.”  Then the other side would start pantomiming things like picking cotton, chopping cotton, cutting wood, or whatever.  Once the challenging team guessed what it was there was a big melee.  I may be forgetting a few details!  This was usually under the direction of Montez and/or Zenoma and/or another cousin, Joyce, some of the bigger kids.

Franklin, Uncle Bud’s son, lived about a half mile away through the woods, and would come over and play baseball.  Well, it wasn’t exactly baseball.  We didn’t have a baseball, so we used a tin can.  And we didn’t have a bat, but a stick would do.  After a few licks, the tin can baseball could be sort of rough on the hands, and the bat became pretty ragged, but nevertheless the game went on.  Franklin was actually the left-handed pitcher for the Shorter High School team.

We played tin can ball in the pasture, in an opening just north of the pine thicket.  The pine thicket itself was a wonderful place to play.  I can still remember the odor the pine trees and pine straw.  The pine straw could be piled up, and you could turn flips in it.  Or if the girl cousins were around, we could play playhouse.  Playing house didn’t involve a real playhouse.  The walls of the “house” were outlined in rows of pine straw.  If you needed a door, all you had to do was leave off the pine straw.  If there were dolls around, and sometimes there were, they were the babies.

The pine thicket was also the location of my tree house.  The tree house was just a platform secured on two limbs that left the tree in the same general direction the same distance from the ground.  Getting the boards up there was the problem.  I would try pulling them up with a rope.  Wade wasn’t interested.  But by the time Chan was about three years old, he got interested.  So, he was on the ground, pushing the board upward and I was in the tree pulling.  After it got higher than he could reach, I had a problem.  I couldn’t pull it any farther, and he couldn’t push.  And I couldn’t drop it, because he was still there!  I said, “move!” and he said “Huh?”  It got him right between the eyes.  But somehow, we got enough boards up there to complete the house, such as it was.  The boards for the floor were actually “slabs”—the outer portion of a tree that went through a sawmill, and had one round side—but we put the flat side up.

We built an interesting “playground” contraption.  I think that Daddy must have built the first one at the little house, but we built our on after we moved to the house that Uncle Jody built.  We called this thing a “flying jenny.”  It involved sawing off a tree about three or four feet above the ground.  Then we cut a long pole—maybe the top of that tree—and somehow drilled a hole through it midway its length, so that half the pole was on one side of the hole and half on the other.  Then we got a long metal bolt, or spike.  The spike went through the hole, and into the top of the stump.  It took at least three people to play on the flying jenny.  One got on each end, and the other pushed so that it went round and round!  Sometimes, pretty fast! There were mishaps, like cousin Betty Jean flying off the end of the pole and sailing through the air, fetal position, to a landing that occurred with no serious injury.  It’s a wonder any of us survived!

And at night, we might play “fire ball.”  That was properly done in a plowed field, for reasons that will become obvious.  The fireball was made from rags or strings, or maybe even a coverless baseball.  It was soaked in kerosene.  When lit, it was exciting to toss it around in the field, but you had to get rid of it pretty fast.

Did I mention corncob fights?  They didn’t hurt all that much unless they had been soaked in a syrup bucket in water for a few days, but after soaking, they threw better and more accurately, and hurt worse when they hit.

A well-worn footpath led directly from the Little House to Uncle Earl’s house.  Unlike the road that went around the draw where the branch started, it went through the pasture and the branch.  The path left the Little House, headed east towards Uncle Earl’s, down by the orchard, across the pasture fence, through the pine thicket and right to the branch.  I shouldn’t have described play without including the branch!

The branch started with springs just a little north of where we crossed the branch on a wide plank that spanned the narrow stream.  Just above the plank was a broken dam made of bricks, partially overturned into the stream bed.  Uncle Earl had built that dam.  He mounted a little water wheel on it that turned a small grind stone that would sharpen tools.  That has always seemed like a lot of work for a machine to sharpen an ax!  And it apparently didn’t last very long before the branch flooded and took it down.

But just above the plank and broken dam was a delightful pool in the branch.  In it there were crawfish and tadpoles galore.  Little tadpoles and big ones.  I never really knew the difference, but I guess the big ones turned into bull frogs and the little ones into toads.  There were lots of other aquatic life.  Little insects that skipped across the top of the water.  Off in the edges there were wiggle tails that would turn into mosquitoes.  And there were snakes.  Mama always said that just because we didn’t see them didn’t mean that they didn’t see us.  “Watch for snakes,” and “Don’t get on a snake,” were well worn warnings.  But that didn’t keep us from having a great time in the branch!

A little southeast of the little house in the pine thicket, there was a sawdust pile.  There had been a saw mill at some point in time, and it made a big pile of saw dust.  I don’t remember anything about the sawmill.  Maybe it’s where they cut the boards to build the Little House.  Close to the saw dust pile was the pig pen, but I don’t remember the pigs that lived there.

Back in those days, Monday was wash-day—the day for washing clothes.  Early memories of wash day are very special.  I mentioned that there was no running water at the Little House.  There was no water at all at the Little House, in my earliest days.  The drinking water came from the well at Uncle Earl’s.  We didn’t wash clothes at the house at all—we did it at the branch! 

Washing clothes involved some interesting equipment.  There were wash tubs, a rub board, a wash pot, and if we didn’t string out some kind of wire between trees, the pasture fence would work for a clothes line, even with a little risk of snagging on the barbed wire.  But then again, you didn’t have to have clothes pens if you used a pasture fence.  If you did have clothes pens, there were two different kinds.  One kind didn’t have a spring, it was just a peg, with a split down the middle.  Come to think of it, they may have called that a clothes peg.  The other kind—with a spring–had two pieces of wood, flat on the outside, with the insides facing each other, with a notch to hold the clothes on the wire, and a spring between the two wooden parts with short arms toward the end that closed, to hold the two ends tightly together.  And, of course, there was washing powder.  I believe that it was Tide, even back then. 

Here’s how it worked.  You dipped up water from the pool in the branch just about the plank, filled the two wash tubs about half full of water—one for the wash and the other for the rinse.  The rub board went in the tub that you were washing in.  The tubs were galvanized, number two wash tubs, and I will not bother to describe them.  They are still made, and anyone who requires a description probably won’t understand the rest anyway!  The rub board had galvanized, corrugated metal sheet between two straight pieces of wood.  The metal began about 4 or 5 inches up the side pieces, leaving legs that went down into the tub that you washed in.  Above the metal, still between the wooden sides was a shelf, and above that a flat wooden piece in the same plane with the metal, and above that, a wooden piece between the two side pieces, holding it all together.  Octagon soap was the standard, and the bar of soap rested on the shelf above the metal when not in use.  (By the way, Octagon soap had coupons, and I think you could use to buy more Octagon Soap.  Mama cut them out and saved them, of course.

The rubboard stood in the tub, leaned up on the side of the tub.  The bottom of the rubboard was in the water.  The clothes were rubbed vigorously on the rub board, up and down, in and out of the water, and Octagon soap was liberally applied.  (The Tide went into the wash pot).  You had to be careful not to mix the whites and the colored clothes.  The colored clothes would fade on the white clothes.  Soap wash rubbed on and made suds as the rubbing proceeded. After the person doing the washing was satisfied that the grit and grime had been expelled, the clothes were transferred to the wash pot, for boiling.  I guess that it followed up on Pasteur’s great discovery. 

The wash pot was cast iron.  It held about 5 or 6 gallons or more, and was bigger around in the middle than at the top.  After the metal closed in toward the top, it spread out again in a flange around the very top.  It had three very short legs, and these usually stood on bricks, and a fire was made under the pot.  You put enough water in there to boil the clothes without boiling over.  If you boiled over, it doused the fire, and that was not good and had a distinct smell.  We had to gather trashy wood for the fire around the pot.  The fire was built so that any breeze carried the fire under the pot.  The fire around a wash pot also had a very distinct odor about it.  I can still recall that odor, like I recall the odor of cotton.

A wooden stick was used to punch the clothes while they were boiling.  The wash powder went in the pot, and you had to be careful not to put too much, and have suds boiling out of the pot!  After boiling the clothes for a while, using the punch stick, you lifted the clothes out of the pot and maneuvered them into the rinse tub.  The stick was helpful in getting the clothes out of that hot water. The rinse tub got the soap out.  Then the clothes were clean, so you “hung them out” on the line (or fence, as the case may be) to dry.  After they dried, you “brought them in.”

Octagon soap did cost money, and Mama was always frugal.  (And by the way, there was a war going on and commodities and supplies were “rationed”). So, Mama and Uncle Earl experimented with lye soap.  I can’t begin to describe the process.  As best I remember it involved running water through ashes to collect some kind of chemical, but I may be wrong.  And I think it involved something from a hog, but again I may be wrong.  And red devil lye.  She actually got the soap into cakes.  But I remember it being pretty potent.  It may have caused some wear and tear on the clothes, so it didn’t replace the Octagon soap.  Lye soap never became our standard washday soap!

Just across the branch and a little south of the path to Uncle Earl’s was the cow pen.  It was fenced and we always “brought up” the cows at night to stay in the pen.  Inside the pen was a cow shed.  It was about an open shed—a trussed roof held up posts around the outside, about 16’x 30’.  As best I remember the roof had a wooden deck and “tar paper” roof”.  “Tar paper” was a rolled roofing or siding material.  The long dimension of the shed ran north and south.  Down the middle next to the center were two rows of troughs for feeding.  I believe there was a row of poles holding up crest of the roof that ran the length of the shed.  There was a “V” shaped hay holder with leaning sides made of narrow boards several inches apart that would hold hay, that the cows could pull down and eat.  I think cow feed also went into the troughs.  In the mornings, Daddy and Uncle Earl fed the cows.  While the cows were eating, Daddy and Uncle Earl would milk them.  Wade milked too, when he got big enough.  I never got big enough, while we were still doing that.

The cows had names.  There was Suzie, and Flossie and Blaze that I remember.  I think maybe Blaze had been Suzie’s calf.  Wade and I had to go and “bring up” the cows at night.  Sometimes they were all the way down in salt bottom on Uncle Earl’s place, next to Calebee Swamp.  We would “get around” them and “drive them” to the shed. 

Suzie was mean.  Sometimes she would chase us, and we would have to get up a tree.  Flossie was nice, though.  Suzie was the bell cow, the leader of the herd.  After we had moved away from the Little House, old Suzie came up missing.  I went with Daddy in search of her.  We found her bones in edge of the swamp, in a brushy area with low vegetation.  I will always remember the strange pattern of broken-down bushes and cow tracks, where the herd had gone round and round her dead body.  Some strange, haunting death ritual.

Just north of the cow pen, and across the path that led to Uncle Earl’s there was what I will call a “patch” of French mulberries.  They are etched in my memory for some reason.  Wandering around in them was an adventure for a little boy.  It was not just the French mulberries—the purple bunches of inedible fruit—that were fascinating.  There were big spider webs.  In the mornings, the spider webs would catch dew, and if the sun caught it just right, you could see the rainbow colors.  And in the webs were the big, beautiful black and gold spiders.  And there were butterflies.  Big, beautiful butterflies.

And on the pine trees, in the pine thicket and close to the cow pen, we would find “locust” shells.  The shells were dried skins, left by an insect—I think a cicada—that we called locusts, apparently in a process of metamorphosis.  We found lots of them.  As twilight descended, the locusts—the actual bugs that would eventually left their shells on the pine trees—would “sing.”  There song was a distinctive, intermittent two pitched buzzing (maybe two different bugs) that I still associate with the sounds of night fall.  These look like the 17 year cicadas that you can now find on the internet, but it seemed like we had them every year.  Maybe their life cycle involves 17 years, but with a different crop every year.

            And around the cow pen at the right time of year, there would be “June bugs.”  They were green, and when they lit on a big flower, you could catch them.  Then you could tie a string around one of the June bug’s legs, and have it fly in delightful circles around and around, while you held the other end of the string.  Somehow, I associate their buzzing flying noise with the sound of lots and lots of airplanes near the end of WWII.

            And there was one more fascinating bug that intrigued us:  the tumble bug.  That is not exactly what we called them, but if you are from that era you will understand.  These bugs seemed to operate in pairs.  Somehow. they maneuvered dung (even including human waste) into a small ball.  Then, with one on one side, and one on the other, one would push, and one pull, I guess, but they were always intent one taking it somewhere.  I can’t say where they were taking it, or what they planned to do with it!  Oh well.  If you look up tumble bug on the internet, you will get the gymnastics.  If you want to see what I’m talking about, enter a search for “tumble turd.”

 The Old Segrest Homeplace

Although they arrived in Macon County soon after it was ceded by the Creek Indians, I have never heard of my Segrest forebears owning any plantation.  Other Segrests who were a part of the same Nineteenth Century migration into Macon County apparently acquired significant amounts of land, but I do not believe that my ancestors did.  If they did, they must have lost it long before I came along. My immediate ancestors seemed to have moved from farm to farm in the Macon County area from the time that they arrived in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.  I know that Daddy’s immediate family lived briefly in Tallassee Alabama for a very brief time when he was very young.

The closest thing to a “homeplace” for my forebears, was the place that I am calling “Uncle Earls.”  Daddy’s family apparently lived there off and on for quite some time, but to my knowledge, they did not own the place until Daddy bought it, in 1934, along with the land where Daddy built the Little House.  He bought 160 acres in all.  Daddy sold 80 acres to Uncle Earl, that included the place where Uncle Earl lived with Grandma and Grandpa.  But the family was already living there, and had lived there in the past, before Daddy bought it.  So, Uncle Earl’s home place was more or less the Segrest homeplace, for my closest Segrest relatives.  Grandpa died there in 1944, and Grandma in 1948.  Daddy had bought it, and Uncle Earl bought the part that included the old house pictured above from Daddy.

The old house where Uncle Earl and Grandma lived was torn down, and Uncle Earl used the salvageable material to build a new structure sometime after 1944.  Before that, it was an old fashioned four room house with a “dog trot” hallway down the center.  I don’t actually remember the hallway, or whether the ends had been closed in.  The old roof line drained in four directions, not quite coming to a point at the very top.  The new roof on the house that Uncle Earl built tapered two ways with a single roof line at the top traversing the entire house from east to west.  The hallway was eliminated, and there were six rooms in the remodeled house.  It included a “double” fireplace with a single chimney that served both the living room on the front, and the center room on the back that was a combination bedroom/sitting room.  Uncle Earl was a carpenter by trade, and did most of the reconstruction.

The main house of my recollection is Uncle Earl’s rebuilt house.  Grandma died at Uncle Earl’s in 1948, the same year that Uncle Earl married Aunt Daisy.

One of the peculiarities of Uncle Earl’s house, or it may have been the old house, that for some reason I accepted as quite normal at the time was that all through the house, on the side of the doors opposite the hinges, there was a triangular hole where the corner of the door had been cut off.  The quite logical explanation was that it allowed the cats to freely roam the house in search of mice!  But Daddy and Uncle Earl told the story of a dark night in the old house long before, when something strange entered through the hole and was making a strange noise as it made its way into a corner.  They decided that they needed to catch whatever it was, and used quilts to jump on and almost smother an old setting hen.  Stories like that were very amusing to them.  They told them over and over again!

The house was furnished with old fashioned, cane bottomed straight chairs.  I think that all of the grandkids—my cousins—must have learned to “plow” with those old chairs.  You see, you could turn them upside down, with the top of the back and the front of the seat on the floor, and hold onto the back legs of the chair as if it were a plow.  The front corners of the top of the front legs were worn smooth and flat from miles of plowing!

Soon after the remodeling of the house, Uncle Earl decided that he needed a storm pit.  Before that, Uncle Willie had a storm pit—some boards and tin over a ditch on the other side of Uncle Earl’s house from the Little House, as I remember it.  I don’t ever remember going to Uncle Willie’s storm pit, and don’t really know why anyone would have gone there!  The “ditch”, as we called it, was much more useful as a place for kids to play.  You could slide down the clay banks—especially if there was pine straw on the bank.  But I guess if it “came up a cloud”, Uncle Willie actually got in that thing.  If there had been a real flood, he would have drowned!

But Uncle Earl built a real storm pit.  He dug a hole about 10 feet square and four feet deep right behind the west end of the back porch of the remodeled house.  (Of course, I had to help dig, at about age six , and enjoyed it a lot!)  The entrance to the storm pit was a covered stairwell that led down into it.  It had a concrete floor, and concrete block sides.  The dirt that came out of the hole was around the west and south sides.  On the east side the concrete wall came up above ground level, and a couple of blocks were left off, leaving openings that the “old” folks could look through.  There was a roof, with rolled roofing.  It was a neat place.  With the passage of time, it became a bit moist and dank, but that was okay. You could store vegetables down there!

Some of my best memories involve “heading to the hole, ” (our affectionate name for the storm pit) because it was “coming up a cloud”.  Sometimes Uncle Earl would meet us half way, and help us across the fence to make sure we got there safely.  We never got blown away, like Grandmother and Granddaddy Mote’s house did in Calera in 1910!

Out in front of Uncle Earl’s, where the lane that led down from the big road turned west to go to the Little House, was a huge Black Oak Tree.  The tree was actually on Mr. Frank Pierce’s place and the family story was that many years earlier, the Pierces cut the tree down to keep it from sapping up the moisture from the adjoining field.  Sprouts sprang from the stump.  Grandpa Segrest cut off all sprouts but one.  That one sprout became the huge oak tree.  At one time, it was actually marked with a metal plaque by people from Auburn University, denoting the largest black oak tree in Alabama!  Under that tree, and in that tree, was a great place to play.  Forks in limbs made a good place for a tree house, but the limbs were so big, your hardly needed any boards.  Many watermelons, cantaloupes, and tomatoes have been shaded, eaten  and sold/or from the shade of that old tree!

If you went out the front door onto Uncle Earl’s front porch and looked to the right, in front of the porch and about six feet away, Grandma had a nice rose bush.  It was the vine type, and was on a frame.  Mama really like those roses, so Grandma gave her a “cutting.”  I was fascinated with that project.  The idea was that if you stuck the end of the cutting from the rose bush down in the ground, and kept it watered, it would sprout roots.  From that, you could generate a new rose bush.  At four or five years of age, I was totally engrossed with the project.  Mama faithfully set it in the ground at the Little House.  I would go and look every day, to see if it were growing.  Of course, I really couldn’t tell whether it was growing roots or not.  I would ask Mama every day, and she we tell me that we would just have to wait and see.

But I really wanted to know about those roots.  This was after we got a telephone, and Mama was talking on the telephone one day when I got curious about the roots on the rose cutting.  I inspected it, but still couldn’t see anything.  I tried to get Mama’s attention, but she was talking fpor a long time, it seemed to me!  I got so anxious to find out that I just pulled the cutting up.  It had roots, alright, but of course that was the end of the rose cutting project. 

A great lesson for life.  Some of the most sensitive, important things are destroyed if we insist on examining them too closely.  If we examine the roots, we kill the plant!

Uncle Earl had a barn right behind his house.  We didn’t have one at the Little House, but Daddy and Uncle Earl did a lot of their farming together back in those days, so we didn’t need a barn.  Our mule, Pete, stayed at Uncle Earl’s and spent nights in covered shed that was part of the barn.  Uncle Earl’s mule, Molly, stayed there too.  But independently of the mules, the barn was a fascinating place.  It had a loft, and there was all kind of stuff up there. The mule shears were there, long after the mules were gone.  It was a great place to play, there was a door that opened from the front of the barn into the loft, so you could put stuff like hay up there.  There was a shelf, or porch, just below the loft door that someone could stand on, and that made it easier to get things up into the loft.  But it was also a good place to jump from, if you were brave enough.  If some hay wound up on the ground below, it was even better!

On the ground level barn floor there was a corn crib, and there was a place where we stored cotton that had been picked, until we got enough to carry to the gin.  The cotton crib was a fine place to turn flips, and no matter how you landed, it didn’t hurt.  But the cotton didn’t stay in there all that long, so we needed another place to turn flips.  Wade, four years my senior, tried out the corn crib and was pretty good at it.  I couldn’t do a flip in the corn crib, so he decided to show me how, with accompanying oral instructions.  He perched on the partial wall that retained the corn in the crib so it didn’t scatter all over the barn floor, and proceeded, while talking.  “You go up, and over, like this…….” whereupon, he landed squarely on top of his head!  It was not like landing in the cotton, to say the least.  He walked around with his shoulders almost up level with his ears for two or three days!

We were delighted, on one occasion to find kittens right behind the barn.  Aunt Daisy feed them milk for some reason, and I don’t remember the ultimate disposition, but I don’t think Mama would let us keep one.

Sometime after we got a tractor, and Pete and Molly, the mules, were gone, Uncle Earl housed his milk cows in the shed where, the mules had stayed. One night he heard a commotion down there, and as usual in cases like that he called for Daddy. I’m not sure that Daddy had arrived by the time that Uncle Earl figured out that there was a fox in with the cows, and they were very much afraid of the fox.  Somehow Uncle Earl, while perched in the adjoining fence, managed to shoot the fox.  As expected, the fox tested positive for rabies.  And the cow, as they used to say “went mad.”  Rabies was a very scary thing.

I will have to be honest.  Most of the time, us kids didn’t wear shoes.  But there were occasions when we needed to have shoes, so arrangements had to be made to purchase them, and I remember what we did about buying shoes when we lived at the little house.  It may—or may not—have been associated with the war and rationing.  Both Daddy and Uncle Earl were involved in executing this plan. 

They didn’t actually take us to a clothing or shoe store.  We had to make other arrangements.  But the shoes needed to fit!  So, they carefully put my foot down on a piece of paper—probably newspaper—and they carefully cut a template for the foot, and that was what they used to determine the size of the shoes!  Armed with the paper, they “went to town”—Tuskegee—and made the purchase.  As best I remember, it worked ok, and the shoes fit.

One of my most memorable farming events from the Little House years was a trip to the gin.  In those days, financing was interesting.  For poor farmers, it often involved credit with other people in the farming business.  I think that Daddy had borrowed the money for a crop that year from “Miss Carrie.”  Miss Carrie Carr was a large landowner in the area.  I’m sure that she had tenants.  She owned a store and a gin.  She also financed the farming operations of small land owners.  The details are sketchy in my memory.  But I’m sure that she loaned Daddy money in the spring with the promise of repayment in the fall, from the proceeds of the crop.

We picked the cotton and put in Uncle Earls barn.  From there we loaded onto a wagon.  The wagon “body” was about 4 feet wide and about eight or ten feet long.  There were sides four or five feet high.  It held about enough cotton to make a 500-pound bale.  Axles ran under the wagon, the back one stationary, and the front axle would turn when the mules headed in a new direction.  On the ends of the axles were the wheels, mostly wooden construction, but bound in essential places by iron.  Iron bands circled the outside perimeter of the wheels and that is what made contact with the ground.

The front axle connected to a “tongue”.  On either side of the tongue were “single trees” that hooked onto the frame of the axle/tongue.    They were metal shafts, about 30” long, with hooks on the each end.  When everything was in operation, chains connected the harness on the front of the mules, Pete and Molly, to the single trees.  Bridles hooked to ropes that allowed the driver, back on the wagon, to “drive” the mules. 

The occasion that I remember must have been sometime in 1946-1948.  It was before we got a tractor.  The cotton was loaded, and Pete and Molly hitched to the wagon.  Off to the gin in far away Shorter!  Daddy driving, Wade and me right beside him, on the front of the loaded wagon.  Out past Uncle Earl’s huge Oak tree, Mr. Frank’s magnificent magnolias, the big Sassafras in Uncle R.V.’s field, to the big road.  Down the big road to the corner.  Off to the left toward on the gravel road through Calebee Swamp.  Three bridges.  Up Haden Hill.  Finally, onto US Highway 80.  To the left, just as if we were going to Hardaway and Downs, where Mama’s folks lived.  But not that far.  The gin was on Highway 80, right where the gravel road turned off to the right to go to Hardaway and Downs.  Highway 80 was paved with concrete!  Wade asked if the metal wheels were legal on the paved road, and Daddy said, “Yes, for farmers.”

The gin was amazing.  The gin had a tall canopy, and we drove the wagon right under it.  Once it was under there, there was a sucking tube about 8 inches in diameter that swung down from above, and sucked the cotton right off the wagon and took it into the gin. 

But once we got to the gin, we were off the wagon, and I don’t think we were allowed in there.  Later I came to know one armed or no armed people who lost them in the old cotton gins.  They were dangerous!  But out front of the gin, and off to the side there were lots of bales of cotton.  The bales weighed five hundred pounds, or more.  If they came out less than five hundred, they were considered “bundles” not bales.  They were about five or six feet tall, thirty inches or so thick, and three or four feet wide.  The top, bottom and narrow sides were wrapped with burlap.  The cotton was packed tight, and the whole thing bound tight with metals bands—three or four of them.  They stood upright.  You could climb up on a bale by using the bands.  What a great event it was to climb up, and jump from bale to bale! 

The cotton was ginned and baled.  Daddy settled up with Miss Carrie.  And then back home on an empty wagon!  But with precious memories for the twilight years.

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We didn’t have a refrigerator in my early days at the Little house: we didn’t have electricity.  But we had an “icebox” that sat in the kitchen.  The “ice truck” came as far as Uncle Earls place about once a week.  It was loaded with ice.  The ice was protected by heavy, insulated tarpaulins, on the back of the truck.  The ice was in large blocks, maybe 50 or 100 pounds.  The ice man could skillfully use an ice pick (or perhaps other tools that I don’t remember) and divide the blocks into whatever size was needed.

“Ice tongs” was a special, scissors-like caste iron tool, with points on the “business end” that could clamp down on a block of ice, so someone could “tote” it, just holding on to the handle.  You didn’t even have to hold both handles—gravity would clamp the ice block in place.  In due course, the ice block made it from the ice truck to the icebox.  The icebox was well insulated, and the ice would keep, without melting, for several days.  Other compartments in the icebox were good places to store, milk and other stuff that needed to be refrigerated. 

One of the most exciting things about ice was the ability to make ice cream.  Uncle Earl had a hand cranked ice cream freezer.  They mixed up the ice cream, put it in the central, metal part of the ice cream freezer.  Then chipped up ice, and it went into the wooden bucket-like container, between the outer walls and the metal freezer.  Salt made the ice get colder than 32 degrees F.  A handle on the side was turned, and gears meshed to rotate the metal container. 

When it got too hard to turn, the ice cream was ready.  OH MY!  If you ate too fast, it would make your head hurt!

About the time that Chan came along in 1946, electricity arrived at the Little House, and with it a refrigerator, that stored milk for bottles.  The refrigerator replaced the icebox, and the icebox moved to the little storage room at the end of the chicken house, where it stayed, and finally, years later deteriorated beyond restoration.  The refrigerator froze ice in trays, and we were never without ice.  But for a long time after the refrigerator came along, the icebox terminology remained.  The refrigerator was the new “icebox.”

When I was born, we did not even have a well, let alone indoor plumbing.  Before the well was dug, we had to get water the best we could.  Sometimes we got it from the branch, in buckets.  But usually we would get it from Uncle Earl’s.  He had a well as far back as I remember.  You had to draw the water from the well with a bucket and rope.  The rope went over a Whirl, and from there into the well, so that you could pull down—not up—to “draw” water from the well. They made special “well buckets in those days.  It was a sort of tall, skinny bucket.  The bail was twisted in a loop at its apex, so you could tie the rope on there, and the rope would stay in the middle rather than sliding from side to side and spilling the water as you drew the bucket from the well.  The tall skinny bucket was not inclined to float when you lowered it to the water, it would turn over on its side so that the water would run in, and when it filled and went under, you were ready to draw it out.

At one point in time Uncle Earl had a windlass on his well.  Somehow, in the local vernacular, windlass got converted to wi’less.  Of course, nobody had to spell that word, so I don’t know how the abbreviated word should be spelled!  Totin’ (another well-known country word) the water from Uncle Earl’s well could be quite a chore.  It was about a quarter of a mile from Uncle Earl’s well to the Little House, and a two-gallon bucket of water probably weighed 15 pounds.  Needless to say, a wash tub, or five-gallon bucket full weighed a lot more than that.  By the way, water buckets were also an identified product.  It was not just a bucket—it was a water bucket, and was usually enamel.  But I’m digressing, and I’ll have discuss the water bucket and dipper in another essay.  I was talking about getting the water from Uncle Earl’s well to the little house.  Daddy improvised.  He built a sled with runners on each side made out of two by sixes.  The 2X6’s stood upright, and boards were nailed across them. Only the two-inch sides of the 2×6’s touched the ground.  Daddy’s mule was named Pete, and he stayed at Uncle Earl’s barn at night with Uncle Earl’s mule Molly.  But Pete could be hitched to the sled, and drag it around the road to the Little House.  And I didn’t mention the milk cans.  Daddy had driven the milk truck, so we had milk cans that held about five gallons.  They had lids, and were very nice for hauling water!  And some where I will need to mention syrup buckets, and we used them for water sometimes.  They didn’t hold but a gallon and a little fellow like me could carry one of them!

But the time came when we had our own well.  I must have been three or four years old when Daddy got it dug.  There was a Black man named Buck Tolbert in our community who dug wells.  He also drove the school bus for Black children who attended the segregated Black school.  But again, I am digressing and that will require another essay! Buck Tolbert dug our well.  He used short handled picks and shovels.  The well was about three or four feet in diameter, and after he had dug down four or five feet, there was an improvised wi’less that served multiple purposed.  You understand, of course, that a wi’less had what I learned in physics to be a “mechanical advantage.”  Less strength was required to lift stuff out of the well with it.  So the wi’less was used to get Buck Tolbert into and out of the well!  And while he was digging, a helper used the wi’less to pull five-gallon buckets of earth from the bottom of the well to the surface.  Buck Tolbert had to dig down about twenty five or thirty feet before he found water, and then had to keep digging in the mud to assure a plenteous supply. 

The well digger was protected from cave ins.  The well curbs—concrete cylinders about three feet in diameter slid down into the well as he dug.  There are no doubt a lot of details that I don’t remember (not to mention some that my imagination from the memory of an event that occurred seventy-five years ago) but that is the basic story of the well digging.  I want even mention the fact that the five-gallon bucket came loose while Buck Tolbert was at the bottom of the well, but miraculously, he was not injured!

In the Little House days, there was a “rolling store.”  A large truck carried a supply of merchandise and circulated through rural communities selling the things that the poor country people needed.  The rolling store came as far as Uncle Earl’s house, and most of the time we would try to be there when it arrived.  It kept a regular weekly schedule.  I really don’t remember a lot about the merchandise.  But I remember clothes pins, matches, sausage in oil, Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco, Hitchcock, snuff, and various kinds of candy, like Hershey bars.  Needless to say, there are reasons for my recalling the things I recall.

The clothes pins were useful for hanging out clothes, but they also made good toys.  We could make wooden pistols, and tie a clothes pin on the back side of the handle, stretch rubber bands from the end of the wooden barrel to the holding part of the clothes pin, and then squeeze the clothes pin to release the rubber band as a bullet.  Uncle Willie chewed Brown’s mule, and “took” Hitchcock—a laxative.  Mama bought matches to build fires in the fireplace and light the oil stove and the lanterns.  Aunt Ida and Grandma dipped snuff.  Not very often, but occasionally, Mama would buy a Hershey bar, or Brock candy bar.  O, by the way, there was a kerosene tank on the very back of the truck—for kerosene lanterns, and the oil stove.

I vaguely knew the Mr. Menefee owned the rolling store.  I little imagined that he was my future father-in-law.  But I did not meet Betty until we started to school.