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 25th, 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!
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