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.
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