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August 21, 2007

Sally

April 02, 2008 12:21 PM EDT (Updated: June 21, 2008 08:02 PM EDT)

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A life in the public eye is celebrated with magnification of every victory or every fault. But what of the billions of lives lived out in a seemingly mundane existence. How do we celebrate those? This is the story of a life, although humble, that was far from mundane. Each life reaches out as a droplet in the wave touching the lives around it and sometimes it extends beyond the wave it's a part of touching generations to come with a soothing comfort, as that particle of water might eject out from the wave that it's a part of to land upon you and cool you on a hot summer day.

I embark upon a pilgrimage of sorts, not a pilgrimage to distant places to find answers, but on a pilgrimage exploring my own soil. As Dorothy tapped her ruby slippers and said there is no place like home, I too awaken to the realization that our roots provide our greatest and wisest vantage point. The strongest pilgrimage is finding those genuinely sacred places in our own back yard. This is a quest to awaken the spirits who once toiled, shed tears, laughed and loved here and to connect with them. The center point of this trek is a woman named Sally.

Why are we born were we are born? Most of us if we haven't already will ask this at some point in our life. As the planet spins, most of us race along in rotational sync from place to place looking for that hallowed ground burning with a gravitational rooted sacredness that calls out to us. A few will stand firm or will sit restless at the place of their birth looking for meaning in the dust beneath their feet. It is often said that the grass is greener on the other side. I am finding that the grass is quite green where I sit, maybe even emerald. So I meditate on my own grass and wonder what lives were lived on this very soil as the sun rose and the sun sat, as moons changed, as flowers bloomed into momentary splendor and then withered, and as babies were born, some living to be old men and old women, while others journeyed onto this earth only shortly. All as droplets of water rose and receded with the wave dancing the cosmic dance both alone and together, sometimes in rhythm and sometimes in disharmony. Lessons were studied. Lessons were learned. A few roles were perfected. A spray of new waves rolled upon the sand as the previous waves after playing out their brief drama both paying their dues and reaping their rewards were called back to the vast ocean from whence they had emerged.

The multitude of particles within the waves beating against the shore deposited mostly simple lives; yet the simple, uncelebrated lives, are the most complex. One day they arise again, a watery ghostly tide, begging for celebration. The celebration follows from recollections both true and false, both exaggerated and understated, generations removed. The generations removed look back and reflect while looking for meaning to their own cosmic dance.

In my attempt to step back into time, my husband and I drove up to the house where I met Sally. The house still stood, more or less unchanged. There had been some transitions. They were minimal in appearance. They were major in utility. Plumbing had been modified. The house still used rainwater gathered in a cistern; but it now flowed on the inside. Sally didn't have this luxury. Most dramatically, the landscape around the house had changed. Railroad tracks still lay on one side, and the river on the other. The electric company had taken massive amounts of right of way taking out houses on the non-river side of the railway. There had been a near by neighbor. This house no longer stood. Yet the Bonzo house remained untouched. The humble structure was still anchored to the fertile soil on the Kentucky side of the river from which they once had made their living. Farming had moved aside for what is termed as progress. A bridge and highway, and the businesses of convenience that usually accompany such, moved in to take the place of what was once modest countryside leading to the Bonzo farm. Once, in another moment of time, a simple clapboard farmhouse stood surrounded by flat richly blackened fields fed by the intermittent floods of the Ohio River.

The land once bore prized rows of watermelons, the usual corn, and beans, along side sheds, barns, and metallic blades and rakes gleaming in the sun looking up to the sky. The sky looks changeless, but the land below has been much altered by the differing faces of people who have come after. Farm implements and machinery were no longer there. Only one barn still stood. There were no rows of neat fences. There was an absence of animals and their sounds that had once enlivened the scene. Missing were cows, pigs, chickens, horses, and even a family of geese, one of which was a particularly mean one. My cousin, in his youth, remembers being chased by this goose. Sally had had a dog, perhaps a stray, which she had just referred to as Pup. I couldn't say if there had been a cat on the premises; however, it is more than likely that there was. Farmhouses always had cats. I looked at what was now, and imagined back to what was then, the simplicity, the green fields, and nostrils embracing poignant farm aromas with one intake of breath and a clean freshness in the next. This had once been the landscape I had visited in my youth. This was the land on which Sally had intermingled her energy with during the second part of the century in which she lived.

I wanted to go inside the house, hinting for an invitation, but wasn't so bold as to openly ask the present owners. So, we remained outside talking and asking questions. There was a different feeling.

Inside this same house I only glimpsed Sally when I was eight years old. She was a very old woman at this time. I had heard adults talk of her. She was an enigma, a piece of history. The people who knew Sally during the first half-century of her life are now dead. The children who heard the stories from their elders are now the elders themselves. In a sense she was famous, at least in the area in which I grew up. I sensed a charisma and charm that had kept people talking about her long after her death. Forty-seven years later I am trying to resurrect her story – the story of Sally. In bringing her back to life, a multitude of other lives and their stories also started surfacing. They all made up the inter-related droplets of water from which the wave was constructed that touched and danced upon the land in that one era of time.

The memory of an eight year old isn't to be relied upon as having a great deal of clarity. Still it was one of those rare moments in which a defining event finds a corner of the skull to rest in and emerge from time to time. When the time is right, that memory is triggered, only to jump forth as a compelling force that says tell me.

During the summer of 1961 I sat in the back seat of a car, my father and uncle sitting up front. My uncle and aunt had close ties with the Bonzos and Sally. My aunt had often stayed with Sally as a little girl. She is no longer here to tell me her first hand stories of Sally. Nor is my uncle. I recall the energy and love in my aunt's voice when she talked of Sally to me when I was young. When she visited she always slept with Sally.

I don't remember who drove on this trip. I just remember it seeming like an uncommonly long drive, although in actuality it was approximately a little over an hour along backcountry roads. This was at a time when trips could be much dustier or muddier. We were still very much in the throes of country living when off in the distance cityscapes were cementing into reality. Today, wider, straighter, smoother and newer routes shave off one third of driving time, as asphalt has invaded the final frontier of humble, off the beaten path country lanes. It wasn't the same trip at all as everything had changed. I can now only imagine how long and uncomfortable trips must have been in Sally's earlier years when people were still using horses and wagons to a large extent and when dust and mud would have been much more of a factor than even in 1961.

My father and uncle were going to see two men, Ben and Ted. Ted was a nephew to Ben, who was getting on in years. Neither had ever married, and Sally had lived with them and had taken care of them off and on, since both had been babies. I was excited about the trip, though, for another reason. I had heard the names Nel and Sal, and sometimes-just Sally during the early years of my life. These were black women who had been slaves in the area in which I lived. One of my aunts had always referred to them as sisters. My family had been connected with them in later years after they were granted freedom. Maybe it wouldn't have evoked such interest on my part if I had grown up with any African Americans in my community. Our little town had no people of color, any color for that matter. So hearing about Sally was an anomaly in itself. Sally, herself never marrying, giving her life in caring for others, lived with these two confirmed bachelors. She was the reason I requested to tag along; or should I say begged. Was it coincidence or synchronicity that my uncle had asked my dad to go along on the trip that day?

I had heard mostly about Nellie and Sally from my Aunt Margaret and Aunty Ruby. They were a wealth of information regarding any family history. How many times do we regret that we didn't sit at our elders' feet and listen intently taking to heart any crumbs of information and wisdom while we had the chance about the personalities that preceded us? I am now approaching that same elder stage when I should be handing down stories and histories and wisdom to descendants; but information is scant. Somewhere along the line we thought it not important and stopped listening. Now to find the lives lived before we search legal records and gravesites, getting mostly only names and dates - missing the richness of stories of the personalities.

The journey of reconstruction now takes me to libraries, courthouses and places of final rest. There are visits to homes and treks across fields viewing long forgotten headstones and foundations of structures, piecing the puzzle together as any detective might do in bringing all the evidence I can muster to light. There are endless telephone calls, one person leading to another, as I coax what memories I can from now aging adults who may have remembered something as a child - any tidbit of information. There was always one commonality with each person to whom I talked. The name of Sally brought a smile and uplifting vibration as the person remembered her – an energetic lightness quite evident even over the telephone line. They each tried to define the indefinable way Sally had touched their lives, just by her mere presence. The people who remembered her were just as anxious to bring the energy of her humble existence to this generation as I was. The excitement of my project became their project as well.

Sally had been born into slavery. She was now over one hundred years of age; although neither my father nor uncle knew her exact age. I was to find out later that at the time of this visit she was aged one hundred and three. That same day my father asked Ben, who was turning eighty, how old Aunt Sally was, as that was what she was often called. Ben replied that he remembered Sally as a full-grown woman rocking him when he was just a child. My impression at the time was that Sally was to Ben and Ted as Aunt Bea had been to Andy and Opie.

After miles of narrow, curvy roads, we traveled the last span of the trip on gravel; Ben and Ted were outside to greet us as we pulled up to a modest white clapboard house. They lived on a farm. Farming had always been their life inherited from their ancestors. The car tires grinding against the gravel must have alerted them to our arrival. In days gone by simple country folk often made their way outside to greet visitors. It seemed like an eternity as the four adults stood outside under a shade tree next to a picnic table talking. This shade tree that I remembered in my youth still stands in front of the house. A cart of watermelons stood off to the side. Sally was nowhere to be seen, and my anticipation was growing. Finally, we climbed a short row of concrete steps and entered through a wooden screen door, in to the kitchen area. The screen door is now aluminum.

There she was. Time froze in that instant. She stood in a cotton, blue or gray checked dress, coming well below her knees, almost meeting her thick rolled white socks. I remember comfortable, no nonsense shoes, the kind I can really appreciate now. Over that was a simple white unbuttoned sweater with pushed up sleeves, even though we were in the midst of summer. There was a bucket of sudsy water by her side, as she pushed a mop along the floor. Strands of white partly curled, partly frizzed hair fell to the side of her ashen face as she raised her head briefly to smile and acknowledge us. At that point our eyes met, and our souls touched. She lowered her head once again and went on with her work.

Summing her up physically, I don't remember her skin as being truly dark, but more of a medium shade of brown. This was later confirmed by other accounts of her. I'm not sure what I expected; but, I definitely wasn't expecting a woman of that age to be doing something as strenuous as mopping a floor. At that point in life Sally was definitely bent over. Being a scrawny kid of eight all adults seemed big to me, so size was hard to judge and not something I really thought to question about her until now. I didn't really envision Sally as being overly tall at the time; but most accounts have her being stoutly built at around 5'7" with a propensity towards big bones.

I followed the adults into another room. The memory stops here, but it would remain both in my heart and mind as a scene out of some novel surrounded by a haze. I had seen what I had come to see, this legend of a lady that I had heard about for as long as I could remember. We did bring home gifts of watermelons, which was the favorite crop of Ben and Ted. I never was to see Sally again. Being an overly shy child while there I never even spoke to her.

Now, after all these years the memory has resurfaced; and I think if only I could go back to that moment in time I would have carried a notebook and pencil and stayed in the kitchen with Sally and asked her to recount her life for me. I was entering third grade at that time. I would have given a report of what I had learned. Sally was the real history, the real study of life, and now I would have to say learning and writing about her is somewhat of a spiritual experience. There is a number of contributing factors or synchronizations leading me to explore what I can of Sally's life. I start writing this story in February of 2008, which is black history month. Lately there has been a series of programs on public television exploring African American Lives. The universe works at its own pace. There is also the possibility that I listen slowly. My writing endeavor only began a little more than a year ago. When I considered what of real interest I had to write about, the memory of Sally became strong. Now it is practically hounding me. I hope I can do Sally the justice that she deserves. Although I was too shy to speak to Sally then, I speak to her almost daily in laboring with love on this project of her life. I feel she is listening, as with almost each day a new fragment of information about her comes my way.

At first I tried to write a short story about meeting Sally relying only on memory. I've now begun an earnest research into her life. There are records that I've only begun to explore. I have no experience in genealogical pursuits; therefore, this is also a learning experience in so many different ways.

I've often wondered as all of us do why I'm in the particular geographical spot that I'm in. In the quest of exploring Sally's life, a rich history of other lives and a multitude of dramatic saga all happening within a few miles radius of where I now sit has started opening up and coming together. It is quite amazing as to what has happened on the very soil where I now sit. The energy still remains. Nothing is ever truly lost.

I'm now sitting at the feet of my elders heeding their stories and their wisdom. I begin to appreciate and find fascinating the diversity of events that took place and made up the lives that once lived out their sagas in this small rural area. These lives may not be the ones that made history books; nevertheless, that doesn't make them any less appealing. Even though lives also tend to become more romanticized after death I feel as if I'm only skimming a rich sea of struggles, dramas, loves, lives lived to dominate, lives lived to eke by, and lives given to the service of others, all trying to find their place among the heavens. I see a microcosm within the macrocosm.

Herein, what I write is part fiction, part truth, an interpretation of stories that have been told and retold, handed down, and some even written down. In all areas I found different versions existing. Even the most documented history is still perception. Time changes perception. The world abounds with stories and different versions of the same stories. They are as plentiful as the cells in our bodies. Maybe it's not the accuracy of the stories, but how the stories make us feel. Therein lies the real truth to the lives that make up the stories.

It has been said that ignorance is bliss. A wise holy man that I had the good fortune to listen to said, "We are born innocent children of God. Innocence is bliss. Innocence is divine. Ignorance can bring all kinds of problems." Sally was born an innocent child into a world of ignorance. Throughout her life she somehow remained innocent. Her innocence in the midst of a life of hard struggle spanning over a century through countless changes and countless faces is a part of her legacy.