Clothes on the Line and Preachers Kids who write

    Frank Morris was the pastor of the FBC of Gaffney SC in the early fifties, left for about fifteen or twenty years and came back to town to be the pastor at West End BC. His daughter lately has published a series of articles in Gaffney's Cherokee Chronicle about her time in Gaffney and her father's love of the place.

     Ive had a few efforts published there as well, am especially proud of my take on the Gaffney Spartanburg game of 69 published about ten years ago.  My  family years from 62 to 78 never coincided with Ms Blevins  Dad's two stays, and for certain she was gone when we arrived. 

    I think there is something about preacher's children that bend them toward storytelling. You hear all those sermons and Bible Study lessons three times a week and more growing up, and words have to register somewhere sooner or later and find a way to come out. Then all those stories that come through a parsonage about human nature in the congregation and beyond; Its like Linda in Slingblade, you like pricing items as much as I do, she says, and your bound to be employee of the month sooner or later.

    Ive invited Barty Sides of Limestone Prez to get in on these memories of Gaffney. He could likely be better than us all, at least me. My hero is Baptist preacher's son Marshall Frady , A Furman grad, who Pulitzers David Halberstam named likely the best story teller of the Civil Rights era the last half of the twentieth century.

    No offense but I consider Ms Blevins stuff kinda cornpone , Lawrence Welk, Gone with the Wind nostalgia, though I give her credit she writes very well. I did like her most recent piece about the technology of doing laundry over the years from reminiscence of her grandmothers rolling pins to squeeze out the laundry in the forties to her state of the art washer dryer room in Savannah Georgia.

    Still her Mom persisted in drying most of the clothes on the clothes line.

     What is sweet about all this, even for males is the reminder of similar observations of their own grandmothers and mothers and the clothesline and where they were situated in reference to the house.

     My Grandmother Fox house was about five miles East of  Rome Ga just off the Kingston HWY on the Family 70 acre hilly farm they bought in 1952, There was a little driveway up to their small home where I think we packed twenty cousins in one Christmas or Thanksgiving in 65 with a bunch of us on the living room floor and two out back on the rollout couch where the fireplace was. I think Cousin Neil in from Wyoming or Alaska slept under the dining table.

    On thanksgiving days our family would usually get there from SC late Wednesday night some harrowing as 75 was non existent from Marietta on up to Calhoun Ga and you had to go over to 411. We'd stop at Krystals which kept Nanny and Papa's two bathrooms active through the night as you had to go through their bedroom to get to either one.  And  one bad rain about Kennesaw about put dad at wits end. Almost didnt make it to Trevor Lawrence territory at Cass.

     Dad's sister Aunt Katherine married Paul Simmons who had a career as a Hushpuppy Shoe Salesman. Before the SUV's he'd get a new Cadillac about every three years for the big trunk for his shoe travels and write it off as a business expense. About four years in a row I'd be sitting on the front screened porch with my Grandfather and about 11:30  and the Simmons would drive up from Atlanta about hour ten minutes away. As they came   up the driveway. You could hear em early cross the little creek and Papa would say, there is Paul Simmons and that Big Fine Car.

     Nanny's clothesline was on up the hill from the home  up the steps from what they called the freezer locker house,  a little ways half way to the barn. My Sister and Momma would help her do clothes and whatever. Nanny had only a second grade education. She would sing as a lot of god fearing women of her era did at the clothesline one of the most contented woman of any generation I knew.  Other clotheslines included my mother at her clotheslines in Erwin and Hayesville NC in Gaffney between the basketball goal and the garden, down in Pike County Ga that one two out near the garden  where Dr. Bill Brumbach and Wayne Whiteside stopped with the wives one Sunday afternoon after a trip to Callaway Gardens, and then finally her last year and a half in the house she lived in as a young girl south of Collinsville Alabama with Lookout Mtn nearly in the front yard across HWY 11.

   In Hayesville the line was in a narrow space behind the parsonage where the yard abrubtly ended and there was a big drop off down to a Sawmill about four hundred yards behind the house. A little east anothe two hundred yards to the Truett Memorial Baptist Church was the historic marker on HWY 64 commemorating George W. Truett, the consensus greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century. He was born in Hayesville in 1867 lived there his first twenty years, moved to Texas and saved Baylor from Financial ruin and was pastor of FBC Dallas Texas from 95 to 1944. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chic Fil a is named for George W. Truett.

      Whatever ranking I mighta held against Frank's daughter was reconciled in her laundry piece with reference to the laundromats her twin sister and she cherished in college. They went to the black laundry near campus mid sixties cause it had the better juke box. That's my kind of Baptist. Reminded me of the great segment in the Aretha Franklin Movie Respect when she goes down to Muscle Shoals the first time with her contemptible boy friend and gets a classic introduction to race relations in Alabama. Spooner Oldham shines in that one as well as the rest of the Swampers

    I gotta share this one as the Stones also had a good session at the Shoals. Upon leaving a young woman from even further out in the country asked Bill Wyman if they were one of the rock groups that had been coming through the Holiday Inn a lot in the last few years. Wyman said Yeah, Martha and the Vandellas.

    There is this great scene in the Pulitzer prize winner Marilynne Robinson novel   Harvard Lit Critic James Wood picked it out as one of the most sublime  he knows in American Literature...... Quoting Wood:

    All in all I deeply admire the precision and lyrical power of Robinson's language, and the way it embodies a struggle--the fight with words, the contemporary writer's fight with the history of words and the presence of literary tradition, the fight to use the best words to describe both the visible and invisible world. Here, for instance, is how the narrator of "Housekeeping" Robinson's first novel, describes her dead grandmother who lies in the bed with her arms flung up and her head flung back and "it was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether".  In the same novel the narrator imagines her grandmother pinning sheets to a line, and on a windy day--"say that when she had pinned three corners to a line it began to billow, to leap in her hands,  and flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and the thoes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements".

     My  Mother suffered awful the last three days of her life as she succumbed to liver cancer. I was there with her in the hospital the last night. She was out with medication, but her belly swelled and about four in the morning she groaned out in excruciating pain. She was pronounced dead about five after seven.

      But now after reading Robinson, I want to think of her and my Nanny Fox as going out to the clothesline, and me as a seven year old boy walking with them then heading back to the house, looking around in a strong early April Breeze and they are not there,  caught up and like the song they loved so much at the Helton Reunion in East Tennessee , Some Glad Morning we shall see Jesus in the Air, and Momma and Nanny and all the other Loved Ones will be with them.