What Daddy Was Scared Of

Every morning, before anyone else is up, you’ll find my Dad at his kitchen island drinking coffee and looking at the newspaper. When Rich and I are visiting, I always look forward to joining him there. If you sit down next to him with your coffee (or tea for me) before long you might hear a story like this one, which he told me yesterday.

“When I was five years old, my Daddy took a job for about a year in Thomasville, Georgia, driving a truck, delivering groceries. It was just Kathy and me back then, and I guess my little brother Benny would have been about a year old. Kathy was in the first grade, so she would go to school while Benny and I stayed home with Mother.

I had a little red wagon, and once a week my mother would load up my wagon with the laundry, and we would walk down the red clay road, pullin’ my wagon to take our laundry to a black woman that washed our clothes. It’s strange that everybody did that back then, but that’s what we did. Benny would ride in the wagon with the clothes, and I would walk with my mother and help pull the wagon. Boy, when it rained, those red clay roads would be slick as anything.

Sometimes, if we were going to visit family or something, we got to ride in Daddy’s truck. All five of us would sit up front in the cab—Mother and Daddy, Kathy, me, and Benny. Our house was in Thomasville, and Little Granny and Granddaddy, my mother’s parents, they lived oh, about 30 miles away, just south of Whigham.

Once I went to stay with Little Granny and Granddaddy for a few days by myself. At the time I didn’t know why, but now I can look back and say that it prob’ly had something to do with the fact that my mother was pregnant with my sister, Pat. Let’s see, Pat would be born in January, and this was early December 1941.

Now, Granddaddy was a stern disciplinarian. He kept a switch over the kitchen door, and you had to behave yourself. But Little Granny, she was sweet to me. When I stayed with her, she would teach me Psalms from the Bible. (At this point my Dad looks up towards the ceiling, thinking, and begins to quote.) Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law he doth meditate day and night… She could recite Psalm 1 and Psalm 23. And boy, she could cook up a storm. She cooked on a wood stove.

At their house, I had to sleep in a bedroom that had been built onto the house with a sort-of a breezeway in-between—it wasn’t part of the main house. But it had a big ole’ feather bed, and when you crawled into it at night, you just sank right down. Granny would walk out to that bedroom with me and tuck me in. She’d carry an oil lamp, and when she left it would be dark as pitch.

They didn’t have electricity. They didn’t have a telephone or a radio. So, every morning Granddaddy would walk down the road to my Uncle Maston’s house (my mother’s brother) and listen to the news on Uncle Maston’s radio. Then he’d come back to the house and tell us.

Well, one morning he came back with the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. He came in the house sayin’, ‘The Japs have attacked us, Looks like we’re going to have another war. Here we go again.’ Granddaddy and Granny, you know, had lived through World War I, and they had sometimes talked about people they knew that had died in that war.

Well, Granddaddy’s news really scared me. As a little five-year-old I was picturing Japanese soldiers coming that night and capturing us all. I got so scared and I guess I started crying. Little Granny was trying to console me, and Granddaddy was saying in his stern voice, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

So, Granny got out a penny postcard and wrote to my mother. Back then you could buy a postcard already stamped, for a penny. She wrote to my mother and said she prob’ly should come get me because I was so upset. She put that in the mail, and the very next day my mother came and took me home.”

Suzanne Rood is the author of A LIMP OF FAITH (Credo House Publishers, 2019), her story of daily life with CMT, a hereditary neuropathy that challenges her walking, her music, and her faith. Here’s a link to purchase the book on Amazon.

Granddaddy and Little Granny (B.O. and Lela Harrison) It’s easy to see why she was called “Little Granny”