The Red Flannel Rag

When we left the beauty shop, she was ecstatic. Her headache was gone. She

said, “I feel so free. I feel like I could just fly. My head is so light.” She never stopped

mentioning her promise to her daddy but ju stified her short hair by saying, “I don’t

think he would have wanted me to suffer with headaches.” I always reassured her, “I

know he wouldn’t, Mom.”

Mom never attended funerals of people who died in the community, and I always

wondered why. After we bought the tiny farm where she still lives, we had a well drilled

in the back yard. She could not stand to walk out the back door and see the red clay

where the drill was working. One day she realized that it reminded her of her parent’s

graves. Mom associated the red clay with loss and grief she suffered as an orphan.

Realizing what red clay meant to her did not help her cope with death. She never

attended the funerals of her sisters and brothers and even my daddy. When the time

came that she knew she was too sick to get well, she sat in her chair for five years

somewhere between life and death and could not make the transition. I am sure her

clinging to life had something to do with the finality of the red clay around the grave.

She did not want her children to suffer the pain of her loss as she suffered throughout

her life.

After she was orphaned at age nine, she was passed from one older sister to another for

a year. She spent part of that time with her oldest sister, Zilla, who was extremely

abus ive. Zilla was a promiscuous woman, and she told Mom, “As soon as you start

‘bleeding like a little pig’ you’ll be screwing around with men.”

Mom told her sister, Goldie, what Zilla had said to her. Aunt Goldie, who was twelve

years of age, was in love with a young man named Robert Crawford. He was twenty

years old. Partly in keeping with mountain tradition and partly to give Mom a home,

67