I Wonder Why We Wandered...

Some friends have expressed puzzlement as to why our family moved so often. It was normal to us, but now looking back, I wonder why... Were we wanderers and gatherers? Nomads? Roamers? Rovers? Birds of passage...? I wonder why we wandered...

Were we poor? It depends on one's definitions of rich and poor. Both our parents came from large families and had been raised "barely making it" on small farms in Arkansas and Mississippi. Daddy only finished the fourth grade in school. He wasn't very good at school, didn't really learn to read. Perhaps he was a bit dyslexic, and no one back then knew how to help him see the letters right.

He was the youngest of ten children, and had worked since childhood. His first "paying" job was picking up laths in a sawmill when he was ten years old. He was paid a dime a week, and his father took that to help with family expenses. That would have been in 1923, when, as Daddy used to say, "A dime was as big as a wagon wheel."

By the early '30's he married his first wife, Minnie, who was only fourteen. I don't know what kind of work he did in those years between his marriage and World War II in the early 'Forties, but he moved around to various places and had three children. One son, Calvin, died in childhood. He was drafted in the Army at the age of 30, and served as a foot soldier in Italy. When he came home, he took his family to California and worked in Bakersfield in a mattress company.

They returned to Arkansas to be near their families, and settled in North Little Rock. He worked in another mattress company there, and stayed in that job until after Minnie died and he married Mama. I don't know how many times he moved between World War II and when he took his newly blended family to California in 1955, but I'm pretty sure he worked in the same job in the North Little Rock mattress company all that time.

Mama's history had a lot of similarities, as far as living on poor dirt farms and moving around a lot. Her father's ancestors had imigrated from Ireland in the late 1700's and had eventually migrated to the south and bought land where they built a plantation in Mississippi near Vicksburg. They owned slaves, and were fairly well-to-do before the Civil War, but of course when the slaves were freed they were unable to produce much without the free labor. Both my grandfather's parents died (of some kind of sickness) right after the Civil War, and their children were divided up between relatives. Pap'aw was seven years old when that happened. He was unruly and was moved around between relatives, finally settling down for a couple of years with an uncle in Texas.

At age fourteen, he ran away from that uncle's home. He walked across Texas and Arkansas, and eventually found the old "home place" in Mississippi. There he found an old ex-slave woman who had cared for him when he was a very young child. He stayed with her a little while but she was unable to take care of him. Soon he got into trouble with the law. He was in court about to be sentenced to jail when an old man who had no children offered to adopt him and "make a man out of him." So with that old man and his wife, he learned to work and "live right" and so he eventually married Mama's mother and had a "whole passel of younguns".

After working for other people for many years, Mama's father finally bought land, a small poor dirt farm. That was the farm that was flooded in 1927 (see Mama's Flood...). After that, they moved to Arkansas, but was barely making it when he died in 1939. His wife also died a few months later.

So my mother wandered from job to job in cotton fields, dime stores, and eventually to a meat-packing house (in Greenville, Mississippi) where she met and married Russell Lusk, my father. After he ran off with another woman, leaving her with two babies, Jim and me, she wandered from cotton mill to cotton mill trying to support us.

We were very poor but I never knew it. I never felt anxious about it. I just wished I had a Daddy. After Mama married Clarence Ballentine, I was big enough to see at least the shadows of their financial struggles, but we always had somewhere to live and plenty of beans and potatoes to eat, and iced tea, and lots of fruit and other good things once we moved to the San Joaquin Valley.

We never had a fancy house, at least not while I was still at home. After the bulk of the kids grew up and left home, Mama and Daddy lived in a couple of nice houses in good neighborhoods. They had pretty good cars. Daddy had a truck, and later several trucks in the mattress business he started in McFarland. But he was always in debt.

He tried to retire a couple of times, but always returned to the mattress business. That involved several more moves, to Missouri and back, then later to Mountain View, Arkansas, where is his final resting place. Mama also is buried there beside him. After his death she moved around several more times before she finally returned to California, where she died in 2009 at the age of 93.

So we were wanderers. We children of the Coalters and Ballentines have all moved around a lot, too, in our life-times... Someday, like Mama and Daddy, we are going home. Home. Home.