Old-Timey Childcare ... on Barraque Street

Single moms and often married moms as well, who work outside the home must find someone to care for their little ones while they work. My youngest daughter, who will be 29 next week, has a baby almost five months old and is struggling a bit with finding child care, even for only two or three days a week. I sincerely hope she will be able to stay at home with the baby in the near future. I'm sure there is no one in the world, other than her husband or other family members, who will love and care for that little one the way she does.

My Mama was a single mom for the first ten years of my life. As far back as I can remember, she worked. My first memories are of living in Kosciusko, Mississippi where Mama worked at the cotton mill. She was a weaver, and in those first years she worked for less than a dollar an hour. Of course, a dollar would buy a lot more then than now. It was a hard, loud, dangerous job, with room-sized looms loudly clacking and banging all day. The air was full of cotton shreds and fragments; she would come home in the evening with white hair and clothes.

Who took care of Jim and me? Aunt Berl did. She was our maiden aunt who had lived with several of her siblings over the years and cared for their children while the parents worked. In my early years, I remember far more time spent with Aunt Berl than with Mama. In Kosciusko I remember playing under the quilting frame while Aunt Berl quilted quietly. I remember her holding me in her lap in church while Mama played the piano. If I wanted to get down and run around or talk (which was usually the case), Aunt Berl would place me firmly in her lap facing her and flick my lips with her fingers. "Don't you cry, Girl," she would barely whisper. And I wouldn't dare.

When we moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Mama got a job in the cotton mill there, again as a weaver. We lived at first on Barraque Street, in an apartment that shared a bathroom with another apartment. I was five years old by then, not quite old enough to start first grade.

The "apartment" was in a big old house that had been converted into three apartments, one of which shared a bathroom with us. Our apartment consisted of two great big rooms, or so they seemed to me. The kitchen was on one side of one room and consisted of a kitchen sink with no counter top, just a sink. There was one small cabinet over the sink, but I could climb up and get into it. The table and chairs was in the middle of the room, and served as counter top for preparing food, as well as dining table. The other side of the room had the bed Aunt Berl and I shared, and the treadle sewing machine.

The other room was a huge bedroom that had Mama's/Jim's bed and a dresser, and a large glass-paned door that opened to the front porch. It would have been the living room, but we had no couch or chairs in there.

Aunt Berl got a job at the cotton mill, in the quieter area where the thread was made. She was a spinner. She worked on the "Second Shift" and left for work in the middle of the day, an hour before Mama came home from the "First Shift."

So who was supposed to care for me? I still took a nap during the day, so it was decided that I would be put down for my nap before Aunt Berl left for work and I could get up when Mama came home. The neighbors in the other apartment, a young mom with children younger than I, agreed to "listen" for me and take care of me if I awakened during that hour. It was not necessarily a good solution but the best Mama and Aunt Berl could come up with. They could barely make ends meet even with both of them working. There was no extra money for child care.

The neighbor lady listened to the radio during that hour. I remember hearing through the wall the music strains of her radio soap opera, "The Young Widow Brown." I can still hum it to this day. I have no idea what the story was, but I'm guessing it was extremely tame compared to television soaps of today.

Eventually, I stopped sleeping at all during that hour. I would pretend to be going to sleep, and Aunt Berl would go sit on the porch steps watchng for her ride. As soon as I was sure she was gone, I would get up and start "cooking."

Fortunately, I didn't know how to light the stove burners, or wasn't really interested in that part of cooking. To me, the stirring of ingredients together was the fun part, so I would fill a cup with some white powder out of several boxes in the cupboard (probably sugar, soda, baking powder, and salt), add some pepper because it was always fun to liberally sprinkle salt and pepper on food. Then I would climb up on the sink and turn on the faucet. The plumbing was very old in the house, and so corroded that you couldn't get a big or hard stream of water, so it didn't wash my ingredients out of the cup. When it was all wet enough to stir I would take it back to the kitchen table, which was the only counter top in the kitchen, and stir to my heart's content. It was really fun.

Then when I thought I heard someone coming, I would rush back over to the sink, pour it all down the drain, turn on the water and swish my hand under it and try to brush away the evidence of my adventure in cooking. From this vantage point of sixty-one years later, I can clearly see the hand of God, keeping me from desiring to taste what I "cooked" or getting in to something poisonous, or messing with sharp knives, or turning on the gas without knowing you had to strike a match, or any number of potentially fatal activities right there in the kitchen on Baraque Street.

Once I found the toothpaste where it was parked by the kitchen sink. Such fun to squirt it out all in the sink. But shoot! it didn't easily rinse down the drain like the other stuff I had stirred together. So I mashed it with my fingers and did the best I could to get rid of it.

Later when Mama came home, she saw it in the kitchen sink and started rinsing it away, griping, "Why is all this toothpaste in the kitchen sink?"

"Well, Aunt Berl brushed her teeth there," I offered, innocently. She seemed to believe that, and didn't pursue the subject further.

Eventually, my adventurous little spirit took me from the kitchen into the living room where I eventually got caught. First, Mama told me never to go answer the door if someone knocked. Of course, I promised not to do that, and I kept my promise, sort of. The front door was mostly glass inside a dark wood frame. A curtain was gathered thickly on a rod on the inside for privacy. One day I heard someone knock, and I got up, sneaked into the living room and peeked around the furniture. There were two or three people out there; I could hear them talking and see their feet through the edges of the ruffles at the bottom of the privacy curtain.

I wanted to see their faces, so I sneaked up to the door and pulled the curtain back just a little, just enough to see the two women and one man standing there holding papers in their hands. I didn't make eye contact with any of them, but quickly dropped the curtain back in place and backed away. I heard one of them say, "Someone is in there. I saw the curtain move..."

Then another one said, "Me, too. I wonder why they aren't answering the door..." Eventually, they left. I was glad; I never considered they might hurt me, but I was afraid they would tell on me for getting out of bed, which would probably get me a "whuppin'."

Oh, well. Since I was already in the living room where I wasn't supposed to be, I might as well look around in there for something to play with.  Hmmm... There was Mama's Noxema in the dark blue jar. I loved the smell of it, but she would never let me put some on me. I decided to see what it felt like... I unscrewed the jar lid, and breathed deeply, savoring the pungent smell. I felt gingerly of the top of the creme. Sooo smooth and silky. I dug my pointer finger all the way down to the bottom of the jar, and came up with a handful of the creme. I then thought I heard someone coming, so I quickly put the handful of creme back in the jar as best I could and screwed on the lid. I made a dash for the bed in the kitchen, and pretended to be asleep when Mama came in the front door.

I could hear her putting her stuff down in the living room. I waited what seemed like a long time to me (probably ten seconds) and then got up casually and went in the living room to meet her. She was just standing there, looking around, sniffing.

"Hi, Mama. You're home."

She looked at me, and sniffed the air again.  "What is that I smell?"

"I don't smell anything..." I was hoping she would come on in the kitchen away from the dresser in the living room.

"It smells like... something... Hey! What's this?" Uh oh. She eyed the dark blue Noxema jar. She walked over and picked it up.

"Aunt Berl was using that," I lied, straight faced.

"She sure got it all over the place," she opened the jar and looked inside at the deep cavern in the middle of the creme, closed the lid, shaking her head. She picked up her purse and started toward the kitchen.

Whew! I thought I was off the hook. But no, as soon as she passed me, she stopped short and turned around. She bent down as if to hug me, and then her eyes widened. "What is that I smell?" She took my face in her hands, smelled my hair, drew back a little and said quietly, "What have you been into, Jean?"

I shook my head. I still hoped I could fool her. I didn't want a whuppin'.

To my surprise, she didn't make me answer her question. She said, "I know. You been messin' with the Noxema. Haven't you?"

I considered lying some more, but realized it was no use. Mama saw the answer in my face, and to my surprise, she took me in her arms and squeezed me... When she released me, there were tears on her face and a crack in her voice as she said, "You could get hurt, Jean, by getting into stuff. Don't get into my Noxema any more. I know you like the smell of it. But if you get it in your eyes or mouth, it could burn real bad. It could make you real sick. Don't do that no more..."

So I didn't. After that she must have put away whatever she thought might hurt me.