Author: Martha Mattingly Payne

Martha Mattingly Payne was born in Atlanta and raised by a father who loved sports and a mother who loved books. Little wonder then that she writes stories that probe the dynamics of family life while also celebrating the thrills and heartaches of the world of athletics. A former columnist for ChopTalk, the Atlanta Braves’ official magazine, Payne has also served as a feature writer and assistant editor of Augusta Magazine in Augusta, Georgia. Educated at UNC-Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University and a graduate of the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, her fiction and poetry have appeared in such journals as Snake Nation Review, the Alabama Literary Review, and The Reach of Song. Payne’s first work of non-fiction, Put Him In, Coach! A Mother’s All-Star Memoir (iUniverse, 2007), was a 2008 recipient of a Mom's Choice Silver Award. She recently completed her second novel, Girl of Summer. Set in a fictional town on the Gulf Coast of Florida, the novel follows Tessa Girard, seamstress for a struggling baseball team, as she navigates an unplanned pregnancy amid the unraveling of a dark family secret, one that ultimately helps her make peace with her haunted past.

Afternoons with Mary: Sharecropper’s Daughter

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Life on the farm in Depression-era Alabama

In memory, my first few visits with Mary Darian are fresh and bathed in light. It was spring, 2017. From where we gathered in her daughter’s living room, we could see Lou’s back yard, the lawn greening and her plantings touched with early spring color. Yes, Mary was still grieving the loss of her oldest son and recovering from a fall. Her speech was sometimes halting, especially when she grew tired, in the wake of her last stroke, but for the most part, she was upbeat, both determined to do her therapy exercises to regain her strength and eager to share the story of her childhood. Her Alabama family was cash-poor when she was growing up—she made no bones about that—but when she described her young parents and her grandmother and great-grandmother, her expression warmed. Sometimes, her voice was tinged with longing, a longing for the simple life her family built out of next to nothing.

Which is not to say Mary romanticized that rural mid-20th century life. She’d lived in Atlanta since she was fourteen. She’d experienced unrest, boycotts, and violence just to earn for herself and her loved ones basic rights she lacked as a child—the right to sit where she pleased in a theatre, to use a public restroom, to vote. Like other Black tenant farming families in the Deep South, during her childhood the Walkers and Cochrans were trapped in a dead-end economic system. The threats and humiliations of Jim Crow hung over them like a shroud. “You couldn’t make a living in Hurtsboro,” she liked to say. “Hurts to stay there and hurts to leave.”

But Mary was the walking example of the old adage that the key to happiness is to want what you have, not in the sense of surrender but in making the best of what’s given you in any particular moment. I’ve been pretty bad at this most of my life, always striving for something or other just out of reach. Maybe that’s why being with Mary in Lou’s sunny home, just being with her and listening to her stories, no matter how surprising some of them were, was such a comfort.

When Mary Lue Cochran was born on November 11, 1935, her father, Jimmie Lee, was twenty. Her mother, Lue Milla James Cochran, was seventeen. Mary’s brother Leroy came along a year later. I asked Mary one afternoon whether her mother had to join her father in the cotton fields to meet the quota that paid their rent.

“My daddy …” she said, shaking her head. “Also worked at the Perlmans’ store. That extra money he made kept my mama out of the fields after I was born. She stayed in the house working and taking care of Leroy and me.”

The Perlmans, an immigrant Jewish family, owned a dry goods store in Hurtsboro. Strange. I knew that as Atlanta’s population boomed in the late 1800s, the city began to attract immigrants from all over Europe, but Hurtsboro? A town that grew up around a sawmill in the 1850s situated in remote eastern Alabama, in 1900 it had just over 400 residents, most of them farm laborers or mill workers. I decided to do a little research. Turns out that of the influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms and economic hardship of Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century, many wound up in small Southern towns working as merchants or peddlers. So the Perlmans’ store wasn’t strange at all. I checked out the store owner Sol Perlman on Ancestry.com and managed to locate his son. Sam Perlman, who spoke affectionately of growing up in Hurtsboro, shared that his grandfather Henry had immigrated to Montgomery from Lithuania in 1891. A few years later he took out a loan to open a store sixty miles southeast in—you got it—Hurtsboro. Henry Perlman was a smart cookie. Two railways served by a shared depot had just been extended through the middle of town, and though one Ben Goldstein, originally of Poland, already ran a general store there, they both wagered there’d be business enough for another. They were right. A golden age followed. By 1914, a year before Mary’s father was born, the sawmill town boasted an inn, a cafe, those two general stores and a couple of banks. By the time Mary was born, the population had more than doubled and two hardware stores, a library and a movie theatre had sprouted up. Henry Perlman, and later his son Sol, much like Ben Goldstein and his son Abe, did good business, not only with rail passengers passing through but with tenant farmers, providing them with fuel, feed, kitchen staples and other goods. Southern landowners generally preferred it this way. By sending their tenants into town for supplies, they could leave unpleasant matters such as late payments or poor credit to the shopkeepers.

Another smart cookie, Jimmie Lee Cochran was also a hard worker. Not only did he do maintenance work for Sol Perlman, he became a chauffeur for both Sol and Abe Goldstein, whose store was a short walk up Main Street. When his work was done in town, Mary’s father walked back to his family’s rental property a few miles outside of town, a two-room clapboard house with straw mattresses, “a big fireplace for heat,” windows that had shutters “you could close at night or when it rained,” but no glass panes. And an outhouse out back.

“We had a well for water,” Mary said. “That was the best water, just as cool as it could be. And Grandma Ca-line had a little garden of her own …” she added, full of pride. “She grew lettuce, carrots, corn, cucumbers, plums … Mm—mmm.” She smiled and smacked her lips. “Ma Sweet had a little store by the side of the house and folks would come by and pay her a little to go pick whatever was in season straight from the garden. They knew it was fresh that way. Ca-line raised chickens, too, and sold eggs. That’s how we had income.”

“Ma Sweet” was Mary’s father’s mother, the younger Ellen in Mary’s family tree who had attended a few years of school and was the entrepreneur of the household. She earned her nickname not only by baking sugary concoctions like tea cakes for the white family she worked for but also stocking in her store penny candy, RC cola and Nehi (“from the icebox”), goodies she bought from a traveling peddler.

A kitchen corner, with woodstove, in an Alabama tenant farmer’s home. Photo by Walker Evans, 1936

“Ma Sweet and Ca-line used lard. Everything tastes better with lard,” Mary laughed. “Ooooh, those biscuits! I get hungry just thinking about them. And you know, all we had was a pot-bellied woodstove with two eyes—how’d they cook all that and make our meals, too? And honey, Ma Sweet bought lemons from that peddler. She had us roll and roll them until they got soft. Then we’d squeeze out the juice and she’d sweeten it up with sugar or honey—I never knew which I liked best. She sold that lemonade and mint tea in Mason jars.” Mary paused, her gaze turning inward as she drifted back in time. “Mint tea was a good thing.”

“Oh! And blackberries!” She snapped back to attention, her soft brown eyes bright. “I almost forgot about blackberries. We picked them to eat and Ma Sweet sold them. That’s the other sticky thing I didn’t like.”

The other sticky thing … And the first? Maybe I was naive, but that first sticky thing had surprised me.

“You picked cotton?” I’d asked, struggling to mask the shock in my voice. The Mary I’d known was a spunky young city woman, clever and streetwise with a sophisticated wit. A city girl myself, I’d never known anyone who worked a farm—well, that’s not altogether true. A cousin of mine owns a ranch in Colorado, but managing horses and livestock, brutal as I’m sure it can be, seems different from manually tending a crop. When I pictured the child Mary bent over a row of cotton beneath the punishing summer sun, I could conjure only something distant and unreal, a downtrodden character in a movie or novel. But Mary’s experience was as real as it gets.

“Yes, I picked cotton as soon as I was able. We kids started, oh I guess we were seven or eight years old. It was the dog days, all summer right up through Labor Day. The boys had to pick after school, but we girls didn’t.”

I was rapt.

“We had a sack we carried over our shoulder,” she went on. “You picked off the hard brown bolls, they were like a little hard flower with a thick husk and the end of it was sharp and sticky. You had to take off the boll and pull out the little seeds before you dropped the cotton in your sack. Once your sack was full, you brought it so they could weigh and bale it up.”

How much cotton was expected from each of these second and third graders?

“The owner of our patch liked us to pick a hundred pounds a day.”

Quite the taskmaster, King Cotton.

Mary’s story will continue next time in “Sharecropper’s Daughter, Part II.” Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below, and thanks always for reading “Afternoons with Mary.”

Afternoons with Mary: Strong Roots and Brittle Branches

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In which I explore my beloved friend’s family tree and confirm a painful truth

Mary Darian’s great-grandparents, Georgia and Thomas Cochran, circa 1890

“When my mamma and daddy started their family,” Mary began. “They didn’t have anything, so they had to work the farm.”

Mary, my childhood caregiver, and I were sitting together in her daughter’s home just south of Atlanta studying the notes Mary had spent days preparing. By “the farm” she meant a cotton farm owned by a white family who by the time Mary’s parents married employed her paternal grandmother as a laundress and her great-grandmother as a cook.

“Were they sharecroppers?” I asked. I was presuming, I suppose, but with good reason. It was 1935. Mary’s parents lived in Hurtsboro, a tiny town in a county pushed up against the Georgia border in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” so named for both its rich soil and its historic dependence on the labor of African Americans, originally as enslaved workers and later, as tenant farmers. These tenants, who during the Great Depression accounted for well over half of all farmers in Alabama, “shared” profits earned from the cotton and other crops they harvested for the farm’s owner.

Or that was the theory.

“Humph …” Mary said with a smirk. “Sharecropper? I don’t know about that. They didn’t share nothing.”

With this she let go a sharp laugh. I smiled, marveling at her sassy wit and how it had survived the years. She was spot on, too. The bits landowners shared were most often so meager that tenant farmers struggled to break even after each year’s harvest. Sharecroppers who tried to save enough to move on to some other life would labor years, decades even, before they felt secure enough to leave. Even then they rarely had the means to purchase land of their own.

“My grandmother Ellen Walker had married a Cochran,” Mary went on. “But it didn’t work out, so my daddy was the man of the house. He had to work in the fields even when he was just a boy, to help support the women.”

Mary’s women, strong women who would end up raising her, were her grandmother Ellen, Ellen’s mother Caroline—“but everybody called her Ca-line,” Mary added with a broad smile—and Caroline’s mother, also named Ellen Walker. I asked, but Mary wasn’t sure exactly where or when the first Ellen or Caroline were born. Hmmm. Perking up, I slid to the literal edge of the couch we shared. I tinker a bit with genealogy (ok, it’s my favorite rabbit hole), and with tingling fingers I asked Mary’s permission to do a little research into the Walkers.

“Why sure,” she said after a pause. There was a touch of something in her soft features, unease, maybe even worry, but I brushed it off.

Parsing out birth places and hidden relationships and surprising connections is a lot like solving a puzzle. Though following a hunch through the generations can take weeks, I love the warm and fuzzy feeling that a successful search brings. I fired up my Ancestry account later that day, and dug in. The 1930 census suggested that the older Ellen Walker, Mary’s great-great-grandmother, was 106 years old that year. 106!!! Alas, this detail is likely exaggerated … Ellen was alive when Mary was a young child in the late 1930s. Her actual birth year is reported in a different census as 1840, in another as 1835, and on and on. But no doubt, Ellen Walker the elder was at least in her nineties in 1930 and was born, in rural Alabama, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. Ellen first shows up in public records, along with three daughters and a son, in the Census of 1880 as a farm laborer in a community called Glennville. A ghost town now, Glennville sat about twenty miles south of Hurtsboro at the northern tip of what was then Alabama’s most prosperous cotton producing region.

In spite of Ellen Walker the elder having been born in 1840 or before, she is not listed in the censuses of 1840, 1850, or 1860. Although free people of color are listed in these censuses, enslaved men and women show up as anonymous tick marks in separate “slave censuses” reported by landowners and identified only by race, age and gender. Odds are high, then, that in the antebellum years, Ellen’s existence was noted by one of these tick marks and that she worked as an enslaved laborer in the cotton fields of a Glenville plantation. At the end of the Civil War, she likely stuck around Glenville, as many of the formerly enslaved did, to work the same or another farm nearby with her young family, which included her second child, Mary’s Ca-line, listed in that 1880 Census as ten years old.

I kept burrowing, hoping to find a reference to the elder Ellen’s husband, or her parents or siblings, but came up empty. No census listings, no birth or death certificates, no marriage license. Feeling anything but warm and fuzzy, I paused my search. A deep loneliness filled me to think of Mary’s second great-grandmother, a woman who lived such a long, brave, rich life, perched alone atop the Walker branch of Mary’s family tree as if she’d self-birthed when in reality she had ancestors dating back hundreds of years, ancestors who had survived the cruelties of slavery, the unfamiliar environment and diseases of a new world, the brutality of the Middle Passage, but died unnamed and unheralded.

I thought of Mary’s hesitance about my search and sensed she wouldn’t be surprised to hear that members of her family were brought to this country against their will, forced into backbreaking labor, among other things, and treated as less than human. When we next met, we chatted a little about her great-great-grandmother. She confirmed the names of Ellen’s other children that show up in that 1880 Census. I probed her a bit to see if she might remember any other Walker ancestors. She didn’t and I left it at that. She knew where Ellen’s branch led and to dwell on it could only bring pain. A little at loose ends, I opened my phone and zoomed in on a few other things my search had turned up—a photo of her mother’s mother, Bettie Lou Tyner James. Born in 1879, she lived to 91. ”Why that’s Ma Bettie!” Mary exclaimed. Then a pic of her Cochran great-grandparents, Elias and Georgia, on their wedding day, and copies of several marriage certificates, her parents’ and grandparents’ and even one for Elias and Georgia, married in September of 1890.

Bettie Lou Tyner James, Mary’s maternal grandmother

Holding the phone close to her face, Mary thanked me, her voice filled anew with her characteristic joy. I told her it was nothing. I liked genealogy and hoped to discover more. We both felt better for having looked over these images together, a little less lonely to think of Ellen Walker and her lost parents and grandparents, and of Mary’s many other unnamed ancestors, those whose blood she shared and whose strength and courage live on in her children and grandchildren.

Afternoons with Mary: “On my Mind and In My Spirit”

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne2 Comments

After nine long years of procrastination and skittishness, I’ve worked up the gumption to share the story of my rekindled relationship with the beloved caregiver of my youth. The story will unfold in several chapters. If you’d like to read the origins of this journey, just click here: I Am Mae Mobley

On a steamy afternoon during the troubled summer of 2016, I finally worked up the courage to call Mary Darian, the intrepid woman who half-raised me. Though I loved Mary dearly, I’d failed as an adult to stay in close touch. As each ringy-dingy sounded, I worried, whispering my introductory lines again and again. A waste of energy this. Mary knew my voice immediately—“Angel Face, is that you?” I pictured the tall, confident young woman who used to drive me to McDonald’s for a Big Mac after middle school, and let go a grateful sigh. I was no longer a school girl, of course, and Mary had long moved on from being our family’s housekeeper, but her voice still brimmed with warmth and affection.

I caught her up on family this and thats. We exchanged stories about my mother—“Now she was a real lady … ” Mary gave a chuckle. “And what a seamstress!” She’d long admired my mother’s knack with a needle, and one of her lively descriptions came to mind: Your mother made a white jacket for her new formal gown with shells around the midriff … she once penned to me at summer camp. Wow! When the lady moves, she gets momentum and never stops … I think she’s going to wear it with her sexy red sandals!

Though Mary had never much liked talking about herself, she finally told me she’d recently had a fall. “But Lou took such good care of me I’m already back on my feet!” Lou is Mary’s daughter, as loyal and kind as they come, and I noted as much. Hesitant again in light of this news (was this the time to worm my way into Mary’s life?), I took a deep breath and asked if I might drop by for a visit. “Why sure, anytime!” she said. Then a pause. “Well, anytime other than Wednesdays … I still get out for my Bible study on Wednesdays.” Smiling, I suggested the following Thursday and our plans were set.

Eighty then, Mary lived alone in the home in west Atlanta that she and her husband had moved into in the late sixties. A one-story with wood siding and four inviting windows across the front, I’d been there as a child. As I drove between sprawling azaleas lining the driveway and parked beneath the shade of a generous hardwood, I found it as cozy and comfortable as it was back then, only better. Previously a neutral cream, it had been painted a bright banana yellow. The shutters and trim, dark navy before, had gone lime green. The effect was bold and welcoming, as if the house itself wore a wry grin for neighbors and strangers alike. Perfect, I thought. Mary through and through.

Mary’s home for over fifty years

“Come on in!” Mary said with a yelp of pleasure, and squeezed me tight. As we walked inside, she limped a little and gripped the back of a chair. I winced, reached to help, but she brushed it off. We sat side-by-side on her couch and studied the faces, many of them Mary-like, smiling out from the abundance of photos in her living room. One by one, she proudly identified family—the three sons I’d once known now become men, the late husband I never met, the many beloved grandchildren and great-grandchildren and of course, Lou, who showed up toward the end of our visit, sacks of groceries spilling from her arms as she corralled her little granddaughter through the door.

Mary had visitors most every day, family and more. She bragged on her neighbors and beaming, described the teenaged boy from her church who dropped in often to check on her. We reminisced about my parents. She asked about my children and my writing and just like that, the gap of years since we’d spent time together fell away. We joked about my older brothers’ teenaged exploits of long ago, and she said how sorry she was about the oldest, Ed, who’d been gone nine years.

“Your mama called me,” she said, her eyes damp. “More than once after he passed. Just to talk. A mother shouldn’t have to lose her child.”

“No, she shouldn’t,” I agreed, my voice wobbly. Mary took my hand and I mentioned that I’d been thinking about her a lot recently … “Especially since I rewatched The Help. Have you seen that movie?”

“Sure have,” Mary said, her tone wary.

“You know, it has its faults but it made me realize I never took the time to really get to know you … ” I began to sweat. “I guess what I’m trying to say is I’d like to learn your story, Mary. It’s something I should have done a long time ago. I’d like to know about you and your past, the way you’ve always known about me and mine.”

Her soft gaze clouded in bemusement, maybe disbelief. It wasn’t like Mary to be at a loss for words, and I looked away. Maybe I was being pushy. Maybe I should have kept my mouth good and shut.

“Well, honey,” she said finally, grinning. “It’s not all that interesting of a story, but I can probably come up with a thing or two.”

I laughed in relief, and we agreed I should return in two weeks armed with pen and paper and I-phone microphone. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do with what she chose to share—blog? book? keep in my heart?—but I left excited about what lay ahead and hurried home to call my sister in Pennsylvania. Ten when our parents hired Mary at eighteen, JoJo loved Mary too, if in a different, maybe even deeper, way.

My sister and I visit Mary on her 81st birthday, November 11, 2016

A week later, Mary called, her voice subdued and full of pain, to cancel our get-together. Her oldest son, Lewis, Jr, had suddenly passed away of a heart attack, at fifty-seven. It was almost eerie, given what we’d recently said about mothers losing sons—such a cruel twist of time—and my heart ached for her. The fact that she’d lost her husband decades before in the same way and at roughly the same age only deepened her sorrow. My brother George and I attended Lewis’s funeral, a service filled with music and laughter and tears. During one of the soulful hymns, Mary, seated in a wheelchair in the front row, reached her hand toward Lewis’s casket and swayed in easy rhythm with the music. She was a woman of strong faith, among the strongest I’ve known, and I remember feeling that the air in the church seemed to shift, as if Lewis’s spirit had joined Mary’s own, and settled in to stay.

Not long after Lewis’s death, Mary had another stroke. I visited a couple of times at her rehab facility, once on her birthday when JoJo was in town, but we agreed to hold off with the note-taking and the rest until she grew stronger. The stroke had slowed Mary’s speech and in truth, I wondered if it might be best to leave well enough alone. We were back in touch, friends again, and Mary should save her energy to heal and live her best life. In the span of a few weeks, she’d given me a glimpse into her family life—who could ask for more? Tough as ever, Mary had something else up her sleeve. The next March, she reported she was much improved and ready to start getting together, only I would have to come to Lou’s house while she recuperated, which was peachy with me.

And so it began. Lou welcomed me to her home on our appointed day, and Mary, the walker she was learning to use close at hand, gestured me to join her on the couch.

“Angel Face,” she said, her trademark smile tinged with emotion. “His story has been on my mind and in my spirit.”

“His story?” I asked.

“My daddy’s,” she said, touching the tight white curls around her still- smooth face. “I want to tell you my daddy’s story.”

She held up two pages of blue cursive notes written in the hand I knew from her letters, if a little uneven. I longed to hear about Mary’s life, and felt a touch disappointed.

“I’ve been trying to get it all down,” she said. “But I’m such a slow writer these days!”

“It’s hard for her …” Lou chimed in from the kitchen. “She spent days on it!”

Awed, I scanned Mary’s pages and it hit me: by sharing her father’s journey, she would be sharing her own in a manner she was comfortable with. Besides, do any of our lives make sense without the larger story of our parents and grandparents and on back?

“He was born in Hurtsboro, Alabama,” Mary began.

Hurtsboro—then a town of less than 900 residents wedged into a far southeastern lip of the state, deep in the Cotton Belt. Hurts to stay but it hurts to leave, Mary once quipped. The 1910s and 20s. The legacy of legalized slavery still shrouded the South, and Jim Crow was flexing his muscles. Mary’s father, Jimmie Lee Cochran, lived with his sister and their mother and grandmother on a white man’s farm. As early as the third or fourth grade, Mary explained, her father, “the man of the house,” often had to leave school early to go home and work the fields. Children being children, his classmates took note, in heartbreaking fashion, but a certain little girl understood Jimmie Lee’s predicament, and that would make all the difference.

Mary tells this best, so I’ll sign off for now with the brief clip above (apologies for the poor editing and annoying oohs and aaahs) in which she describes the moment her mother-to-be, Lue Milla James, first felt a pang of love for the boy who would become Mary’s father.

Shaking off the Dust

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When I launched this site a decade ago (!), I expected to share a few posts about the exhausting, cathartic, sometimes funny and strangely exhilarating process of cleaning out my parents’ attic. One damp box of mid-20th century toothpicks led to another, and thanks to support and input from readers like you, I learned that sharing family stories not only kept my late parents alive, it sustained me through the joys and sorrows of the years that followed.

In that spirit, and because honestly, how much more can be said about faded photographs and mildewed button boxes, I’ve decided to creak shut the attic door and launch a new site. It’s called “Why the World Wags,” and in it, I plan to wax on about well, whatever grabs me as I move along through life. Ten years on (!!!) from that first post here in “My Mothers’ Attic,” I find myself teetering at the edge of what some call the golden years. Has there ever been a more obvious euphemism? Golden in the sense of being burnished by life perhaps, but there are days when the world around me seems cast in the gray light of dusk. And yet! At other times, that world seems to sparkle in a way I rarely noticed when I was younger–when a bluebird lights on a leafy branch in our back garden, his feathers aglow with morning light, or when I’m able to revisit a place I’ve come to love, like the brilliant waters off the coast of Belize pictured above, or when my toddler granddaughter reaches for me, smiling, and calls my name (which at her bidding, seems to be “Gaga”).

Golden moments, every one.

If you’d like to join me on my continued journey, here is the first newsletter/post from the new site. I’ll be migrating some of my more popular posts from here to there, usually with some editing, but I’ll leave the Attic open a good while, too. To visit the new site itself, just click below. If you like what you read, consider subscribing (s’il vous plaît!)!

https://marthamattinglypayne.substack.com/

Thanks for reading, always, and I hope to see you in Why the World Wags!

A decade! Maybe that explains the shocking loss of melanin 🙂

The Places We Become

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne16 Comments

Tuesday, January 28th, 2025, would have been my brother John’s 75th birthday. I woke thinking, Oh, I need to call John today. How strange, how wrong, it felt not to have one of our cross-country chats. Like me, John was born and raised in Atlanta. When he was around thirty and I was twenty-ish, he moved to San Francisco. There, he became a clever, in-demand, pen-wielding ad man, later a creative director who befriended the celebrities he hired for shoots or met in Marin County on his children’s ball fields and school auditoriums, celebs like Steven Spielberg and Téa Leoni. Over the years, those of us living our quieter lives back east kept hoping something would draw John home to stay. We missed our smart gentle brother, but California had lassoed his heart for good. Our southern charm and Georgia sunshine were no match for the fog rolling in off the mighty Pacific, the hills rising impossibly beneath the wheels of the cable cars, the giant conifers piercing the skies, the 49ers, and the quirky beach towns where John summered with his family.

John and me, with our mother, in the early years of his California life.

John’s son and daughter grew to love San Francisco and Marin County with a passion to rival his. On Saturday, the first anniversary of his passing, Ben and Laura Lee held a memorial service in Stinson Beach, the quirky beach town John loved best. Tucked below Mount Tamalpais in West Marin, Stinson curves along a peninsula east of Bolinas. Seals swim and dive for their dinners in the lagoon on the peninsula’s north side. Egrets and herons glide over the sea and roost in the trees.

Our family had visited John often in recent decades, and these wonders of Stinson, the memorial itself, brought him back to life in bittersweet ways I hadn’t expected. Ben and Laura Lee set up a display that featured laminated copies of the print ads John created. His original portfolio briefcases spilled their treasures: John’s brainstorming notes, folders holding rough drafts, more ads, including one for a brewery that features John himself striking a gangster-like pose. A longtime colleague told tales of John’s ad days and reminded us he earned a professional nickname–Mad Dog Mattingly–when he once shed his Southern gentleman skin to stand down a difficult and demanding director. John’s children shared stories about John as a California Dad–the hours he spent shoveling snow at their cabin in Lake Tahoe to create luge-worthy troughs for their sleds, the steak dinners and fish fries he prepped, his habit of pulling over at every turnout during countryside drives–“Take it in, kids” his favorite refrain as they gazed together at the sea, the mountains, the dramatic cityscape of San Francisco. As her comments drew to a close, Laura Lee spoke of John’s close relationship with his grandson, her five-year-old son Ollie, who called him Poppy. With that, Ollie rose from his seat and lifted a basket from a table near the front. “California poppies,” Laura Lee said as Ollie handed out small bags of seeds for those in attendance to plant. Later, she, Ben, and Ollie spread John’s ashes beneath a Blue Oak tree that rises leafy green atop a slope of Mt. Tam, where in better days John loved to hike and think and admire the view.

One of John’s portfolios

The next day, as we walked Stinson’s main drag, we paused in front of the tiny Stinson bookstore that sits across from a bar and grill called the Sand Dollar, a bookstore we learned John dreamed of owning. Sell books by day and live in the apartment above by night. Somehow I never knew, but that’s how John hoped to spend his golden years. I’d wager he read nearly every book in that store, but life got in the way. In his early fifties, John developed a bad back, had a couple of failed surgeries, and spent the next twenty years struggling to adjust to the often debilitating pain that resulted. His dream was deferred, as so many are. Though this makes my heart ache, I’m glad to know of it. It helps me better understand the brother I loved.

Home now, I can hardly wait for my poppies’ spring bloom. And I’m grateful for the new memories of John I’ve gathered, new images of him as a California man. Among these, I’ll cling to two in particular, one grounded in reality and the other a bit of a fantasy: John resting for eternity in the shade of his Blue Oak, a chilly breeze rustling and the mighty Pacific spread before him, and John very much alive, shelving books in his tiny store, his glasses on his nose and his mustache twitching as he chats and smiles and rings up customers. As dusk falls, he turns out the lights, scales the stairs without pain, and enjoys a steak and a glass of wine, the rumble of the surf in the distance and the summer bustle of his adopted town below his window.

John’s Blue Oak. Swinging beneath, his daughter; gazing out to sea, his son; playing, his grandson.

Smoke Got in My Eyes

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne2 Comments
Dreamy pre-teen moi. Photo courtesy of my mother’s attic 🙂

Is wist a word? The OED says not, but I would argue for its inclusion. As an early teen, I was the walking definition of wistful, meaning, quite literally full of wist. Let’s consider possible synonyms … Was I instead melancholy? Nope, the feeling was less gut-gripping than that, yet stronger than longing. Reflective? No way. That suggests an intellectual hankering, which believe me, was years away. But I leaned hard into the wistful in those unsettled days. I was absolutely captive to if not wist, then wistful-ness? So clunky, that word. Plus the emphasis is wrong, less the wist, more the ness.

Shall we delve into a few of my favorite musical selections of the era? There was Carole King’s “Too Late Baby,” and Jimmy Buffet’s “Havana Daydreaming,” and for sure James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” Wist, wist, wist … And let’s not forget “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a remake by the Platters that was an oldie even in my day. I adored it ne’ertheless. I distinctly remember, after a date that went poorly, meandering up my darkened hallway to my father’s study to spin it on the family turntable. Certain I would never date again, I slumped to the window and stared out at our front lawn, moonlight in the weeds. I may have actually shed a tear, so wrapped up was I in my manufactured teenaged angst.

Yet these numbers pale one and all beside the song that gave perfect voice to what was bottled up inside me, a little ballad by the soon-to-be forgotten group, Looking Glass—

Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be, but my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea …

Is it regret I hear in these lines? Does regret equal wist? No, not really. At least regret is not precisely what “Brandy” evoked for me. It certainly wasn’t sorrow—what did I know of sorrow at age fourteen? But each time my radio played that quick guitar twang, then the riff on the keys followed by “doo doo ‘n doo doo,” my belly quivered and my heart swelled. I would crank up the volume and sing along with great gusto. And no verse bewitched me more than the last: At night, when the bars close down, Brandy walks through a silent town, and loves a man who’s not around …

Oh, the heartache! The delicious pain! This woman, this lovely barmaid, strong and independent yet imprisoned by love for a sailor she could never have. Even now I can feel it, the … the … the wist, for heaven’s sake! One refrain and I’m a skinny girl with long stringy hair who longed for curves ample enough to attract the one swaggering boy everyone yearned to make out with. Yep, there I stand in the dark corners of a fellow middle schooler’s smoky rec room while my friends, maybe a few enemies, roll around on the couch or slow-dance to “Stairway to Heaven.” I lean against the wall, less flower than sprout, and shut my eyes so that I might better conjure, and draw strength from, my precious Brandy—footsore, coins in the pocket of her apron—as she lays that whiskey down. Looped around her neck of course is a braided chain made of finest silver from the north of Spain. And it bears the name of the man Brandy loves! A man (her sailor!) who brought gifts from far away but made it clear he couldn’t stay.

How silly I was, a silly girl looking for love in all the wrong places. Unless maybe, just maybe, what I really hungered for wasn’t puppy love, or even romance. Maybe I couldn’t get enough of “Brandy” because of its poetry–a stretch, sure, but with apologies to any real poets out there, bear with me. Pop tune it may be, but the lyrics and the melody blend perfectly to create a certain mood (right?). A mood, I believe, that reflects and heightens the emotion its songwriters sought to convey. At the very least there’s this: Perhaps in those confounding years of my youth, I longed–without realizing it, mind you–for a sort of experience that was as yet out of my reach. As she pulled beers and served those sailors as they talked about their homes, Brandy took me with her, to that faraway fishing village by the sea where a spunky young woman could make it on her own (albeit without love). The lyrics, the harmonies that bolster them, rustled up in me not only the wobbly ache of the teenaged crush, but the exhilaration of finding oneself in an unfamiliar place or situation, the joy touched with loneliness that solitary travel, for example, can trigger, and that several years on, I would come to know myself, and to treasure.

Looking Glass, the rockers whose one-hit wonder tattooed my teenaged heart.

So maybe my pre-pubescent self, my mind (my soul?), stood in awe of the power of the artist, the power to make words and rhythms work so effectively in tandem that they forge emotion out of air. Magical thinking? Could be, but to believe it, that at some level even then I hoped to imprint others with words the way Looking Glass imprinted me, gives me great solace.

“Brandy,” to conclude, has staying power. When a band cranked her up during a wedding reception I attended recently, I embarrassed myself by jumping and spinning (partner-less), circling my arms overhead and shouting every last syllable at full volume. The crowd of mostly twenty-somethings around me danced and sang along, too, if with slightly less passion.

All wist and wistfulness aside, “Brandy” continues to transport me, as all good art should. A couple of her introductory notes sound through my Pandora app, and I’m right back on that western bay, where I can feel the ocean fall and rise, and see its raging glory.

Note: This post grew out of a writing prompt my friend and fellow writer, Mai Al-Nakib, shared with our beloved writing group in June (thanks Mai!):

“Think of a song that meant something to you as a teen … Why did it mean so much? Does it still? Explore it in writing… “

If you have a second, drop in a comment below about a song you once loved that can still bring a little lump in the throat. I’d love to hear from you! And be sure to check out Mai’s latest book, An Unlasting Home, a gorgeous and expertly researched multi-generational novel: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/an-unlasting-home-mai-al-nakib/1139827261

Home at Last

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne6 Comments
Like her father, once Mary earned the right to vote, she never missed the chance. Here she fills out her absentee ballot in October of 2018 for Georgia’s gubernatorial election.

Some of you met Mary Darian in “I Am Mae Mobley,” one of my early posts here in My Mother’s Attic. In part an outcry against an upsurge in race-related killings during the summer of 2016, that piece is at heart a tribute to Mary–the woman who helped my mother rise to the Herculean task of raising six children. Since I launched this blog, Mae Mobley continues to garner far more views than any other Attic post–testimony to Mary’s captivating character. In that earlier piece, I lamented that during the two decades Mary worked for our family, I failed to learn much about her life. I vowed then to make amends for this, to reach out to Mary, though I was more than a little nervous about cold-calling after so many years of silence. I might have known that was a waste of emotional energy. In the years that followed, in spite of facing one personal challenge after another, Mary shared detail after detail about her story, and more broadly, her family’s story, which to her were one and the same.

One morning not too long before the pandemic hit, I went to see Mary at the nursing home where she’d recently moved. Her room was small but comfortable–a sink and closet against one wall, a twin bed at the center, a broad window at the far side, the ledge below crowded with photos of her grand- and great-grandchildren. Mary’s devoted daughter, Lou, had a bird-feeder installed just outside the window so Mary could enjoy sparrows and robins and fiery red cardinals as they flitted about. By this point in her life, Mary was confined to a wheel chair, though I was soon to learn that in her case, confined did not apply.

I breezed through the door a little earlier than usual to find no Mary in sight. I heard a scuffle on the far side of the room and stepped closer. She had wheeled herself into the narrow space between bed and radiator and crouched low over her knees, her head nearly hidden between the bed and bedside table.

“Mary?” I asked, trying to control the worry in my voice. “Can I help?”

“Oh!” she said, her voice bright with enthusiasm as she looked up. “Angel Face!” (the pet name she coined for me as a baby). “Come on over here!”

I did just that. Mary craned about and reached her long arms around my neck. That’s when something shiny flashed in her lap–a long, thin metallic tool.

Celebrating Easter. April 2022

“Just give me a minute …” she said, ducking head under table again. “While I find my Puh …”

“Here, can I get it for you?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Her paper? Her pillow? I tried to maneuver between wheelchair and radiator but the space was tight, the bedside table happily cluttered–a card illustrated in blue crayon, a tub of Vaseline, a small glass vase filled with Alstroemeria, a stack of word puzzle books and a red leather Bible, its pages well-thumbed.

“What is it you need, Mary?”

No answer, just more poking at that shelf.

“Ah, here it is!” she cried at last. Turning, she sat up straight, her expression devilish and triumphant. “My Ponds!”

She held out the stick, which I then could see had a grip handle at one end and a sort of claw at the other, not unlike the mechanism in that arcade game in Toy Story (The claw is our master … ). Caught firmly in Mary’s claw was a jar of Ponds cold cream, same pale green cap and tulip logo as the ones my mother used to keep on her vanity table.

With easy dexterity, Mary twisted open the jar, scooped out a finger full, and chatting all the while, began massaging the silky cream into her still-smooth complexion. Her task complete, I offered to return the jar to its shelf. She laughed, waved me away, and did it herself, metal claw re-extended. Then she nabbed her hairbrush from the drawer, dropped it in her lap, and wheeled over to the sink. One of her feet–slightly swollen–nearly collided with the corner of the bed frame as she went.

“Mary, your leg–is it ok?”

“Oh that …” she mumbled as she set the hairbrush at the edge of the sink. “Some kind of blood clot in that old leg.” Then she plucked a cloth from a towel rod, wet it generously, and ran it across her short thick curls before brushing them out.

“Ok, now …” she went on, patting her head and smiling at my reflection in the mirror. “That’s better. I never know what it’ll look like in the mornings.” Then guttural laughter as she spun her chair around to face me. “Now tell me … What have you been up to?”

I gathered my thoughts, but before I got a word out, her eyes flew open wide and she cried, “Wait a minute! … I forgot my teeth!”

With that, and without a wrinkle of embarrassment, Mary spun back around, tugged a set of dentures out of a cup and slathered them with toothpaste. While she gave them a sturdy brushing under the faucet, I marveled at the independence, the lack of self-consciousness, and the serene acceptance of the time-consuming rituals of growing old that she possessed.

“Your mama liked Ponds, too,” she mused. “You know …” She paused and turned to me, that devilish smile restored. “She may have been the one who got me started with it!”

Whether this was true or its inverse–that Mary actually introduced my mother to Ponds–didn’t matter. This was a habit they shared, one I hadn’t known about, and something soft padded into my heart. Not a visit passed between us that Mary didn’t turn our conversations back to my parents, or one of my siblings–to those days she was part of the everyday workings of our busy household. She loved especially to wax on about my mother’s expertise as a seamstress, but then she’d been doing this since my summer camp days. Your mother made a white jacket for her new formal gown with shells around the midriff … she penned in a letter she sent off to Camp Merrie-Woode. Wow! When the lady moves, she gets momentum and never stops … Then, one of her witty after thoughts–I think she’s going to wear her sexy red sandals.

Back then, ten years old and homesick, I likely cried to read this, but it was a good cry. Mary was enfolding me from a distance into the home life I loved. I understand now that during our recent visits, she was doing much the same. Her smiles, her laughter, her stories, were keeping my mother, my father, in short, my childhood alive. She did me as much good–no, probably more–than I did her.

Mary’s father, Jimmie Lee Cochran, as a young man.

Though she lost her mother very young, Mary was eager to share her father’s story, too. In the 1920s, when he was hardly more than a child, Jimmie Lee Cochran worked the cotton fields of Hurtsboro, Alabama, where he lived on a farm with his mother and grandmother. In 1939, when Mary was four, Jimmie Lee came within an inch of being lynched. After a narrow escape, he managed to slip away to Atlanta, where he built a long career with Southern Railway. More importantly, a decade later Mary’s father brought her and her younger siblings to the home he’d built–literally built with his own hands–for his family. The twists and turns of Jimmie Lee Cochran’s story, and Mary’s alongside, paint a shimmering picture of courage, devotion to family, and perseverance. It’s a story that could fill a book. Maybe someday it will.

Born in 1935 in Hurtsboro, Mary Cochran Darian moved on from this world on April 18th, 2023. She worked those Alabama cotton fields herself before graduating from Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High. She married her sweetheart, Lewis Darian, and after twenty years with our family moved on to an administrative career at Crawford Long Hospital. Through it all, Mary took care of people–her four children, her physically disabled brother, her neighbors and grandchildren, her church family (to them she was “Mother Darian”) and me and … well, the list goes on. Her family held a “Homegoing Celebration” last week at her beloved church. The service left room for sorrow but had joyful music aplenty and tributes full of love and hope meant to speed Mary along on her journey to the place she firmly believed was her true home. I think everyone who spoke of Mary mentioned that infectious smile that so warmed me during our visits in her last years. I’ve mentioned the knack Mary had for helping me laugh away my little girl challenges and preteen angst. Her ability to smile and laugh herself through the many trials of aging was to me more remarkable. My mother had her strengths, but facing old age with grace was not one of them. She raged against the dying of the light, and though there’s something to be said for that, the way Mary kept her spirits high in spite of the slings and arrows fortune tossed her way not only eased her days, it lightened the hearts of those who cared for her.

The pastor who gave Mary’s eulogy asserted that her smile set an important example. If you love God, he suggested, the least you can do is smile for the world to see. Mary’s resting face was a smile, a natural one, broad and vibrant in a way that said, Watch out because here comes a laugh, a big one straight from the belly! The photo below offers proof. I can hear my brothers and my father laughing with Mary even now.

Mary returns for a much-anticipated visit with my family, sometime in the 1980s.

The cover of Mary’s Homegoing tribute booklet features a couple of her favorite phrases. “I expect a miracle every day,” reads one of them. For those who consider miracles to be only raising the dead or turning water into wine, this may sound like hyperbole. Like the wisest among us, Mary knew that the simplest things could be miracles: The touch of her first great-great grandchild settling into her lap; the familiar taste of the meals Lou prepared at home and brought to her room; the right to vote safely and the freedom to shop where she pleased and sit at the front of the bus (freedoms she had to wait until age thirty to enjoy); the weekly Bingo games (she won a lot) with other residents in the nursing home common room; a skittish bluebird in the morning sun, darting close for a nibble from her feeder before the pushier birds moved in.

Miracles every one, just as Mary was to all who knew her. She is home now, flights of angels singing her to her rest.

Mary with her daughter, Lou Darian Qualls, on Mother’s Day, 2022

A Tale of Two Cousins

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne24 Comments

During a late sweep through the dark corners of my mother’s attic, I stumbled upon a moldering shrine to one of my paternal great-aunts. Louise Bickers, a.k.a “Weezer,” was a feisty single woman whom I loved like a grandmother. With affectionate if drowsy interest, I dragged over a rickety wooden stool and dusted off her leftovers—stacks of limp letters, photos with curled edges, family trees scribbled on yellowed paper, and a decomposing shoebox of daguerreotypes.

Stumped? So was I. An early form of photograph produced by “fuming” mercury vapor onto silver-plated copper, the daguerreotype was introduced in 1839 and became obsolete by the 1860s. The 1860s! And there I sat, a hundred and fifty-plus years later, with several in passable shape. I ran my finger along the hammered tin frames, eyed the elaborate clothing, the formal, sometimes severe gazes. Where did these people—certainly family—live? What did they do? My curiosity piqued, I tucked the least fusty samples into a fresh plastic bin beside far too many of Weezer’s letters and photos and family trees, and moved on.

During the pandemic’s endless, vacant shut-in hours, I fetched up those family trees, rebooted my Ancestry.com membership, and typed in name after name. It was fun, by 2020 standards, learning how to create profiles for my long-lost blood kin and search for relevant documents and photos. When a grainy image of one of my great-great grandfathers popped up, I knew immediately it was—you got it—a daguerreotype. I fished out Weezer’s frames to compare and contrast. None of the faces matched exactly, but they favored, as my mother would say.

At once piercing and playful, my second great grandfather’s gaze seems especially, hauntingly, familiar. Born in 1825, Thomas Blake Bourne descended from a long line of tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland, a leg of land that kicks out into the Chesapeake Bay. The Census of 1850 valued his property at $2,500, equivalent to about $150,000 today, making his a healthy if small farm for its time. I can’t pinpoint the farm’s exact location, but odds are it was on or near Eltonhead, a tobacco manor along the instep of the county’s watery foot, tracts of which had belonged to Bournes since the late 17th century.

Thomas Blake Bourne, Lieutenant of the “CSA” and my second great grandfather

A city girl, I smiled to picture my great-great grandparents, Thomas and Margaret Louisa, living their quaint, rural 19th century lives. Soon a marriage record surfaced from May of 1848, a photo of Thomas’s gravestone, the inscription honoring him as “… a devoted husband and father, true to his friends and his country,” and a certificate proving that his maternal grandfather, Colonel Joseph Blake, fought in the American Revolution. Cool. I’m a DAR. I felt all rosy with pride. Then something else, less than quaint, caught my eye—a Slave Schedule, an appendix to the 1850 Census in which enslavers identified their “human property,” not by name but according to age, sex and color. I blanched, my ancestral pride dissolving as I counted the tick marks beside Thomas’s name: an even ten, six black males and four black females between the ages of six and forty-five.

I attached the Slave Schedule to Thomas’s profile and clicked back to his daguerreotype. That playful grin … might it be more a cunning smirk? My forehead heavy in my palm, I called my daughter in New York.

“We are from the South, Mom,” she said, unsurprised.

“But your grandfather came from humble roots,” I argued. “And Maryland’s hardly the South …”

“I know, Mom,” she said gently, knowingly. “But even small farmers enslaved workers back then.”

Which I knew, but this was our family, a whole different ballgame. I hung up and returned, dull eyed, to my laptop screen. Lined up in the right margin, I noticed tiny circular photos I’d missed before, profiles of other genealogists who’d saved Thomas Bourne’s image. I hovered over one, then another and another, and a pattern emerged—many belonged to people of color. What’s more, the family tree associated with each profile included a common ancestor, a man named Louis H. Bourne.

With clammy fingers, I typed Louis’s information into the Ancestry search engine. My first hit was the Census of 1860, which lists Louis H. Bourne, born 1830, as a “mulatto” head of household and farm laborer in Calvert County. More hits revealed that by 1880, Louis and his wife, Margaret, had purchased over thirty acres of land and settled down to farm tobacco in Island Creek, a breezy community along the Patuxent River that lies about fifteen miles from where Thomas Blake Bourne lived with his family. 

Calvert County in the Colonial Era

Or used to live. In 1855, amid rumblings of the war to come, Thomas had moved his household—including three children and at least nine enslaved persons—across four rivers and the Mason-Dixon line to a manor house near the James River in Virginia, a state he surely wagered would prove friendlier to his future as a planter. Eight years and three children later, Thomas enlisted to fight for the confederate states. He was thirty-eight. Around the same time, Louis H. Bourne, thirty-two, signed on with the Union Army. And so it was that second cousins, as I believe they were, took up arms against each other in a war rooted in misconceptions and greed. Were Thomas and Louis aware of this? I suspect so. It was a much smaller world then and Thomas still had family aplenty in Calvert County. Both men survived, though my great-great grandfather would die suddenly ten years later, the youngest of his nine children only eleven years old.

As intrigued as I was conflicted, I reached out to a few folks whose trees included Louis Bourne. Responses were scarce, but eventually I heard from Florencetine “Tina” Bourne Jasmin of Baltimore County. I hesitated–what right did I have to barge into her life?–then dove in and wrote to her that we could be related, somehow, through Louis Bourne.

“Oh my gosh,” Tina responded. “I’ve been hoping to find someone who might know something about my great grandfather!!!” Smiling again, I shared a little about my family. Tina sent photos of her son and daughter and grandchildren. She told me Louis Bourne had remained—thrived—in Island Creek until his death at seventy, as did many of his children, and some of theirs, and theirs and theirs right up to the present. Louis and Margaret had eleven children, among them trailblazers who stared down the fetters and hostilities of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. One of their sons, Ulysses Grant Bourne, was among the first black physicians to practice in Frederick, Maryland. A grandson, James Franklyn Bourne, Jr, was the first black judge to serve on the district court for Prince George’s County. Quite a legacy, an improbable triumph in fact, and this was only the beginning.

Louis H. Bourne, 1830-1900

At some point, I told Tina I regretted the unspeakable abuses my ancestors had visited on hers. “This history is beyond our control,” she mused. “I want to believe our ancestors are pleased with us for trying to reconcile our past.” Awed by her tolerance and wisdom, I thanked her and we dug in, working to make sense of our family ties. Tina quickly shared her best clue–a digital copy of Louis’s death certificate which names his mother as “Gracey Mason,” and his father as “James Bourne.” James Bourne? Thomas’s father, my third great grandfather, was named James. But then so was his oldest son, and his first cousin, James Jacob Bourne. Which James fathered Louis? And did he enslave Gracey Mason and the son they shared? Hard to know. A pair of 19th century Calvert County courthouse fires destroyed wills and bills of sale that might have given us proof.

We called in help. Tiffinney Green of Baltimore, Delma Bourne-Parran and Patrice Evans of Prince Frederick, and another cousin in California, all descendants of Louis Bourne, joined our search. The emails flew. We shared trees, unpacked oral history. Hoping to discover shared DNA, we spit in vials, waited, and waited some more.

From the will of Jacob Bourne, my 5th great grandfather.

The results: Delma, Patrice and Tiffinney each match with at least one of my distant white Bourne cousins. And the kicker–Patrice’s sister and I share DNA. Heartened by this proof of our kinship, we analyzed and drew charts and at last wagered that James Jacob Bourne (1791-1850), an enslaver of twenty-two, most likely fathered Louis H. Bourne. This means our common direct ancestor is my fifth great-grandfather, Jacob Bourne (1721-1771), whose will survives with a full inventory attached. In the same figurative breath as a tea kettle, three old sickles, and the spinning wheel in the corner, Jacob names Grace, age forty-five, as one of several enslaved people to be “gifted” to his sons. Might this Grace have had a granddaughter who was passed down the line to James Jacob? It was common after all for baby girls to be named for a grandmother.

My ethnicity compared with that of a person of color who shares DNA with both Patrice Evans and me.

Due to those courthouse fires, for months we had little else to go on. Then Tiffinney found a Grace Mason, born 1807, listed in a Calvert County registry of Free African-Americans in 1832. She lived with a Hannah Mason, age forty. A Louis Mason, age two (just Louis Bourne’s age), also appears in the registry and seems to have been part of Grace’s household. Grace and Louis Mason then disappear. Free people of color were often servants in households that enslaved others, and our hunch is that Grace Mason worked for James Jacob Bourne. Maybe at some point, say when Louis was a child, James took in Grace and their son, maybe even enslaved them in some sort of twisted effort to control them. Did Louis Mason then become known as Louis Bourne? Did James Jacob later free his son who should have been free all along?

We’ll likely never know the full truth. The fact that Louis shows up in the 1860 Census means he was a free man well before Maryland officially emancipated its enslaved. Hannah Mason, the woman listed alongside Grace in the 1832 Registry, provides another clue. Louis’s 1860 household included a Hannah Mason, age seventy-four. Though the years don’t quite match up, they’re close enough for that era to suggest that Hannah was Louis’s grandmother, and that her daughter–Louis’s mother, Grace–died young.

Unless James Bourne sold Grace off.

“I pray that was not the case,” Tiffinney wrote to me.

I pray so, too.

Much work remains. Most of my family lines run back to the colonial era, where other fraught relationships lie in wait. Tiffinney and I have DNA matches in common that suggest we may also be kin through my Mattingly side, and I’m in touch with another young woman directly descended from Colonel Joseph Blake. Looks like the Colonel’s son had his violent way with her third great grandmother.

Broome’s Island at the mouth of Island Creek, not far from where Louis Bourne farmed tobacco and raised his eleven children.

In May, my sister, JoJo, and I visited Calvert County. We researched alongside Tina and Tiffinney, and after, the four of us gathered for dinner with Patrice, Delma, and Marietta Bourne Morris, who still lives in Island Creek. We bored each other with family stories. We laughed over wine and margaritas. Humbled, JoJo and I accepted the kindnesses these women offered. Strong one and all, they overlook with seeming ease the troubled origins of our relationship and accept us as family. I’m proud to call them cousins, hopeful that Louis and James Jacob, Thomas and Grace Mason and my great aunt Weezer are indeed pleased.

Moving forward, I’m not naïve enough to expect from others the open-hearted welcome I’ve received from the Bournes. It’s nothing I deserve. One thing seems certain—this is not a tale of two cousins. It’s a tale of hundreds, thousands—dark-eyed and green and blue; blonde, red-haired, brunette; Irish and Bantu and Latin, Nigerian and Welsh and Congolese. Our skin shines ebony and alabaster and every hue between, and our cells quiver with the tangled threads of those who came before us, our human race.

Family

Postscript: If this sort of research project interests you, message me below or through Facebook. I’m happy to share tips and links to resources. There are many!

Lady Nona

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne4 Comments

Happy New Year! What a year it’s been. Like everyone else, I welcome 2021 and the hope and possibility it brings (yesterday’s horrific events in DC notwithstanding).

It’s been a while since I dipped in here to post, and I believe the last time I did I declared my intention to abandon my Attic blog altogether. Well, here I am again, but for something a little different. Today I share a short story, one I’d about given up on seeing published until The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature kindly included it in their January, 2021, issue. I’m grateful to the Mule. It’s a wonderful issue, by the way, in a lovely journal. You can check it out here: https://deadmule.com/

The setting of “Nona’s Gift”–a college town on a football Saturday–springs from my memories of UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 1980s. My late mother with her snobbish tendencies and ladylike grit inspired the character of Nona herself. It seems only right, then, that this story have a place in “My Mother’s Attic.”

Hope you enjoy!

Martha Payne: Fiction: January 2021

 PUBLISHED DATE:2021-01-01

Nona’s Gift

Nona reaches for the red beret hanging on the coat tree by her front door, and misses. Despite the ache in her joints, she rocks forward on the balls of her spectator pumps and gives it another whirl. The beret slips successfully off its hook. It’s a good Irish wool, soft. It warms her ancient fingers. Nona grips the beret gratefully as she gathers up her purse and walking stick, locks her door and totters up the carpeted hall of what her daughter calls “the home,” though it’s anything but. 

The elevator, thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is empty. Nona steps in, takes a sniff. Urine. She rolls her eyes. She’s had it with old people and their sloppy hygiene. Ground floor. Nona braces for the painful jolt as the elevator hits bottom. Then she settles the beret on her silvery head, checks the mirror on the back wall, and adjusts so as to center the beret’s rhinestone brooch above her left brow, the way she likes it. 

Outside, all is crisp and blue and breezy, perfect weather for the tailgaters who will soon be making merry at the stadium parking lot. To think of their Solo cups and onion dip makes Nona thirsty. She picks up a little speed, hoping to outfox the light at the corner of Magnolia and Main. It flashes yellow before she’s halfway there and she slows again. Not to worry. If they’ve run through the single malt by the time she arrives, Nona feels sure young Stuart will find her a decent glass of Dry Sack. She squints against the Carolina sun and steps to the curb. A crowd gathers behind her. To her left, a horn shrieks. Breathless, she clutches her purse against her bosom. Through a cloud of exhaust she watches a jeep sweep around the corner, its body splashed with paw-prints. Lengths of red and white crepe paper whip from its roll bars, and three—no four—barelegged girls balance on the running boards. Swaying left, then right, they shake pompons and cowbells and shout—GoCats! Numberwan! 

Her small feet splayed for good balance, Nona clucks her tongue and shakes her head. Then a thought, a terrible thought as young bodies jostle past, bumping her hips, her bony shoulders. Her heart aflutter, she opens her purse. All darkness. With trembling hand she fumbles past her wallet, a dusty lipstick tube, a blue lozenge and several loose aspirins and ah! There it is, beneath the glare of her compact. She hasn’t forgotten: Stuart’s gift, a box the size of a baseball wrapped in gold and tied with matching elastic ribbon. Nona touches a bent finger to the cool paper, lets go a sigh, snaps the purse shut. 

From a few blocks away comes drumbeat and blast of trumpet. Nona trains her eye on the signal across the intersection. It shines green. Shouts, chatter, the thump of a heart, her own. She wavers, her softly furrowed cheeks coloring beneath twin smears of crème rouge, then rights herself and steps off the curb, swollen knees and narrow hips cooperating with a grace she’d thought long gone. The electronic hand ahead flashes three times then becomes the number nine. Nona lowers her gaze and moves along, her cane ticking off with each measured step the manic neon countdown—six, five, four … 

“It most certainly is not a cane … ” Nona mumbles to the image of her daughter’s face that rises in her mind, stern and round as the moon. “A proper walking stick this is, been in the family since … ” She wets her lips and raises her voice, but Nona forgets exactly who it was, which of her grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, whittled the stick, carving it out of mountain laurel sanded soft as mink. “Well, I don’t care who whittled the thing. It’s positively not a cane, as anyone with half a lick of sense can see …” 

At the opposite curb, Nona pauses beneath the signal light, fingers the khaki piping at the collar of her peach-hued St. John’s knit, and eases up one foot, then the other. Her pale crooked fingers bear down on the walking stick’s handle and she just manages to scale the curb. Nona resents the stick’s handle, an ugly rubber affair Melinda’s husband attached, poorly, the day they moved her out of the house (an English Tudor on an acre lot) that she and Mr. Snyder saved twenty years to build. “Part of the deal, Mother,” Melinda announced while the glue dried, big bulbous globs of it that overflowed the handle’s edge, spoiling the walking stick’s lines altogether. “We retrofit that handle for safety, Missy, or you stay put.”

The sidewalk is moving! Nona plants her pumps at hip width. Then she sees—or hears—that it’s only music, rock music playing so loudly through the open windows of the columned house on the corner it vibrates deep into the earth and back up again. A plastic disc sails past Nona’s shoulder, then ziiiiing-pop! Something flies out a window and splats against the ancient oak tree to her right. A boozy mist falls over Nona’s face, mingles, glittery, with her finishing powder. 

 “Sorry, Granny!” screams a youthful voice through a window. Then, a chorus of deep-throated laughter. 

Pabst, Nona sneers, licking her lips and feeling all the more proud her grandson chose to pledge at the fraternity down the block, where for Game Day Brunch, the brothers serve sausage-cheese casseroles with pecan pinwheels and drink the way they did in her day. Bloody Mary’s, mimosas when it’s hot, whiskey straight up. They stock beer for those who must have it, mostly the climbers from the eastern counties, but serve it discreetly from a cooler on the stoop near the service entrance. 

It’s the front door for Nona, a tasteful Colonial with a modest transom. Once she’s scaled the porch steps, she raps the door with the rubber pad of her walking stick. Inside, a television blares: “Wear Nike and sweat like you mean it!” Nona knocks again, harder. Nothing. She shuffles back a step, then another, and lifts her walking stick high, aiming for the doorbell. Her shoulder creaks and her wrist downright wobbles with pain but ding-dong! She’s done it. She can just hear the chime above the din. 

A young coed—slender, doe-eyed, blonde—swings open the door. Her skirt is too short, her top too skimpy. 

“I’ve brought something for Stuart,” Nona declares. 

“Stuart?”

Nona gazes at the blonde through rheumy eyes. “Yes. Stuart Bridges, a third year. Come January he starts his term as president. Elected by unanimous vote. Today is his birthday.” 

“Who is it, Tink?” A voice from inside—Tink? What kind of a name is that? The voice is not Stuart’s, but Nona recognizes it. 

“Uh, um, a Missus … ?” The blonde gives Nona a look she doesn’t like. Pity-full. Who needs it. 

“Tell him it’s Mrs. Snyder,” she says, raising her voice, along with her chin, up and over the relentless music. The bass notes tremble, not unpleasantly, up her legs and spine.  

“A Mrs. Snyder!” calls Tink. She smacks something, gum maybe, or cud, and her eyes crinkle up in a smile. “Looking for someone named Stuart? Says he’s her, uh …” With a cheeky wink, the blonde leans close and whispers. “Grandson?” 

Nona nods, sniffs. Dime store perfume. “Stuart Snyder Bridges,” she declares, nose upturned. “After my late father-in-law, Stuart Jefferson Snyder.”

“Her grandson!” calls the blonde, smacking harder. “Stuart? Says he’s a junior?” 

“Thanks Tinkerbell!” A broad-shouldered young man with glossy hair slides a hand around the blonde’s hip and moves her gently aside. “I’ll take it from here.” 

The blonde smiles, gives a final triumphant smack, and trots away, ponytail bouncing. 

“Hi there, Mrs. Snyder. Glad to see you sporting our team colors today.” With a winning smile, the young man gestures at Nona’s beret with firm fingers that brush the brim ever so slightly. Nona grins, hesitant but proud. 

“Stuart had to run out …” the young man goes on. “Uh, for more mixers.” 

Her face pinched, Nona studies his eyes, his jaw line. She tilts so close she can feel the silky hairs along his forearm. 

“Now John, why didn’t you say that was you?” she says. Flushing with pleasure, she lowers her head and starts across the threshold while John, whose name is Cliff, steps aside to let her pass.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Snyder. We weren’t expecting you so early. I think you’ve been walking faster this season.”

“You think nothing of the sort,” says Nona with a smirk. Walking stick tapping, she makes her way to the living room and sits on the ragged couch. It smells of dog.

“Single malt, neat?” shouts John who is Cliff.

“Splash of soda today. Thank you, son.” 

Her purse in her lap, Nona rifles through its fusty depths. She pulls out Stuart’s gift and cups it between her hands. Patient, she watches huge players moving across the huge gridiron on the huge television across the room until John who is Cliff appears again, a sweating lowball in one hand.

“I see you remembered Stuart’s birthday,” says Cliff with a wink. White cardboard peeks through at the corners of the box where the wrapping paper, which once had a sheen to it, has worn smooth and begun to split.

“Why yes I did,” Nona says, and for a moment all her aches and worries soften. “Thank you, John,” she says, and extends her hand. 

“Yes ma’am,” says John who is Cliff. He grasps her fingers, hands her the lowball and leaves. A deep gulp, and Nona settles in to wait. 

In his townhouse seven miles away, Stuart Snyder Bridges, a thirty year-old accountant with a March birthday, pulls his cell phone from his pocket. 

“Hello, Mr. Bridges. So sorry to bother you …” 

It’s a voice Stuart knows well. A brother, Cliff, if memory serves, though they sound younger every time. “I’ll be right over,” he says. 

In the frat house living room, Stuart’s grandmother drains her scotch. 

“Would you like another, Mrs. Snyder?” Different voice, different young man, one Nona feels less sure about.

“Don’t mind if I do, dear,” she says nevertheless. “I’m sure Stuart will be here soon.”

“Yes, ma’am, he’s headed back now.” 

“Oh, my. Thank you, son.” 

Panicked, Nona searches for her purse, which someone has set on the floor. Her foot bumps the patent leather bulk of it. As she reaches down, the hard edge of the gift box presses into her belly. 

There it is, Stuart’s gift. She hasn’t forgotten. 

Nona relaxes into the soft odorous sofa cushions. Beneath her fingers, the box in its gold paper feels cool and expensive. She can hardly wait for Stuart to see it.

She Who Taught Me to Read

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne16 Comments

Screen Shot 2020-03-21 at 1.38.15 PMHonestly, I’m not sure this is true, that my mother taught me to read. I recall lying belly-down on a thick-piled prickly rug (an Oriental, as Mom used to call them in the days before we knew better), sounding out words in The Little Engine That Could. But the rug in question covers the floor of my father’s library, and it is my father, crunching numbers at the desk above me, who comes to my aid when phonetics fail and I stumble over a word. 

The thing is, “learning to read” involves much more than figuring out a diphthong (“bl” plus “UE” equals blue?!?), or understanding that “th” ends up sounding like whatever it is (“I think I can, I think I can,” said the little blue engine). Learning to read means coming to love the musty smell of an old paperback, the grainy touch of its spine, the voices both lyrical and rational that speak from the pages of any book, even an e-book. Learning to read means finding your proper posture. For my mother, this meant perched with straight back, ankles crossed and feet up, whether tucked, tickly, behind me on the couch or buried under her bedcovers. Learning to read means losing yourself to the story, soaking it in through your pores so deeply that the satisfaction of reaching the conclusion to a well-crafted tale feels not unlike the sensation of discovering someone you’ve long loved from afar loves you back. And when the tale ends, when you must surrender your book’s characters and plot twists and precise lovely language back to its well-thumbed pages, it’s as sweet a sorrow as love lost.

But my father. It’s not that he didn’t read. Daily reading was part of the routine that sustained him. His day at the office complete, the dinner dishes rinsed and racked, he carried his Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta papers to his armchair in our family room and settled in. He read his papers pretty much cover to cover, but he wasn’t much into fiction. At one point in late middle age he became enamored with Ferrol Sams, a Georgia novelist whose most successful book, Run with the Horsemen, told a coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up during the Depression, much as my father did. Other than that, I don’t remember a single fictional title in Dad’s lifetime bibliography. He may have shored me up with the fundamentals, provided the scaffolding for the life in words I would build, but it was my mother who proved true the adage, Children Do What You Do, Not What You Say. Mom read everything, everywhere: den, kitchen, bedroom; trains, planes, automobiles; mountain cabins, hotel rooms, beach.

Yesterday was her birthday, number 101 were she still with us, and with COVID19 running roughshod over our world and everyone in it, I have more time to read. It’s one of the things that helps me stop obsessing (did I wash my hands after touching that banister? Wipe down that counter where my son just scarfed down a sandwich? Did I, did I, did I?) I’m glad, in a way, that my parents aren’t around during these troubled times. My mother, as my sister reminded me this morning, couldn’t abide talking about one’s health, or illness in general (what else is there to talk about now?). And my father lost his mother to the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the only other health crisis in modern history to grip the entire planet as ruthlessly as COVID19. Dad always claimed he couldn’t remember his mother’s illness or death. He was only four at the time, but I fear some long-repressed and terrifying images might have resurfaced for him, were he around to try and survive this scourge.

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My grandmother, Frances Bickers Mattingly, circa 1908.

My grandmother Mattingly was a lovely woman, as you can see here. She died, pregnant with her fourth child, at age thirty. Unlike COVID19, the 1918 pandemic killed mostly strong young adults. Though I never knew her, I miss my grandmother somehow, and always have. With all this idle time on my hands, I miss my father, and especially my mother, during this, her birth week. The less we’re occupied, the more strong emotions rise to the surface I suppose. And though it seems wrong, selfish to speak it, I miss getting together with friends. I miss eating out and going to movies and plays and damn it, it’s spring. Of all entertainments, I miss baseball the most.

We–that is those fortunate enough to have so far avoided the virus–have lost something we desperately need: camaraderie, breaks to the routine. But I have what Mom left me, a love of books to help pass the shut-in hours. And I’m most grateful.

 

BOOKS
My current bookshelf