A Slap and Unintended Consequences

My remarkable grandmother, Mary Lee Blake Calhoun, died from cancer in 1946. As a newborn girl just after the civil war ended, she traveled with her family in two covered wagons pulled by mules over unimproved paths and across rivers and swollen streams about 1,000 miles and four months southwest to Pickens county in west Alabama. This was the jumping off spot for those former rebels escaping west to Texas.

It was a difficult and dangerous journey. She told me about encountering many desperate people but kind people. Her father had been a medical officer in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and his South Carolina property had been lost to taxes. There was little US paper money in circulation. The South had been reduced to a barter economy.

She clearly remembered stories told by her two, much older brothers (11 and 13 yrs old) about having to conceal their weapons well when encountering Yankee patrols. Any former confederate wearing parts of his confederate uniform and possessing a weapon who didn't have papers attesting to their loyalty to The Union could be executed on the spot. Remember that there was very little paper money paper of any sort available immediately after the war ended; so these roving patrols were greatly feared in the south. This edict was issued by Lincoln’s War Secretary Stanton who hated the South for killing his friend, Lincoln. The family’s trip grew out of desperation to find a safer place to settle.

Her passing in 1946 affected my mother Evelyn Calhoun Johnson. At that time, myself and others did not understand or appreciate just how much of an impact there had been

Mother had given me a cap on my twelfth birthday and I had later re-given it to a school girlfriend. Some time afterwards, when Mother asked me where my cap was, I told her.

She hauled off and slapped me with all her strength.

Hurt, angry-mad, and embarrassed, I cried. her slap was a defining moment in my life. There was no beloved grandmother to console me.

Only later, replaying the slapping incident in my mind that I realized my mother, with WWII ending, Dad would lose a well-paying Defense Industry job and be ,forced to return to a poorly-paid position in his father’s jewelry business. She may have been worried about how to make ends meet and fund my college education. Anyway, Here I am, seventy years later still struggling with an ancient wrong, the slap, that drove a steel rod down my spine. The word, agency was in vogue at the time.

You, dear reader, may wonder, how I responded: I became a crawfish, hiding on the bottom, staying out–of–the–way, pretending that all was well. I opened a bank account and my first deposit was the money I saved stocking shelves, sweeping floors and tips received carrying customer's groceries to their cars. My first deposit was slightly less than $100. How proud I was. At last I had some agency.

My paternal grandfather, Samuel Oscar Johnson (forever to all, SO),came to Birmingham off the family farm on the Sequatchie river in SE Tennessee, near Chattanooga. In Birmingham, he sold his jewelry wares provided on credit by a Jewish friend to the well—paid miners extracting the iron ore and coal that fed the sloss furnaces producing cheap high- quality steel. All necessary ingredients to make the steel were available locally without expensive transportation costs.

This steel was used to supply guns and tanks, first in WWI and 20 yrs later in WWII plus lamp posts and bridges in NYC and other large, metropolitan Northern cities.

SO shared his profits on a handshake basis with his Jewish friend supplying the jewelry. SO worked hard “to make a show (displaying and selling his wares everyday)”, his favorite saying to me as a child. He was a life-long, church-going, Methodist, blessed with a fun-loving, teasing and mischievous nature.

SO was frugal and successful beyond his wildest imagines. Within five years, he had accumulated enough money to buy 600 acres South of Birmingham, build a home, and later return to Tennessee to get his girlfriend, my future grandmother. They married, and raised a son, my dad, and five lovely daughters, My paternal aunts and their future husbands. my uncles, were kind and helpful growing up. The cousins they sired, my loving, special friends.