No Hill Too High for a Stepper Page 6

  Maggie, I was told, lived with her husband “’cross the creek.” To many people, that meant “nigger quarters,” but we didn’t say that in my house. From a very early age I heard the word constantly and even used it myself, but not in our house. Dad taught me that when I addressed Taft Farrington, Gene Prentice, and Rose Cottingham, I was to say Mr. Taft, Mr. Gene, and Miss Rose. That really applied to the older black people I knew, except for the blacks we were extremely close to, like Maggie. I could call black children my age by their given names, so they were Cary or Peanut or Lightning.

  Maggie lived ’cross the creek until during World War II, when her husband was drafted into the army. Maggie didn’t have enough money for rent and food, so Mother and Dad began to figure what they could do to help her. Mr. Pete Givhan had built a garage between our house and Bloomer Wilson’s, and, since we didn’t have a car to put in it, it was unused. “Do we dare to fix that up and move Maggie into it?” Dad asked, and he and Mother decided that if Sam and Rose Klotzman on Highland Avenue could have their maid living in their backyard then we could too.

  Dad bought some lumber and got Harry Miller, a shoeshine boy at his shop, to help him put in a floor and to install a door and one window. He nailed up the large garage door and cut a smaller opening in the middle of it, using the planks he had cut out to fashion the door, which he placed on runners so it could slide open and shut. He used the same procedure for the window. He did all this work with a handsaw and a few other simple tools. There was no glass in the window, and I wondered how Maggie could see out. Dad showed me how she could open the window, but I thought that wouldn’t work very well in the wintertime.

  It was late fall when he fixed up the garage for Maggie, and Dad feared that the room would have wind blowing through it. Maggie said he should fill all the cracks with newspaper, and that is what they did. Then they covered it over with heavy wallpaper with big white magnolias on it, tacking it up rather than gluing it. After Maggie pronounced it quite warm and said it looked wonderful, they set about furnishing the room. Maggie brought a little table and a couple of chairs with her, and Mother and Dad found a bed, a small dresser, and a chifforobe with a round mirror in the top. Maggie ran a wire across one corner of the room and hung clothes on it, covering them over with a white sheet.

  Dad had Mr. H. G. Parker run an electric wire from our back porch to the garage so that the room could be lit by a single light bulb hanging in the middle of the room. The place had a tin roof and no insulation, so it could get either very cold or very hot in there. Dad installed a small stove for warmth. The stove looked similar to the four-legged monster in our kitchen, but it was not a water heater and did not need a silver water tank. Maggie’s stove burned coal, and of course she used our coal from the coal shed. She was very pleased with her stove because she not only could keep warm, but she could even cook on her stove if need be.

  For the hot weather, Dad bought Maggie a brass-plated General Electric oscillating fan, which she would plug in to one side of a two-way plug connected to the light bulb socket. If she wanted to run the fan during the night without the light, she had to reach up and unscrew the light bulb. The fan seemed to me far preferable to the ones we had in our house, and I wondered why Dad didn’t take Maggie’s fine fan for us and replace it with one of our old black ones.

  All in all, Maggie’s place was quite cozy, and I recall going in the room at night and being charmed by the glow from the light bulb, casting a rich rose light over the furniture and walls covered with Maggie’s magnolia wallpaper. And when the oscillating fan was on, there was a low hum I found mesmerizing.

  Although at the outset Mother and Dad had worried a bit about what the neighbors would think, once Maggie moved in she was welcomed by all of them. Even though her friends were ’cross the creek, she seemed happy. Of course she still came in the back door, never in the front—she could leave by the front door to clean the porch or sweep the sidewalk, but she could not enter the front door. Maggie had her own dishes in her place in the kitchen, but on lots of occasions she was invited to eat at the table with Mother and me. I liked those occasions. Often, however, Maggie would wait until we finished eating and then sit alone, eating the leftovers from the stove.

  After World War II ended, Maggie’s husband came home, and shortly thereafter Maggie told us she was leaving and moving to Detroit, Michigan. To say the least, this was a shock. How could she leave us? Some crude neighbors said, “Just like a nigger, she didn’t know how good she had it,” that Dad and Mother had always overdone for her, and she was ungrateful. But whatever her reasons for going, there were tears on both sides when Maggie left. We knew very well how lucky we were to have loved and been loved by Maggie, and, though we seldom heard from her over the years, we never relinquished her place in our hearts and minds.

  After Maggie left, Mother and Dad were without help for a while. They hired other women, but none stayed long until they hired Leonora, a tall thin lady, thought to be dignified and beautiful by most who knew her. I remember how gracefully she walked down the street. She lived across the little red bridge on Depot Street, which ran parallel to the railroad tracks.

  Leonora arrived at our house early enough in the morning to cook breakfast and see Mother and Dad off to work. She did our washing in a new wringer washing machine, which sounded like a snare drum when it was running: para diddle, para diddle, para diddle, slam slam. I especially liked watching Leonora feed the wet clothes through the two rubber rollers above the tub, with water and soap bubbles squishing out into the tub. Then Leonora pressed a button and the dirty water was pumped out a black runner hose into a grease trap Mr. Shorty Smitherman had installed in the yard. After that Leonora had to take the clothes in a #2 galvanized tub and hang them in the yard. Washing was not a simple matter in those days.

  Leonora stayed with us several years, but a new opportunity came available at Alabama College and she was hired as one of the maids at Flower Hill, the beautiful home of the president. Mother and Dad were happy for her, thinking that her smiling face would fit in perfectly in such elegant surroundings. This was certainly a prized job, and even as a boy I thought Leonora looked right at home as she walked up the brick drive to Flower Hill, under the arch of pecan trees lining the drive.

  6

  Ancestors

  The Mahan legacy in Brierfield began when the Mahan boys—along with the Fanchers, Smiths, Ragans, Lindseys, and Massingales—came upon the site while returning home after fighting in the battle of New Orleans (or the battle of Chalmette Plantation, as it was often called). According to family history, the men of these five families proceeded north and east toward their homes in Tennessee. Following a trail from the junction of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers at what would become the settlement of Cahawba, they came through what is now Brierfield, where they found a wealth of natural resources—longleaf pine, oak, chestnuts, and iron ore. The Mahan boys, being blacksmiths, said this is the place we need to be. The other men felt the same way.

  Family tradition has it that the group left a few men behind in an Indian village on the banks of a beautiful stream, and the rest returned to Tennessee to gather their families, load wagons, hook up teams of oxen, and return to the newly found utopia. When they returned, the men they had left were no more. It was said that they couldn’t leave the Indian maidens alone and were killed. But these are just stories. At any rate, the families who returned from Tennessee had little time for mourning, and they split up and went upstream and down, settling on the banks of what is now known as Mahan Creek or on the Cahaba River.

  My great-great-grandfather, Edward Mahan, was a hoarder of books, personal items, letters, and even clothes. None of this was junk to him. It was preserved carefully so that it would be in good shape when viewed by future generations. Edward married twice, as did his son Jesse. Two of the eleven children born to Jesse Mahan—Adelaide and Jesse Jr.—were not content to stay in Brierfield, given its limi
ted opportunities for education and prosperity, and they sought their fortunes elsewhere. Luckily for our family, both Jesse Jr. and Adelaide left records that allow us to know a great deal about them. I am descended from Jesse’s first wife, and the mother of Adelaide and Jesse Jr. was his second.

  Jesse W. Mahan Sr., 1816–84, the son of Edward, one of the original Mahan boys. Jesse was my great-grandfather and a man of many faces who witnessed significant historical changes. Among his accomplishments, he was the first Republican state senator from Bibb County, Alabama.

  Anna Cunningham Curtis Mahan, wife of Jesse W. Mahan Sr. and mother of Adelaide, posing in Adelaide’s studio on the banks of Mahan Creek, May 27, 1910.

  Adelaide, my great-aunt, was born in 1872. Her mother, Anna, had a first husband, Joseph R. Curtis, a member of the Fifth Alabama that formed in Montgomery, who was killed early in the Civil War in the battle of Seven Pines. Anna’s second husband was also a Confederate soldier. A few days after their marriage, he went off to join a Texas unit and was never heard from again. After the war, about 1870, Anna met and married a Bibb County legislator and widower, Jesse W. Mahan Sr., my great-grandfather.

  Aunt Adelaide’s early passion was art, particularly painting. But her study was postponed while she served as postmaster of Brierfield from 1897 through 1901. Following her term, she was accepted by the Woman’s Art School at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. From 1901 through 1903, she distinguished herself by winning prizes and earning the praise of her teachers at Cooper Union. In 1902, she traveled to Cape Cod to study with the well-known painting teacher Charles Hawthorne in his first outdoor summer school, the Cape Cod School of Art. He was favorably impressed with her human form pieces, and he encouraged her to submit her work to exhibitions.

  Returning to Manhattan for another year at Cooper Union, she passed the year successfully. But the summer brought an unhappy experience—teaching art in the city to a set of recalcitrant boys she referred to as “the demons.” At midterm she resigned, dutifully returning not long afterward to Brierfield to take care of her seriously ill mother.

  In 1911, Adelaide returned to New York to complete her course of study at Cooper Union, again winning prizes, and then bringing her degree home to Brierfield, where she spent the rest of her life. She became somewhat reclusive, supporting herself with her art, her honey production, and by selling timber and leasing her inherited land to farmers. She was a member of the Brierfield Catholic Church and was a founding member of the Catholic church in Montevallo. She had little to do with people in Brierfield, but she did belong to the Birmingham Art Association and had a one-woman show in Birmingham. As the years passed, she painted seriously less and less, as an interest in crafts replaced her devotion to fine art.

  As a boy, I paid little attention when I heard of Adelaide’s artistic accomplishments. I mostly thought of her as a witch, stomping around in knee-high boots and wearing shapeless hand-sewn dresses. When it was cold, she would wear a heavy woolen sweater and a toboggan cap she had knitted. When Mother and Dad took me to visit her, we would walk up the herringbone brick path to Adelaide’s unpainted house on Mahan Creek (the house had been built, but never finished, by her father for Anna, who refused to live in the old family home where Jesse Sr. was brought up). Often we would find Adelaide busying herself with her bees, doing needlework, painting valentines and notecards she would sell to local people, or busily working on some other project.

  Adelaide Eleanor Mahan, 1872–1958, my beautiful, adventurous, creative, selfish, and self-reliant great-aunt.

  She is at far right holding a palette in art class at New York’s Cooper Union, circa 1903.

  She never seemed particularly happy to see us. Her bearing was austere, and I was rather scared of her. She hardly acknowledged my presence, and I wasn’t much interested in the conversations she had with my parents. But occasionally things were enlivened when she would take issue with Dad on some topic. One source of contention had to do with Dad’s handling of the Baird House in Brierfield, built by the husband of Adelaide’s sister Christabel, who came from Honduras and abandoned the house in the twenties. All had agreed that it had become such an eyesore that it should be torn down. Dad agreed to handle it, and afterwards Adelaide and others felt that he had kept too much of the money he received from selling the scrap lumber. He was quite defensive about it, and if anything about the Baird House came up he and Adelaide would argue. Afterwards, Dad would say he would never set foot in her house again. But Mother would begin to feel sorry for Adelaide out there by herself, and invariably through the years Dad would go back. In fact, at the end of Adelaide’s life, Dad and Mother cared for her in their home.

  There were four rooms and a large hall in Adelaide’s house. On our visits, we entered the dark and shadowy living room. Like the rest of the house, the room was totally unpainted, with beaded ceilings and walls and broad-board pine floors. Its walls were filled with her paintings, and on tables—covered with doilies Adelaide had crocheted—sat pottery and other things she had made. Later when I saw photographs of Victorian salons in Europe, I immediately associated them with this room. I was always a little amazed that one of the pictures was of a naked woman and another of an almost naked man. Nobody ever mentioned them. I also remember being a little surprised to see that some of the paintings had price tags attached.

  We never sat in the living room, but usually she led us through the hall to the kitchen. At one end of the hall stood her prized piano. Hung on the walls of the hall—the bee room, we called it—were an oilcloth hood and apron and high-top gloves she used to handle her bees. I was particularly interested in the extracting machine that took the honey from the combs, and I was impressed with the shelves of quart jars and half-gallon cans arranged neatly along the wall, all bearing the off-white labels she had designed, with the words “HONEY by AE Mahan, Brierfield, Ala.” printed in blue ink. Much of her living came from her sale of this honey, which was thought to be some of the best anywhere.

  I think now that the only thing back then that really impressed me positively about Adelaide was how organized and precise she was. She knew how to take care of things, and she didn’t want to be distracted from doing so.

  From the hall, we would enter the kitchen. Taking our seats in the cane-bottom chairs she used at the kitchen table, we sat around the potbellied stove that glowed red on cold winter days. The one attention she paid me was to get the Civil War sword that Mahan slaves had found after Wilson’s Raiders came through Montevallo. I was quite interested in the sword—and am lucky enough to own it now—but a boy was really limited with what he could do with it while sitting in a chair. The adults talked, and I quickly became bored and let my mind wander.

  Adelaide’s bedroom was off limits to all visitors, and I spent a good bit of time wondering why. What was she hiding back there? Her desk was in her bedroom, and some people thought she didn’t want anyone to meddle in her affairs. Some thought there were lurid love letters she wanted to conceal. Others thought she wanted to conceal graphic oil paintings of nudes. Her nephew Edward, who had been sent to live with her in Brierfield because he was thought to have tuberculosis, ran up on those paintings, and when Adelaide found out she was quite furious and burned many of the paintings she had done at Cooper Union. Only after Adelaide died in 1958 did we see that room. Packing up her possessions to send to Texas to her nieces and heirs, Cornelia and Sarah, we never found anything we thought she would have wanted to hide. But she was always a private person, and I guess she felt that she needed one place that was absolutely her own.

  I was greatly curious about one family story. In the hall there was one wall that did not reach the ceiling, and it was said that Adelaide threw a number of Honduran gold coins in that space when Edward and his friends kept getting them out and playing with them. It was also said that she skipped some off rocks in Mahan Creek, and when I was a boy I sometimes dived in s
earch of the coins, but never found a single one. Once Adelaide heard me telling someone the story about the coins, and she told me in no uncertain terms to shut up.

  I had my most memorable experience with Adelaide while I was in college at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn). I was taking a sophomore course in Alabama history from the distinguished professor, Dr. Malcolm McMillan, and I decided to do my paper on the Brierfield Furnace. My ancestors had been involved in its establishment, and Adelaide herself had been cited in Ethel Armes’s book on Alabama’s coal and iron industry. She seemed an obvious source for my paper.

  Adelaide did not have a telephone, so on a freezing Saturday morning in the winter of 1953 I knocked unannounced at her door. She rushed me in so she could close the door against the cold. When I told her what I wanted, she didn’t seem overjoyed to have to deal with me, but she said, “Take off your coat and I’ll try to answer a few questions.”

  The visit ran on for about three hours, and with every question she became more agitated. Probably she wanted to be doing some of her projects, but that did not occur to me then. At one point, when she ventured some observation, I said that I thought she was wrong, that Dr. McMillan had told us something different.

  “Well, if you and that professor already know everything, why are you here bothering me?”

  That startled me a bit, and I said I was sorry, that I thought she’d be interested in his opinion.

  “Well, I’m not,” she said.

  I had pretty well gotten all I needed from Adelaide, so I decided the smart thing to do was change the subject. I asked her about her pet wren that had for several years been flying into her kitchen and eating breadcrumbs from her hand.

  “You know all there is to know about it,” she said sternly, still fuming about her authority being questioned. “There’s nothing to say.”