Growing Up Read Online Free PDF

respect. With coarse black hair and dark brown skin, he might have been part Indian.
    Maybe it was his utter difference from Papa that stirred her. Despite her preference for gentlemen, she was not without a healthy feminine interest in tall, dark, and handsome specimens with the adventurer’s gleam in their eyes. Much later, when Robert Taylor was Hollywood’s newest sex symbol, I was surprised to overhear her tell a group of women discussing Taylor’s charms, “He can park his shoes under my bed anytime.” She was joking, of course, being one of the girls. Still, it forced me to concede that she was capable of more varieties of love than her girlish love for Papa and her motherly love for me.
    The young man in Bessie Ahalt’s parlor was obviously no gentleman. Gentlemen didn’t visit Sam Reever. In his favor, though, he was quick to smile, and he was not a complete Hottentot. He had enough manners to say “ma’am” when he talked to Bessie. There was a sense of fun in him too. Unlike most men she met, he was not so blinded by awe of a schoolteacher that he couldn’t see a woman. Though he’d left school after fourth grade, her learning didn’t scare him. Cheekily he asked if she’d like to go riding in his Model T.
    She said she’d like that.
    Among other things, she planned to improve him. Her first goal was to stop his drinking, but as months passed and the courtship became complicated her program went awry, and then there was a crisis. She was pregnant.
    Out-of-wedlock pregnancies were fairly commonplace in thatpart of Virginia. They occasioned mild scandal when the news spread, but there was no taint or disgrace if a man “did the right thing” and a marriage ensued. If he refused, people looked on him as a bad sport for a while, until he found another woman, married, and “settled down.” The rejected mother-to-be, on the other hand, faced a lifetime of shame and ostracism.

    In either case a schoolteacher’s career was ended. In this terrible moment when she faced ruin, my mother was confronted by a redoubtable enemy. This was her prospective mother-in-law, whose plans for her son did not include marriage with an outsider she heartily disliked.
    An obedient son, he had taken the schoolteacher home to meet his mother when the courtship began, and the two women promptly developed a lively aversion to each other. When his mother learned of the pregnancy, she declared violently against marriage. She told him he was a young fool who had been tricked by a hussy ready to stoop to any scheme to trap herself a husband.
    She was a domineering woman, who had trained her sons to march to her command. Normally, her opposition to a marriage of this sort would have closed the case against the mother-to-be. This case, though, was different. She was pitted against a woman as fierce as she.
    In March of 1925 her son and his schoolteacher went discreetly down to Washington to be married. They were both twenty-seven years old. I was born six months later and immediately became the darling of my doting grandmother. With all her love for me, however, she never forgave my mother, and my mother returned the scorn measure for measure.
    Ep Ahalt’s farm looked down across sloping cornfields toward a small village a quarter mile to the south. The village consisted of seven houses and a general store, a few vegetable gardens, a couple of straw ricks, and a scattering of barns, chicken houses, and pigpens. On a summer afternoon the whole place dozed in the sun, under silences broken only by the occasional cluck of a hen, the solitary clack of a closing screen door.

    This was the center of the universe in the days of my innocence. Its name, Morrisonville, dated from the early part of the nineteenth century. By the time I came along it could have been appropriately renamed Bakerville, for almost every soul in the community was a member in some degree of the prodigious Baker family, which had settled in the region around