My mother was born in this country, but her grandmother rode the train with her children to Texas to escape injustice*.There’s a lot of talk about immigrants coming across our borders lately. Here’s what happened to the child of one of them…*Escape to Laredo, Kindle short.

My mother was a funny  person, even as a child. I found this page from  my mother’s journal in my computer this morning. She wrote it in 1983 after I had asked her about her childhood (writer’s tend to be very archival.). I think it is a real window into the life of a migrant in Oklahoma. It was 1934 when she was five-years-old. When my mother was about seven-years-old, she sewed her first garment. She told me it was a bra with a big green bead in the center; she thought it was so glamorous! Her siblings teased her so much about it that she poked it into a hole in her bedroom wall to get rid of it forever. Mom became an amazing seamstress who could sew a garment for a customer just by looking at a photo–without a pattern. In her later years, she worked at The Bon Marche (now Macy’s) as an alteration lady and a designer of wedding veils. Later, she owned R-Zak’s, an officers’ uniform store in Lawton, Oklahoma. I hope you enjoy it:

I was five-years-old and I had found my first pet. A cute little dog. It disappeared before I had even named him. I was too young to know if my mother had given him away, she kept telling me that he would come back. I cried for days.

We were at a farm where Dad had been hired for the cotton season, as was the custom, the owner had given Dad two big tents. One for sleeping—one to use as a kitchen.

I was happy, but very quiet, and very serious. I was too small to pick cotton, so my first job was to take drinking water to them. The way to the cotton field was all warm brown sand, and I use to dance all the way.

After the water drinking, I just stayed and walked beside my Dad, we talked, and he taught me one Spanish song, when he sang this song, he would look very sad.

Lunchtime, we all walked home. The flaps of the tent would be rolled up, and we could see mother cooking. She would be making her favorite bread made like biscuits and pulled long as she put them in the pan.

Beans, rice, and a big bowl of hot peppers, plus coffee which I wasn’t allowed to drink, but I drained all the cups after they left the table. Our table was a long board table with a bench on each side. Mother always had tablecloths made out of white sugar sacks with flowers embroidered all over.

When the cotton season was over, we moved to Cyril, OK. I was almost seven, and time to start school.

Then the fun started, since I was always hungry, I developed a scheme how to get candy, apples and Indian bread from the Indian kids. It was so easy since I was the teacher’s pet, and she thought I could do no wrong. I would trade my tablets, pencils, crayons for any thing that looked good—then all I had to do was shed a few tears and I got all my things back. And the kids would get the ruler for taking “things from Little Grace.” One day I made a big haul—one apple, 1 orange, one Milky Way bar all for my Red Chief Indian tablet. During recess,I inhaled all this stuff. When we went back it was time for penmanship. I started my act, I was so upset I couldn’t even say the boy’s name. I just pointed to him. He got a spanking—I got my tablet—what an actress!

My school days were cut short when my dad decided to try his hand at farming, he leased a farm three-miles from Cyril. After a year he gave up, he didn’t know how to run a two-horse plow, he didn’t know how to milk a cow.

So back to Cyril, he rented part of a house from an Indian lady she had three-sons-one daughter the two older boys beat the drum and sang all night long.
About that time some of the men with families started moving to Lawton, we had had enough of drumming, so we moved also. We landed in tent town, east of Lawton, my dad and brother set up a tent, but didn’t secure it right so that night a strong wind came up, and we woke up with a tent on top of us.

My father started looking for a house. He found one on Bell Street, three rooms, with an out-house. We lived there about three years, then we moved to a big house with a bathroom.

On my eighteenth birthday my dad bought me a bed room suite. I was real popular, I danced I played softball with a team—I was real interested in art, but we couldn’t afford lessons. I earned money working for my Sunday school teacher.

Times were hard, the county was helping us with staples. Every month the man would bring a box with Flour—cornmeal, syrup, sugar, coffee cheese and cans of chopped meat.

I made all my clothes, without a pattern, we did have a paddle Singer sewing machine. I had a lot of friends, but boys didn’t like me—they all called me sis, maybe  if  they had seen my legs they would have liked me, but dad didn’t allow us to wear shorts or short sleeves.

Our home life was good—no fights, no quarrels. I only saw my dad angry once when mother used his hammer from his tool box and didn’t put it back. He was going to leave us. Then he went in the kitchen and made coffee. One thing was for sure, she put everything back when she used his tools.

This is one of my last photos of my mother. Her story was the basis for my first novel, A Three-Turtle Summer.

There’s more, but I’ll stop for now in case you’re busy!

Thanks for stopping by!
Janelle

See my books and stories on Amazon and other Internet bookstores:

My newest novel. Amazon Kindle.
How does a One-way Cruise to Africa end up in Tombstone?