Mama Downs' Farmhouse

Sixty years ago, I spent many weekends and summer times visiting with my grandmother. My grandfather passed away when I was 5 years old, so I never had the opportunity to spend much time with him. My mother had 11 siblings, and 60 years ago, three or four of her brothers would be living with my grandmother in her rusty tin-roofed 4-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing. My uncles tried to make a living farming Mama Downs’ 80 acres of Mississippi hills or working as loggers.

The farmhouse had a small kitchen with an electric “ice box,” a wood fired stove and a couple tables where the food was prepared and dishes were washed and rinsed in two large porcelain dish pans. Another smaller table held a metal porcelain wash bowl, a bar of soap, and a metal pitcher of water to wash hands. On that table was also a bucket of water with a dipper.  A nail on the wall held the hand drying towel.

There were two sources of fresh water, but there was no deep-drilled water well. One source was a hand-dug cistern about 15 feet deep that had a dirt bottom, and the walls were plastered with cement. The cistern was a storage tank for rainwater. My grandmother’s house had gutters that were home-made from scrap metal and caught some of the rain running off the tin roof and carried it to the cistern. The cistern water was used for washing clothes in the huge fire-blackened iron pot in the yard, for washing dishes, for baths, and for other house cleaning duties. 

Drinking water came from a shallow well. We would withdraw water with a cylindrical bailing bucket about four feet long on a long rope. Water pulled out of the well would be poured into a bucket and was designated for drinking or cooking water. The bucket with the dipper on the small table in the kitchen contained the drinking water.

Everyone used the same dipper, and no one ever thought about that being unsanitary. I don’t remember one family member ever saying that they were ill from drinking water out of the same dipper.

As a boy, I would often spend the night with Mama Downs. There were no extra beds, so I would sleep with her. My fondest memories are of the cold winter nights when you could feel the cold air coming through cracks in the uninsulated walls and floors. There was no TV, no games to play—we just sat around the fire and talked and tried to stay warm. About an hour before bedtime, Mama Downs would put a couple of flat creek rocks about the size of an iron skillet at the edge of the fire box. When we were ready to go to bed, she would wrap up one of those rocks in a towel and give it to me. I would climb into that cold bed and wiggle around and make my nest on that homemade feather mattress and hold that warm rock next to my chest.

I can close my eyes and see every detail of that old farmhouse. I don’t have any pictures of the inside of that quaint rustic house, but I do have a painting of the outside of the house that I have cherished for the past 55 years. When I was in college, I learned that Mama Downs’ old house was going to be leveled by a bulldozer. A few days later I was there for a last visit to this place that held so many memories for me. I had recently purchased a roll of slide film, and I took a picture of the front of the house. Six years later I asked a friend who was an artist in Vicksburg, Mississippi to do two paintings of the old house.

In every home in which we have lived since our marriage, we have exhibited one of those paintings of Mama Downs’ house. I gave my mother the other painting, and to this day it hangs on the wall of her home. The day that I captured the house on the slide film, I picked up an old piece of wood that had fallen from the side of the house and had been propped up on the front porch. Both paintings are framed with wood from that piece of siding from the old family home.