Mama Downs

Mama Downs was my mother’s mother. Mama Downs’ father was a frightful part Cherokee man who slept on animal skins. All his grandchildren, including my mother, were afraid of him as they said that he looked like a wild animal.

My mother’s father, who we called Papp, died at 56 years from liver disease caused by the consumption of his own homemade corn whiskey. All the neighbors including the county sheriff knew that Henry Downs distilled his own liquor, and no one ever reported him to the “revenuers” because he provided them with their own mason jars filled with the rotgut stuff—including the sheriff!

Papp died before my 5th birthday, so I barely knew him. I grew up spending a lot of time at Mama Downs’ house. My mother and her ten brothers and sisters grew up in that old house with basically two main rooms and an add-on small room on the back next to the dining area and kitchen.

The simple old house was covered with unpainted weather-beaten pine planks that Papp and his sons had sawed from pine trees that they cut down on the farm. It had no insulation, no indoor plumbing, no screens on windows or doors, a wood-fired stove, and it was heated by a fireplace in one room and a pot-bellied heater in the other. But I loved staying in this old house any time of the year.

Its roof was rusty old tin, but I loved playing “Annie Over” with one of my many cousins. I would throw a rubber ball over the roof and yell “Annie Over” and the cousin would have to catch it before it hit the ground. I loved pulling water from the well and filling the drinking water bucket with fresh water.

The cousins and I often played hide and seek, and there were so many great places to hide—in the barn, in the smokehouse full of smoked meat hanging from the rafters, in the storm cellar where potatoes and onions were stored, in the massive fenced-in garden, or under the house as it sat balanced on large rocks.

There were basically three gathering places at Mama Downs’ house—in the room with the fireplace where there were also two double feather beds, the front porch and the dining area where there was a long bench alongside the wall and wooden cane-bottom chairs around the rest of the table. There was enough room to get a dozen or more people around that table.

Mama Downs’ hair reached her waist, but people never saw the length of her hair as every morning before dawn, she would rise and brush out her hair and braid it and wrap the braids tightly around her head. Each night she would take her hair down and brush it out just before she climbed into bed.

She was a workhorse! Her energy was endless, and she never blinked an eye no matter how many people she had to feed. All the cousins’ favorite meal was fried chicken. Mama Downs would call a couple of the cousins to help her catch a couple of chickens that were running loose in the yard. She would grab the chicken by the neck and with a flick of the wrist she would swing the chicken around and wring its neck from its body. Sometimes the headless chicken body would continue to run around for a few seconds until it keeled over.

Next, she would throw the chickens into the boiling water of a huge black pot over a wood fire. After a couple of minutes, she would remove a chicken from the pot and pluck its feathers. After removing the unwanted parts of the chicken, she would bring it into the house where she would cut it into our favorite pieces—that included the pulley bone for those of you who know what I am talking about. The cousins would fight over this piece as we would quickly eat the meat from the bone so we could choose someone else to pull the bone and see who got the shortest piece.

So many more stories to tell about Mama Downs, but I will close with this one. When I was a freshman in college, Mama Downs sold her old house and 80 acres, and moved into town. She bought an ante-bellum two-story house in Carrollton, Mississippi. It was not in the best of shape, but it was far better than the old house on the farm.

A Hollywood movie company came to town to film one of William Faulkner’s classics. Mama Downs agreed to let them use her home in the movie because they were going to do extensive remodeling inside the house and paint the exterior of the two-story wood frame house. They transformed the front yard by adding a trellis with climbing rose bushes over the sidewalk and installing a white wood picket fence. The movie crew arrived to film “The Reivers” and transformed the little town of Carrollton into a 1905 setting.

All went well with the filming at Mama Downs’ house until she learned that they planned to film a “bedroom” scene in one of the upstairs bedrooms. That did not go over well with her, and she told the movie producers that there was no way that they were going to have any bedroom scenes in her house. The producers backed down and finished the bedroom scene in a Hollywood set.

She was a loving, hardworking, quiet, firm, straight-shooting woman who raised 11 of her own children and three grandchildren and put up with an alcoholic husband who died an early death and left her alone to provide for five kids who were still at home. Even with adversity she lived to be 86 years old. What a woman!