Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

3. My Childhood

K ? I < < My Childhood My brothers and sisters: Eddie was born in 1920, Grace in 1921, John in 1923, Patsy in 1925, Billy in 1926, Nita in 1927 (Nita died when she was five), Jack in 1929, Gene and Dean in 1930, Scotty in 1932, Donna in 1934, Jimmy and Rita in 1937 (Rita died when she was a baby), me in 1938 (May 5), and finally Van in 1940. So I was the second to youngest. My birth certificate said “seventeenth Stoneman, female.” It was a while before they got around to naming me. And then it was Veronica Loretta, after two sisters of Aunt Jack’s husband Smitty. When I was growing up, we were living in that one-room shack in Carmody Hills, Maryland, Prince George’s County. It was not known as a very desirable area. The people from the hills, trying to get work, they would find the place out. Most of them were from Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. In that one room there would be twelve or fourteen of us, depending My Childhood My Childhood 16 / pressing on on which of the older kids had left home. Under the big room was a small dirt dug out basement where Daddy slept. I talked about Momma’s trying to fix the place up, but it was a pretty sorry situation. Poorism, we were ate up with poorism. There was no roof, just a canvas tent. We had one little wood stove in the middle of the floor. That’s what we used for heat in the wintertime, and Maryland can get pretty cotton-pickin’ cold. Daddy bought that piece of land and built the house with whatever he could get. When he would do work for churches, they would give him the lumber from an old church they were tearing down. The front door was always left open in the summer, and there were no screens in the windows, so the flies went in and out. No closets. We’d have four or five kids to a bed. Momma would sometimes use straw tick mattresses. That was for the bed wetters—the urine would go right through the straw. We didn’t have a bathroom or running water. We had a well. To wash up, we used a wardrobe that we set catty-cornered. Me and Donna would get behind it. We had a washcloth and a washbasin for our face and our hands and arms, and the upper part of our body. And then for the lower part, we had a pan and a rag, and different water. There was one dresser, sitting over in the corner. The boys would put a pan of water on it and shave, and sometimes we’d all get to running around, or fighting, and we’d knock the pan over. On the wall was a razor strap my brothers nailed there so that Daddy couldn’t grab it too easily. Light bulbs hung down on wires, three or four bulbs, like you’d see in a cheap poolroom. I’d look up and gaze at all the colors from the light bulbs, a kaleidoscope of colors. We didn’t have much food. Eggs because Momma had chickens, and canned vegetables and fruit we’d bring back from the summers in Galax . Beans, lots of beans, and cornbread. And Momma’d make a kind of cake and pour icing over it—similar to Moravian sugar cake. We didn’t eat a lot of meat but sometimes we’d have boiled ham, or a little liver or fried steak. And mackerel. Daddy’d take the mackerel out of the can, leave it in hunks, and then fry it in cornmeal. We had it for breakfast a lot because Daddy said it was good for your eyes. A little like people today, we never ate dinner at the same time. My brothers would come in at four, five in the morning, and take some of pressing on / 17 the leftover pinto beans or biscuits and gravy. One night we’d all gone to bed, and set aside the gravy in a pan for whoever happened to straggle in. Mommy wasn’t there because she was taking care of Granny, who was sick. Well, my brother Dean came in and he got the gravy and put it on some biscuits. Then he cried out, “Hot damn! What the heck is this? It tastes like old wallpaper paste!” And Daddy yelled from downstairs, “I made the gravy. It’s not wallpaper paste.” I went and looked. Daddy had got the flour out of a paper sack, and it had the red on it that marked Momma’s wallpaper flour. So we kids started laughing and making fun of Dean, chanting, “Dean came in and ate wallpaper paste. Dean came in and ate wallpaper paste!” And he said, “What the hell are you talking about? You ate it too.” “But it was warm when we ate it!” we said. “Makes all the difference in the world!” I always looked like a ragamuffin. We couldn’t afford store-bought clothes, so Momma would make flour sack dresses. The school we Carmody Hills kids went to was over in Seat Pleasant, where there were people with more money, so sometimes a teacher would get together a bunch of clothes and send them down to the Stoneman children, the poorest of the Carmody Hills kids. The clothes were from the other children in the school, and that was bad because they would recognize your dress. Someone would say, “Hey, she’s got my dress on. My mother gave away my dress and I didn’t want her to.” You’d stand there, and a bunch of her girlfriends would come over, and then you had to fight for your life. One fight that sticks in my mind was about a beautiful yellow dress. That was worth fighting over. Sometimes you wore one of the boys’ shirts or a boy’s pair of shoes. And then you had to fight the boys. I was always embarrassed about my clothes. I remember one particular day when I was wearing my brother’s britches. I didn’t have a belt, so I took a stick and put it in a belt loop and twisted it and then turned it down into my waistline. The stick worked—though you’d have to be careful all day so you didn’t get gouged in the ribs. But when I stood up to read in class, it looked like I had a big knot sticking out—even though I was trying to hide it with my blouse, and putting my left arm over it. And a kid, his name was Walter, called out, “Lookat that hillbilly Stoneman . Got a stick in her britches!” 18 / pressing on Of course medicine and doctors were out of the question. We didn’t have the money. So in an emergency we’d go to the charity hospital. Jimmy was born there the year before I was. And they somehow put him in a pile of clothes, threw him down the laundry chute. He was lost for awhile. We would make fun of him for it later, but he always took it seriously. When it was my turn to be born, Momma was having a terrible time, so they had to take me with forceps. And Momma said that’s why my eye was crooked—the forceps gouged at my eye, and then injured my neck. The eye tormented me for much of my life. The name they have for it is wall-eyed. It means when you look straight ahead, the eye looks toward the wall. My neck, well, a few years later, I developed a big growth, as big as your fist. I couldn’t turn my head, and I was violently ill—fever, nausea, on death’s door. They took me to a hospital run by the Catholic Charities. The doctors there saved my life. Afterwards my mother always wore Catholic medals, and I still wear my Catholic medal. I can’t go anywhere without it. If I lost it, I’d be . . . just lost. Well, when they first took me to the hospital to be operated on, they gave me antibiotics. It was in the early forties when the antibiotics, penicillin , had just come in. Two or three times a day I was getting a shot in the butt. I was so full of holes that Momma counted them when I came home. I remember the doctors telling Momma that I needed blood. I had O positive, Daddy did too, and he lay down and gave me blood, the blood going straight from his arm to mine. Later I was dating a man named Dr. Henry Head, and I told him this story. He said, “Well, my father invented that machine, Dr. Jerome Head.” I think that’s such an amazing coincidence. There was one other medical crisis when I was little. Mommy had been away with Granny in Galax. She came in the door, and I was over in the corner, in the bed. Right away she could tell I was very sick. She helped me open my mouth and my throat was white, coated, my tonsils practically together. And I had been having hallucinations from fever. Daddy hadn’t noticed. He was busy practicing with the boys with a new amplifier nailed on the wall over my bed. Momma said, “Lord Gosh, pressing on / 19 Ernest, she’s got diphtheria.” They took me to a hospital in Washington. The doctors quarantined you in those days, and I was in a room just by myself for a long time, seemed like forever. Daddy would come over to see me after work, but Momma couldn’t come because there was so many kids at home to take care of. Well, I guess as I got better I wanted some attention. Anyway, at one point I remember standing up in this crib-like bed, holding onto the sides, serenading one of the doctors. At the top of my lungs I was singing, Ain’t gonna marry a doctor / I’ll tell you the reason whyyyy / He goes around the country makin’ people die / Chewing chawing gum, chewing chawing gum. That poor doctor! Well, again they had been sticking needles in my butt. And when I finally got to go home, Momma put black salve on it. She used it all the time, that black iodized salve. It came in a little jar, and when you bumped your head, when you got hit with a rock, she would always grab for it. If you got burned, she used butter or Cloverine salve. There were lots of home remedies like that. We didn’t have money for dentists. Once my jaw tooth was abscessed real bad, so Daddy got the old tooth pullers from his little case of tooth puller stuff. He’d been working on a house, and my jaw was way out by the time he got around to it. The tooth had four roots, two abscesses on different roots. I had another dental problem, a large gap in my front teeth. But that was not something Daddy could take care of, and I only learned years later that a proper dentist could have done something about it if we had had the money. Turned out it was a good thing we didn’t—that gap in my teeth later became a trademark when I was on Hee Haw. Because there was no money, we had practically no store-bought toys, but I did get one when I got home from the quarantine. Before that, I had had a doll that Momma had made me out of a big old lumberjack sock. She put button eyes in it, and she sewed a mouth. I was born for babies. It’s in my blood. I would sit and stare at that doll and rock it all day long. Children who don’t have a lot, they can imagine—their dreams are so real, their imagination so big. It seems as if God says, “Well, this is something I’m gonna give this child, this gift.” I would imagine the prettiest face on that little rag doll, just an old rag that Momma had stuffed with cotton balls. 20 / pressing on I took it up to the house of my girlfriend, Mildred. Now, Mildred had a nice new doll she got for Christmas. She suddenly said, “Here, let me feel your doll,” and she grabbed it. “This doesn’t weigh much. It doesn’t even feel like a real baby.” I went home and I said, “Momma, she said my doll doesn’t feel like a real baby.” “She said that, huh?” “Yeah. But I love my doll, Ma.” And then after I came out of the hospital, Momma went and became a nurses’ aide for awhile in a hospital in Washington, and with the money she earned, she bought me a snowsuit and a doll. The snowsuit was winecolored , made of wool, a coat and leggings to match. The doll opened and closed her eyes and went “waa waa.” I carried this doll around everywhere. We didn’t get lots of toys for Christmas. The first Christmas I remember was when I was about six. I can recall Daddy saying, “Hattie, I got to go up to the store and get the children something for Christmas.” He came home with oranges and nuts. I remember him giving them around—he took my little hand with his very big one and said, “Hold your hand out,” and I got an orange and some nuts, walnuts and chinquapins . “This is the best I can do,” he said. That was the year Scott went out to get a Christmas tree. He suddenly said, “I’ll get the best darn Christmas tree that ever was made! We’re gonna have the prettiest tree in the world.” He went out, him and his buddies, and they came back dragging a holly tree with red berries all over it. My mother saw it and immediately started praying—she thought we were going to be jailed. It was so tall it touched the canvas roof. And we kids were so happy. My mother said, “It’s the most gorgeous thing I ever saw. Now children, don’t fall into it. All those needles—you’re gonna get hurt. Lord have mercy, don’t step on them.” Because we were barefooted. It was a beauty. We all just stood around and looked at that tree. Since we kids didn’t have toys, we invented things to do, “diversions .” There was the time Scott and one of my other brothers had me lie down and gave me “chicken pox” by dripping candle wax on me. When Momma finally came home, I said, “Momma, it burns!” “Well, I guess so!” she said and went for the butter. My brothers were responsible for another adventure—when I fell in the outhouse. And this is a pressing on / 21 story I sometimes tell when I’m performing, because a lot of people in my audiences remember all too clearly the days of the outhouses. Well, one day, when I was about eight years old, I had to go to the outhouse. I passed Jimmy playing in the yard, and I warned him not to come near the outhouse—because sometimes my brothers would get sticks and beat on it. I went inside and there in the corner was a mud-dauber’s nest. Well, I climbed on the two-by-four, and all of a sudden some of my other brothers threw a piece of lumber on top of the roof. The mud-dauber nest fell. This big mud-dauber started buzzing around and every time he’d make a dive at me, I’d go “Whoooop!” and I’d lean backwards. About the third dive he made at me, I fell, head over heels into, well, let’s call it the “Pits of Hell.” I did land feet first, thank God. I started hollering “Help! Help!” Jimmy finally came and looked into the hole. “Whaaat’s the matter, Ronnnni?” (he always talked real slow). What did he think was the matter?!!!! Finally Jimmy ran and told Momma. “Lord God!” she said. When she looked down and saw me, she started praying. She prayed and she prayed. I thought, If she don’t finish praying and get me out of here, I’m gonna die! But I knew better than to tell her to quit praying . She finally pulled me out and all of the neighbors came and formed a bucket brigade. But even after they washed me down with that trusty old lye soap that Grandma made, I still had an ungodly smell on me. When I started to go to bed that night, six feet kicked me out: “Momma, the outhouse kid ain’t sleeping with us.” I slept on a pallet of straw on the floor for the next three months. It’s amazing any of us survived. Momma would try to get us doing nonviolent creative things. For instance, when it was raining, she’d put a scarf on her head and go out with a dishpan and dig up red clay and bring it in the house. She’d have all of us young children sit at the table, and she would give us clay to make things. And one time Jimmy, he looked at this red clay and didn’t know what to do with it. Had a big hunk of clay about as big as his fist, all rolled out. And there was a railroad spike laying around that Daddy had brought in to show us kids what the spikes looked like that the men used to lay crossties. So Jimmy stuck it in this hunk of clay. I’m sitting there making a snake. “This is a snake! Lookat it!” I said, and I’m concentrating, trying hard to make its fangs. Well, Jimmy walked up behind me and took that ball of clay and 22 / pressing on hit me right on the top of my head. I let out a scream. The blood flew. Jimmy claimed to the end of his life that he didn’t do it to be mean. “I had to find something to do with what I made!” he would say. Even Donna, sweet gentle Donna, got in on the mayhem. Donna was left to take care of Jimmy, Van, and me an awful lot. Well, one day Momma had to go to the store. She had to walk six, seven miles up to the grocery store to get anything she needed. And that morning we had had pancakes, and all the leftover batter and other garbage was put in this great big bowl on the table. Now Momma always said, “If I’m ever not here, and a storm comes up, don’t you all stay in this house. You go over to Eddie and Katherine’s.” (My oldest brother and his wife lived right across the creek.) Momma was terribly afraid of storms. She was taught to be, I guess, up in the mountains. She swore she once got knocked off a porch by lightning. When it stormed, the old canvas covering that we had instead of a real roof would go “Whompy, whompy, whompy” because the wind would get up underneath where Daddy had tied the canvas down with a cord. Momma would get us all in the corner and she would pray—“Oh, dear God in Jesus’ name, take care of us, take care of my little children.” Then she’d start talking in a tongue, saying things you couldn’t understand. It would just flow out of her. She wasn’t trying to impress anybody—that’s why I know it exists, talking in tongues. I think some folks try to impress people with that, but I know my mom didn’t. The whole scene was like baby chickens coming up under the mother hen, and she putting her wings out, protecting them. We never had a tree fall, and we saw them sway almost to the ground. So this one time when Momma went shopping, a storm came up. Donna said, “We got to go to Katherine’s.” And I was being a brat. “No, I don’t want to go! I wanna stay here! It ain’t raining yet!” “We got to go. If I don’t take you and Van and Jimmy to Katherine’s, I’m gonna get a beating! C’mon, Katherine’ll give us stuff to eat.” “No, I ain’t gonna go! I wanna eat here.” So we got into a real fight, and it ended up with delicate, fragile Donna sitting on top of me, holding me down with her knees, and cramming that old pancake batter and garbage into my mouth. pressing on / 23 “Eat here? Okay, I’ll make you eat here!” Now it sounds as if I’m the victim in all of this stuff, but just like in this story, I was a brat too. I was always hyper and dirty and getting into things. I can remember times when I was specially aggravating, would be running around the house, rooting into things, zip, zip, zip, worse than a two-year-old. When we got into trouble, I was generally the one whupped. My brothers were too big, all except Van, who was spoiled because he was the youngest, and Jimmy, who never got whupped because he was an epileptic. That’s why he talked so slow—the epilepsy. My mother would say, “We got to take Jimmy to John Hopkins again, see what kind of medicine we can get for him. Poor little thang sleeps all the time.” So we all understood. And even when he should have been whupped, he wasn’t. Donna, in spite of the pancake batter incident, was pretty much always good and demure. The whuppings, well, I better explain them. They were no big deal. Everybody out there in those days got lots of whuppings. In our house Momma was generally in charge of them. She’d get a switch from the yard, sometimes get three or four of them and tie them together at the bottom, where she could get a good grip on them. And she would make you dance. It would whistle—tchoo, tchoo. Switching would be like you were running through a briar patch. Sometimes blood would come out of your legs and run down, but it was nothing like child abuse. Because we didn’t have toys, it was really special later on when we got a television set. We used to watch the comedians. Daddy loved Judy Canova, and I remember looking at her with her pony tails and thinking , I want to be like Judy Canova. And Imogene Coca was wonderful, the way she could create the fun within herself. She just spoke out, Hey, here I am and you’re going to laugh ’cause by golly I ain’t leaving here ’til you do. We also loved Carol Burnett. Her “husband” would come in and say, “Where is he? Where is he?” accusing her of having another man. She’d be mopping the floor and she looked like death, she’s dressed awful, had these old shoes on. And she says, “Who?” And he says, “Where is he? Where’d he go?” And then he picked her up and she just let her arms go limp. Years afterwards I saw Carol Burnett in California when we were doing a television show and I went over to where she was doing 24 / pressing on her show. And while she was off camera, she would be either reading or doodling. She gave me about five pages of her doodling—she was really a great artist, she could draw anything. But what impressed me was that she was real quiet between takes, she wasn’t always “on.” And then she’d go right back into the character she had been playing. The TV was very blurry, so when it really mattered, we would go to a friend’s to watch. And that’s what we did when I was a teenager and Daddy was on the The Big Surprise quiz show. He kept winning week after week, until he finally missed a question. We were proud, but we were so dumb and poor that we didn’t really get that excited. I think I was more excited about him being in New York. I said, “Look, he’s up there in New York with all them tall buildings!” Well, with the money he won, he bought clothes for us to wear and a new dining-room table, and a ring for Momma, to replace the one he had to sell when the Depression hit. I don’t know how my parents did it, manage to raise us all. Daddy was good at psychology. He would say when people asked him about all his kids, “I had a lot of young’uns and every one of them is different. Every one of them has different thoughts and different needs.” Mommy never had time to give us the one-on-one attention that kids today get. She didn’t say, when I was running around, “Hey c’mere. Sit down on my lap. I love you.” Never. But she loved me. If she was washing dandelion greens or fixing beans with a pan in her lap, I’d come up and lay my head on the side. She’d move the pan and let me lay my head right there, and she’d put my hair behind my ears and pet me and caress me and say, “Poor little Roni, poor little Roni.” ...