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1. Through a Glass Darkly
- The University of Alabama Press
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1 Through a Glass Darkly I was born on the exact spot where the Dairy Queen stands, out on Max Luther Drive.That’s where my house was, the exact spot.The place was in the country back then, north of the city limits, but you wouldn’t think so now. Across the road, right where the Dollar Store and the flea market sit, was my grandfather Tom’s house, with a barn and a cornfield just beyond it. To the northwest,where red dirt outcroppings dropped off into good bottom land,and where you see a high rise and a cable TV company today, was a cotton field of fifteen acres, and a little farther on, another one of seven acres. If you walked west, you’d run into a two-lane dirt road known as Blue Spring Road, which in the summer, as the trees alongside it grew out, became a onelane dirt road.There was no Memorial Parkway back then, no trucks, no minimarts —just our house and two others sitting out in the meadows. Our place was a sharecropper’s house of four rooms, without running water or electricity, no porch or stoop. Everything just opened onto a dirt yard. The house had a kitchen and a fireplace, a storage room, plus two small bedrooms, with me and my brother, Tom, sleeping in one, next to our parents, and my great-grandparents sleeping in the other. It was in this house that I was born, at the hands of a black doctor in town named Claxton Binford, and they tell me it happened in the year 1931, on the seventh day of January at seventeen minutes past 7:00 in the morning. My daddy was the only child of Annie Hereford and Matt Stewart, who lived together for a time and then separated right after he was born. Matt was a fair-skinned man whose people later became one of Madison County’s biggest landowning black families. Later on, he married a woman named Ollie, and they had seven or eight kids.Annie ended up marrying a fellow namedTom Johnson—he’s the one whose house was across the road from where the Dairy Queen is—and they also had seven or eight children. This meant that Daddy 12 / Chapter 1 had fifteen or sixteen half brothers and half sisters, though no full brothers or sisters of his own.1 I saw people from the Stewart side very little as a boy,and just a few stand out today—people like Aunt Mattie, a schoolteacher, and Aunt Muriel, an insurance writer, who’d go door to door in the black neighborhoods collecting payments for burial and life. Daddy would visit the Stewarts from time to time, but our families generally kept apart. Daddy was what people called an “outside child,” which means he’d been born out of wedlock and raised by his mother’s folks. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Sonnie Hereford, the man he always looked on as his daddy. Sonnie Hereford Sr., as people called him, had been born in slavery, just like my great-grandmother Bettie.2 The story I heard was that he belonged to one of the slaveholding Herefords out around Meridianville, but I don’t know for sure. Back then, people didn’t talk to us children about slavery because it stirred up such bitter memories. Neither of my great-grandparents could read or write, of course, and had spent their lives working the land. They died a few months apart when I was eight or nine years old, first Grandpa Sonnie and then Grandma Bettie, so my memories of them are dim. I do recall one thing, and that was how Grandpa saved every receipt for every bill he’d ever paid, sticking them on a wire in a spindle attached to the wall. There must have been four or five hundred. The newer ones were white, but toward the middle they’d turned yellow and were brown at the back. My mother was a Burwell, the daughter of Tom and Elizabeth Burwell of Madison County. Her name was Jannie, and, like Daddy, she was an only child, born before the turn of the century. Her mother, the one I always knew as Grandma Liz, was a Tillman, and Grandpa Tom, the man my brother was named after, was one of four children belonging to Wash and Mollie Burwell, both born in slavery times. Mama...