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Childhood: For My Mother
- Appalachian Heritage
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2005
- p. 72
- 10.1353/aph.2005.0081
- Article
- Additional Information
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Childhood: For My Mother I believe you had no childhood— houseful of sisters and brothers, absent father, then his presence numbed by alcohol, mother who did what she could, fed the town's workers, the miners who had no family. You were lost—young girl with shy eyes, with feelings no one noticed. I believe you would have liked books, would have chosen flowers, paintings, would have worn ribbons in your hair, lace collars, shirtwaist dresses crisp with starch. In my only photograph from your childhood you stand before the miner's cottage with older sister, younger sister, with brother who later will smile beneath his army cap, its tilt more jaunty than all your young years. The four of you see something beyond the camera, eyes dark as coal seams, mouths straight, lips tight, arms and legs too thin for American children. I believe you carried the weight of those early years, rocked it in your arms with your babies, tucked it each night into our beds. Its presence shadowed the house we lived in, clutched you to its chest while you sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes, while you ironed our starched dresses and sang the songs that welled in your heart like cries of all the lost children, the lost years. —Connie Jordan Green 72 ...