Uncle Charlie

Uncle Charlie was 100 years old when I met him. He was my maternal grandmother's uncle which made him my great, great uncle. There were 530 some odd people at his 100 birthday party. And there were at least 520 some odd that I would not want to be related to at all!

Aunt Mary, his sister, sat beside him in a chair of honor since she was celebrating her 95th birthday at the same time. Uncle Charlie lived in an old farmhouse up in the hills of Tennessee and the closest neighbor was at least two hundred acres away. I remember it had an old fashioned dog run down the middle of the house. Homes were built that way often to keep the kitchen and living areas separate from the bedrooms. In the summertime, it made the bedrooms a little bit cooler and in the wintertime, the living area a bit warmer.

When he was 95 years old, his children built him an indoor bathroom, but I never knew that Uncle Charlie didn't like it, until later in the afternoon, I was hanging out on the porch and Uncle Charlie turned to me and said, "Go with me, boy," as he slowly rose from his chair and with his cane and stooped walk, grabbed my arm and began moving us away from the house out back toward the barn.

We got to the back of the barn and Uncle Charlie placed me by the corner so I could see if anyone was coming. He proceeded by himself around the back of the barn and disappeared for a little bit. Shortly, he came back around from the back of the barn, buttoning up his pants. He took my arm again and we began to slowly walk back towards the house. About half way there, he seemed to be thinking about something to say, when he did, indeed, speak up. "Never did like to piss in the house," he mumbled.

That was my one and only time I ever saw Uncle Charlie. I have never forgotten our excursion out back to the rear of the barn in those Tennessee hills.

Bro. Hardy

Belle

Belle even looked like an older Native American woman. She had been plowing out in the field with a mule drawn hand plow when a little gray lizard ran up the handle of the plow, up her arm and down into her dress. Except for her "plowing shoes" that were old army brogans that her one of sons returning from WWII had given her for her farm work, Belle stripped right there in the field until she was totally naked. That lizard never had a chance!

Even as a young girl and walking home from school along the dusty country roads of the deep south, she would both scare and enthrall her classmates by seeking out the snakes along the way, especially those called "Black Racers" and grabbing them by the tails, she would whirl them around her head (and everyone else's) until she would suddenly stop and crack the snake like a horse whip and snap their heads off! But lizards were another story

She was one quarter Native American alright - Cherokee - we were told. Her own grandmother married to an itinerant preacher who, so the legend goes, married her to keep her from having to march across the country on "The Trail of Tears." It was this fierceness that made Belle stand out as a woman among women and sometimes mistaken for a man among women. There was hardly anything that was "dainty" about her.

And I loved her, for she was my paternal grandmother.

Bro. Hardy