Every family enjoys and tolerates juvenile grownups who aren't good for much...
By F. William Broome
Copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved
Even as a child while growing up I knew that some grownup kinfolk were a lot like children.
My aunt Elviria was two persons; A prim and proper lady, and a gospel-spewing devout Baptist, who said that if you weren't trying to go to heaven the Baptist way, you weren't going to make it. She was what people call a hypocrite; always quoting the Bible, but constantly gossiping about church members and others. She never did obey the Commandment saying that God-fearing people shouldn’t be bearing false witnesses against neighbors.
Then there was our Uncle Avery, from my Mama’s side of the family. Some of my kinfolk said that he had no job, got no work, didn’t seek it,and work left him alone. He complimented good cooking, especially fres vegetables cooked with streak-o-lean and served with big squares of cornbread made with pure lard and fresh cold buttermilk. Yes sir, Uncle Avery was a sure enough gourmet of southern cooking and eating.
Cousin Cornelius, Uncle Daniel’s boy on Daddy’s side, never grew up, but kept us laughing with new stories, funny jokes and crazy tricks. He always paid his way, they would say. But he didn’t know when to go home and would hang around for days and days, piddling with little jobs, fixing things with borrowed tools and parts, which, it was agreed, helped the family enough to earn his keep.
Great-Granny Hope will never be forgotten. A woman born to rule from the time she steps off the Greyhound bus, she is the absolute boss. Mama resented everything about her ‘cause Granny Hope told her how things ought to be done in our Mama’s very own home. It’s true ; there ain’t no kitchen big enough for two women. But Mama kept a civil tongue in her mouth and a mad beet-red face most of the time, which said she wanted that woman out of her house. Her name didn’t help ‘cause Great-Granny never gave us hope that she would change.
Nobody likes to talk about Aunt Lavinia’s step-son; the one her second husband left with her when he died back in 1948. He was in the big war which got him all messed up, and when he passed through Atlanta, he met and married my aunt She didn’t know until they got back from a quick honeymoon in a hotel in Chattanooga, that she had a step-son.
Aunt Lavinia’s husband was the one everybody talked about, but he was never around so we could get to know him. He would take off somewhere, and be gone for days, then come home broke and sick. She would nurse him back on his feet, only to see him take off again.
Her step-son, Brady, was backward, they said; couldn’t remember his name at times, but he was kind and tried to keep up with things around him. I liked him for one thing above all else; he could solve any arithmetic problem I showed him. He didn’t know how to read, but he was given a talent, and that was figures. He told me that his daddy had taught him to, "push all them numbers around." I learned more math from Brady than my teacher taught me.
Brady’s daddy was from up north; Cincinnati, I recall, and when home, he surely drank a lot. He drank all the time, it seemed, and when he did he got mean and did mean things. One night he got so drunk Aunt Lavinia tried to get him quiet and go to sleep, but he yelled and finally hit her with his fist, breaking her jaw. His son, Brady, who loved his step-mama, screamed for him to stop, and began hitting his father with his fists. He was shoved away, and the bully went upstairs to sleep it off.
People in our town still talk about the poetic justice in what happened next. Young Brady got hold of a pistol that belonged to Aunt Elvira’s first husband, Arthur. Speculation was that he found it long before, but that night Brady took the pistol upstairs, went into his daddy’s bedroom and blasted his daddy’s head to smithereens.
There was no trial. There wasn’t even an arrest, because the whole town knew that no jury would ever convict Brady lacking all that mental judgment. More than that, every adult in town, knowing what a sorry son-of-a-bitch his daddy was, cheered silently that the man was dead and gone.
Another cousin was an angel. She was named, Angel, and I thought she got the name up in Heaven before she came down here. Cousin Angel would do anything for anybody at any time. She was our substitute Mama for a whole week one summer when our parents went to the beach. I loved Cousin Angel for cooking a lot of sweet stuff, and I wanted her to be pit Fun Mama, but if she was, she would be living with us all the time, and that would be too much of somebody outside the family, and besides, Aunt Angel wasn’t married to our Daddy, so the whole thing would be too messy and would upset my real Mama for sure.
Mama had a cousin who caused more trouble than anybody. She was in love with love, I’d heard, and she read a lot of the romance magazines and books back then. The stories didn’t come right out and tell everything that was happening between a man and a woman, but even at twelve, when I read them, I knew what they were doing. And I knew that if they kept doing it, some of them would be having a baby. I wondered why a woman wanted to do that, and then go through the shame of having a baby without a married husband. Some of them had to leave town, and if they were young, their parents sent them off to live with a relative on a farm in Kansas, or some other place way out west.
Cousin Viola liked men so much she would have those romance things with a lot of them. Some were married men, and when that was found out, there was hell to pay, with the preachers and the police getting into the mess. Viola was the main cause of divorce in our town. She was one of very few who had a job as a secretary in town, and she was so good at it, they didn’t fire her. It was probably true what Daddy said about that; "Her boss was first in line with her favors."
Sexy Viola was not welcome in our house after Daddy found out that she had passed some of her romance stories on to her cousin, our Mama. He had her arrested one Saturday night when he saw her in the car with one of his friend’s eighteen year-old son. When the police took her down to the station, along with young Harvey, they didn’t have a case after she swore that she didn’t take any money from Harvey, "Cause he was too young for her to charge him for love." After that, his parents sent him off to a boarding school, and he never came back as far as I know about.
The greatest thing I ever heard about Cousin Viola was when she wrote up some of her romances, describing what happened with some of the men, giving all the details. She sent them to the editor of her favorite, True Romance Magazine, in New York, hoping they would be printed, and that she would be paid for them. She told a lot of people in town about her writing up the stories, and about sending them all the way up to New York City.
After several months, one of her co-workers in the office where she worked insisted that she tell whatever happened to the stories. She wouldn’t say anything for a long time, but one day when her boss kidded her about it, she opened up and told everybody in the office that the editor didn’t buy a single one of her stories, "But he did come all the way down from New York City - just to visit with me."
I think you could easily write a story about Sexy Viola! This is hilarious! Michelle
Reviewed by La Belle Rouge
10/23/2004
Oh my gosh, I am holding my sides laughing!! This is tooo cool. In the words of the old hew haw show on tv, "Don't belive I a tole that" thank you so much for a wonderful laugh this morning. I have a few of them kin folk too. Great story, William.
Felt like I was a fly on the wall. Kinfolk, you can't live with them, you can't live without them. I trust they don't know the link to this story! :) Thanks for the laugh!
I think I know your Aunt Viola...? I enjoyed this look at your crazy family, love to hear more as does Donni down there...(received the book and am already almost finished my first reading of it, and I just picked it up from the PO yesterday, THANK YOU SO MUCH) Find peace in family, Ed & Rufuz
Reviewed by Donni De-Ville
10/19/2004
Absolutely LOVED this Mr Broome! Wonderfully written with great sense of humour! I LOVED this! Write more about your amazing zany kinfolk George, please!
Fractured Frazzled Folk Fables and Fairy Farces is adult literature that satirizes famous children's stories, fables and fairy tales. The work is Jay Dubya's twenty-first e-book available in Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook.
