You can't choose your relatives

I don’t exactly know when I started thinking bad thoughts about my sister. But I know it was close to when she was born.

I was five and ready for a little something to play with that didn’t have anything to do with sock puppets or a broken Slinky.

Having my own personal, living, breathing play-pretty would be fun. Momma and Daddy and sundry relatives told me so and back then I tended to believe adults whatever they said.

Aunt Betty Ann scratched my head and said in a loud, clear voice: “Won’t it be fun to have a little brother or sister?” I’m sure I nodded yes, because Aunt Betty was pretty and she constantly told folks I was “the smartest thing in this world.”

Nanny, my grandmother, who referred to me as her “special trial,” told folks – some who knew us right well and some who didn’t – that “I love Butch a lot. Somebody has to.” She also said, “A little brother or sister is the best gift God can give a child.” Nannie obviously believed her God-gift logic and followed it to the letter, having given each of her children eight separate God-gifts.

In the five-year-old mental Mixmaster called “conscious thought,” I extrapolated Nanny’s God-gift theory to puppies and kittens and wondered if cats and dogs were happier because they had litters. Human babies, mostly came along as onesies. I couldn’t understand why Momma couldn’t have a litter so I could have lots of brothers and sisters to play with.

I decided I wanted Momma to have a litter and that was the end of it.

My grandfather, Daddy George, was partial to girls and ordered my mother to bring forth the family’s first granddaughter. After six grandsons, he was ready for a grandchild with indoor plumbing.

One night at the supper table, Momma asked: “How’d you like to have a baby brother or sister?”

“Don’t know. Never had one. Can I go play?”

I took my plate to the kitchen, went out the front door and crawled under the house and sat there, thinking. Five minutes later I was at the Lassiter’s, waiting on Billy to get through with dinner.

Billy was two years older and went to school. Learned. Sophisticated.

As we walked to the schoolyard park down the street I told him I was getting a new brother or sister.

“Your dad done knock your maw, huh?”

“Daddy never hit Momma. You take that back!”

“He didn’t hit her. He ‘knock’ her. That’s what married couples do when they want to have kids.”

I knew that Daddy never knock nobody, much less Momma. I didn’t know much about ‘knocking’ but I knew that me getting a baby sister or brother didn’t have nothing to do with nobody hitting anybody.

Billy wouldn’t shut up. He told me that babies came from the daddy knocking the mommy and that it took a while to know if there was going to be a baby or not and if there was, then the mommy’s belly got big, then bigger. (“It look so big you’d swear it’s gonna pop.”) And after a year or two, the mommy went to the hospital or to the back of the house and came back skinny, toting a baby.

I went home and when I walked in the kitchen, Momma was standing by the sink, washing dishes. I looked at her stomach. Iron-face flat.

“It’ll get bigger over the next several months, Butch,” she said, reaching out and ruffling my hair. “The baby will be growing in my tummy.”

I went to bed that night worrying about my baby brother or sister growing inside Momma. I didn’t know if I was more worried about the baby or Momma. To me, it seemed like a bad bargain for both of them.



You hear all kinds of clap-trap when you’re a kid. I was told about 113 times by well-meaning adults that my brother or sister was going to be coming from the cabbage patch. Or that Momma would wander off one day and find the baby in a hollow stump. The stork thing was the stupidest. We were in Hope, Arkansas. No storks to speak of. A few cow birds that looked like miniature storks. But, certainly, no storks.

Over time, it seemed like Momma was taking her own sweet time hatching the baby. There had been the end of fall, a whole winter and spring, and still no baby. My sixth birthday was close by and I wanted a new fishing pole and some proper bobbers made from red-and-white plastic, not the old cork ones that were so drab and unassuming so as to practically shout “Dumb!” or “Poor!”

Knowing grownups in general like I did, I figured they might try and sneak the baby in as my birthday present and rob me of the new fishing equipment. I let Daddy know first-up that would not be sufficient after he surmised the baby might come on my birthday.

“Don’t plan on sharing my birthday with your’s and Mommy’s baby. It’s my birthday and it’s going to share my birthday, and that’s that!”

Daddy grinned and clapped me on the back. “I’ll just tell your mother she’s not to have the baby on your birthday.”

“Good. Go tell her.”

Daddy was good at his word. Andrea Dale was born two days after my birthday, on June 5, 1951. I think I started disliking her the first time I saw her in the hospital. She had a forest of solid black hair that stood straight up from her head. Her face was red and scrunchy. Slight slits were stuck where eyes should have been.

She looks like a monkey, I thought. Actually, I said it out loud and was quickly hushed by a bevy of relatives nose-pressed to the glass in the nursery at the Julia Chester Hospital on Highway No. 4 South.

“She’s the prettiest little thing I ever saw,” Nannie said.

Old woman’s lost it, I thought.

“I think she’s precious,” Daddy George opined.

Him, too.

I found myself at the back of the relative herd, looking at backs of knees and assorted sizes butts that ran from XS to Triple X.
Better view than looking at the monkey girl.


Despite my fervent hopes and single-thought prayers, three days later we brought Momma home from the hospital.

I didn’t like the baby much. She was too little for me to hold; she couldn’t play for shucks, and mainly just slept, cried, and ate. Actually, I didn’t know if she ate or not. The baby would start squirming and then started bawling and Momma would get up and say, “I’m going to feed the baby” and walk toward the back of the house where there was no refrigerator or plates, glasses, spoons or forks.

I would look quizzically at Daddy. He just said, “She’s going to feed the baby.”
I was six but not stupid. “Feed it what? There’s nothing back there to eat.”

Daddy started coughing “Hack, hack h-a-a-c-c-k.” He saw my worried look. “I’ve got something caught in my throat. Sit down, Butch, and let’s talk.”

I’ll reiterate: I was six but not stupid. I knew “Sit down” and “talk” in the same sentence uttered by an adult to a kid was never a good thing.

Daddy took a deep breath and started in: “Babies are special and have to be fed in a special way.” He stopped and looked at the ceiling. I looked there, too. Nothing.
“Babies eat, or drink actually, mothers’ milk. Do you understand?”

“Not really. But I guess Momma can get milk at the store if you don’t pick it up.”

“That’s not what I mean. Birth is a miracle. When a man and woman love each other, they sleep together . . . ahhh, I really hate this . . . ”

That was two of us.

“. . . and anyway the man gives the woman a present and it makes a baby. Do you understand?”

“Not really. What kinda present?”

“Aggggggh! A seed. The man gives the woman a seed, and it grows in her tummy and it becomes a baby. Now, do you understand?”

I knew he wanted me to say yes, but since I didn’t understand, I said, “Not really. The baby, that baby that Momma took to feed in a room where there’s no food, came from a seed?”

“Yes. Lord God, yes.” He ruffled my head. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

He patted me on the head and went out the front door, muttering something about going to the store to get cigarettes. I told him there were two packs on the end table, but he didn’t answer.

I thought about what he had said and then went to the bedroom door. “Momma, what are you feeding the baby?”

“I’m busy. Go ask your father.”

Between you and me, I didn’t care if the baby starved.