Good morning! I talked with Aunt Doris this morning to sing her Happy Birthday and visit a bit. We talked about the usual things, but I got her reminiscing about the past and unexpectedly, this little gem came forth:
On the occasion of Aunt Doris’s 88th birthday, talking on the phone, I asked her if she remembered her and her mother, Granny, making birthday cakes when she was a young girl.Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed hearing it from Aunt Doris. I wish we had a way to 'mine' the treasure trove of memories all these elders have hidden in their minds.
“Oh yes,” she replied.
“You didn’t have box cake mixes back then, did you?” I asked.
“Oh, no, we had to make everything from scratch, you know.”
“Did Granny like to cook?”
“No, she didn’t like to cook at all,” Aunt Doris replied. “See, doing the laundry back then was a big job. We didn't have machines back then. You had to build a fire under those black cast iron pots and heat up the water real hot so we could get our clothes clean. It was a big job. So Mama hired a black lady who lived nearby to come and do the laundry on Monday. She got done early, so Mama asked her to cook dinner. We all sat down at the table and Daddy wouldn’t eat. We said both our prayers and Daddy just sat there, quiet and wouldn’t eat."
“Do you think he wouldn’t eat the food because it was cooked by a black woman?”
“Maybe that was part of it, but he didn’t want Mama to stop cooking. He sat there the whole time, ‘til we were done and wouldn’t eat. I thought that was kinda silly of Daddy, but he wouldn’t eat.”
To me, this corroborates another story that I have heard: that Granny (Hermione), from the Moerbe family, was used to a more comfortable life. The Moerbes had more money than the Kunzes and felt that Hermione had married below her 'class' when she married John. The fact that Granny hired a woman to help with the laundry perhaps wasn’t unusual from her family’s experience. John protested Hermione using hired help to cook, even though he knew Hermione didn’t like to cook, so he refused to eat. I speculate that he didn’t want Hermione getting in the habit of paying someone else to cook for their family.
And the silence, and Aunt Doris's memory of implied refusal to talk about it feels so authentic to the Kunze family's reputation for little (read poor) communication.
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