The Power of "Drawing Back a Nub"

When reading some Southern sayings the other day, I started to think about the short stories I'm working on. "Drawing Back a Nub" will feature stories about growing up with an old-school, down-home mother.

It has dawned on me that a lot of the parenting techniques my mother used back when I was a kid would land someone in jail today. Kids are so easily "traumatized" today that parents are cautious about "harming their psyche". Whatever. I'm not going to bash what other people do, but I know that nothing my mother did cause any trauma or harmed my psyche. She 'harmed' my backside with a switch plenty of times, but never without a reason or a positive result. And what are those results? Well, I've never been in jail, I am respectful to my elders, and I have nothing but good memories of the way my mother raised me.

One of the things my mother (and most other Southern mothers) was known for was a way with words. Here are some of the things I can remember Mom saying to me at some point during my youth:

• "Girl, sit down before I snatch a crook in your neck." (How exactly does one 'snatch a crook' in someone's neck?)
• "You better take your hand off that bone you call a hip when you're talking to me." (These days, I wish I could still find that bone under all this fat!)
• "Sit your little narrow ass down before I pop a knot on it." (Pop a knot? On my behind? Wha???)
• "Comb that part out of the middle of your hair, looking like Sister Tutta." (To this day, I have no idea who Sister Tutta was. Apparently she had bad fashion sense because she came up often in the critiques of my own hair and wardrobe choices.)
• "I'll slap that nasty little attitude of yours across the street." (Well... dang!)
• "I'll slap the taste out of your mouth."
• "You gonna draw back a nub" was said if you reached for something you shouldn't be reaching for. That one is harsh!

When I was reading that article about regional sayings, I had one mystery cleared up. Apparently when my mother said someone was "Drunk as (or drunker than) Cooter Brown", she was speaking of a well-known town drunk. That saying was right there on the list I saw. (And here I spent years trying to identify which of my parent's friends lived under that Alias.)

I look at kids today and wonder what they are going to remember about their parent's discipline methods. I suppose most will involve having their electronics taken away. Maybe being restricted from surfing the Internet will be the biggest punishment. Huh. They have no idea! I think the worst thing my mother ever did to me was not to give me a "whooping" but to have me go out to the yard and pick out the switch she was going to use. 

There is "power in the tongue" as the Bible teaches. I know that is the truth. My mother didn't always speak "discipline", she spoke "love". The power of my mother's love didn't save any of us kids from making errors in judgment, dealing with heartbreak and heartache, or keep us out of every bad situation we got into. What her love did was keep us from giving in to any of that. When we fell down due to our problems, we never stayed down. When we lost one fight to get ahead, we didn't tap out. Our mother's love is with us to this day. She's been gone now for 20 years now and we still abide by her advice and guidance. There were a few times in my life when I had the chance to make a lot of money but I'd hear Mama's voice saying that "a lifetime of luxury in this life is not worth an eternity of regret in the next."

I WILL be checking out this site asap!
I remember this saying so well.

So, yeah, Mama could be rough on us. We got scolded and "whooped" with switches, and we were told when we were wrong. But we turned out okay. To be honest, the only trauma I suffer from today is being afraid of all the kids who didn't have a mother like mine.

Peace

--Free

P.S.: I wrote this post so long ago that I have forgotten where I got the list of sayings I mentioned. I just went and searched out a couple of sources that you might enjoy:

• "Black Mama's Sayings" 
• Southern Mama's Say...

(Repost) **GRIOT** Devil Beating His Wife

(I'm going to be posting twice today. When I was recycling some of my old posts I realized how mundane this blog has been lately. I think I have gotten away from why I started this blog. I always wanted to share my thoughts and feelings as a way to uplift people - and myself. I used to blog about things that perhaps other people could relate to. Looking at some of the more recent posts, all I see are product reviews. How did that happen?

Anyway, I am going to still post product reviews but I really want to focus on life and living and being. For today, I am resharing a Griot post first then I will finally put up a review of that dang Ninja coffeemaker that I have been trying to finish for the longest. This Griot post is from July 11, 2019. It's one of my family's favorites.)

Being the child and grandchild of southerners, I grew up hearing a lot of odd phrases. To be honest, my relatives just talked plain funny. They had weird phrases and they painted the English language with a beautiful array of colors. My people used language in their own way, just as they put a unique spin on living life.

my mother in her late 20's-early 30's (?)

 For the longest time, I thought that only my mother said things like "You don't believe fat meat's greasy". That was for when I was being warned that my misbehaving was about to get me a whooping. Modern mothers threaten to start counting to ten, my mom had more colorful ways of warning me.

 While a lot of the phrases I heard had to do with consequences of my behavior (for instance, my butt was constantly in debt from all the checks my mouth wrote), there were some to go with everything from the weather to someone being sick.

I remember whenever it rained while the sun was shining, my mother would say that the Devil was beating his wife. I was surprised to learn just now how commonly that saying is used - and in a lot of cultures. I'm going to have to go take a closer look at that website.

one of the aunties

When my Yankee friends were "about to" do something, I was "fixing to". When Yanks were not paying you any attention, I wasn't "studdin" (or studying) you. You might be going to Heaven, but I'm going up "yonder". We also go over yonder, back yonder, or way yonder.

I'm not sure if this one is Southern or not, but where others might say someone had you wrapped around their finger, we'd say that they had your nose wide open. Another way to put that is to say that someone has your drawers (underpants) hanging on a bedpost. That, I think, had something to do with voodoo (or "hoodoo"). Another one from the voodoo files is to say that someone must have "worked a root" on you.

an uncle with a church group

Maybe right here is where I can get into my Big Mama's fear of all things pagan. Big Mama wouldn't eat food if she didn't know who cooked it. If she didn't know you, she wouldn't eat your food unless she had watched you prepare it. Why? Cause she was scared of hoodoo. For that same reason, she never left her comb or hairbrush laying around where just anybody could get to it. As Christian as she was (which is why she didn't like voodoo/hoodoo), she wasn't ashamed of her superstitions. She was one of those people who, after accidentally spilling salt, would toss some over her shoulder. Yes, my Bible-believing grandmother could be so unconsciously paranoid that it was kind of hilarious.

 These are some random photos from an old
photo album of my mother's

I don't know most of the people except that they are aunts, uncles, extended cousins, or 
very close family friends.

 I thought it would be cool for my younger nieces & nephews to see these photos. I just now started posting links to this blog of Facebook because that's where the kids hang out!

 

 I love the hair & clothing fashion of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.










Maybe because of their cultural ancestry, or maybe just because they were very practical and thrifty people, my relatives even dealt with health issues in their own ways. I've already talked a lot about my grandmother using asafetida poultices to deal with chest colds. I suppose there's a reason 'fetid' is in the name, but I just learned another thing: that asafetida gets its name from being funky. Wow,. At any rate, my mother never tortured me or my siblings with it but our Big Mama made up for it by giving us daily tablespoons of Castor oil. You might want to throw up every morning after your dose of oil but you were never constipated around Big Mama.

On my mother's side of the family, it was less about the countrified 'slanguage' and more about the Texan lifestyle. Where back in Hope, Arkansas where our Big Mama took us fishing with worms for bait, my West Texan grandfather let us enjoy his walnut and pecan trees. My mother would make homemade, fresh-churned ice-cream right in the front yard of Grandaddy Bud's house. Back in Arkansas, we ate bacon from pigs my grandmother's husband, Mr. Brown owned. We had fresh eggs and meat from his chickens.  In Texas, we ate peaches and apples and crab apples fresh off Granddaddy Bud's trees.

My granddaddy Bud always owned a pickup truck of some kind. My cousins and I would ride in the back while he went around to different homestead's taking care of business and sharing the goods from his trees. I remember one time when he took us on a long ride out "in the country" and showed us fields of cotton ready to be harvested. He told us to ask our mothers about their time spent picking cotton as kids. My mother told me that it was one of the ways she and her cousins made money as young girls. They would spend hours in the field, filling bag after bag with the cotton. I was absolutely horrified, but my mother had good memories of the time spent with her cousins and friends out in those fields. Even though she explained to me that there was a difference between being forced to pick cotton and being given a choice to get paid for doing it... I never could handle it. Years later, when I went through my stage of being a junior revolutionary and idolizing Newton and Seale for being bravely defiant, I would just cringe when I thought of my mother picking cotton.

Back when I was young, church and religion was a different experience depending on which grandparent I was visiting. My dad's mom (Big Mama) was deeply religious but didn't attend church on a regular basis. Nevertheless, if there was a heavy storm, she made everyone (kids and adults) get still and quiet. If there was any lightning or thunder involved, well, forget doing anything but taking a nap. You weren't going to disrespect the Lord in Big Mama's house by doing much of anything until the storm passed. To this day, during a heavy storm, I will sit my tail down and try to be still until the weather calms down. Unlike Big Mama, I don't go around unplugging everything, but I'm not trying to party down.

I didn't realize it until I was writing this post, but apparently, I carry a lot of my recent ancestors around in my behavior. Yesterday, I was cooking some sausage in my new cast iron and I flashed back on my mother standing in front of the stove, cooking something in her cast iron. I understand that people we love don't go ever completely away. They are in our memories of them. They are in the lingering memory of their touch or the sound of their laughter. They are here with us in the ways they affected us, changed us, or made us love them.

Peace
--Free

For the video pick, I think this one is just about perfect.

(Repost) Back to Church

(I'm recycling some old posts while my brain is on a sarc-induced hiatus. This one is from 5/14/19. I've been listening to music that uplifts my heart while I rest my body. One of my favorites is "Redeemed" and my mother and I both loved "In the Upper Room" and, another of my faves & and because Buckley does such an amazing tribute to Mahalia with his version"Satisfied Mind".)

I can't remember (and don't have the patience to check) whether or not I have ever posted here about why I left the Pentecostal church. Basically, it was all about that church being a legalistic man-based religion instead of being Bible-based and God-led. The church I grew up in worried more about a person's outer appearance than they did the inner heart. And they really loved to pick and choose which parts of Jesus' teachings to follow.

Anyway.

One thing I did always love about the church services of my youth was the music. There is no Broadway production that can beat a Sunday service at the right church. When the preacher finishes performing, then comes the choir with its musicians.

I have always had a hard time explaining to people what the music was like in the church I grew up in. Then I found this video. It took me back 45 years and sat me down in a pew in Big Spring, Texas just like I never left.

This is why some church services lasted well into the night. Just when you thought you were going to be dismissed and get to go home, someone on the keyboard or drums would get inspired to hit one more note and then someone else would start to get "happy" and we'd be back into another round of singing and shouting. I got used to being in church and banging a tambourine until as late as ten o'clock on a school night.

Say what you want about all the stuff that's just wrong about the "Holiness" church, you can't badmouth the musical talent.

My ex and his cousins were the musicians in our church and their talent was just astounding. My ex is the best musician I know. He grew up in church and around all that great music. Too bad that growing up around all the preaching didn't rub off on his behavior as a human being.

I want to mention that not all people associated with the church were bad. There were a lot of good, well-meaning and true-hearted Christians who attended. Just like in the rest of the world though, it's easier to focus on and criticize the worst of the bunch.

Peace
--Free

Memory Storm (4th time)

 UPDATE - I added some graphics for those who asked.

(8/17/21) I'm going to be recycling some posts while I deal with a little health interlude. This is the fourth time with this one. I heard such a beautiful song the other day that it made me feel both happy and sad. It is a song about missing someone who is no longer here in this life. After I listened to it 3 or 4 times in a row, I thought about my mother, my brother, my sister, my husband - all the people who I never dreamed I would have to live without. Even now that I am a Christian, I grieve for them still. I wonder if their essence is still here. I read somewhere about the possibility that the air still holds the breath of people who are long gone. And isn't that something to ponder? Sometimes, I just sit and think about things like that. So, once again, here's this post.

(1/20/10) This is the third time I am re-posting this one. This time is for my girl Miss Carrie :-) 
Seems like a lot of us over on Facebook had our Mamas on our minds. So...


(2/19/09) I posted this the first time almost 3 years ago. At that time, my life was in a cycle of changes, but they were all good changes: moving to start somewhere fresh, new job, new relationships... This time the changes are more painful and harder to bear, but I realize that, God willing, I will live long enough for these hard times to be just a memory. Hopefully, this is just a valley I'm going through on my way to some peaks.) Anyway, like always, good times or bad, when things are at an extreme for me, I think of my mother. So this is, again, for Mama.



(3/14/06)
A Memory Storm
Hey y'all. Your girl here is having what I like to call a memory storm. You know, when you have so much going on in your head that things collide & your brain rescues itself from possible system failure by taking a walk in the rain of pleasant memories. Only the memories aren't nice & organized - they just bounce all over the place, like hail or those hard little raindrops that hurt when they hit you.

Memory storm.

Memories about my mama.

Asafetida - I don't know if that's how it's spelled, but I remember Mama saying it's what her mother used to put on her (Mama's) chest when she had a cold or something. Said it stunk to high heaven & probably only worked because the odor scared the germs away.

Urine Shampoo - Mama told me once how, when they were young, her cousin "Bunky" was the only one in the family with short hair (do y'all remember "In Living Color" where one of the characters talked about folk & one of her lines was about a woman with short hair: "hair so shawt you can read her thoughts!"?) and someone told her that it would grow if she washed it in her urine. This fool saved her pee in a big old jar & once a week, she'd pour the urine on it. I don't know what that old pee must've smelled like, but Mama says Bunky grew enough hair in a few weeks to snatch up into a rubber band. She might've grown more hair if "Aunt Jack" hadn't made her stop with the pee shampoos.

Bacon Grease Lotion - Mama says that if they ran out of Jergens or Vaseline, she and her cousins would use bacon grease (and you know she meant that big jar of "drippings" that sat on the stove in an old Folgers can) instead. One time, one of her cousins oiled up and headed off to work. She was running late, so she short-cut it through someone's backyard. "Someone" had some dogs. Dogs smelled the bacon grease. Cousin had to pull the Wilma Rudolph out of her soul and book like the wind. I guess she was leaping fences like somebody had bet money on her. (I suppose she made it away from the dogs. Mama never said. We were both laughing too hard for her to finish that story.)

Sooty Beauty - Back in the day (Mama's day), there weren't a lot of readily available cosmetics for "women of color." Most of my mother's family has LOTS of color & they go from black as midnight (some of them with grey eyes that gave me serious nightmares & this is before colored contacts!) to Light as Vanessa Williams. Most fall in the middlin' to dark category. The lighter-complexioned folk could get away with over-the-counter lipsticks & blushes and all that. My mother and the rest had to work something else out. So what did they do? Mama says that they'd find the darkest lipstick (usually some kind of slut-red shade) and they could find, then mix in some soot. Yep. Soot from the bottom of pots or burnt wood... The soot would darken up the lipstick enough to compliment a sister with deep roots. (Another time, Mama told me that there were some cosmetics for black women. These were sold door-to-door or could be ordered from ads in the back of romance magazines. A long time ago, someone sent me an old copy of a black romance mag & I saw an ad for "Lucky Heart Cosmetics." Somehow, I picture this as one of the places Mama would have found her makeup when she was young.)

"Busting" a part - My mother was extremely honest. If she didn't know you well but didn't like something about you, she'd be polite about telling you. If she knew you well - or "owned" you as she did her children - she'd skip politeness & just get to the damn point. (Mama's bossiness with a person went up with her level of approval of them. I could always tell a friend of mine was "in" with my mama the minute she went from inviting them to "come on in and have a seat" to telling them "bring your ass on in here and sit down, boy. That couch ain't gone bite your ass." Most guys who made it past being like by Mama were keepers as far as I was concerned.) One time, I thought it would be cute to wear my hair with a part down the very center. Mama didn't think it was cute. When I came out to rescue a date from being scared into incontinency by Mama, she took one look at my head and asked, "Why you got your hair busted down the middle with that part, looking like Sista Tutta?" (I have no idea who "Sista Tutta" is & I didn't ask. I was too busy sliding back into the bathroom to get that part out of my hair. And, no, I didn't "keep" the guy I had the date with. He laughed a little too damned hard at Mama's comments.)

TPV Perfume - (This crossed my mind when I did my "favorite perfume" on the ABCs yesterday.) When I was younger, I wasn't allowed to wear make-up (don't forget my Pentecostal "holiness" background), and perfume was too extravagant. BUT - I knew I had hit a milestone of "getting grown" when Mama let me wear TPV to a school "dance" (aka a bunch of kids standing against the wall in the gym and pretending not to notice each other while music played). Talcum powder and vanilla extract. Yep. I didn't get to buy "Heaven Sent" (or whatever it was called), but I sure thought I was some hot stuff when I wiped that cotton ball of vanilla across my shoulders and then puffed on some powder. Shoot. Too bad the only boy who got close enough to smell it was the boy handing out the plastic cups at the punchbowl.

Chewing tar - This falls into that category of "country health" stuff. I can't even lay this on my mama's generation & end it there because she passed it down to us. Until I was about fourteen (right around the time I was leaving my small-town life), I - and all my cousins, play & real - chewed tar. I don't remember where it came from. My mama and aunt would have it to hand out to us. It was clean little pieces & shiny where it had been broken or cut into bite sizes. We'd gnaw on that tar like dogs on rawhide. Mama always said it was good for the teeth. And I have to say, I always had great teeth - until the Air Force let their dentists practice on all of us.

Wow. Memory storm. Mama on the mind.

Believe it or not, I owe almost all of my current manuscripts (the ideas, the characters, the settings - everything) to these memories. Of course, I guess most writers will say the same thing.

Speaking of writers - be sure to check out the new link on the left. John Baker, out of the UK, writes mysteries & we've exchanged links. (John - I'm SO coveting the cover design on your books - just beautiful! - & I can't wait to read these.)

(1/20/10) Can't believe I forgot this one in previous posts... 
Hot Toddy (?) Remedy - This was a concoction of really hot, really black tea with some liquor tossed in. Mama would give it to me for my, ahem, cramps. I joke with my friends now that I don't know if the cramps went away or if I was just too drunk to notice. (And, BTW, I never did become much of a drinker. Just ask any of the ladies who were with me on a particularly hot Mother's Day outing when I experienced something called "Saki Bombers" for the first time. I definitely got bombed...)

Peace
--Free