Growing Past Childhood

In 1949, I was at an in-between age. I was still a child but my body was attempting to develop into that of an adult. I found it to be a confusing period in my life. By the time I had finished seventh grade, I was getting closer to becoming a teenager.  My monthly cycle had become extremely painful on the first day. Stomach cramps were so severe on a scale of one to ten I would have guessed, at least a nine. Only one thing was strong enough to make it bearable, and that was a BC powder. I don’t know if they are still around but they came in a small paper fold. You dumped the powder toward the back of your mouth and swallowed a big gulp of water as quickly as possible. The pain-killer’s taste was bitter, but it worked quickly.

I had started developing a nicer shape with a tiny waist and larger hips and bust. Men and boys who had always thought of me as a child were looking at me differently. I had suddenly gone from being just another kid to someone worthy of another look. It wasn’t so obvious in school because a lot of female bodies were changing.  Away from school, guys were more likely to take notice. It was both elating and unnerving.

I spent a lot of time after school at my Uncle Willie and Aunt Eva’s burger café waiting for Dad to get off work and drive me home. The customers were mostly blue-collar working men who suddenly seemed anxious to talk or joke around with me. I realized something had changed. I felt I’d gained a power I’d not had before, but didn’t quite know what I was supposed to do with it.

At one point, I’d gone with Mom to visit her oldest sister. Her husband must have been in his eighties. I was wearing a new white sweater. I started to go out the front door as the old man started in. Without saying a word, he reached out and grabbed one of my breasts. I was horrified. As soon as we left, I told Mom what happened. She brushed it off by saying, “Honey, he’s an old man. I’m sure he didn’t realize what he was doing.” Okay, maybe he was suffering dementia, but the next incidence wasn’t quite so innocent.

Mom’s older half-brother’s wife was dying of cancer. I was reading nursing novels and was fascinated with hospitals. I was willing to sit with her in the hospital to give other family members a break. Uncle Henry encountered me in an empty hospital corridor. He grabbed me and started fondling me and tried to kiss me in the mouth. This time I felt assaulted by a relative in his fifties. He was a respected deacon in his church and had a wife who was dying. Mom didn’t want to believe her brother would have done such a thing. I think she thought I was imagining something. She didn’t want to talk about it, although if it hadn’t been her brother, she would likely have been outraged.

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During the summer after seventh grade, I kept seeing these black-ink ‘Draw Me’ ads in magazines and newspapers. The picture to be copied was the profile of a lady. The best work could win a free art correspondence course. It was a come-on ad to find interested people who might buy the course. I’m sure many people sent in drawings hoping to win. I was one of the ones who sent in a drawing. A salesman came around with his pitch of how with a little training I could have a career as a high paying commercial artist. I wanted to take the course and Mom made the down payment. Again, my grandmother agreed to help make the monthly payments.

Sometime later, I would learn two of my cousins had also sent in a drawing and bought the course. Five years would pass before I met the man destined to become my husband. I was surprised to learn he had also sent in a drawing of the girl. He didn’t buy the course because he had gotten burned on another ad which showed a skinny dude getting sand kicked into his eyes by a muscle-built hunk. It was for a Charles Atlas course that never came when he sent in the money. He didn’t buy the art course but he did become a draftsman, which involved mechanical drawing and lettering. I’m only mentioning those ads to remind some who may be old enough to remember seeing them back in the day.

Since art wasn’t taught at my school, it seemed I would have to teach myself. I checked out art sites in my encyclopedia and learned the primary colors were red, yellow and blue, and most colors could be mixed from these. There was no art supply store in our town, but the hardware store sold house paint. They carried tubes of different colors which they used to mix with white house paint to make the desired room color. Dad went to the hardware store and bought me tubes of the three primary colors and  a small can of white lead house paint.  

Back then we didn’t know lead paint was dangerous. Kids have died or gotten brain damage from eating chipped off lead paint. We didn’t know asbestos was also dangerous. Our house had asbestos shingles covering it.

I didn’t deliberately eat lead paint, but by the time I finished one of my paintings, it was pretty much all over me including my face. I even used the backs of asbestos shingles as my canvas. So if I appear to be a little cuckoo, you may have reason to understand why.

My oil painting seems to have impressed my mom enough that when I wanted to get out of having to go outside and help in the garden or mow grass, I could say, “I was really planning to paint a picture.”  It was a good way to get myself out of a hot, sweaty task.

Someone visited who was taking art in college. He told me he thought I’d used a little too much burnt umber in one of my paintings. He was referring to the dark brown I’d mixed, but I had no clue what burnt umber was. I told him he was wrong because I didn’t have a tube of burnt umber. I was taking an oil painting course in college before I learned it was a standard color artists use. I also learned the reds and blues I used to mix my colors weren’t anything like the shades real artists would dream of using. In spite of that new information, the color in my earlier painting doesn’t look any different from my later ones.

The summer passed quickly, and I covered our walls with pictures. When school started in August, I was almost thirteen. For the first time I would have more that one teacher for the year and I would be changing classes and getting involved with campus clubs. I started to think maybe being a teenager would be something I could handle after all.   

Harry Truman was president and the US was in a cold war with Russia. At the Academy Awards that year, “All the King’s Men” won Best Picture. It was from a novel based on the life of Louisiana’s charismatic populist governor, Huey P. Long. If you are curious as to what politics were like in the south during those days, it is a good film to watch. This version was in black and white and starred Broderick Crawford and John Ireland. A couple of more recent versions of the novel have been made, and are in color.