Lamb In His Bosom

Reading this historical novel, Lamb in His Bosom, has been as close as I've ever come to meeting my own ancestors, farm people of strong constitutions and hard work.  The book is set in the 1800s, so these characters belong to the generation of the grandparents of my  grandparents, and they live in swampy, flat, piney woods south Georgia, as did many of my people.

I read the spoken accents and colloquial expressions of these characters, the roots of my own speech. I read "Oh Law" and "Little Fellers" and "Crazy as a bat" and other expressions used by the Carver family and they sound familiar to my ear.

With no birth control, women in the novel give birth at home, as my grandmother Rose did.  These characters had so many children that by the end of their childbearing years, they seemed old and worn out. Cean's mother--by the time she was sixty--was crippled, demented, and blind, and she had to be carried from room to room by her children.  Cean, the main character, gives birth to fifteen children, including a set of stillborn twin boys.

Today we use the word, busy, to account for our luxurious choices: to have lunch with a friend, to watch a Spurs game or a movie, to take this trip or that trip.  But our busy-ness is a choice.  We buy our shoes and clothes ready made--while women like the protagonist, Cean, planted with her husband in the fields, stayed up at night to tend to sick children by candlelight, spun the cloth, then made the clothes for her children, her husband, and herself. Once she was struck by a rattlesnake, then picked it up and killed it.  Once, she had to watch her husband kill her favorite calf because they needed meat and leather for shoes.  They made medicines out of herbs and stitched up broken skin with sewing thread.

While reading this book in the luxury of my air-conditioned house, I've been struck by the comparative ease of my life and my good fortune to be born in the 1940s instead of the 1840s--when children were "taught their letters" by their mothers but who could, presumably, read only the basics.

To ride an oxcart to the coast to trade what little they had for what little they needed was a privilege of the men only.  Women and children stayed home, tending the crops and the house.  The world of women was very small--encompassing, in Cean's case, only the seven miles between her house and the house of her parents. There's no talk of friendship, no libraries, no schools, no doctors, and no grocery stores.

These people were not overly expressive of their affection for each other, but they showed up for each other to help get work done and babies delivered.  Love was demonstrated, but not talked about.  Children died, and their parents grieved.  Parents died, and their children grieved.  They sang the same hymns that I grew up hearing and singing and playing on the piano, one of which provides the title for the book.

When I was considering divorce, I remember that Betty and I asked Mimi, my grandmother, "Did you and Papa have to work on your marriage?"

"Oh yes,  Honey, we had to get up early and milk the cows and gather the eggs and make the butter and kill the chickens. "

Working ON a marriage was a concept she didn't get. That's a modern dilemma--one that people have time to think about when they aren't so busy surviving.