QUE SERA SERA, MOTHER

By Randy Reynolds

It wasn't her birthday or mine. It was no special night. But something triggered memories that night and I am a memory-writer with a frequent urge to document what I feel during my journey on this planet and I was 45 already, running out of time, I thought. And Violet —Sheesh!—she was already 61!!! I HAD to tell her right then, that night, October 28, 1993, what I remembered about her because it would be a shame if something happened to me tomorrow and she never got to know!
The letter I wrote that night came back to me in a box of Violet's things, my one-sixth share of her photos and keepsakes distributed by my sisters after Violet died, twenty years ago today (May 13, 2022.) Here's what I told her in that letter, written 9 years before she died:
Dear Mom,
It occurs to me that you probably don't know the things I remember best about you from the time I was an only child till now:
,,,I've always thought that no one could have such a pure, sweet singing voice as yours. This has always made me wonder whether I was adopted because surely anyone who carries a tune as badly as I do could NOT be the son of someone who sings like you!
When I was 4, I remember sitting with you on a piano bench in our empty church in Adel, Georgia, in the middle of a steaming hot day. You were picking out some notes, teaching yourself to play. You told me I could sit there if I wouldn't touch the keys. You'd play a few chords and sing a little. And I was the only one on the bench with you. You sang so beautifully it gave me chill bumps. (I thought you were a genius to teach your own self to play.) I seem to remember that Ricky and Ronda (still toddlers compared to me) were playing airplane or something in the aisle. I'm not sure. I mainly remember a black piano up against the right-hand wall beside the pulpit. And I was the only one on the piano bench with you so, thinking as 4-year-olds do, I felt satisfied that you were just MY mother for that little while...not theirs.
I thought you were very talented back then, when I had no one to compare you to. But later, when I heard how others sang, I realized you actually WERE the best. You just stood out. And every time I heard you sing in the churches at Bainbridge or Shepherd's Fold or Alabama City or wherever, it made me think of the private concerts you gave—the ones I pretended were just for me— in the empty church in Adel.
Do you know the one word that always makes me think of you? "Jackpot." That word brings back memories from when I was 5 and we lived in Shannon, Georgia. You listened to the radio as you did your housework and there was a "jackpot song" on your favorite station every day. If no one guessed the title of the song, the announcer would add another dollar to the jackpot for the next day. I remember the radio was on a tiny table in the kitchen and you'd make us all hush up when it was time for the jackpot song. You'd get real close to the radio, often leaning on your broom or mop and you'd turn up the radio for the jackpot song. You always guessed the song, but I don't remember you calling in. I just remember you explaining to me what a jackpot was and I was totally awed that someone gave away dollars on the radio and also that you always got the songs right.
I remember 1957 when we lived in Cooper Heights, Georgia, the way you sang Que Sera Sera. You sang along with Doris Day but she couldn't hold a candle to you. It's very rare that I hear that kind of music anymore, but every time I do, I think of young Violet, with outstretched arms, singing Que Sera Sera to an imaginary audience in our tiny living room in Cooper Heights.
I don't know if anyone in your life ever told you this, but you were prettier than any movie star. Maybe you'd have been one if you hadn't met Gene Reynolds and become a preacher's wife in a religion that taught that going to the movies was a sin. But then I wouldn't have been your son. Someone else would. Ha.
I sometimes think of your training when you were a little girl —your Daddy preaching on those street corners in Gainesville, Georgia, in the late 1930s and early '40s when you were a little girl and standing you up on a chair, a box or a car's hood and making you sing. If that was hard for you to do, at least you mastered your feelings and performed like a trouper! I think that made you tougher than most people. Tough enough to wrangle 6 children 24 hours a day by the age of 27!
I hate to tell you this, but as the family disciplinarian you weren't so tough. You'd fuss like a mad hen and try to hide your grin. And every time your threat started with the word "Buster..." we knew it didn't mean anything.
The most I ever heard you laugh was in your late 20's, in the fall of 1960 on Sunday nights after church when Fred and Irma Jenkins came over to the old Shepherd's Fold parsonage (the one that burned down after Labor Day) and y'all sent both sets of kids to the back room to watch TV and y'all grownups played that board game WAHOO! in the dining room. I never heard such laughter from you, (and Dad, too,) before or since.
The most I ever heard you cry was when your mom and Donnie got in that wreck in Tifton when you were about 29 and I had just become a teenager. You cried all the way from Louisiana to Georgia that night, because you thought you might not see them alive again. I crouched down, fearfully, in the back floorboard of that green and yellow Chevy Biscayne behind Daddy. Ricky was on the floorboard behind you. Ronda and Ramonda were asleep on the back seat. I remember that Renda was in the back window. Little Renee was in the front seat with y'all.
It was touch and go, as the doctors' said, but your mom and brother survived, of course. Their close call and your sadness over it awakened in me the question of how I would feel if MY mother was that close to death.
But mostly when I think about you, I think of your singing—singing to me on that piano bench in the empty church in Adel while Doris Day and Patti Page were getting all the songs that should have been yours.
Love,
Randy






OH, THE THINGS WE FEARED IN 1969

  by Randy Reynolds

It was the summer of 1969 and my Uncle Donnie, age 17, was visiting from Georgia. He had sat with me throughout my six-hour show at the Slidell, Louisiana, radio station that day. Being 19 and already a four year veteran of radio, I showed off, saying clever things to introduce and back-announce each record, talking my head off, as all small-town announcers did in those days. When the mic was off, we talked about the music and our favorite artists and Donnie helped me decide which record to play next. When he got bored with that, we played two-hand Rook in the space between the turntables.

When my shift ended at 4 PM, we jumped into my ’64 baby blue Fairlane for the 26 mile drive to my duplex in Covington, but it became immediately clear that we weren’t going to make it. Not in that car anyway. We drove it, sputtering and jerking, to the nearest mechanic—Ronnie Toney (my wife's cousin) working at a Firestone store in a shopping center. He said he couldn’t get to it today, but he’d fix it tomorrow.

That left us afoot, 26 miles from home. Our only choice seemed to be whether to spend the night at the radio station or hitchhike home to my wife and baby in Covington.

“Two handsome guys like us won’t have any problem thumbing a ride,” said Donnie.

That sounded like a challenge and I couldn’t turn down a challenge from my younger uncle, so we set off down the street, which eventually turned onto the highway. We walked a couple of miles, turning at the sound of each oncoming car, sticking out our thumbs and smiling for all we were worth. But nobody even gave us a second glance till a car full of black guys (well, three of them anyway) pulled to a stop.

We were frozen in place for a moment and Donnie said, “What’re we going to do?”

I said, “We can’t refuse ‘em. They might get mad. Just pretend we’re not afraid.”

And so we got into the car and told them we were headed for Covington.

The driver said, “Us, too. But we got one little stop to make.”

“They gotta take me home,” said the tall black guy in the back seat with us.

I looked at Donnie. His eyes were big as saucers. Mine probably were, too. I think “scared shitless” is the appropriate term.

Growing up in Georgia and Louisiana, we had never associated with blacks. Even though we both had started first grade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, we had never attended school with a black kid. Ever. Not even one. We had never been to church with one. Never eaten in a restaurant with one. Never played with any, except Jo-Jo and Charlie, the sons of the maid who worked for my family in the summer of 1958. (We hired the maid when my pregnant mother got a job in a sewing factory for a dollar an hour. She then hired a black lady who would clean house, cook, and watch us five kids for fifty cents an hour. Mother’s calculation was that working eight hours a day in the sweltering heat of the sewing factory was easier on a woman than cleaning the parsonage and taking care of the five kids she had produced in 8 years. I forget the maid’s name, but she brought her sons Jo-Jo and Charlie with her most days and we played in and around the church and in the vacant buildings on the poor side of Bainbridge, Georgia, where my dad was pastoring a church, two years before we moved to Covington, Louisiana.)

Donnie and I and everyone we knew came from a culture that taught us that the Civil War was about “states’ rights,” that the Confederacy was a glorious “lost cause,” that the Civil Rights movement was stirred up by “outside agitators” –“Godless outside agitators,” at that. And that blacks were asking for too much too soon. We were taught that “our” blacks, here in the south, were happy and didn’t want things to change. Most everyone in our Reynolds and Appling families proudly voted for the most racist candidate in any given election—Lester Maddox and J.B. Stoner in Georgia; John Rarick in Louisiana; and always George Wallace for President when he was on the ballot.

Now here we were—Donnie and I, white teenagers—in a car with three black guys. We didn’t know if they were the infamous outside agitators, the hated demonstrators, godless Communists, escaped convicts, killers, perverts, kidnappers, rapists, forced-bussers, robbers or what. All we knew was they were black and that scared us nearly to death.

As the old car sped north, I positioned my right hand inches from the door handle, poised to jerk it open and dive out of the car when they tried to kill us, which I had no doubt they were going to do. A wave of sadness swept over me as I looked at my Uncle Donnie who was sitting between me and the tall guy. There was no way I could save him and myself both. He was trapped. A goner. I stared, wanting to remember him at his youthful best, but he was already past his youthful best, with ghostly white cheeks, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, breathing raggedly through his mouth. I could smell the fear, both his and mine.

Near Lacombe, Louisiana, the driver suddenly pulled off the highway onto a small dirt road that led into the woods, past trash piles, and into a junkyard surrounding a mobile home with a basketball goal beside it. I wasn’t sure whether to jump out while the car was still rolling or wait till it stopped.

When the tall guy opened his door, got out and pounded twice on the roof of the car I nearly had a heart attack. Rather than jerk on the door handle and roll out, leaving Donnie to his fate, I was too terrified to budge. This was it. Goodbye world. But all the guy said was, “See y’all tomorrow.” Our would-be murderers in the front seat grunted something in reply, the driver turned the car around and we headed back to the highway.

The fact that there was a perfectly innocent reason for the detour into the woods didn’t register with me. I was suffering from cognitive dissonance—so sure that my fearful image of black people was right that not even reality could convince me otherwise. I was still certain they were going to kill us somewhere else, but at least the odds were better now—two against two instead of three against two.

As we barreled up the highway again, my courage began to return. I mentally ran through all the scenarios including whether I should just jump out of the car at 60 miles per hour and leave Donnie to fend for himself, or just wait till the car stopped and attack the two remaining black boys with my bare hands.

A half hour later as we entered Covington the driver said, "Where you live?"

"Anywhere along here is good," I said.

He dropped us off near Marsolan's Feed and Seed, which was two blocks from where I lived.

I said, “Thanks for the ride” and Donnie said, "Yeah, thanks."

The driver said, “No problem.”

Donnie and I told the story of that ride, with varying degrees of drama, for many years afterward to demonstrate our bravery in the face of the enemy. We were far into adulthood before we finally realized the problem was not "them" but as Walt Kelly's Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."



VIOLET MEMORIES


 by Randy Reynolds

A letter from Minnie Appling to her daughter Violet Appling Reynolds, written Jan 2, 1979:

In 1933 something wonderful happened in our home. The Lord gave us a darling little girl. 7 lbs. light complection, blue eyes. The prettiest little thing I ever seen. Then I happen to think how beautiful flowers were, so I knew I had the loveliest flower of all. So I gave her a flower name. (Violet)
Her dady and I watched her grow. When she was 1-2-3 years old, I would buy cloth the best I could find 1 yd. and make her dresses. I’ll never forget when she took her first steps, when she got her 1st. Tooth. She was a good baby. Just a bundle of love. This baby I’m talking about is you.
The first step you ever took, you were 11 months old. I would stand you up in the middle of the room. You would take a step or two, get in a hurry and fall. But you were always ready to try it again.

You and your Bro. Tommy would sing together. We would stand you up in a chair because you were so little. Your singing was perfect. You started singing before you were old enough to go to school.

It was hard times back in the '30s and '40s. Sometimes we did not have things and food that we needed, but what ever we had as a family, we shared together. So many cute, Loving and wonderful things you did during your child hood days, that I could mention, but it would take to long.

You learned how to sew when you were only 10 – What ever kind of work there was to be done such as house work, you were always ready to help. You were 5 or 6 years old before you could talk plain. You were always good making friends.

The Lord saved you when you were just a young girl. You would cry, shout and praise God. To me you looked like a angel, long blond waveing hair.

Maybe sometimes I might have failed, but I did the best I could to be a good mother to my 4 children.

One day I’ll never forget a young man, by the name of Eugene Reynolds took you from our home to be his wife. He’ll never know what that did to us. (Your Dady and I) One thing I can say. You have not only been a wonderful Daughter, but you are a good Wife, Mother, Grandmother etc. but most of all you are still the flower of our hearts.

No tongue can tell how much we love you.

Bless you on your 46 Birthday, Jan. 2, 1979.

With much Love

Can’t write a lots of things.There is too much to talk about, I can’t keep from crying as I write this letter.
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(From MARRIED IN THE MORNING  by Randy Reynolds)

Violet Appling Reynolds was married twice in the same day and some say that 54 years later she died twice in one day--or was it three times?

Violet never had a room of her own until she got married.  Her father was a poor preacher and they always lived in drab places, small houses, where there wasn't enough space for the family's only daughter to have a room of her own.  From infancy until the day she left home to be married she always slept in the "front" room, on the sofa. In adulthood, she made up for the drab surroundings of her childhood.  She decorated her homes with taste and elegance, with walls supporting eye-catching groupings of all things beautiful, many of them violet, the color evocative of her name. 

Her daddy used to preach on street corners and little Violet, starting at age 4 or 5, would stand on a chair or flatbed truck and sing to help attract a crowd.  The man she would someday marry became a preacher, too, and she sang in his services in almost every state in America. 

She ran away and got married when she was 15 years and one day old, Jan. 3, 1948. She got married not once, but twice that day.  The first ceremony was performed by a county Ordinary (a lower-level judge) who was drunk. Gene felt bad about it, so he got a new marriage license from the Ordinary’s wife. Then he and Violet went to a preacher who knew her father, and got married again, just a few hours after the first ceremony.

54 years later, in  2002, she was at the end of a terrible illness and her doctors were amazed that she was surviving both the illness and the highest levels of their strongest painkillers.  They observed her lying in her hospital bed thanking Jesus for her pain and they said there was no way she should still be conscious. 

When she breathed her last, her husband was in the room.  Amid the hubbub and comings and goings that accompany a death in the hospital, the nurses sent the grieving husband out of the room.  A short while later, he was in the chapel when nurses summoned him again.  Violet was alive.  He hurried to her room, but it was too late.  He had missed her brief resurrection. 

They took Violet to the hallway outside the morgue and put a toe tag on her.  Her husband sent everyone away so that he could be alone with her.  He pulled down the sheet to look at her face. He thought of the first time she had kissed him, when she was fourteen.  She had said 'I love you' and a tear had trickled down her cheek.  He bent down and kissed her and, just like 54 years earlier, a tear came out of her eye and trickled down her cheek.

And he knew for sure that wherever she was, she still loved him. 


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(From KING OF THE AVENUE  by Randy Reynolds)

Shortly after he married Violet Lee Appling, who was two years younger than him but way more mature, Gene Reynolds brought a goat to their home on Myrtle Avenue in Gainesville.  He hadn’t gone out looking for a goat, but he saw his daddy's second cousin Butch Reynolds who happened to have a great big goat with him that particular day.  Butch owned a meat market and the billy goat's days, apparently, were numbered. 

“How much would you take for that goat?” asked Gene.

“Two dollars,” said Butch.

"I barely have your rent money," said Gene.

"Two dollars," said Butch. 

Gene bought the goat, borrowed some boy’s little red wagon, roped the goat to it and drove home, seventeen-years-old and King of the Avenue once again.   

Fifteen-year-old Violet clearly wasn’t happy when she came out to the porch and saw her husband being pulled up the avenue by a goat, followed by an excited bunch of children.

She went back into the house and slammed the door.

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(From BOOKWORM by Randy Reynolds)

Bainbridge, GA, 1959. From behind, as she fixed breakfast, Mother looked like a choir director, moving this way and that, her arms in constant motion, putting a pot on the stove, scrubbing the sink, grabbing a box of grits from the cabinet, pouring the grits into boiling water, shaking out her rag over the trash box, turning back to stir the grits with a big wooden spoon. The mother of 6, (aged 27) was a symphony of motion.

She knew the sound of an encyclopedia hitting the table. Without turning from the stove she asked, "Are you going off somewhere to read all day?"

"I guess so," I said.

“Aren’t you selling peanuts for Sister Griffith today?”

“Nope. She said she’d call me when she gets some more.”

"Well, go out and play ball with the other boys, then. And y‘all stay out of the intersection. There's a perfectly good field over yonder by the warehouse. For the life of me, I can't understand why y’all prefer to play in the street."

"Because it's smooth and it's shaped like a baseball diamond--each street corner is a base."

"Ya'll are going to get yourselves killed playing in that street. Now, I mean it, ya'll play in the field."

"Don’t tell ME! Tell Ricky. They’re HIS friends, not mine.”

She set a glass half-filled with tan liquid before me. "You're looking puny. Drink this Ovaltine and forget about reading for today. What you need is some activity!"

"Yuccch! I hate Ovaltine! And who says reading is not activity?"

"Don't sass me, young man. No more reading today. And Ovaltine is good for growing bones."

"That's only when you add milk, Mother. It's not the same with water."
"We don't have milk today, unless you want goat's milk."

"Yucch."

“We’ll have regular milk when we can afford it.”

"Will you get me another encyclopedia when you go back to the grocery store?"

"Didn't I just buy you the 'F'?"

"It was the 'E-F' combined, so you got two for the price of one. And that was last month, Mother. Volume 'G' is probably in by now."

"You may have to wait another month, Randy. We can't afford any extras right now."

"But, Mother…"

"Re-read the 'E-F.Doesn't it have a lot of stuff about flying in it?"

She was stirring the grits again and didn’t see the face I made behind her back.

I wasn’t going to tell her that the ‘E-F’ was a big disappointment, that there were words missing between “Fuchs, Sir Vivian Ernest” and “Fucshia." I spelled out the missing word and came up with Funk, Jim--the pioneer who'd had most of the adventures later attributed to Dan'l Boone, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the boys at my school brought up Funk's name so often!

Daddy came in, kissed the back of Mother’s neck, tapped her fanny with his Bible and sat down across from me.

He said, playfully, “Coffee woman!” And she scurried to make him a cup of instant.

After serving Sanka for daddy and grits for me, she went over to the screen door and stared out, idly running her fingers back and forth on the coils of the door spring. There was nothing to see back there but an old shed and a thicket of bamboo that separated the church property from the family behind us. When she quit scraping that door spring, the silence caught my attention and I looked up and caught her stealing a glance over her shoulder at me, then quickly looking away. It made me wonder what she thought of me sitting there with my daddy, both of us lost in books, not talking. And it occurred to me that she must have been thinking that I was already a boy of 10 who not that long ago was her sweet little angel baby and now I was almost as tall as her and I already knew some things she didn't know and was in a hurry to learn more.

I cleaned my plate, because if I didn’t she would tell me the thing about starving children in Red China who had to go without food so that could have enough, and that it was my Christian duty to eat everything on my plate. I couldn’t stomach the Ovaltine, though, so I left it where she’d placed it and if she could get it to China, they were welcome to it.

“I enjoyed my breakfast,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist. "May I please be excused?"

Mother said, "Yes, you may."

“I need you to sweep the church,” said Daddy without looking up.

“Mother told me I could go ride my bike.”

“Okay,” he said, turning a page in his Bible.

I ran out the door, encyclopedia in hand, and Mother called after me, “Be careful on your bike!”

“I will!” I yelled.

“And no more reading today!”

I didn’t reply to that because I didn’t want to lie.

That was the day Mr. Powell saw me riding my bike down the middle of the unpaved street with no hands, reading my encyclopedia.

He called out from his porch, "You're gonna fall and kill yourself!"

I glanced his way and my front wheel wobbled even as I assured him, "Nah, I never fall."

I tumbled butt over bicycle and landed flat on my back, still clutching the encyclopedia. To preserve my pride, I lay where I had fallen, lifted my book and continued reading, there in the middle of the dirt road in the morning sunshine, as if this is what I had intended all along. 

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The lady in purple...



VIOLET'S LAST WORDS TO ME
by Randy Reynolds

The words she wanted were way down deep
in the murky abyss at the edge of sleep.
She backed away from her tunnel of light
and, fighting painkillers to phrase it right,
said what she said in a weak little voice
that I barely heard above hospital noise...
“My boy... came to love ...me today.”
And that was the last thing I heard her say. 


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