A letter from Minnie Appling to her daughter Violet Appling Reynolds, written Jan 2, 1979:
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
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)
“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.
She went back into the house and slammed the door.
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(From BOOKWORM by Randy Reynolds)
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
"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?"
"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 I 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?"
“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!"
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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