My Family: Chapter 52

I had a cousin would try to hang out with us but we threw rocks at her to make her go home because we didn’t want her dad to follow her and whip her with the razor strap. She asked me once, after we became adults, if I remember doing this to her. I said I did because every time she’d come up to the house, there came her dad with the razor strap to whip her every step of the way back down the road. Her mom and dad came up to our house all the time. Every day after supper, her dad would come up talk to Dad while we did the dinner dishes. If we dropped a knife onto the floor, we would say he was coming for a visit. That’s an old wives tale; if you drop a knife a male was coming for a visit. 

Dad’s niece met her second husband at our house at one of the house parties and I got my first speeding ticket driving his car. He had a wife and a house full of children which lived further up the hollow but, like all the rest of the men, once they started to come to the parties they just kept coming back. Some of the men’s wives would come with them but mostly the wives thought they were above messing with White Trash. These wives would sometimes stand at the fence and call us names. One time Mom took out after a lady who came to the house and called Mom names because her husband was at our house drinking on the weekends. Mom went after her and picking up a pipe as she went, the woman ran and got into her car real fast.