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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [01:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. For the Moth listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook you may like listening to the Onion Book of Known Knowledge, a definitive encyclopedia of existing information. That's the Onion Book of Known Knowledge. It's available from Audible. To try Audible free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.com themoth that's audible.com the moth the story you're about to hear by Tina McElroy Anza was told live in New York in 2011. The theme of the night was Raise the roof.
- [02:08]
Tina McElroy Anza
When I was growing up in Macon, Georgia, my family lived in Pleasant Hill at the foot of Forest Avenue and a great big old beautiful old brick two story house that was set way back from the street at the end of a long driveway that was lined by Georgia pines. Tallest a Georgia pine. Hi, it's a Georgia pine. It was nestled at the edge of woods, some thick woods, and it had a beautiful little brook running through it. The neighborhood of Pleasant Hill is now an historic district, but when I was growing up it was just a good solid neighborhood and our house was a good solid house. It had six bedrooms, a music room, my mama's sewing room, a great big old attic that was musty and hot all year long. And for some reason smelled like Christmas candy all year long. And that's where my brothers and my sisters and I would play for hours with our friends from the neighborhood. It even had a long narrow linen closet that smelled like fresh laundry that I would escape to and hide in to read and to daydream. Our house was the house that all the kids in the neighborhood wanted to visit. We even had in the basement a standard sized pool hall pool table. That of course, made us very popular with the boys in the neighborhood, the Holden brothers and the Brown boys. And all of them would come down to play until my father would just, you know, run them off. My father, you know, get your asses on out of here. You know, you don't have to go home, but you're gonna have to get out of here. That was my daddy. My daddy was very handsome, very charismatic and very complicated. If you looked up the word complex in the dictionary, you see a picture of him going, winking back at you. My father was a man of his times, but he really didn't think the rules applied to him. He owned juke joints and liquor stores in and around Macon, Georgia. When I was growing up, my whole life, you know, that's not really what you call a sure business, you know, like mortuaries or insurance or something like that, you know, and you had to take big risks sometimes. And my, my father took the big risk. And sometimes the risk paid off and sometimes he didn't. So when I was growing up, sometimes we had lots of money, sometimes we didn't. But, oh, when we had money, my dad didn't know how to pamper himself and his family. He knew how to spend it. He loved good food. And so this was in the 50s. And so regularly he would take the five kids and my mother and the whole family on these car trips up north to Cincinnati and Washington so we could eat at fine restaurants, something we couldn't do in the south at that time. My father was like the master of the grand gesture. On my parents wedding anniversary every year, my father would order 100 live Maine lobsters to be shipped down from Vermaine, of course, on rail cars. I remember the first time they came, I was a little girl. They came packed in this seaweed. I'd never seen seaweed before. And we had a feast. My mama got big old pots from down at my father's place. And she had us spread newspapers all over this breakfast table. I mean, all over this picnic table that took up the breakfast room in the house. And we just had a feast you know, nothing fancy. Lobster and butter. Lobster and butter. As much as you ever wanted. By the end of the evening, everybody was covered with butter and little pieces of shell. My father liked to have everything the way that he wanted. When we had money, my mother also would take us to a nearby white neighborhood, to a store called Jory's. It was a little upscale children's dress store, and we love to go to Jory's. Jory's was special because every time you went there, no matter what you bought, they would fold it nicely, and then they would wrap it in this lightly scented tissue paper, and then they would put it in this great big, shiny white box. It was just special. And my mother loved special. My mother was also very beautiful. And she had a knack for just making everything around her beautiful. You know, she was into the smallest detail. Cloth napkins at every meal, fresh flowers in the house. She was into special. I'm sorry, I'm thinking about my mother. She made everything in balance for the family, for the times when things were up and down. With the risk my father took, she was the one who kept the whole house sort of in balance because she loved special. Usually my father's risk would pay off, and sometimes they didn't. And when they didn't, you know, he, in the past, would always scramble and find some money to save the day. He loved taking risks. He thrived on it. My mother made her crazy. It didn't matter to us kids one way or the other. And to me, especially as the baby of the family, until the day we lost our house. Oh, God. My father just announced at dinner one night that we were going to be moving as a baby. Nobody told me anything more than that. I had to sort of eavesdrop and listen around corners and, you know, listen. Listen to what my brothers and sisters were saying. And I thought this was really a momentous event. I thought I was prepared for it. But when the day of the move came, my little world was shaken to its core. I felt unglued. I remember every detail. It was late summer, still hot in Middle Georgia, and I was 8 years old. And my mother was orchestrating everything. I'm telling you, she was telling the movers what to do. She was telling us what to do. She was wrangling the whole thing. Not a crack in her facade. I mean, she was on point. She was on point with this move. Mother had lived through the Depression, and I found that women who had lived through the Depression just cut from a different bowl. And I saw it on that day when that move. My mother was telling everybody what to do. She was wrangling the movers. Five kids, ages 8 to 18. All that furniture, that pool table, all our possessions. And she was on point. She was just telling everybody what to do, making sure that they did it right, you know, not a crack in her facade. Even with the sheriff standing there with his arm folded over us, you know, I wasn't expecting to do much more as the baby just kind of stayed out of the way. So I spent the whole day just sort of wandering around, saying goodbye to my beloved home. At some point in the evening, I wandered around to. I'm sorry. At some point in the afternoon, it was late. I wandered around to the back of the house to say goodbye to my little beloved woods and the little stream where I made my first little sand pies. And I came upon my mother. She was sitting at the top of the steps that led from the cement steps that led from the kitchen all the way down into the yard and on into the. Into the woods outside. She was sitting by herself and she was crying. I don't mean she was, like, weeping. My mother had her hands and her head in her face and she was sobbing, okay? I mean, these deep, gut wrenching sobs. I had never heard sounds like that before, especially from my lovely mother. And she was sobbing up there by herself, and I just stood frozen. I don't know whether I knew intuitively not to just intrude upon her or whether my little legs wouldn't move and allow me to. My mother had confided to me a couple of years before I was about 5 or 6, and we were both sitting in her sewing room that she was an only child. And as an only child growing up in Macon, her only dream in life was to marry the man she adored and have a house full of children and a big old house to run. A couple of seconds before I come upon my mother, I had seen my father leave the house through the front door, jump in the car and just sort of speed off, kicking up pine straw in his wake. Over my shoulder, I could see he hadn't gotten very far. He didn't even make it to Forest Avenue. In the middle of the driveway, he slammed on the brakes and turned that car around and came back. I could see him when he went through the house, going from room to room looking for my mother. My mother couldn't see or hear him, but at that point, she stopped the sobbing. Just, I mean, cut it off, okay? She stood up and she wiped her face and she straightened her back. She literally straightened her back like that. She turned around and went back inside for what she had to finish doing. Through the kitchen window, I saw where my mother and my father found each other. There was no conversation, no touching. They just looked at each other for a long time, and then they went back to doing what they had to do. Well, the movers, who were really men from my father's now defunct business downtown juke joint, moved us, packed us up, and moved our home across town to Dove street, which was near the Tyndall Heights housing projects. You know, when we first drove up, the first time I saw the house, I thought the guys from the place were playing, like, a mean joke on us. I couldn't believe we were going to have to live here. The house was. Oh, my goodness. The house was so sort of ramshackle, you know, and it didn't look very sturdy. And it was just one story, and it was tiny, and it was sort of rickety. It was made out of wood. And I remember thinking, oh, heck, the Three little pigs and a big bad wolf and everything. And so I got a little afraid. I didn't know what was going to happen. It had gray paint on it, and it had the nerve to be peeling. And it had this rickety porch, unscreened that sort of leaned away from the house. And the first time I went on that porch, I remember thinking, because Dove street was at the top of the hill now, the hills in Macon, Georgia, at the top of the hill. I remember thinking I could stand on that rickety porch and look out and see everything. The housing projects nearby, the abandoned lots down the street. The other rickety house is just as bad as our house, with front yards that were the color of red, dusty Georgia clay. And I remember thinking you could see everything from here, and you could never, ever forget where you are, ever. The inside was even worse. When I went in, I almost burst into tears. It was even tinier than outside, and it was really not very well made. And the floor was this rough sort of wood that had, you know, things sticking up. And I remember thinking, I'm gonna get splinters in my butt when I scoot up to the television to look at cartoons on Saturday morning. I didn't know how we were going to live there. None of our furniture fit, of course, and what fit just made it look like it was too big for the space. And it made it look sort of cartoonish. My brothers. There were lots of changes. My brothers had to double up and sleep together in one room. The Girls, my sisters and I had to triple up and sleep in one room. There were lots of changes. And that night, that first night when I lay in bed with my sisters, lay on my back and tried to ponder My little 8 year old, my, you know, all the things I had seen in just that one day. And while I was lying there, you know, I looked up and I saw this little hole about this big in the ceiling. And it just wasn't in the ceiling. It went right up to the roof. There was a little hole in the roof and you know, it just went right up to the skies. And I said, oh my God. And I elbowed my sisters and said, hey, look at this. We can see the stars in the ceiling here. Well, you know, I thought this was something magical and wonderful. But I knew it wasn't because my sisters just burst into tears and they threw, they were teenagers and threw themselves into the pillow, you know, and just sobbed themselves to sleep that night. And I started thinking, well, shoot, you know, things may be a little worse than I even thought. So I started paying attention to other things and noticing I noticed that my mother tried her best to grace that house with her special details, but it just didn't take. No matter what my mother did, that house remained the same. Other things didn't. I still went to school over in Pleasant Hill at the Catholic, private Catholic school. But after about a week, I noticed none of my friends had visited me. So I went find my mother. I found her in the kitchen shucking corn. My father loved fried corn and my mother made fried corn for him every day of the summer. So I found her in the kitchen shucking the corn and I asked her, you know, what's going on here? And she turned to me and said very gently, but very firmly, now look, you know, you're not just a short walk or a bike ride away from your friends anymore, you know, your friends, parents don't have the money or the time to be hauling their girls across town just to visit you. Shoot, we don't have the money to do that, you know, and in essence, I was going to have to suck it up. You know how they say, you know, you're a big girl now, I got that you're a big girl now speech. You know, you're going to have to just deal with this the way that it is. And I did. I read more. I love to read. And I spent time in my head a lot more. And when my sisters got tired of me begging them to play, I even found a little friend right next Door. A little red faced, red haired girl named Frankie, who was just like me, except she was a couple of years older and about this much taller. And she kind of smelled. She smelled like her house, which had a sort of odor to it. And she wore shabby dresses until my mama got ahold of her. And most amazingly, she dipped snuff. 10 years. She was about 10 years old, you know, like an old woman. And she spit the snuff juice, you know, the packages off the side of the porch. Well, I was enthralled, okay? And what was so amazing is she was just as enthralled with me and my family and that we sat down and ate dinner together. And the things that we had, even in our fallen state, she was just amazed. So I thought I, you know, had done pretty good, things were going to be okay. But it still didn't feel right. It still didn't feel right. Then one day in November, my father came to pick me up from school in Pleasant Hill, which was a treat in itself because we hadn't seen much of my father, day or night since we had moved into Dove Street. And he took us a long way, circuitous way, around getting home, which didn't surprise me either, because my father fancied himself a bit of an explorer. And so he liked to go down back alleys and all of that. And so I didn't think anything of it. And when I got home on the front porch, I saw all my family, not just my brothers and sisters and mother, I mean, my cousins, hanging off the front porch waiting for them. And my family grabbed me and sort of threw me in the house. And my sisters and my mother, you know, took me by the hand and pushed me into the bedroom and said, you gotta change. You gotta change your clothes. And I was like, oh, okay, okay. I didn't know what was going on. It was exciting. It was very exciting. And so I changed out of my little Catholic school uniform. And my mama took me and turned me around. And there on the bed was this big, white, shiny box. And inside it was this frilly blue and white dress wrapped in tissue paper that smelled faintly of my mother's Joy perfume. And I tried it on, and it fit. It was wonderful. And I still didn't know what was going on. And they brushed my mother, brushed my hair and scooted me out. My sister dragged me into the. Into the backyard. And in the backyard, oh, God, it was filled. It was filled with balloons and streamers, cake and ice cream. But most of all, it was filled with kids screaming Happy birthday. It was my first surprise birthday party. And it was a surprise. It wasn't even my birthday. It was on another date. And my family had done it to trick me. And the kids were in the backyard, kids from my school and from Pleasant Hill and kids from the neighborhood. Frankie was there in one of my suit sisters, outgrown fancy dresses. And we were all screaming and hollering and running, all jacked up on ice cream and cake, and nobody noticed, you know, the peel and paint on the house or the patched roof, you know, the fact that any of the kids were any different. We just all felt good and wonderful and protected and loved and special. And I started thinking, you know, how in the world did this happen? How did my parents. We were struggling. We didn't have any money. Nobody had bought anything new since we had moved to Dove Street. And how did they come up with this party? And what did my mother get? You know, she probably didn't buy the dress at Joris was somewhere else, but she had added her special touches to it to make it special. And I started thinking, well, hey, you know, special may not have any special kind of address. We stayed at Dove street for a little over a year. And then one night, my father made another announcement at dinner. He loved making proclamations at. He said, you know, that we were going to be moving again. Well, I was a little wary of this move this time. I had been through this before. And then he dropped the bomb on us, okay? We were moving back to Forest Avenue and Pleasant Hill in our own house. Oh, my God. You know, there were screams and yells and squeals and probably even tears, but there wasn't one thought in my head how my father, a black man in the 1950s, must have struggled and connived and hustled and managed to get his business back in one year and to get us back in our home in one year. But he did it. And so it was good times when you moved back. I remember the same way as when we left, but I was a little older. You know, I was a year older, but I was older in here, you know, I had learned a couple of things. I had learned how quickly life could change. I could learn how quickly things and people change and then change again and then change back. But I'd also learned, thank God, that there were some things in this world that never, ever changed. There were some people in this world that never, ever changed. And when I lay down for the first time again in my own little twin bed, by myself, in my little cotton candy pink bedroom. I lay on my back for what seemed like hours just searching, searching the ceiling for stars. Thanks.
- [20:37]
Dan Kennedy
Tina McElroy Anza lives on an island off the coast of Georgia. She's the author of five novels, runs a small press, produces films, teaches and lectures, but above all, she's a storyteller. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audience audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. To try Audible free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.com themoth join the moth at New Belgium Breweries Tour de fat in Washington, D.C. on June 1 for your chance to tell a story at the show. Just submit your one line pitch via email to tourdefatthemoth.org and you can check themoth.org for all the event details. Hope to see you there.
- [21:34]
Tina McElroy Anza
Dressing freaky and riding bikes and bands.
- [21:38]
Dan Kennedy
And beer are things you like the most fun fundraiser around the Tour de.
- [21:44]
Tina McElroy Anza
Fact New Bell Jump back in town. Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available May 28.
- [21:58]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio exchange helping make public radio more public at prx. Org.