Today, May 20, on her birthday, Momma would have turned seventy-two, so I am sharing a passage of text from an interview that we did in spring 2016 for my Sociology of Aging and the Life Course class. Storytelling was something she loved very much. Although she did not write any books, her life was certainly an unwritten novel lived beautifully. She could write, I told her, and should write, I insisted, but she worked and would be tired—and she told me that I should do the writing for us both to have a story. My love of reading came from Momma.
Vickie Cleckley, April 2016:
When I was graduating from high school, I lived with my oldest sister. They had moved to Louisiana. I graduated down there—Thibodaux High.
I was so sad because I was graduating and I thought: How unfair, how unfair, and for me not to have my mother here, of all the people! Why couldn’t have you just left my mother and taken somebody—anybody else but a mother?
I was just crying and, all of a sudden, I felt wet lips touch my face and push down.
Talk about dry up your tears in a hurry!
I stopped. I called out my sister’s name. I said, “Jo Anne?” No answer.
I got myself up out of that bed, turned on the light, looked under the bed, checked the back door. No, it was locked.
I went to my sister’s room through my niece’s room. She said, “No, Vickie, I wasn’t in your room.”
I slept with my light on the rest of the night.
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