A Conversation

By C.J. Turner

About the Book
A Conversation by C. J. Turner is about a young lady, Jaé, who had several conversations with an older lady, Rosie Anne Taylor. Taylor had been ill most of her life and still suffers from respiratory problems. She was sexually assaulted at an early age, received no professional help, and attempted suicide. Regardless, she trusted in God to deliver her from every situation in which she found herself.
Turner hopes this book gives young ladies courage to depend upon God and themselves, and not to blame themselves for criminal acts committed against them. Do not allow men to abuse you. Learn how to deal with grief, whether it is a death or the loss of a friendship, both are grief. Learn how to grow more in grace and have faith in God. Turner hopes people become stronger after reading this book and believes they too can handle anything that comes their way, whether good or bad.
About the Author
Author C.J. Turner is active in the Baptist Church. She serves on the Senior Usher Board and sings in the Mass Choir and is a licensed Missionary. Turner visits the sick and shut-in members of her church as well as other churches and visits various nursing homes. Her hobbies are baking and reading the Bible. A Conversation is an accurate description of the life of Rosie Anne Taylor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890278432

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

One day I rang the doorbell at the address that my agency had given me. An older lady came to the door, and I said, "Good morning, are you Miss Rosie Anne Taylor?

She said, Yes, I am.

My name is Jaé Morrison, and I’m your new housekeeper. Did you request a new housekeeper from the Sunpledge Agency?

Yes, I did, she said with a smile. Will you please come in? The house is a mess, but I’ve been ill and unable to keep up with the dust that keeps accumulating. My other housekeeper became ill while on vacation two weeks ago, so my house has not been properly cleaned for almost three weeks. If it is too much for you, tell me now and I will ask for someone else.

Jaé smiled. Actually, I don’t see much dust, and your house seems to be very clean other than the carpet may need to be vacuumed. Do you do any cleaning yourself?

Rosie sighed. Yes, I try to keep it clean by picking things up here and there, and I always keep a clean kitchen. Besides, I live alone and it’s easy to clean up behind myself. I have an insurance-paid housekeeper for the weekends, but I just wanted someone to come in two or three times a week to dust and do other things that the weekend person does not have the time to do.

Jaé said, I understand, and I will be more than happy to clean your clean house. I can see that you are used to having an immaculate house. I’ll bet when you were younger, there was not a speck of dust to be found anywhere. Well, may I talk to you as I clean? I find that getting to know the person I work for makes the time go faster and makes it more enjoyable. I understand that you are somewhat ill, so let me know if I can help you in any way.

Rosie grimaced a bit and said, Well, the next time you come over, I would appreciate it if you did not wear any perfume. I’m allergic to certain odors.

I don’t mind at all! Actually, if you don’t mind me using one of your towels, I will wash the perfume off before I get started.

Rosie seemed relieved that she had not offended Jaé. No, I don’t mind. Just look in the linen closet and get a towel from the left side.

Jaé walked over and opened the door. Wow, you have so many towels, I’m almost afraid to use one of them. They all look new, and they are so beautiful.

Thank you, but use any one of those towels that you want. Rosie paused for a moment before asking, "Jaé is a unique name; how do you spell it?

Just like the alphabet letter ‘J.’ My mother had a sense of humor when she was naming me. May I call you Rosie Anne?

Sure, you can call me anything except Mrs. Taylor.

Jaé said, I am a missionary and very proud to be one. Most people that do missionary work think that it is easy, but it is not. In addition to doing the Lord’s work, I sometimes have to go to shut-in church members’ home with broom and mop in hand to clean. I do not mind it at all. After all, when I get older, I want someone to clean for me and not charge me for every little thing that they do for me. I even enjoy cleaning because most of the mothers in the church are very clean and they keep their houses clean, just like you. They dust and polish their silverware and most important to them is their china cabinets and the contents therein. Each piece of china or dish has a history behind it.

Rosie smiled and said, I’m a missionary also. I’m with Calvary District. To what district do you belong?

Metropolitan.

That is a good district, Rosie said. I know several people who belong to Metropolitan. Do you mind sitting down for a minute and having a glass of apple juice with me? I feel pretty today, and I want to drink from one of my special crystal glasses.

After the ladies sat down with their drinks, Rosie seemed to relax. She began to open up. "I find that people don’t talk to each other enough anymore, especially family members. Too many secrets are being withheld. No one wants anyone else to know about their crazy Uncle Gary and the bad things that he did when he was thirty years old. And don’t even mention their precious grandmothers and grandfathers. Most people want you to think that they have been saints all their lives just because they are deacons and mothers in the church today.

"I’m very thankful that I grew up in a time where mothers talked to their daughters or at least talked to other people and allowed their daughters to listen. Well, they allowed their daughters to listen to some of their conversations. But mothers in my day told us about our family and who we were related to so we would not end up marrying our cousins, even though there were intermarriages sometimes anyway. But at least they knew the truth about their past. That was long before ancestry research and these other things became popular. We learned who we were by word of mouth.

I miss those days because parents don’t communicate with their children very much these days. They are too interested in becoming their friends instead of their parents, Rosie finished, taking a sip of her juice.

Jaé said, I have only dusted your dining room today because we’ve been talking so much. May I come back tomorrow morning? I’ll do my cleaning because I did more listening than cleaning today.

Rosie smiled. Sure, you can. I enjoyed talking to you today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Jaé left, and while walking down the street, said to herself, I enjoyed talking to her, and I look forward to going back tomorrow. Rosie is a very interesting lady, and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Jaé’s POV

I knocked on her door the second day. It took her a while to answer the door, and I was going to actually clean her house today; that is, if I could find something that needs cleaning because her house was already very clean. When she answered the door, she apologized for taking so long. I told her that it was not a problem.

I reminded her that I was there to clean that day. I ran the vacuum, and when I was finished, she offered me a glass of apple juice again. I asked whether she was feeling pretty again today, and she surprised me and said, No…actually I’m not feeling so good today, but we can sit and talk for a minute if you don’t mind.

I did not mind at all because I enjoyed talking to her, but I enjoyed listening to her talk more than anything.

She said, When my family talked about their distant relatives and the things that they did and things that happened to them, I paid attention. In other words, the history I know came directly from listening to my relatives and friends passing on parts of their history. She was much older than I, but she loved to talk, and I loved to listen to her talk. That was the high point of my day, just listening to her talk and asking her questions.

On one particular day, I asked her if I could write down some of the things she was talking about. Maybe someday I would be able to write a book, try to get it published, and turn it into a movie. She said, Sure, and I’ll get some royalties also. I promised her that if I sold one book, she would get half of my royalties. She then told me that if I was really going to write a book about her, she would prefer it if I did not use her real name and the names of the people she would refer to unless she told me it was ok. She was interested in not offending her family and friends.

Rosie Ann was born in a small town in Mississippi called Bude which is located between Brookhaven and Natchez, or as she said, about a hundred miles south of Jackson. She always said that if you blinked, you would miss the town of about two thousand residents today.

CHAPTER 2

She had a remarkable memory regarding her childhood, with the exception of about six months, and that bothered her very much. Rosie was a sickly child. She spent her fourth birthday in the hospital with asthma and pneumonia. Doctors in the small, rural hospital did not expect her to live. Her mother was poor with no insurance, and she could not afford to take her to Natchez to a better hospital with more experienced doctors. The hospital she was in was named Franklin County General Hospital, which was about three miles from her home in Meadville, Mississippi. Franklin Hospital had just hired a German doctor as Chief of Staff, Dr. Wilhelm Schmidt, who spoke broken English and was not prejudiced.

When he ordered Rosie Anne to be placed under an oxygen tent, the other doctors and hospital administrators were up in arms. After all, she was only a poor black girl with no insurance. But somehow Dr. Schmidt won his case, and Rosie Anne stayed in that oxygen tent for over three months. She needed oxygen to help her breathe, but she could not stand wearing an oxygen mask. Each time the nurses would put the mask on her face, Rosie would start fighting and crying. So Dr. Schmidt ordered the oxygen tent.

Rosie Anne was a fighter, and she would never cry, except when the oxygen mask was on. Whenever one goes to a hospital in today’s society, the nurses immediately put a needle in your arm so if you need medication, they inject it through the tube. However, during the early fifties, each injection had to be administered in the hip or the arm muscle. Rosie Anne would never cry, regardless of how many injections the nurses gave her.

One nurse noticed that she would never cry, so she put a pint jar beside her bed and deposited a dime in it. This gesture quickly caught on, and all nurses who administered an injection would put a dime in the jar. Rosie noticed the jar growing, and she knew it was money because the nurses would often ask her what was going to buy with all that money. Rosie Anne would always reply, A big doll.

However, Rosie Anne remembers crying when she thought she had to use the bathroom. The nurse brought her a bed pan, and she felt something moving in the bed pan. She started crying and yelling. When the nurses ran to her room to investigate the problem, they saw a tapeworm in the pan. Rosie remembers them taking the tapeworm out of the bedpan with a tool of some kind and laying it flat on a silver tray. She cried harder because she was afraid that more worms were in her stomach. She was reassured that there were no more worms in her body. They gave her another injection and she went to sleep.

When Rosie Anne was removed from the oxygen tent, she stayed in the hospital for some time. She does not remember how long.

When she was released from the hospital, her mother cared for her, along with other neighbors. Rosie Anne remembers asking her mother for the jar of dimes only to be told, Mother had to buy medicine with those dimes. I won’t be able to buy you the doll you wanted.

Rosie said, My mother loved flowers, and she had a beautiful pink rose bush all across the front yard. I would get a blanket and lay on the ground. Then the honeysuckle bush would start blooming. Every year, I would get scissors and cut that honeysuckle bush down, and every year I would get a whipping for doing so. Then one year, I got a shovel and a hatchet, and I dug up that honeysuckle bush and cut the roots so it could never grow back again. And, again, I got a whipping. I did not care because I could not stand the smell of honeysuckles. I told my mother that I could not breath around that bush, but either she did not care, or she did not believe me. It was the same thing with toothpaste. I could not stand the smell of the mint that was in toothpaste. It would make me cough every time I brushed my teeth. My grandmother gave me a box of baking soda one day and told me to brush my teeth with the baking soda and I should not cough when I brush my teeth. It worked, and from that day on, I only brushed my teeth with baking soda.

CHAPTER 3

Jaé’s POV

I told Rosie Anne that I couldn’t help but notice that almost every time she talked about her mother, her expression changed, and it appeared that she did not have many fond memories of her mother. I asked her to explain her feelings toward her mother if she did not mind.

Rosie Anne said, "No, I loved my mother; however, she hurt my feelings lots of times, and it took me a long time to get over those hurt feelings. I was also very proud of her. Did you know that she was an educator? She taught school before teachers had to be certified and had to have a college degree. She taught children English and Math before she married.

"You know she married John Clark at the age of twenty-two? He lived only about two blocks from our house. He was an entrepreneur - he sold liquor in his nightclub. He had to pay the local white policemen because Franklin was a dry county. That means you could not openly sell alcohol without going to jail unless you paid the police. I think it is still dry even today, in the twenty-first century.

"However, for some reason, the marriage did not work out. I heard talk about him having other women on the side. He was high yellow and very handsome. My mother was a very beautiful woman with big pretty legs and an hour-glass figure. I always heard that they made a very beautiful couple.

My mother was somewhat on the bright side. Her mother could have passed for white because her father was white. She was born during slavery. Had it not been for her large nose, she really could have left that town, went up North, and passed for a white woman. Back in those days, girls who were born from rape and did not have a large nose passed for white, and most of them left home.

CHAPTER 4

"My great-grandmother, who was known as Big Mama, was raped by Mr. Childs, who owned her at one time. But because she was so beautiful, she was afforded the opportunity to work in the big house. They were referred to as ‘house niggers.’ But my grandmother functioned as if she did not mind. I guess she had to act that way in order to survive the horrible conditions of that time.

If you don’t mind, look in my china cabinet and take that party platter down for me. Be careful not to drop it.

Jaé told Rosie Anne that that particular dish had the same markings on it as some antique African pattens.

She said, Yes, it is from Africa. What most people don’t know is that not only did the white men capture our ancestors, but they raided the villages and brought back lots of dishes, crystal, and many things of value.

Jaé asked, Miss Rosie, how do you know things about this era in your family’s history? You were not even born yet.

Rosie Anne said, "Other people have told me. Child, I’m sixty-five years old (or at least that’s what I was told), and my memory goes back sixty-two years. God has been good to me, and he still is good to me. He blessed me with a long memory. I will always be grateful for my memory and being curious as a child. I was a curious child, and I would always sit under the porch, listen at the front door, or stand silently and pretend to play while listening to whatever was being said.

"My grandmother was very ill, and my mother had to stay home to care for her. Therefore, my mother’s friends would come to our home, sit on the front porch, and talk about things that only adults talked about. My mother told me some things about my past, but I learned most of what I know from ‘overhearing’ people talking about things.

"I’ve always believed that if three or more people tell you the same story at different times, then you can believe that particular story to be true. Especially if those stories were told years apart.

I was told that one Saturday night, Big Mama was working in the kitchen because Mr. Childs was entertaining guest. One of his guests saw Big Mama take something off the fruit platter and put it into her mouth. The guest told Mr. Childs, and he went into the kitchen and told Big Mama to throw both fruit platters in the garbage immediately. Big Mama took the two platters outside and gently put them in the garbage. Upon leaving the house that night, she retrieved the two platters out of the garbage can, threw the fruit away, and took the platters home. She washed them and hid them. Later that night, Mr. Childs sent for Big Mama and raped her as her punishment for eating from the platter. As a result of that rape, my grandmother was born, and as you can see from this picture, she looks like a white woman.

CHAPTER 5

"Two years after that, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, and Big Mama became a free woman. She had already had one child by Mr. Childs and one by her husband, and now she had another girl by Mr. Childs.

"When Big Mama’s husband died, she let her first child, Nancy, go back with her husband’s family. So now she had only two children, Shirley Ann and Rosalynn, to raise.

"Big Mama was very smart. She bought a large house and turned it into a boarding house. That was the thing in those days. Women who could would purchase houses and turn those houses into boarding houses. Big Mama was the landlord and collected rent from her boarders until they moved out and got married. It was only women in the boarding house.

Big Mama raised her two children on her own. Rosalynn became a seamstress. She could look at anything and make it without a pattern. My mother told me that the white people from all over the county would come to her and have clothes made. My great niece is the same way. She can look at something and make it without a pattern. I can sew some things without a pattern, but it has to be made by hand because I cannot thread a sewing machine. I have two antique sewing machines, and I can’t use either of them because I cannot thread the needles.

CHAPTER 6

Jaé said, Miss Rosie Anne, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I want you to get back to the boarding house story!

Rosie Anne said, with a shake of her head as though she were clearing it, "Oh, yes. I’m sorry. I start talking and sometimes I don’t know when to stop.

"It was said that Big Mama’s boarding house was more than just a boarding house…if you know what I mean. And, just in case you don’t know, I will make it clear. I heard that it was boarding house and a bordello. She would temporarily stop hourly renting on an hourly basis whenever her father would come to visit. My great-uncle was a minister who lived in another state. She would know of his visits long before he arrived because they corresponded through letters. There were no phones in those days - at least not for black people.

"I was later told by cousin Aletha that it was not a bordello, but due to the fact that her only income was from her deceased husband and the money she made from the boarding house, it made sense to me that the boarding house was a bordello. She always had a purse full of money, but she would never spend any of it on her granddaughter.

"Whenever she would go to visit her son who lived in Alabama, my cousin told me that she would never spend a dime on anything. Aletha would tell me about the times that the fruit and vegetable man would come by their house and Big Mama would go out to the truck, get whatever she wanted, and ask her mother or father to pay for whatever she purchased. Aletha resented the fact that she would never use her own money for anything.

"Aletha told me one time that whenever she went to church, the Holy Spirt would come upon her and she would always shout, cry, and jump up and down, praising the Lord. Well, one day she was shouting, and her purse fell onto the floor. Money came spilling out. Aletha said she went over to where Big Mama was sitting and was surprised to see how much money was on the floor.

"When Big Mama saw Aletha with her purse, I guess the Holly Spirit left her, and she snatched the purse and started stuffing the money back in. From that day on, Aletha always thought that she was pretending because her son was the preacher, and it just looked good for her to shout and pretend to allow the Holy Spirit to come into her body. But after the incident with the money, that was the end of her shouting days as far as Aletha believed.

"Big Mama definitely lived a double life. She would go to Sunday School every Sunday and church services every third Sunday for communion. In those days, there were not many ministers. Each minister had four or five churches. Believe it or not, that tradition is still practiced today in several states in the South.

"I never met Big Mama because she died before I was born, but I’ve heard plenty of stories about her from several people. Some of my information came from the ladies and my mother talking, but the majority of my information came from asking different people questions when I became grown on my frequent trips home from Detroit.

Jaé asked, Rosie Anne, how old was Big Mama when she died?

Rosie replied, I believe she was ninety-eight when she died. Her father was 123 when he died in California. His older daughter died at the age of 109. I had already bought a ticket to San Francisco to celebrate her 110th birthday, but she died at 109. I was blessed to have the opportunity to read the obituary at her funeral, and before I left, I was given two of her church hats.

CHAPTER 7

"My grandmother was ninety-two when she died of stomach cancer. Or should I say, she was euthanized. I can remember that night very vividly.

"I called my grandmother Mama. One night, my grandmother became very sick, and my mother called Dr. Schmidt. He made house calls because she was too sick to go to his office. My mother called Dr. Schmidt one night in 1966 to deal with my grandmother, and he gave her a pain shot. Even though my mother had morphine to administer to her, she was in extreme pain that night.

"Dr. Schmidt taught my mother, my sister, and me how to give Mama pain injections every four hours. But that night the pain injections were of no help, and she appeared to be in more pain than ever before.

"After Dr. Schmidt arrived at the home, he gave Mama an injection almost twice as much as we gave her, and she began to calm down. I noticed him as he was walking out of her room. When he passed by the end of her bed, he removed the cover from her foot, and he stuck her big toe with something. Whatever it was must have hurt her because Mama said, ‘Ow!’

"I told my mother that Dr. Schmidt stuck Mama in her big toe, but she did not pay me any attention. Later that night I heard a voice, very clear, saying to me that Mama’s dead.

"I guess it was about daylight when my mother came into my room and said, ‘Anne, Anne, wake up.’

"I said, ‘I know…Mama’s dead.’

She asked me how I knew that. I told her that a voice told me, plus Dr. Schmidt stuck her big toe with something that hurt her. I don’t believe she paid any attention to what I said about the doctor because she called the doctor again. When he arrived, another vehicle and other men were with him. My mother made me go into the room with my sister and close the door. She told us not to come out of the room until she called for us.

CHAPTER 8

Jaé said, Excuse me, Rosie Anne, but did you say sister? I thought you were an only child. This is the first time you mentioned a sister.

Rosie Anne asked, How do you think I have nieces? I’m quite sure I told you about my two nieces.

Jaé smiled. I’m sorry, Rosie Anne, but I missed that part.

Rosie Anne said, "That’s ok. Remember I told you that my mother was very beautiful and was separated from her husband? Well, I’m not sure how long she stayed in that little town before she left and moved to Gary, Indiana. We have relatives there, and I’m sure she stayed with some of them.

"While she was there, she met Reverend Jonathan Bell, who was the pastor of the church my relatives attended. I don’t know how long they dated before they were married. I always heard talk about the rocky relationship between my mother and her mother-in-law. They lived in the same house while he was in the army, and she was miserable. Finally, she caught her husband cheating on her, and she left him and came back home to Mama with a three-month old baby girl named Johnnie Mae.

"It was always a running joke about the night my sister was born. There was no indoor plumbing, so everyone had their own personal ‘pee pot’ for night use. There was an out-house for day-time usage. The night my sister was born, my mother thought she thought she had to use the bathroom, number two. However, that number two was a bouncing baby girl who was almost born in a pee pot. However, someone took Billie Mae to the hospital where she delivered a healthy, beautiful baby girl. She promptly named her after her husband and herself. The name of the love child was Johnnie Mae Bell.

After the marriage dissolved, my mother moved back to Mississippi, where she lived with Mama and raised Johnnie Mae. I don’t know where she worked other than domestic work for a white woman named Della Tyson. Sometime within eight years, she met my father, Billy Lee Taylor.

CHAPTER 9

"My mother was in her early to mid-forties when she was dating my father, who was twenty-one years older than she was. She was also going through menopause, and she was no longer having her menstrual cycle.

"My mother told me that one day she became violently ill. She did not have the flu, nor was she coughing. She was regurgitating and had a severe pain in her stomach. She went to the hospital, and Dr. Schmidt ran several tests on her. After the results of the tests came back from the lab, Dr. Schmidt told her that she had a fibroid tumor and she needed surgery. She agreed to have the surgery because of the severe pain and being unable to keep food down.

"After my mother awoke from surgery and was able to talk and understand what was being said, Dr. Schmidt told her that he had some good news and some more good news. She asked how he could have two sets of good news.

"He responded, ‘Well, I did not find a fibroid tumor. However, I found a three-month old baby girl.’

"My mother asked him, ‘Did you remove it?’

"Dr. Schmidt answered, ‘No. You are going to have a baby girl.’

"I don’t remember how old I was when she first told me that story, but I do know that it was after I had done or said something to her that made her angry. I know I was very young because I did not realize that she was really telling me that I was an unwanted child and she had not planned on having another child at her age. I was in my early teens before I realized that I was not really wanted.

"My sister functioned as if I did not exist. She would never play with me or talk to me very much. The only time she would talk to me is whenever I would ask her a question. I remember one day I was dancing near the gas stove and the flames went out. It frightened me so much that I grabbed a bunch of clothes and started running out of the house yelling, ‘Fire, fire! The house is on fire!’

"My sister started laughing at me and called me stupid. When I went back into the house, my mother had lit the gas stove and the fire was burning as it was before I accidentally blew out the flames. Again, my sister called me stupid. She was very mean to me.

One day when the school bus stopped to pick her up, I saw a red coat on the chair that I mistook for my sister’s red cape. I picked it up and ran and stopped the bus to tell my sister that she had left her red cape. I remember her calling me stupid and telling me that the coat I had belonged to my mother. Everyone on the bus started laughing at me. I remember feeling very embarrassed, but I got over it. I had to get over a lot of things my sister did to me because she is still mean to me even today. I guess she did not want a little sister because she was used to being an only child.

CHAPTER 10

"When I started school, it was fun. In the first grade, I had a handsome boyfriend. His name was Anthony. I quit him because I was five months older than he was. I was stupid because he later became a famous singer.

"In my younger days, gospel singers always came to Bude. Singers like the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Williams Brothers, and many more that I’ve forgotten. I even sang background one time with the Williams Brothers and their sister. They would put on concerts at Little Rock Baptist Church. I don’t know if someone at that church had a special connection with them or not, but now you would have to pay them big money to perform because they really became famous. Again, I digress. Ok, where was I?

"When I was in the second grade, I received my first proposal of marriage from the principal’s son. When he asked me to marry him, I said, ‘Yes, when I get older.’ I also met a girl named Jewell Pernell. I became friends with Jewell very fast. She was a beautiful girl. I was somewhat on the dark side, but Jewell was extremely dark, with beautiful long black hair. Her skin was very smooth, and she talked very slowly. She was a nice person, and we are still friends today. We talk at least once every two weeks or more.

"My fun stopped when I had to go to the principal’s office to take my asthma medication. However, I realized that I had to take the medication or else go to the hospital. So I took the medicine. When I was old enough, I had the responsibility of taking the medication on my own.

"There were no bottles of water in those days, so I would have to go to the water fountain and take my medicine. The other children soon started referring to me as a drug addict. It bothered me at first, but I developed a thick skin, and from that day on, I just did not care about anything people said about me.

"I was already being laughed at because I always wore lipstick. You see, my birthmark was blackberries. My lips had dark spots on them. I did not like that, so I would steal my mother’s lipstick, and when I got to school, I would go to the bathroom and apply the lipstick.

"The principal called my mother on me the first time I did it. He said that the rules of Lillie Mae Bryant School did not allow children to wear lipstick.

"I was sent home several times, but I continued to wear the lipstick. One of my teachers asked me why I was so disobedient, and I told her about the dark, round spots on my lips. Her name was Ms. Castrain. I took off my lipstick and showed her my lips. She immediately went to the principal’s office and explained the situation, and the teachers did not say anything else about the lipstick. Only the children continued to make fun of me. However, I learned at an early age not to care what people thought or said about me.

"Later on, when I was in the fifth grade, Ms. Castrain was my teacher. She was a small lady with a loud voice that frightened me. It frightened me to the point that I was afraid to speak up in class. I failed all of my oral reading tests out of fear. She had no choice but to fail me.

"However, during the summer, she came to my house, picked me up, and took me to her house. She tried to teach me how to fish, but I could not touch the worms. She talked to me and would ask me questions. Whenever I would answer her questions, she would always say, ‘I can’t hear you! Speak up louder.’ This went on several times during the entire summer break.

When school started back, I knew how to speak out loudly in her class, and I was no longer afraid of her. She seemed to have gotten me out of my shyness also. I wasn’t afraid to speak up anymore.

CHAPTER 11

Jaé said, at a break in the story, Miss Rosie Anne, would you say that you were a good child?

Rosie Anne chuckled. "No. I was a terrible child. I was hard-headed, and I always wanted my way. I’m not sure if I told you, but at one point after I got out of the hospital, I could not stand for my mother to touch me. I would not even allow her to give me medicine. Other neighbors had to come and give me my medicine. If my mother attempted to give me medicine, I would stand up in the bed and jump up and down and try to fight her. But I think it was mostly when she tried to give me that terrible, thick, yellow liquid medicine. I hated that medicine. I dislike the color yellow because of that medicine. I do not like bananas, and I do not own any clothes that contain that color.

I love hats, and I have close to two hundred of them! A good friend of mine once gave me a beautiful yellow and diamond hat because it was too small or too big…I really can’t remember which. I accepted it because of her age, and I did not want to hurt her feelings. However, I gave the hat to someone in my church.

CHAPTER 12

Rosie looked over at me with a smile. Jaé, do you have any questions you want to ask me? As you can see, I love to talk.

No, Ms. Rosie Anne, Jaé said. I’m writing. I am so interested in what you are saying. Please continue.

Rosie Anne took a deep breath and said, "Well, all right! Back to my childhood. I thank God that I learned my lessons early in life. For instance, paying attention to what is being said instead of what I want to hear.

"I was about five years old, and my grandmother was still living. I really loved Mama, and I loved spending time with her. She was sick and bed-ridden with cancer for some years. I was always in her room because my mother would run me out of the kitchen. That is about the only time that my mother would allow me around her without Johnnie Mae. I wanted to learn how to cook. My sister was not interested at all in learning how to cook. So whenever my mother went into the kitchen to cook dinner or breakfast, I would follow and watch. As long as I watched, she would let me stay in the kitchen with her. But as soon as I started asking questions about what ingredients she was putting in the food, she would tell me to go and keep Mama company.

"One day I was sitting on a stool in Mama’s room and talking to Mama. The stool was the kind that you could turn around on. Mama told me that if I could sit still on that stool for five minutes, she would give me a dime. I quickly agreed and looked at the clock. I could tell time even at five years of age.

"I sat on that stool for over five minutes, turning around several times, thinking of how much candy I was going to buy. Back then, a dime would get me a small bag of different candy, so I was not about to move off of that stool. At the end of five minutes and thirty seconds, I told Mama that the five minutes were up, and I wanted my dime.

"She told me that she was not going to give it to me because I did not do as she had told me to do. I told Mama that I did not move off of the stool at all. Mama told me that she told me to sit still on the stool and I had turned around several times, so I disobeyed her. My feelings were hurt, and I cried, but she was correct. I told Mama that I would be still the next time. I can still remember her smiling at me when I said that, and she knew that I was not angry.

Now, to me, that is probably one of, if not, the best lessons that I learned as a child. Because of that lesson, I can sit still for hours, not say a word, and I will hear exactly what is being said. Sometimes, I can even remember things that were said!

Chapter 13

"My mother was very protective of me. I had to stay in the yard all the time, and the gate to the fence was locked. I had two friends who would stop by and talk to me. They were my best friends, Parthina and Josie Mae. Unfortunately, Josie Mae died at the age of nine years. I heard the older ladies said that she died from the hanger. So, naturally, I thought that she was playing with a hanger, and she got tangled and probably hung herself. I was in high school before I was to know the truth about her death.

"Josie Mae was molested by her father, and her mother took her on the back street to get an abortion. In those days, black people got abortions with a hanger. I don’t know how, but it did happen. I believe that was before Roe vs. Wade. However, my mother never told me