How To Do a Crisis
March 27, 2020
On a Zoom meeting earlier today, somebody mentioned that one of the things helping her through the pandemic was thinking about her parents who lived through both the Depression and World War II. I have sure thought about my parents as well. They both lived through it, but Daddy kept living it the rest of his life.
When the crash of ’29 hit, Mama was only thirteen. I don’t remember her talking about the Depression much or how it affected her. I’m sure she saw her parents struggling and was expected to do her part. But Mama wasn’t a person, who as a grownup, wore hard times on her face. She always seemed to be stirring up a little magic dust as she kicked up her heels. I know she kept up her chores, rounding up the cows for milking on her horse Beauty and driving her mother, who taught sixth grade, to school and back every day. Once she told me how she’d stay up late, as a child—as a child, now-- reading Shakespeare. She never struck me as a person who’d loved Shakespeare, but she had always told me that very early in her life she knew she wanted to move somewhere else, and perhaps she was traveling in her mind far outside the bounds of South Georgia, with its sand flats and tall lonesome pines to someplace a little more to her liking. I do love to think of that little slip of a girl, Carleton Otelia Ellis, sneaking in a read of Henry IV, part II under her covers. Mama spent a year at a junior college not far from her hometown of Hazlehurst, and then her father heard about a piano scholarship competition for Wesleyan Conservatory in Macon, Georgia and put her on the train to go up there and win, which she did. She played “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov, arranged by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which makes perfect sense. I’m not sure she played it as fast as the versions you can watch on You Tube, but you can bet she played it with pizzazz.
Daddy, though, was sixteen and at that time, at least in the South, school had only ten grades. Daddy graduated valedictorian from (I believe) a school called Darlington Heights in a class of about six or seven students. He got a baseball scholarship to go to Hampden-Sydney College, a good school just down the road from the Cunningham home place, Millbank, where Cunninghams had lived and farmed since 1759. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, and his siblings used to joke and call him “Doc.” The timing was bad, though. He entered college in September of 1929, and Black Thursday happened October 24, 1929. That was the end of his college career. He literally had to go home and save the family farm, which he did.
Mama and Daddy both grew up on farms. Their lives weren’t easy. Their backgrounds were very similar. But Mama came out of the Depression singing “You Gotta Accentuate the Positive,” and Daddy came out pinching the life out of every last penny. The Depression, to Mama, was just another thing that happened in her long and eventful life. To Daddy, it made him who he was.
I don’t know if there’s a right way to do a crisis. So, like Mama and Daddy, I guess we do the best we can according to our gifts. I do know I’m forever grateful for their example.
©2021 Joy Cunningham