Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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Well, you know, I didn’t see a “Nigger” or even hear one mentioned during my visit at my Aunt Harriet’s home, That cook house was the one place not exploited. But somehow the meals got cooked—tempting meals just like my mother used to cook—and I suspect by Auntie Lovell’s regular colored woman, after the Cullom technique.

The smoked ham, produced and cured on the place, was the best I have ever eaten. Uncle and Auntie’s 200-acre farm lay in irregular boundaries—likely described by chains and links zig-zagging between blazed trees—for two miles up and down Buffalo creek. Uncle John showed me the limestone ledge protruding over the north bank of the creek, which sheltered his hogs at such times as they would come home to spend the night—and feed on perhaps the first “bar’l” of corn produced on a near-by clearing. The hogs came home only at such times as the “mast” was insufficient. This combination made for cheap pork—and delicious hams.

I had recently been in Texas—and because of that trip to the Lone Star state, I had a message from a relative to a relative to be delivered in Nashville. Here again I should explain. On learning that I planned a trip to Galveston ten days hence, my Aunt Nancy Porter asked me to stop off at Dallas and call on a relative—a Cullom of the Tennessee tribe. I believe his name was Jerry. But if he were not Jerry, he was a close relative. When I called at Mr. Cullom’s real estate office in Dallas, I was told he had gone to Galveston. I went on to Galveston, and dismissed all thought of seeing my relative. I went out to the beach, and while strolling on the sands—on the gulf side of the sea-wall — among hundreds, perhaps thousands of other strollers, fell in with a friendly man. He told me he was from Dallas, and I told him that I was from Wetmore,„Kansas. He said, quickly, “Did you say Wetmore? Reckon you might know my cousin Nan Porter, there.” And I said, “Then, I reckon you know that my Aunt Nancy asked me to stop off at Dallas, and call on you.” He grabbed my hand, saying with real Tennessee accent, “Mr. John Bristow, I’m powerful proud to meet you.” Again, I may be wrong. It could have been the Texas accent. In the course of our conversation I told Cousin Cullom that I would be going to Nashville for the Centennial, and he said likely he would go, too. The message from him was for my Aunt Tennessee Cullom-Clark, mother’s sister, living in North Nashville.