FRANCES MAE POWELL BALL

FRANCES MAE POWELL BALL


Frances Mae Powell Ball is my mother. She was born, at 4 pm, on Saturday, May 14, 1927, in a “plain, wooden house…un-painted,” in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

In 1927, “Whiskery,” ridden by Linus McAtee, won the 53rd Kentucky Derby, in 2:06. "Ain't She Sweet?" by Ben Bernie, hit #1 on the pop singles chart. A baked ham cost 30 cents per eight-to 12-pound slabs, averaging each pound at about 3 cents. Milk in 1927 was 25 cents, for three tall cans, averaging 8 cents per can. Eggs cost 24 cents per dozen. A 24-ounce loaf of wrapped, split bread sold for 9 cents. Refrigerators in 1927 cost $195. Mowers were self-propelled.

In 1927, a dollar sounded more exciting and valuable than it does today. Today when you walk down the street and see a nickel or dime, it seems easier just to walk on by than take the effort to pick it up. In 1927 though, a nickel or dime was enough to buy a whole pound of baked ham or a tall can of milk. If you found a couple nickels or dimes, you could have purchased dinner for the whole family.

My brother, Arnold, and I used to pick up soft-drink bottles, wherever we could find them, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and take them to grocers, for the deposit money, which we used to buy more Pepsis.

I was at the Dollar General, the other day, and saw Randy Wade, a member of my brother’s church: the La Grange Church of God. Someone said something about the value of pennies, these days. I told Wade that it’s an unbreakable habit, for me, of picking up pennies, so much so, that “I’ll pick up a penny, in the parking at Wal*Mart, in a rain storm.”

Times have changed, but my mother is the same: sweet, kind, compassionate, and generous-to-a-fault. She once loaned $465.00, to a hospice woman , who had given her a sad story. My mother then sat on the edge of her bed, for days, depressed and angst-ridden, wondering if she’d ever she’d ever get her money back. She had asked for no documentation, for proof of the loan. My mother lives on a fixed income.

I discerned that something was wrong, other than the fact, that my dad, mama’s husband, of 61 years, had recently passed away. She explained. I got the money back from the woman, who, interestingly, asked mom for a receipt, although she’d deemed it unnecessary, apparently, to give my mother a receipt for the money she’d borrowed from her. The woman, by the way, drove a big, late-model automobile. It is illegal, as a hospice worker, to borrow money, from a client.

I had always heard that my maternal grandmother, Addie Powell, never enjoyed holidays that most of us look forward to with great anticipation. But Mama Powell, as we grandchildren knew her, had good reason. She was no stranger to tragedy. Her two-year-old, “Little” Elbert, was accidentally killed, on Thanksgiving Day, by her six-year-old, Horace. Uncle Horace died on Easter Eve, in the ‘70s. She witnessed, along with other family members, the fatal shooting of her father, by a son-in-law, on Christmas Eve, 1916. Two brothers were killed in Philadelphia, mysteriously. Another brother was killed when a stack of lumber, at a lumber yard, rolled down over his body.

Vaden and Addie Powell had ten children; they outlived four of them.
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Mama’s family lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Irene was the third child born of Vaden and Addie Powell and the first girl. She died of croup, at age five.

On Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, My Uncle Horace Powell, six-years-old, was in the back yard with his mama. He was playing with a metal rod from a screen door, throwing it around. His mama, Addie Powell (my maternal grandmother), was washing clothes in a big, black pot filled with water that she heated by burning wood underneath, to bring the water to a boil.

On this fateful Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, two-year-old Elbert, (called “Little” Elbert) and my mama, Frances, four-years old, were emerging from the back door of the house to walk outside just as Uncle Horace had, once again, tossed the screen door rod. The rod pierced “Little” Elbert’s tender, fragile skull. If he hadn’t been in front of Mama it would have injured her instead.

Mom told me: “When Mama pulled that rod out of ‘Little’ Elbert’s head, his brains came out with it.” He was taken to the hospital in Wilmington because there was no hospital in Jacksonville. Little baby Elbert died that night.

In the early ’40s, Uncle Horace enlisted in the navy. According to my mother, he was in Philadelphia, at one time, during his two-year tour-of- duty. She said she didn’t “know if he was cruising around or just walking with friends” or alone when, suddenly, Uncle Horace saw a woman who fell or jumped off a bridge. He jumped in and rescued her from drowning. An article appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper about the rescue. Uncle Horace mailed the article back home to his mom and dad.

Many years later, in the early ‘70s, Uncle Horace called Mama one night, from a motel in South Carolina, where he worked as a maintenance man. (My family lived at 303 Tyree Rd., in Kinston, at the time. I was stationed with the 440th Army Band, Ft. Bragg, North Carolina). Mama said: “He sounded like he was drunk or on drugs. He was so out of it; he said: ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning; I’ve got to go,’ then I heard the phone drop. And that’s the last I ever heard of him….”

After not showing up for work, someone from the motel called a woman “that he (Uncle Horace) liked” and “she went to the motel to check on him,” Mama recalled.” Unable to enter his room when she arrived at the motel, someone there told her: “We’ll have to call the law.

“He (Horace) must have left evidence,” Mama told me, “for someone to call Leon (their brother) if something happened to him; because somebody called him the next day, on Saturday, to say he (Horace) was dead. Leon called me and told me he was dead. It broke my heart. He said, you can tell Mama, but don’t tell Papa. I’m afraid he’ll have a heart attack.” When Papa Powell was told that his son was dead, Mama recalled that he said: “He’s not dead. He’s comin’ home.” And “he waited up for him,” she added. “He just couldn’t get it in his head that he was dead.”

When I asked Mama if she thought Uncle Horace’s death was intentional she said: “I don’t think he meant to, he just over-dosed…did too much. I don‘t think he ever got over ‘Little’ Elbert‘s death.”

Mama told me, from her sick bed, that when Uncle Horace was a grown man, he asked his mama to forgive him for “Little” Elbert’s death. Her answer was wrapped in silence.
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Mama’s Uncle Henry James worked in a lumber yard in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1970s. He went to the lumber yard on a Monday morning. While working, a stack of lumber fell on him, killing him.
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Mama’s uncles, Uncle Lacy and Uncle Cyrus James, operated tugboats in Philadelphia, in the early ’40s, and often worked as far down the coast as Florida. They moved to Philadelphia together. Uncle Cyrus lived with a woman named Frances and Uncle Lacy lived with a woman, whose name my mom could not recall. They both lived in common law marriages. They lived much of the time on their tugboats.

Uncle Cyrus died mysteriously. He was found “stuffed down a hole on his tugboat naked,” Mama said. The James family never learned who the killer or killers were.

Within a year, Uncle Lacy, too, died a mysterious death. He was found somewhere in Philadelphia with “the back of his head beat off,” according to my mom. His killer or killers were never discovered.
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Robert Lee Powell was the last of the children. My grandmother was 50-years-old at the time she gave birth to him. “Mama was not happy about it,” my mother recalled. “People were talking about it.” Robert Lee developed “colitis” and died in the “old Parrott Hospital, in Kinston, North Carolina, at the age of six months.

“I was staying with Aunt Clara and Uncle Henry, in Raleigh,” my mother said, “when Robert died...they were mama’s youngest brother and his wife. They always liked me and wanted me to stay with them.



“They [mama’s family] came and got me...He [Robert Lee] was in a little, white coffin. I picked him up. He was wearing a little white dress.” mama recalled, wistfully, at age 77, head bowed.
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My mother sat in the bleachers, many times, with my sisters, Carolyn and Carlene, as Arnold and I played baseball, in the Little Tar Heel League, in Washington. When Arnold and I were afraid to ask daddy for a dollar, to buy a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi, on out-of-town, high school band trips, mama asked for the money. When daddy was unable to make a payment on the drum set he was buying for Arnold, mama gave the seller the five-hundred-dollar diamond ring she’d won, recently, in a contest. It was the most expensive item she’d ever owned. A picture of her with her new ring was published in the Washington Daily News.

In 1965, my dad became a born-again Christian. My sisters, at the height of mini-skirt popularity, were allowed, by my dad, to wear ankle-length dresses only. Mama had to make the dresses for them. “I was sneaky,” my mother said, I would drive the girls to school in their long dresses. In school, they changed into appropriate, normal-length dresses, that we had hidden in the car.

My mother sacrificed, her entire life, for the husband she adored, and her children, she adores. I cannot properly convey the love she’s given us and the devotion to our happiness and well-being, that she’s exhibited these many years.

But that’s not all. My mother cared for her mother and father the last few years of their life. They were totally dependent on her for everything. My mother was up until 7 am, with Mama Powell, my grandmother, when she laid down in her mother’s room, saying: “Mama don’t get up without calling me first.” She got up, fell, hit her head on a dresser, dying two weeks later. Papa Powel died in his sleep, about a year later, from, literally, grief over the death of his wife, of 62-years. When mama went into his room, his body was still warm.

In a column by the late well-known writer, Lewis Grizzard, he spoke, wistfully, of his recently departed mother. The column ended with words that rattled my heart: “I wish I had called her more.”

I promised my mother, in the mid-1980s, that: “As long as I’m able, you’ll never go to a nursing home.”

My long journey on the treacherous road of life has brought me safely, thus far, to La Grange, North Carolina, the most recent home of my mother and my dad, who passed, peacefully, after his evening meal, at Britthaven of Snow Hill, on July 10, 2008.

I live in my mother’s home, where she requires 24-hour, around-the-clock, attention. There’s no place I’d rather be and there’s no one, with whom I’d rather be. I’m twice- divorced. A roving minstrel come home. I’ve chased a dream of becoming a successful songwriter, for forty-two years. I do so to this day. But not in New York, where I lived, briefly, in 1975, and not in Nashville, Tennessee, where I lived for five years.

My priority now is to see that my mother never, never, never is placed in a nursing home, where some precious souls, are unavoidably placed. Unlike my dad, who, with Parkinson’s disease, a bad heart, prostate cancer, and a newly broken hip, was placed in a nursing home, after thoughtful consideration. My brother and sisters felt that I would not be able to care for both my parents any longer. My dad had become bed-ridden.

I will, however, no matter what her condition, stay with my mother, until the light in her pretty blue eyes no longer sparkle and angels come to lead her home. She has a great fear of nursing homes, born of nursing home stories of horror and tragedy, of abuse and neglect.

Unlike Lewis Grizzard, I will never regret not calling my mother more, because I’m blessed; my mother is with me every day.

When I needed my mother, she was there. She needs me now, so I am here.

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If you go to the following URLs you can listen to “What Would I Do,” written for my mother, after another cancer scare; and you can listen to “Mother,” “God Gave You To Me,” and an instrumental song I wrote: “Purple Rose,” all appropriate to send to mothers on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2009.

The songs were written, arranged, recorded, and performed by me, at home, using an I4S Korg keyboard.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!

Allen Ball

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1UwWs3JeCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=078WoBRE_nM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3sFzV8v3p0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25bG9uQ7rD0