WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL---
By Mary O. Pinckney Merrick Keister
Once upon a time there was a little girl named MaryO--her actual name was Mary Olive Pinckney. But she was called MaryO to distinguish her from so many other family members named Mary. Her parents were deSaussure Edwards Pinckney, born April 19, 1881 and Mary Olive Gould Pinckney, born December 9, 1880.
I was that child, born on September 17, 1921 at the Telfair Hospital in
Savannah, Georgia. The fact that I was born in a hospital in the city and also I
was an only child made me a very special and select baby. All the other babies
in Pinckney Colony were born at home. I think that almost all of the families
that lived in Pinckney Colony were my Dad’s brothers or nephews. Uncle Willie
had twenty children, one of them is Mary Powell. Uncle Willie’s son, William
(Bill) had nine children. The youngest is David. Uncle Coty had nine kids, one
of them you know, Aunt Ruth Johnson. Oliveros (Ollie) had nine also—Marie Viens
is one of these.
I don't remember being born--do you? But I do remember my father’s parents.
My grandmother, Mary
Martha, used to rock me when I was small. She died when I was a little over two
years of age. My grandfather, Eustace, was kind of chubby, and had a big white
beard. When he was young he had fiery red hair. My memory of him was not so
gentle. Which brings me to tell you about my pets.
jacket
pocket. Grandpa was getting ready to go for a walk and lifted his coat off the
peg on the wall. What a commotion! Grandpa went after Buster with his walking
cane. I screamed, "Grandpa, Grandpa, don't hurt Buster!" But Buster had jumped
out of the pocket, taken a leap onto Grandpa's head, sailed over my head and
scooted to safety.
The chickens were yard hens. They were allowed to roam everywhere looking for worms and grass seeds. These hens were so tame that sometimes they would wander into the kitchen—they could smell the food, I guess. They loved to be petted. The hens laid their eggs almost anywhere in the tall grass. So finding eggs was like having an Easter egg hunt every day. I learned at an early age to beware of the rooster—he would tackle me in a fit of anger if he thought that that I was getting too close to his beloved hens. When a hen felt the urge to sit on her eggs she would hide eggs in her nest and sit on the eggs for three weeks. Then the biddies would suddenly appear with their proud mom. That’s when she would attack anything, especially little girls that wanted to cuddle her babies.
When I was about six years old my parents thought that it was time for me to
graduate from a goat person to a pony person. Brownie, the Shetland pony
arrives. He was more stubborn than Billie and also very mean and smart for a
horse. After saddling him I could persuade him to trot down the road away from
the barn, about as far as you might throw a baseball. Then he would suddenly
wheel around and head for the barn at high speed with me holding on for dear
life. Then he'd deliberately aim at the
corner of the barn,
running close enough to scrape me off onto the ground, but not near enough for
his side to touch the barn. I lost no love for Brownie.
Kitty wasn't a cat. She was a beautiful trotting horse. She would take my
mother and me to Bluffton at least every week, trotting fast all the way. What
fun! Mother taught piano once a week there. In the wintertime when it was cold
we would bundle up in a warm blanket, Mother heated a brick and put it on the
floor of the buggy to help keep our feet warm.
I remember that she would
take eggs to the Peeple's general store (now known as THE STORE). She sold them
for 10 cents a dozen, unless they happened to get cracked on the way. The road
to Bluffton was an unpaved single lane dirt road with crushed oyster shell
spread over the dirt. My big treat from Peeple's was a box of five-cent Cracker
Jacks which always had a prize hidden somewhere in the popcorn. It was usually a
green clacker about an inch long, shaped like a frog. I suppose that it was
supposed to sound like a frog croaking.
Do you remember the times that the electric power was off for several hours? That's the way it was all of the time here until 1947. I first remember our house with no plumbing or electricity. No one missed these conveniences because none of the homes in Pinckney Colony had them. So it was kind of like going camping, except that we had a house to live in, not a tent. The toilet was an outhouse down by the edge of the river. The unpleasant part of that was going there in the wintertime. In the summer the bad little boys would sneak behind the outhouse and tickle the girls' bottoms with a long broom straw. But woe to them if they got caught. Time-out was never heard of, but the switch from the oleander bush was might handy. That’s the same large oleander bush that is in the front yard of my house.
My parents were hard workers, but they loved the land and their work. My dad was a farmer, and my mother was a farmer's wife and also a musician. Daddy had four mules, Jack, Ginny, Pat and Reuben. I liked to ride Ginny. She was kind of my pet. She was so gentle that I could stand on her back or even ride backwards. My dad would use the mules for pulling the plows in the fields and for hauling the wagonloads of corn to the barn. We didn’t have tractors in those days..
In the summertime we would all sit on the porch, which thankfully was screened, all except one section. Grandpa refused to sit on a porch to be enclosed by "some damned wire screen." My dad would tell us stories and sing crazy songs, or my mother would play the piano. Chopin was her favorite composer. TV didn't exist, but we had lots of fun and love and many cousins, aunts, uncles and friends that visited us. They usually spent several days with us when they came.
This is just a taste of how things were "in the good ole days".