Wallpaper and Air Conditioning

My grandmother, Anna, could do anything. I mean that literally. She could do anything! If she couldn’t do it, it just couldn’t be done. As a very young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, somewhere around the turn of the century, (she was born in 1884) she came to Virginia from the islands off South Carolina. Chester, South Carolina may have been the closest city, but, judging from her speech, she was an island woman. She was a “geechy” but that, in itself, is another story. From knowing her more than from anything she ever said, I knew that there were many times in her life when she had to make something out of nothing. Whenever she did, the product was always something marvelous. When my children call on me to do everything from fixing bicycle chains to fixing hair, and fixing the foul mouths of the neighborhood children, I attribute my versatility and the “handy-ness” to my grandmother’s influence.
I was talking to my Aunt Barbara, and somehow we got on the subject of wallpaper. I don’t know how the subject came up, but, at almost eighty-five years old, Aunt Barbara’s memory, and her tongue, were as sharp as they had ever been, an attribute I sometimes share. She was talking about all the beautiful wallpaper that exists now, when suddenly she exclaimed, “You know we had wallpaper for years before it was in style!” Now I knew that rich people had used wallpaper in the days when she was growing up, and today the most intricate wallpaper is found in the homes of the rich, but I also knew that my grandparents had never been rich. “Yeah,” she said, “we had wallpaper and air conditioning!”
My first thought was that senility was finally setting in, but as she talked, I knew that she remembered quite clearly wallpaper and air conditioning, and what that meant to her in her childhood. “When I was a child,” she said, “we lived in that old house on Farmer Street. We rented that house (at that time Black people didn’t really own nothin’) and you know landlords didn’t really do much by way of fixin’ up houses. Mama decided that she wanted to fix up that old house, so she started collectin’ newspapers. She’d get enough to do a room, and then she’d whip up some flour and water to make wallpaper paste, and she’d wallpaper the room. For a while, until the newspaper/wallpaper yellowed, or until the mice ate so many holes that the paper had to be changed, we would enjoy our nicely wallpapered rooms.” She kept talking, and I wasn’t about to try and stop her. “It was with this wallpaper that we learned to read and write. The younger ones of us would ask questions of the elders—‘What’s this word? or ‘How do you say this word?’—and they’d answer and make us commit the words to memory. She was collecting paper all the time, so she’d start stripping that paper and she’d start the process again. We were always learning new words, ‘cause she was always changing the paper.”
They learned to read and they were surrounded by the words my grandmother held so dear. Because my grandmother was a big child, and her parents had been sharecroppers, she hadn’t been allowed to go to school past the second grade. She didn’t really learn to read until she was an adult, but she learned well and she loved learning. Her love of learning came from having been deprived, and she passed that love to her children, grandchildren, and, through us, to her great-grandchildren. I knew all about that, and so I accepted the wallpaper story… but now I needed to know about the air conditioning. Even rich people, at the time she grew up (Aunt Barbara was born in 1915), hadn’t had air conditioning, so I waited for Aunt Barbara to make something up. She was a jokester, so I was waiting for her to make up something silly. She seemed serious, so I listened carefully.
Having spent several summers on the beaches of South Carolina, I am well aware of the sweltering heat, so very unlike the heat of Petersburg except for a few days in midsummer. Aunt Barbara went on to tell me how my grandmother had learned to “beat the heat”, and how her children thought of it as their own brand of air conditioning. “Mama would put up screen doors on the old shotgun house, front and back, as soon as summer came. She’d make sure the screens were good to keep the mosquitoes out. Then, at night, she’d open both doors and use a fan to create a draft. You were either in the breeze or the draw, because Mama had lined up pallets on the floor, in the path between the two doors. It was always cool at night, and sometimes, even in midsummer, we had to sleep under sheets. It was cool during the day because she kept that air moving.”
I already knew that she raised her nine surviving children, from twelve births, on the money that my grandfather made working at Titmus Optical Plant, and money she made taking in laundry. Aunt Barbara had already told me the story about special occasions at school, and how my grandmother would wash and iron “the white people’s clothes” so that her children could wear them to sing and recite in the school plays, since they were all multi-talented. Both my grandparents were musically gifted, and they passed that gift to their children. Then, when they got home from the plays, she’d stay up all night and wash and iron the clothes again, so they could be returned to their owners the next day. Mama had told me why my grandmother developed the habit of making a pot of soup to go with every dinner meal, not because of “soup etiquette”, but because soup always stretched a meal and she never wanted to run out of food. As a result, her soup was legendary—she could make soup out of rocks and make it taste good—and she made biscuits or rolls ever day. Over the years, her soup and rolls had fed hundreds of thousands. I was always proud of my grandmother, and now I could place her in the Novel Inventions Hall of Fame. As my grandmother and Aunt Barbara used to say, “Old need will make you do anything.”