A ‘labor of love,’ my mother’s memoir, was one of best Christmas presents I ever got

As this year draws to a close, I find myself transcribing my mother’s handwritten memoir, which she gave me as a Christmas present in 1998.

It’s in a green stenographer’s notebook, her penmanship neat. She began writing it in 1990, a note says. The project was, she says, “a labor of love.” I’ve decided to transcribe the memoir into my laptop before it’s too late, so I can print it and offer copies to my sister, my son, my grandkids, my nephews and niece.

This isn’t the sort of memoir that’s going to shake up the New York Times’ bestsellers list. There’s no addiction or recovery, no incest or violence, no grinding deprivation or serious mental illness. There is, however, our family’s share of squirreliness, selfishness and virtue.

My mother’s name was Alice Chestnut Prather. My sister and I called her Alice, or Al, because when we were little she got tired of us following her around whining and saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.”

“Call me Alice,” she told us one day in exasperation. We did, and it stuck, although she hadn’t meant it to be a permanent change.

Her memoir is a tale of growing up in a Kentucky farming community in the 1930s and 1940s, before her family had electricity or indoor plumbing. She carries the story into her and my dad’s courtship and wedding in the 1950s, and 20 years beyond that. She wasn’t a trained writer, but her style is economical, often funny and surprisingly candid.

She was born in a four-room clapboard farmhouse in Pulaski County, thereafter occupied by three generations of Chestnuts—my mom, her parents and her paternal grandparents.

In Alice’s telling, her grandmother, Granny Chestnut, ruled the family as a despot. Granny’s husband, my great-grandfather, was a kindly old soul who mainly went along with whatever Granny wanted.

I remember Granny from my childhood, when she was ancient and nearly blind. But in my mother’s rendering she comes alive as financially controlling, emotionally manipulative and bizarrely obsessed with making certain her son and his bride (my grandparents) didn’t get an opportunity to have sex.

On warm nights, she’d sit in a chair on the porch outside their raised bedroom window, listening. That didn’t work. Her daughter-in-law got pregnant anyhow.

After my mom’s birth, Granny moved the young couple to the house’s center room—normally the living room. It was adjacent to Granny’s bedroom, and she left the door between the rooms open at all times.

When in desperation the kids would slip off to the corn patch for a frolic, “they could hear Granny making her way noisily through the stalks of corn behind them.”

Granny Chestnut’s interference extended to money and all other matters, and to everyone in the house.

But whenever my grandparents considered buying a nearby farm of their own and moving out, Granny “would turn on the tears,” Alice says.

Granny guilted her son by telling him “how old she and Grampa were getting and they couldn’t tend that little ‘hill-sidy’ farm without him. So he always gave in, and at times, I think he almost hated her for the way she had stifled his life. But, he was their only living son, and he had been taught responsibility and that teaching always won out.”

My grandmother, as a young wife and mother, “felt resentment at times—she felt caught—but back then, you just licked your wounds and held in there no matter what.”

But the complicated family dynamics Alice grew up with don’t constitute the bulk of her memoir. She tells what it was like to attend a two-room school. She talks of pie suppers and her colorful uncles and aunts and hellfire-and-brimstone country revivals.

As a girl, she was only a periodic churchgoer, and a reluctant one even when she did attend. Then, at 19, she found herself wed after five months of dating to an energetic young minister, which necessitated quite an adjustment on her part, on several fronts.

“We went to church at the First Baptist Church on our first date and picked his mother up on the way,” she says. “And this launched our ‘courtship’!”

Their relationship liberated her, though. Even if he was a preacher, my dad was a remarkably unfettered one, a guy always in the market for a new adventure in a new town. And he was crazy about Alice from their first date, a feeling he never got over.

They would be together 50 years, about as happily as any pair I’ve ever known.

Here’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t remember any other Christmas present I received in 1998. I don’t remember many presents from the years before or since.

But I cherish this one. As I reread it and type, I can hear Alice’s voice narrating. She returns to life in my heart.

In every trailer, house or apartment in this land, there are as many life stories waiting to be told as there are people inside. Especially now, when so many of us have been separated from our families for long periods, we might decide to record our stories for those who will follow us. It would be a labor of love.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.