Family and Community History through Oral History

Abstract

When was a little boy, lived in a little town . . called Henning, Tennessee . . . with my parents in the home of my mother's mother. And my grandmother and were very, very close. Every summer... my grandmother would have, as visitors, members of the family who were always women ... from places that sounded pretty exotic to me -Dyersburg, Tennessee; Inkster, Michigan ... [and even] St. Louis.... Every evening, after the supper dishes were washed, they would go out on the front porch and sit in cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and would always sit behind grandma's chair. . . . Unless there was some particularly hot gossip that would overrule it, they would talk about ... the self-same thing ... bits and pieces ... of what later would learn was a long, narrative history of the family which had been passed down literally across generations ... [Sometimes] they would fling their finger ... [at] me and say something like: I wasn't any bigger than this young'un here. And the very idea that someone as old and wrinkled as she had at one time been no older than was just blew my