Cold Sassy Tree: Chapters 1–10

The date was July 5, 1906. I know because Grandpa put it down in the family Bible, and also Toddy Hughes wrote up for the Atlanta paper what happened to me on the train trestle that day and I still have the clipping.

Mama liked to stay in front of her work. But then Loma was young—just twenty—and sloven.

When she came down, carrying fat, sleepy Campbell Junior, her mass of red hair was combed, pinned up, and draped with what she called “my genteel black veil.”

We waited in the front hall till she hurried in, her hair still in a thick plait down one side of her neck. I always thought she looked pretty with it like that—almost like a young girl.

It was easy to see he needed looking after, but what did she need that an old man could give when she already had a beau her own age who was anxious to marry her?

No doubt Aunt Loma marveled, too, because she didn’t say anything sassy back.

Tell the truth, she was scared of her daddy, as if she wasn’t sure he’d got over her not being a boy and her marrying a Presbyterian—though the way I heard it from Cudn Temp, Grandpa was all for her marrying my daddy, and had a fit when the Baptist deacons tried her for heresy.
Heresy was his word for their word for her marrying a Presbyterian.

The deacons struck the pottage part from the record. But they turned Mama out of the Baptist communion just the same, and her only seventeen.

I was just fixing to get up off the back steps and go gather the eggs when Campbell Junior started squalling in the kitchen.

Before I had a chance to move, Mama came out and lit into me for sitting there doing nothing. Said I was no-count and shiftless and why hadn’t I gathered the eggs and I was supposed to have weeded the flower garden two days ago and to go do that...

I myself used to wonder why Loma didn’t find some more actors to run off with—a thing she wanted to do—instead of marrying Campbell Williams just to spite her daddy.

In Cold Sassy, ladies who work for pay are looked down on—except schoolteachers or widder women with no close kinfolks to turn to.

Playing jokes didn’t have to stop because you got grown. Grandpa must of been twenty-five at least when he turned over the privy at the depot with a Yankee railroad bigwig in it.

Playing jokes didn’t have to stop because you got grown. Grandpa must of been twenty-five at least when he turned over the privy at the depot with a Yankee railroad bigwig in it.

It was his notion that when I got grown, he would give me an interest in the store and take me into partnership.
It was my notion to be a farmer.

Besides keeping the store’s ledgers, my daddy took a lot of the buying trips to Atlanta and Baltimore and New York City.

When I went inside, there was the new milliner, seated at a table littered with feathers, bird wings, satin bows, stiff tape, bolts of velvet, linen, silk, and so on, and several life-size dummy heads.

Besides about her daddy being in the Union Army, the woman told it as gospel that after Miss Love got engaged to a rich Texas rancher and went home to Maryland to make her trousseau clothes, her best friend got you-know-what by her fee-ance, and they eloped.

Aunt Loma’s face flushed red as her hair, she was so mad, and she flounced off acting like a store-owner’s daughter to a hired hand.

As they say in Cold Sassy, Aunt Loma was behind the door when they passed out the tact.

Not a man in town thought it mattered a hoot about women voting, and only two ladies went to the first women’s suffrage meeting Miss Love set up.

As Grandpa held her hand tight and tears rolled down his cheeks, I thought how Granny used to tell me about them camping out under a thick brush arbor their whole first married summer while Grandpa and Uncle Ephraim Toy built her a two-room house out of poplar logs so big it took just five to make a wall.

The way Grandpa prayed wasn’t like other people prayed. You’d of thought God was an old crony of his instead of somebody who could strike you down dead if He had a mind to.

“Mr. Bla’slee,” she mumbled, “if you’d a-come...a mite sooner...you’d a-seen’m… I seen a...”

She drifted quickly into a deep snoring stupor.

“The Tweedys are always buried at Hebron,” she reminded me. “I mean the older generations. This family”—she solemnly indicated the grave of my baby brother—“has started bein’ buried here.”

Always before, the graveyard had seemed real interesting and peaceful. Just a quiet and reverent place.

Wisht it was over with. I’m plumb wore out.

Mrs. Mattie Lou Blakeslee, a sacred mother of Israel, has gone to receive the crown of righteousness which God has promised to all those who love His appearing.

Since that time her life and character has been that of a pure Christian ministering to the comfort of all, especially her beloved husband and consort, E. Rucker Blakeslee of this city, who now must walk alone.

We must believe that the gates of Heaven were thrown open to receive her ransomed spirit, and that a crown resplendent with glory was placed upon her peaceful brow whilst the plaudit “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” echoed and re-echoed through the mansions of bliss....

We must believe that the gates of Heaven were thrown open to receive her ransomed spirit, and that a crown resplendent with glory was placed upon her peaceful brow whilst the plaudit “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” echoed and re-echoed through the mansions of bliss....

Unfortunately, Aunt Carrie decided early the morning of the funeral that Mary Toy’s fiery red hair looked “inappropriate” for such a sad occasion. Her solution was to dye it black. “Just for today, sugarfoot,” she said when my sister had a conniption fit.

She gave us lectures on women’s suffrage, Shakespeare, Beethoven, English history, and horticulture, and always had two freezers of homemade ice cream, which was why we all went.

It was like getting hugged, or knowing that at the Friday speakings she would be out there in the schoolyard with Mama, sitting on a sawmill puncheon and perking up when it was Mary Toy’s turn to quote from “Lord Ullin’s Daughter” or my turn to give an oration from Demosthenes.

To mourn is not the same as to be in mourning, which means wearing a black armband and sitting in the parlor, talking to people who call on the bereaved.

He had skimped so long to get ahead, he didn’t even notice how stingy he was—something like the way my daddy had gotten everything wholesale through the store for so long that he didn’t notice how much he spent anymore; just noticed how much he saved over retail.

But she had sixty varieties of roses, and most everybody in Cold Sassy was beholden to her for nursing a relative back to health or laying out the body for burial.

Hit said, ‘My son Buson has not acted in a becoming manner so I leave him nothing.’

Behind the bands came a big cotton wagon draped with Confederate bunting and pulled by a double team of mules.