 Photo cutline: Mother and Kitti long before Kitti became an interior decorator (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
My mother was not especially patient, but she was tolerant. If you don’t know the difference between patience and tolerance, GTS or, better yet, read To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe it was just more trouble than it was worth to butt heads with three headstrong children. Or maybe life’s important milestones had put in perspective the things that really made no difference to her. Oh, she had her moments when tolerance gave way to pure anger. I remember a TV show in the 1960s called “That Was the Week That Was,” a satirical comedy that lampooned events and personalities in the news. When Selma’s racial unrest came to the forefront of TV audiences, TWTWTW broad brushed the South with derogatory songs and taunts that my mother could not tolerate. I remember her standing in the hall that night and phoning the show’s executive producer, who, it is surprising, took her call. He might have wished he hadn’t because she shellacked him with his own ignorance and eloquently shamed him for pigeonholing an entire region of people. But generally, Mother was tolerant. When my older sister, Kitti, was in junior high school, she asked Mother if she could draw footprints up our bedroom wall, across the ceiling and back down the opposite side. With no hesitation, my mother said, “Go right ahead.” My sister outlined some tennis shoes in a walking pattern and colored them in with Magic Marker. When she tired of that decorative touch, Kitti asked Mother if she could paint checkerboards on the closet doors in our bedroom. Mother nodded and went about more important business. (BTW, the paint job was a disaster. Masking tape does not work well for lining off red and white checkerboards. The bedroom doors looked like a crime scene.) I can name dozens of occasions where Mother tolerated the results of the most unusual requests and unconventional behavior. I think her acceptance made us more receptive adults. And that’s a precious legacy.
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 (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
“We Southerners must never let our heritage of good food and family stories slip away from us.” ---Kathryn Tucker Windham Though she was the author of several cookbooks, my mother was not what you would call a food bon vivant. But because she was well known for her cookbooks, the Birmingham Public Library invited her to speak at one of their lecture series. They asked that Mother tell stories about her childhood in Clarke County while she cooked a favorite dish. Mother pondered what to cook and decided on a concoction she and her playmates often made in the woods of Hill’s pasture. They called it Rinktum Diddy. They would appropriate the ingredients from their mothers’ kitchens and take an old pot and some matches out with them for their culinary adventure. Mother’s talk at the library didn’t go quite as planned. She had a hot plate for cooking, so she put the chopped onions and butter in the boiler and began her storytelling. She stirred and stirred and talked and talked, but nothing happened in the pan. Mother improvised and embellished the story, all the while stirring vigorously. An alert library assistant finally determined the hot plate was defective and replaced it with another. (I don’t know where libraries keep stashes of hot plates, but it is apparent they do.) All ended well, and Mother’s audience was pleased with the storytelling and with the Rinktum Diddy. Somewhere there is a videotape of the event called “Cooking Up Stories.” You can find the recipe for Rinktum Diddy here on page 102 of Mother’s cookbook, Treasured Alabama Recipes.  (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
Though my family was never wealthy, Mother was rich in curiosity about all manner of things. And though she was not much of a collector, certain collectibles did capture her fancy. One such thing was insulators. Now if you don’t know about insulators, it’s because we don’t see them much anymore. They were originally designed to keep telegraph and telephone wires insulated from the wooden poles that held them high in the air. Yes---those glass things atop telephone poles. Those are insulators. Sometime in the late 1960s, Mother took an interest in collecting insulators. She didn’t comb antique stores for the beauties. She sought them out along train tracks out in the country. I don’t know how she knew where to find insulators, but they were often lying on the ground alongside the rails. Maybe the impacts of trains shook them loose and caused them to fall to the ground like glass fruit. Insulators are things of beauty. On our Sunday afternoon walks along the tracks, we’d find an array of shapes and dazzling colors---clear, light green, aqua, amber, deep purple, light purple and sometimes even brown porcelain insulators. The shapes, too, come in many variations with petticoats, drip points, wire grooves and skirt styles. We carried a crocker sack to haul the bounty, and we’d walk until we were tired or until the bag got almost too heavy to carry. We collected so many insulators that the windowsills at our house were soon filled, so Mother took to storing them in full-size garbage cans in the garage. The collection was not meant to serve any specific purpose; the hunt-and-find simply gave Mother pleasure. Her obsession with insulators did not go unnoticed by the neighbors. “Kathryn, what in the world are you going to do with all those insulators?” one neighbor asked after a particularly good haul. Without missing a beat, my mother said, “I’m going to make hummingbird houses out of them.” That seemed to satisfy the neighbor, and Mother went right on collecting.  (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
We always called them dirt daubers. I looked up that term on Wikipedia and found this family of wasps is more often referred to as mud daubers. That must be a less Southern designation since I never heard it before. Either way, we all know what they are---those slender-shaped flying creatures that are, for the most part, not aggressive like their cousins and build interesting nests. My mother, who was interested in everything, became occupied for awhile with dirt daubers. Now this was not an entomological interest. It was, instead, an artistic interest, a craft of sorts. Mother took a notion that dirt dauber nests would make nice wall hangings. We children were amused and perplexed. Mother was not the sort to take an interest in crafts, for heaven’s sake. But she did. Of course, the nests are too fragile to hang without some stability, so Mother decided driftwood pieces would make nice backings for the mud art. When we went to the beach for Thanksgiving, we spent hours searching for small pieces of driftwood, preferably flat on one side to hold the nest and beautifully sanded by nature’s woodworking shop. We brought back hundreds of perfect stabilizers for Mother’s new project and stored them in her garage. She would carefully glue the nest onto a piece of driftwood, and she would add to the effect by putting dried flowers in the cylindrical tube. Then she’d make a hanging hole in the top of the wood with a hot ice pick. She thought they were splendid creations. Mother sold her “Dirt Dauber Dabblings” alongside her books at various art shows. I think she charged $5 for them. She also gave them as Christmas presents and as tokens to visitors who came by to see her. This lasted about a year. Then she lost interest and never made another piece. After she died and we were clearing out the garage at her home in Selma, we came across a huge garbage bag of beautiful driftwood pieces. The dirt dauber nests had long since crumbled into sand. But it made me remember the iota of time my mother became an artist.  (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.) Mother and Harper Lee were not longtime friends. They first met in August 2003 at the Alabama Academy of Honor where Mother was being inducted. To Mother’s astonishment, Harper Lee, long a member of the esteemed Academy, had nominated her for inclusion. “I had no idea she knew who I was!” Mother said upon receiving notification. They would become fast friends after that hot August day in Montgomery. They shared correspondence and an interest in almost everything. When Miss Lee became more bound to her assisted living quarters, she often would send for Mother to “come entertain me.” Please come to see me, Kathryn. My life here is Hebrews 13:8…. Mother liked to take Miss Lee something for entertainment purposes when she made her visits to Monroeville. She’d take newspaper clippings or a copy of a new book she’d written. On one occasion, Mother took some of her recently unearthed photographs from the 1940s and ‘50s to show her. Miss Lee was delighted and asked if she might have a print of a particular photograph to hang in her sparsely-decorated sitting area. Mother, of course, was happy to oblige, and, the next time she visited, she and Miss Lee drove a nail in the wall and hung the picture. A few days later, a note from Harper Lee arrived in Mother’s mail. It read: 18 November ‘08 (I think!) My dear Kathryn: Eudora Welty’s photographs are famous, but your one picture of the lady with the rooster beats her whole collection. It’s wonderful! Much love from your Biter (“Biter” was a term of endearment that’s a story for another day!) “Woman with Rooster,” along with other limited edition photographs by Kathryn Tucker Windham, are available on this website.   Kathryn with Ben Windham, her middle baby (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.) Like most people, my mother was a sucker for babies. She would ooh and ahh over the precious little things and sing lullabies to them which, remarkably, they seemed to enjoy. I say remarkably because Mother’s vocal talents lay in her storytelling, not in her choral abilities. Her first grandchild, David Windham, was not born until Mother was 70, so she had to wait a long time to pamper a grand of her own. Three years later, along came her second grandson, Ben Hilley. In her eyes, both David and Ben were the most beautiful babies ever to be produced on the planet. Of course, not all babies are beauties. It can be difficult to find something truthful yet kind to say about newborns who have not yet developed their physical allure. When she encountered such unfortunate babies, my mother had a standard comment: “Oh, look how nice the baby’s ears lie flat against his head!” The doting parents were pleased with the compliment, and Mother had been kind.  The recipe for authentic teacakes from Kathryn’s Treasured Alabama Recipes cookbook (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone but not without a (literally) sweet memory of my mother. Mother made the best teacakes on the planet. I know this because I’m something of a teacake connoisseur. If you’ve lived in the South long enough, you’d had a goodly share of those exquisite cookies, which are not cakes at all. Nor are they sugar cookies, which is what some bakers make and call teacakes. No, teacakes are not as sweet and must be rolled as thin as possible and still hold together. When you bite into them, they are crunchy as a cracker, not a bit soft or chewy. That’s my connoisseur’s take on teacakes. After I moved away from home, my mother sent me heart-shaped teacakes every Valentine’s Day. They would arrive in all sorts of containers. Old stationery boxes were a favored mailing container since Mother was quite the letter writer. I’m sure the teacakes were in perfect condition when they departed the Selma Post Office. By the time they arrived to me, they were always in crumbs and pieces, even though Mother carefully swaddled each one in a nest of toilet paper. It didn’t matter. They were my mother’s Valentine’s Day teacakes, and she’d made them just for me. "Like another fine Southern writer, Eudora Welty, Mrs. Windham used photography as an extension of her storytelling, bringing to the eye images that trigger the imagination." –The Birmingham News  WOMAN WITH ROOSTER To celebrate their 50th anniversary in 1930, the Kodak company distributed Brownie cameras free to children who were 12 years old. My mother was among those lucky pre-teens. As soon as she received her Brownie, Mother began making photographs, and, though the camera models changed, she never stopped photographing until shortly before her death in 2011. Mother was keenly aware of a changing South through the mid part of the 20th century. It was often those images of disappearing sights that she viewed through the lenses of her cameras. Backyard haircuts, old soldiers, children gathered for storytelling, mongrel dogs, country shanties, basket weavers, women at spinning wheels and the like captured her fancy, and she captured their likenesses on film. Mother stored her hundreds of negatives in an old wooden file box. She thought nothing of them other than that they were the biproduct of a hobby she enjoyed. One day a well-known Alabama historian was visiting Mother at her home in Selma. The woman was intrigued---even astounded---to see the collection of photography Mother had amassed through the years. Soon Mother’s photography was the subject of exhibits in museums around the state. She gave talks about people and places in her photographs, recalling conversations struck up in the course of her picture-taking. As she told it, “Suddenly I have a whole new vocation. Somebody told me that now I’m a photographer, so I guess I am!” A limited number of images are now available for purchase here
 Kathryn loved Christmas. My mother loved Christmas. The Windham family didn’t have a lot of money for expensive gifts, so Mother directed our assortment of handmade gifts for friends and relatives. There were colorful woven potholders, decorated soap dishes made from cockle shells and other crafts, along with fresh baked cookies and date balls. One of our most anticipated days of the season was my sister Kitti’s birthday, December 17, when we would get our Christmas tree. It generally would come from some little tree sales out in the country, and it was always a cedar. Then we’d climb up the pull-down stairs into the attic and haul out boxes of ornaments and other decorations, many of them handmade by us through the years. When the three Windham children moved away to go to college and start careers, Mother continued the December 17th tradition of getting and decorating a Christmas tree. As she aged, she decided the climb into the attic was not especially safe, so we would come home to find the tree decorated with pinwheels or other dollar store procurement. One Christmas, Mother was particularly ambitious and made a garland for the tree from all her green prescription bottles. Sometime in the early 2000s, Alabama artist Charlie Lucas moved in next door to Mother. They became fast friends, and, at Christmastime, they would go together to land owned by one of Mother’s friends who’d given her permission to cut her tree there. On one such occasion, Mother and Charlie loaded themselves up in Charlie’s pickup and set out to chop the Christmas tree. They pulled off the two-lane road and headed into the woods to find just the right one. Meanwhile, a concerned citizen driving by saw the two of them going off into the woods. Alarmed, she quickly called 911 and got the Selma Police Department on the phone. Questioned about her emergency, the woman breathlessly reported, “I just saw a black man take an old white lady into the woods, and he had a hatchet!” Sometimes it pays to live in a small town where everybody knows everything about everyone else. The policeman on the other end of the line chuckled. “Don’t you worry, ma’am. That’s just Charlie taking Miss Kathryn to get her Christmas tree.” Merry Christmas, everybody…  Kathryn’s primary hobby was photography. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
Mother didn’t have time for a lot of hobbies. She thought garden clubs, bridge clubs and the like were a great waste of time. If you kept the lawn mowed, that was enough. But Mother did love photographing places that were fast disappearing and the people who interested her. It was her primary hobby, and her pictures would later be unearthed and become a traveling exhibition in museums around the state. Her other hobby was winemaking. Mother would collect the wine and whiskey bottles emptied by friends and associates. Most everyone knew of her hobby, so when scuppernong season rolled around, her friends with arbors would collect the grapes and bring them in bags, tubs and buckets to our house. Mother had three large churns that she used to mash up the scuppernongs. I never watched the recipe very carefully, but I believe she’d strain the husks and seeds and add sugar to the remaining liquid. Then the churns went into the cool dark den where the fermentation process did its thing. The den was separated from the living room by French doors. After a few weeks, if you opened those doors, the smell of fermenting grapes was powerful enough to make you gasp for air. Mother’s wine was not very good. As a matter of fact, it was terrible, but she never surrendered to her winemaking failures, and just about anyone who came to visit was dutiful enough to leave with a bottle of bad homemade wine---really potent bad homemade wine. One Christmas, Mother gave a bottle to a young school teacher who was a friend of the family. He made the mistake of drinking most of the bottle and later fell into our Christmas tree, dropping the “F” bomb right there in front of my lovely mother. In her later years, Mother found the churns too heavy to haul about, and her interest in winemaking waned. After she died, my brother and I were sorting through closets that rarely saw the light of day. There, in the bottom of a living room closet, was a large cardboard box filled with bottles of homemade wine. We knew better than to think it had improved with age. We laughed that Mother had held onto it so long, but there was also something heartbreaking about watching that bad potent wine flow down the drain as we emptied the bottles. |
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–Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University. |
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