I just finished reading "A Painted House", by John Grisham. I don't really know about it's "literary quality", but it was the most insightful book I've read this year. It tells the story of my grandparents, both sets, living on the farm picking cotton, and my parents, loving their parents, but longing to get away from the mind-numbing work. I felt as if I'd gone back in time to visit my relatives. I knew every person in this book. I understood my dad's love for the land and need to be on it, but his rejection of the farm and his desire to get away to lead a better life. But he has always wanted to get back to it. This too, makes complete sense to me now.
The grandfather in the book could be my Papa Measles, wiry, obnoxious, shrewd, oddly lovable man, and Grandpa Hogan did the very same thing as far as farming cotton, but he had such a different way about him that I didn't see him as often in the book at first. No one played a guitar with a pocket knife, which Grandpa often did, but he lingered in the back of my mind as I read about the baseball field and the baseball games. He was there, writ large, you just had to look for him. The stories my dad told about how he'd come in from the fields and play baseball with the boys. After he'd whipped 'em for whatever they'd gotten up to, of course! I just hope we still have men like these around. We need 'em.
The grandmother is my Mama. Everytime they set the table in this book I was hungry all day. She's always been my inspiration, not because she could cook, though she could, but because she could run a household, cook, do laundry in conditions we could never imagine, and then go out to the field and pick cotton. How many pounds did she pick a day? The rumors in our family are thick. 100 lbs, 200 lbs. She is such a giant in my mind that anything would be plausible. She might've out picked the men and THEN put her sack up, went home, and cooked supper for everyone. That's why she always said, " I wish I'd been born a man". She might have had time to rest a bit. And Granny Hogan, she did that with a heart condition. And she still picked the cotton, maintained a wonderful garden, and burned every type of meat that they put in the freezer.
What an amazing story. I'm glad I had the good sense to read it. Go buy it now if you wonder what it was really like back then or would like a trip down memory lane.
