Texas State Historical Association - My Texas - Mud Puddle in a Parched Land

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Mud Puddle in a Parched Land

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1939, I had a day so traumatic it embedded itself as my first memory. I was about a year and a half old.

My daddy Eric Israel was working on a road project in the Panhandle. My mother Hertha Kendall Israel, big brother Bartell, and I followed along as the asphalt made its way across the plains courtesy of the Work Projects Administration. The WPA was a program President Roosevelt created to spur economic recovery after the Great Depression. We slept, ate, and played in the forest-green trailer wherever it might be parked, and we weren't alone. The road workers' families moved as a group, so wherever we were we had the same neighbors. I have vague memories of the bathhouses at the camps, probably the same ones used by the Okies a few years earlier as they traveled west to escape the Dust Bowl. They may have escaped, but our families followed, moving along a desolate path that would no longer support crops or cattle.

In my earliest memories of outdoor play there are no grassy fields or lawns or wildflowers--just dark, gray earth, packed hard as if swept clean of loose particles. But the dirt continued to shed its grains as the wind whipped them into stinging, blinding storms, pelting my bare little legs, arms, and face. When you are busy hanging onto your bottle and learning to steady your walk, you don't always see the gray wall coming at you until it is too late. Other times, you look across the bare land and watch a "dust devil" swirling, twisting, coming for you, overtaking you at times, or dancing on by.

But it was neither the drought nor dust that was my first memory. Perhaps those came first, but would have been forgotten had it not been for the drenching rain. The morning after the downpour Mother dressed me in a frilly, pale-colored dress with petticoats that forced my skirt up and out so that I could not see my white lace-up shoes as I toddled along. It threw me off a bit not to see my feet since I was new at this walking business, but I stayed steady on my feet and out of the mud puddle in our back yard as Mother had told me while she grabbed her purse.

Suddenly several big girls from another trailer just appeared. That's how I remember it--they suddenly just appeared. The tall, scrawny girls stared silently at me, at my beautiful dress, but I didn't feel like looking at them. I felt like running to my mother. A girl on each side grabbed a hand, walked me to the edge of the mud puddle, positioned the back of my polished white shoes just shy of it. Then the tallest put her hands on her hips and said, "Sit down or I'll knock you down."

Here's what fixed this memory in my psyche: cold, black mud and water creeping into my ruffled panties and being wicked up by the hem of my beautiful dress and petticoat. I remember, too, the warm liquid spilling from my eyes. There is another memory, also, strange as it may seem coming from a toddler. I recall being ashamed, ashamed that I hadn't fought back instead of assessing the situation (oddly, I remember doing that, though I didn't understand the concept) and deciding I had only two choices: to put myself in the mud easily or be thrown in hard.

I'm not sure what lesson I got from this; maybe it is yet to be learned. Or maybe the true lesson had nothing to do with my humiliation, but instead with understanding early on that girls who would behave the way they did could not possibly have had a mother as wonderful and accepting as mine. How vividly I remember thinking that as Mother crushed her muddy little girl against her only dressy dress and carried her back home wrapped in a warm and healing hug.

Beda (Israel) Kantarjian
Longwood, Florida
Published: August 22, 2006