Family Stories

One time, years ago, when Johnny Miller's Daddy and Uncle Roger and Aunt Tabby were living out on the farm, long before the kids had come, a pig got loose, out of the pig pen. The old homestead was nestled in a valley between two mountains. Out the valley, past the farm, was nothing but deep, deep woods. The farmland itself was situated on rolling land, which had once been planted with cotton.

There was at no point on the property where you could see all of it, there being way too many dips and rises, and one good-sized creek ran along the back edge of the fields, and another, smaller one, up toward the front of the land.

This pig was nowhere to be seen. The family spread out, and were calling him. "Whoooieeee, whoooooiiieeeeeee!!" they'd call. Finally, out of sight of the others, Aunt Tabby caught a glimpse of the runaway pig, and yelled out, as loud as her lungs could carry, "Thar he is... He's a runnin' yonderways!"

Which did not help the others atall.

When Johnny Miller was born, he had a brother a year and a half old already, Tommy, and the next kid up the line was his sister Ann, who was ten. About a year up from her was Randy, and another year or so up was Robert, the oldest.

They were growing up in the hill country of a southern state, where there weren't too many people unlike themselves anywhere around. Armadillo Creek was not a particularly "racist" community, but, it had always been an area, settled prior to the civil war, with most of the original families still living there, where white folks lived.

Johnny Miller, and his brothers and sister, were brought up to respect folks that were different from them, but at the same time, when you only ever saw people who were "different" on television, or on trips to the city, well, it was hard to relate to them.

Long before Johnny was born, his Momma had taken the older kids into the city, shopping. As she carried little Randy in her arms, with Robert walking along beside, across a busy street, he saw a black couple walking the other way, pushing a baby carriage, in which a beautiful baby was laying, so innocently.

Randy saw that baby, and thought it was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen. He asked his Momma, "Momma, can we get one of them chocolate babies and bring it home?"

Now, he didn't mean any harm by the question, but it did embarrass his mother to no end. For years and years, she'd tease him about it, but at the time, she had shushed him up rather quickly.

When Johnny was a baby, his Mother was Mommy, but his sister Ann, being older, was a second Mommy, and he developed the habit of calling her Mama Ann. This was fine and dandy around the house, and everyone accepted it as a normal thing.

Occasionally, out in public, however, it turned into a source of embarrassment for his poor sister. At a community fish fry, held at the Armadillo Creek Fairgrounds, sponsored by the Farm Bureau, Ann was assigned to watch little Johnny.

Of course, she was a young teenager, and he was a toddler, and as they sometimes do, he tended to say what needed to be said without thinking twice. As she stood there, talking to her friends from school, Johnny was dancing and prancing next to her. Finally, he blurted out, at the top of his lungs, his voice carrying over the rustle of the crowd, “Mama Ann, Mama Ann, I gotta go pee!!”

Mama Ann was not happy. There's no amount of talking that can erase the words spoken by a toddler.