Embers of Childhood by Flora Miller Biddle

Author:Flora Miller Biddle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948924016
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2019-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Me in a watercolor by Madame Shoumatoff, 1938

In Aiken, fifth grade was harder than the previous year, but I liked the challenge, especially reading. Across from my bed was a massive desk surrounded by shelves. There were my companions: the Oz series, Will James’s cowboy tales, The Bobbsey Twins, Robin Hood, King Arthur, The Deerslayer, Treasure Island, The White Company, along with several Dickens novels. These books, many illustrated by Arthur Rackham, served to offset the goodness and mercy in the Collects and Psalms I learned from the Episcopalian Prayer Book. (I didn’t learn about Job or Cain or other Old Testament cruelty and violence until later.) Put to bed before I was sleepy, I hid the books under the covers and read in the gloom—a forbidden delight. I began to understand that bad was just as real as good. The Wicked Witch of the West and Long John Silver were just as true as Jo and Beth and Maid Marion. Like most children, I was fascinated by the element of cruelty in my favorite stories. David Copperfield, for instance, and animal stories like Bob, Son of Battle, Black Beauty, or Spunky, which was about the mine pony. I was interested in the very things that I feared. I wasn’t unique—children want and need to know the depths as well as the heights. An awareness of limits is necessary to a child’s understanding of the world. It was safe, at least then, to explore all the information available to me.

I did not question our family’s values, perhaps because of the good manners we were taught as if they were moral imperatives. When I started to examine my family’s way of life and its conviction that our way was the best way, I sensed it was a subject too dangerous, too frightening to pursue. Suppose I were to act on my discoveries—how would I do that? Would it mean rejecting my parents, family, friends? Would I find myself adrift in the real world? Perhaps some children are strong and mature enough to question their families’ assumptions, but I surely wasn’t. Instead, I enjoyed all that my idyllic childhood offered, and read, and read some more.

There were contradictions in the books that I read and what I was told or what I experienced for myself in the world around me. Protective adults often feed children sugar-coated pills. Happy endings. Whereas great books, even those for children, tell the truth about sickness, poverty, pain, betrayal, and death. These things were in the plays and books that I read, but they were not present in the paradise of Aiken—or, more accurately, they were not visible to me.

Father Smith, a priest who enjoyed life and really cared for his flock, once told me about pellagra as we rode through the Aiken woods. A disease caused by dietary insufficiencies, especially the lack of B vitamins in refined wheat and corn flour and polished rice, pellagra leads to physical and mental deterioration. Many families in a certain part of Aiken suffered from the illness.

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