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awareness of her missing parents makes me cling to her still, because I have never been able to bear the thought of such a hole in my own life.
    Her father, Robert Lee, abandoned the family just before she was born, and Mama lost her mother in childbirth when she was only four. She was left to grow up without affection or closeness or indulgence. Yet she wasn’t thrown into an orphanage or adopted or shuttled around to foster families. She lived at first with her grandmother, then in the teeming household of her aunt and uncle. Her kinfolks took her in, out of obligation. But they gave her little love. “You’re lucky to have a roof over your head,” they said as they put her to work. She says she felt like a lost kitten, crouching beneath the passing shadow of a hawk.
    For me, the image that most illuminates her childhood is the Christmas orange. One Christmas, in the houseful of kinfolks she was raised with at Clear Springs, the older cousins got dolls, but all she got was an orange.
    She remembers how, as the smallest child in the household, she was made to work in the garden, the fields, the tobacco patch. “I was just an extra mouth to feed,” Mama says bitterly. “But I was always a hard worker. I guess I got that from my mama. They said she was a hard worker. I don’t know what else I got from her.”
    I believe she also got her black hair, a tendency toward plumpness, and her sense of humor from her mother. Maybe she got her enduring spirit from her, too. Mama has a few tiny memories of her mother, EuniceHicks Lee. And Mama remembers that everybody said Eunice was short and fat with a good disposition, and that she liked to laugh.
    “I had hair when I was born,” Mama tells me. “They said my mama had heartburns all the time she was carrying me, so that’s why I had hair. They said I didn’t have any fingernails or eyelashers. I was real little and didn’t cry for two months, and when I did it liked to scared them to death.”
    Although my mother has told me about it many times, I still can’t quite manage to grasp the facts of her losses, the darkness of her painful upbringing. My own childhood was sunny and privileged, thanks to her efforts, and so my own choices were wildly different from hers. By the time she was seventeen, my mother had quit school and eloped.
    After her grandmother died, my mother, Christianna Lee, was raised by the Mason family in Clear Springs, on the original Mason homeplace. She was taken in by her aunt Rosie, who had married Roe Mason, my father’s uncle. My parents weren’t related, even though they shared a set of cousins, and they did not grow up together. Yet my mother was dominated by Masons all her life.
    In May, 1936, she was not quite seventeen. My father, Wilburn Arnett Mason, was twenty. They had met the year before. When they decided to marry, Wilburn kept it from his parents. Christy told no one except Aunt Rosie, who was relieved that Christy would marry into a respectable family. “I was afraid you’d fall in with somebody no-’count like your mama done,” Rosie said. Christy crammed her meager belongings into a suitcase Rosie let her borrow. Then Christy and Wilburn drove across the state line, to Tennessee, where they were married by a justice of the peace named Squire McDade, a popular performer of spur-of-the-moment, no-frills marriages. Wilburn brought Christy home to his parents’ house that night, long after his parents were in bed. The mantel clock was ticking loudly in the living room, where Bob and Ethel slept in the summer because it was cooler there. Wilburn and Christy crept into the north bedroom and settled onto a narrow bed that folded out Murphy-style from an elaborate piece of cabinetry containing a carved headboard and drop-down legs. Wilburn was clumsy, and the racket he made rigging up the bed made Christy giggle. The night was black, and she could see only vague shapes in the room, like people crouching.
    When he heard his parents