My Life in Spankings

I remember six spankings. My mother, who pretty much thought I could do little wrong except get my clothes dirty or ripped when I was little and she had to wash them on a scrub board, was the only one of my parents who believed in it at all. She was nine years younger than my father (and 20 younger than my step-father) and less experienced. Once in a very great while she would reach the end of her tether, usually when I did something dangerous. Actually, I'm amazed at the patience she had, since I was always doing dangerous things. When I was four, she found me on the third story scaffolding of a building that was going up down the street. Took it like a trooper.

When I was three and she was pregnant with my brother Storm, who died when he was a few months old, I discovered that I could outrun her. We were living in a city at the time, and having me run into traffic must have almost stopped her heart. Poor Mama, when my father got home I ran out to him, calling, "Ginnie spanked me! Ginnie spanked me!" (which would seem to indicate that it wasn't the first time, since I knew he wouldn't approve) and I remember him explaining to her that she was the grown-up and surely they could figure out something to do instead. Instead was a leash. After that, when my mother and I went out alone together, I was on a leash. Good thing, too, or you wouldn't be reading this.

When I was about four, we were staying with my Grandmother Hunt while my father and Uncle Leland were doing some construction around her place. She owned a trailer park and would not allow me to play with the children who lived there, which made no sense to me, since my parents and I lived in a trailer park when we weren't staying with her. One day she caught me playing with one of the children, and when my father came in she insisted that he spank me. He took me out to the tank house, and my mother could hear the spanking and screaming clear into the house. Since he didn't believe in spanking, she thought he must have lost his mind, and came out to save me. When she got closer she heard Whack. Scream. Then, laughter. She looked in the window and saw that I was sitting on his lap while he hit a chair with his belt and after each hit, I screamed. The laughter explains itself. My grandmother felt so sorry for me she spoiled me for a week.

Number three was a humdinger. My mother was terrified. In 1945, Storm had died, and then in early 1948 Forrest, who was seven months old, got pneumonia and almost died, and barely two months after that my father died. We were staying with my grandparents, and in the course of two weeks I had managed to fall into the irrigation canal and sit on a nail. On this particular day I was up in the apricot tree right outside the kitchen door, eating green apricots. I was strictly forbidden to do this, as Mama believed that green fruit would make me sick. It never did, and to this day I love mildly green apricots, but that was the theory and she was the mother. She came out into the yard to call me in for lunch, and stood right under the tree I was in while waiting for me. Of course, I didn't dare come out of the tree. After she had called me for a good 20 minutes and was getting hysterical (I wasn't feeling any too calm myself), my grandfather told her to go inside, he would get me. She went barely inside the kitchen door, keeping an eye on the yard. Grandpa walked toward the front of the house, calling, "Peanut, do you want to go with me to change the water?" I was down out of that tree like a shot, Mama saw me and was on me before my grandfather could turn around, and I remember my grandmother screaming, "Percy, stop her! She's going to kill that child!" Grandpa dealt with Mama and my grandmother scooped me up and handed me off to my two aunts, who hid me until Mama calmed down.

Number four was another that I never received. We only stayed with my grandparents a few months, and then my mother's sister, Florence (on whose 18th birthday I was born) came to live in the trailer and help my mother support and raise Forrest and me. I'm not sure what I had done that day, but it may have been lighting the fire under the trailer. (The woman who took care of us while Mama and Aunt Flossie were at work had turned me outside of her trailer for the day as soon as they left and didn't feed me lunch, so I got some bacon from our trailer and was getting ready to cook it for myself when another neighbor stopped me. [We were cared for by someone else from then on.]) Since my mother had so little experience with spanking, she and Flossie had this conference trying to figure out how to do it, and since they had usually gotten my grandfather's razor strop, and they didn't have a razor strop, they decided to use an ironing cord, which they proceeded to try out on each other and decide it was too awful to use on me.

Next time I was nine. I had been away to boarding school, only returning to live with my mother when she remarried. The thing about boarding school -- you don't have to come right home after, because you live there. Which my mother didn't figure out, and when, on my first day at public school, I didn't come home from school until about 15 minutes before my step-father got home from work, she was worried to a fare-thee-well and the minute I came in promised me that he was going to spank me as soon as he got home. Poor man! They must have been married all of three weeks and he comes home to the news that he is spanking the child he's trying to establish a relationship with. He told my mother he wouldn't make her a liar this time, but he didn't believe in spanking and he wasn't going to do it again. And then he took the switch she had brought in and tried to spank me. Except that I wasn't used to it, I knew he didn't want to do it, I didn't believe I deserved it, and so I kept moving. I ran in and around and through his legs; he got welts, I didn't even get hit.

When I was ten and Forrest was five, we were playing with Colleen who was about four months old, and I was holding her on his back so he could give her a horsey back ride and we dropped her. I took that one like a good little soldier.