“When my grandmother opened the dish cupboard, the family and neighbors fell out,” Darcy Wakefield begins in her introduction to “No Flies on Bill” and with this statement draws the reader into the world of Mamie, Ethel “Billie” Gammon. The ultimate folklorist, Mamie tells her story to her granddaughter, Darcy, through the objects of her life. Wakefield relates that “…when she wanted to give me a sense of farm life before electricity, she dug around in a box of letters and found one that her sister wrote her between 1928 and 1930 about a kerosene lamp being knocked over and the small fire it started” (3). Wakefield asserts that “she began to see American history through the lens of Mamie’s life” (6). It is this lens she, in turn, offers to her reader.
The book stems from a series of interviews between Wakefield and her grandmother that began in 1995. Sometimes Mamie would answer her granddaughter’s question but occasionally “she would scrap my list or chosen topic altogether and tell me what we were going to discuss” (5). Wakefield lets the reader know from the beginning that she is not the only one who finds her grandmother’s story interesting: “In 1991, she was nominated for the President’s Volunteer Action Award and was thus labeled a ‘Point of Light’ by George Bush” (7). Her story is the story of many women of this era, and because we come to know Mamie, we come to feel the pulsing heartbeat of that time.
Mamie’s parents were Howard and Mable. Howard’s first wife had died and Mable took over her job of raising the boys. When Mamie was born, she became yet another “boy” in the family. Mamie explains: “I had to be Bill, not a sissy sister…” (16). Howard was proud of his youngest “boy,” Billie, and would often “say a variation on an old Nova Scotia saying: ‘There may be flies on Ma and Pa, but there ain’t no flies on Bill’” (17).
As Wakefield and her grandmother sort through the interviews, her grandmother remarks: “You may analyze me; you may disagree with me; you may contradict me because things may appear differently to you than they do to me, but you also must allow me my idiosyncrasies, my foibles, my pet misconceptions, my warped views of life because they are part of me” (40). We see the young Mamie who did not care much for her one-room school that housed sixty-one children nor the teacher whom they called “Hardheart” (26). Even so, the experiences there influenced her when she started a living history museum years later (28). She escaped the one-room school when the family moved to Nictaux where her father had bought an apple farm. Later, because of financial problems caused by the Depression, they had to give up the farm and return to North Augusta. We see the young Mamie again saying goodbye to this place that she loves: “I remember going along that path, and every pebble on that path I had to kick and say good-bye to: ‘Good-bye little gray pebble, good-bye little rock’" (31).
We follow the education of this woman as she attends high school at an earlier age than other students. In order to avoid the four-mile trip to the high school, she boards with another family, becoming a “mother’s helper” (43). At the age of twelve and a half, then, she found herself taking care of five-year-old twins and a seven-year-old (49). She did not have the spending money and the clothes that her peers did. However, she enjoyed the family she boarded with and was influenced by the woman’s love of poetry (52). She graduated from high school when she was fifteen.
Mamie attended college where she heard the words that long remained with her: “Any woman can do anything she wants to do” (59). She became a teacher, and once again boarded with a family. She recalls that in the winter it was so cold at night that she had to put on almost all the clothes she owned in order to keep warm (64). It was at this time that she met her future husband at a dance. Wakefield goes on to note that if her grandmother had known that they were going to settle in North Livermore, she would not have gotten married but simply lived with the man she loved because of “how many older non–married couples there were, couples that lived together” (75). Nevertheless, they did get married, and as a result Mamie’s teaching career ended. In those days, married women could not teach (88). Mamie states simply and eloquently that “I married Pubbie, and I did what was expected of women. I didn’t teach anymore. I had to give up something I loved to marry someone I loved” (89).
Wakefield follows this new couple as they begin their married lives together where they establish their home, his job, and eventually their family. When WWII began, Pubbie, Mamie’s husband, enlisted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (107). “War is such a robber! Even if it spares one’s life, it still robs years of life,” Mamie laments (106). Wakefield takes us into the husbandless household that was probably typical of many households at that time. Even though married women were now welcomed into classroom as teachers, Mamie refused to accept a teaching position when the superintendent came knocking at her door, because she felt that she needed to be at home with her children. The money that she earned came from apple-picking, babysitting, and ironing. She explains that these jobs were not demeaning to her because “it doesn’t matter much what you do, it’s how you do it that counts” (112). But, then, this was also a woman who propped up a book of poems in front of her to memorize as she ironed.
Through Mamie’s eyes we are able to see the lives of people before and after the war, the way people budgeted money, built their homes, and raised and fed their children. She feels that parents’ views on child-rearing have changed since she raised her own. Conscious of the need for good nutrition and adequate sleep, she summed up her attitude toward child raising by saying, “I used to say my philosophy was fresh air and fruit juice” (126).
Wakefield’s account of her grandmother is of a strong, determined woman, who from an early age developed a philosophy that she lived throughout her life: accepting hardships without complaint, but not with resignation. We see a woman who is courageous and honest. The frankness of her words speak from these pages as Wakefield weaves her own narrative from interviews with her grandmother as well as from written accounts that her grandmother provides, both from her past and from her present.
Wakefield is a constant presence in the course of the narrative as she interjects herself into conversations where she and her grandmother discuss something she has written or, as in the story about ironing, she poses her question to her grandmother in front of the reader: “When I asked her if she felt that these jobs…were demeaning to her, she told me…” (112). Wakefield’s account is lively; she balances her narration with the kind of dialogue that creates and reveals the character of the persons involved. The chapters revolve around anecdotes that place her grandmother in situations that allow the reader to see how Mamie reacts to the events of her life.
Even though a reader is likely to have no connection to this woman who eventually starts the Norlands Living History Center in 1973 (7), her story is a vital one for someone who wants a slice of life of an independently-minded woman who shaped her own life during the years of the depression, WW II, and beyond.
--------
[Review length: 1305 words • Review posted on December 13, 2006]