Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1910 - 1914
On Sunday, April 14th the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg. I remember big headlines in the papers, great concern among all the adults we came in contact with. A local man had been scheduled to be on board but missed somehow. Vergi Wicker and I played in the brook in their woods with boats. One we named Titanic, and since she insisted there was a sister ship we had two, or boat-shaped boards made by her brother Ernest. She also had a grown-up brother named Eric. Virginia played there too when she grew old enough. Vergi seemed to have a more worldly knowledge of life than I did, probably because she had older brothers - sister? She knew what the farm animals were doing and tried to tell me.
Father seemed to have bought the farm all equipped with implements. Besides the two-story "L"-shaped house there was a barn, a barnyard with a windmill for pumping water for the animals, two pigpens, a corn crib, and close to the back L of the house was a woodshed, and a building that originally was a typical southern separate kitchen with a boardwalk to the back door of the house where our kitchen was located and probably had been since Civil War days. This building had been converted into a tool shop and was well littered with tools and broken parts of farm machinery. It was here that I learned about the danger of a bench vise. I loved to screw and unscrew the jaws by turning the sliding ball-bolt, but one day I let go of it at the wrong time and the upper ball slid down and pinched the web of my hand between my thumb and index finger. I really howled with pain and father remarked "I told you to leave it alone". Well, I certainly did after that and I'm still quite aware of the danger whenever I use a vise sixty-odd years later.
There was a grindstone in front of the shed door which was operated by a handcrank. One of my first jobs was to turn that crank when father needed to sharpen a tool. I found it to be very hard work, especially since it had to be done at a certain regular speed. I know I complained a lot about this work, particularly after I saw, on another farm, a grindstone that was operated by the man himself with a set of foot pedals. I had an early aversion to work of any kind and I hated my next job even more - helping father saw wood for the stoves with a cross-cut saw. I found it hard to pull my end of the saw toward me and father complained that I dragged on the saw when he pulled back his way. What I minded most, however, was the sawdust that was forever getting into my eyes and when that happened I was much less than useless. After a while father fastened a long, thin beanpole to my end of the saw. The top end of the pole pivoted on a bolt way up in the peak of a rafter of the woodshed and that worked much more satisfactorily than I did, I'm sure.
I wasn't so good at running errands, either. Once I was sent over to the Wickers to borrow a little tea for supper. I started home with the tea in an envelope but stopped a little while to play with Vergi on a clay bank and when I got home the tea and clay had somehow gotten all mixed up. When mother saw the tea in that condition she really flew into a rage. She boxed my ears soundly, a common punishment in those days, and told me to go sit in the woodbox beside the kitchen range for a long time. I was completely mortified and my ears rung for the rest of the day. Years later I discovered that mother, soon after arriving in the south, had contracted malaria from the hordes of mosquitos prevalent in Virginia and she must have been in a very miserable state of mind during much of her life down there. She now had four small children, because Donald had come along on January 16, 1913, and I think she did very well to keep her sanity. The only help she had was from an old ex-slave, Marguerite Seegar, who came in for a day once in a while. Her husband, John, came over occasionally to help with the farm work. Marguerite was extremely good with baby Donald. Once, when he was around a year old, and sitting on her lap, he reached up with his little hand and rubbed her cheek then looked at his hand to see if any of the black had rubbed off on it. The dear old lady laughed and laughed at that. She lived in a cabin a couple of miles down the Newport News road. Once she told mother, "Never hire any of those no-count, uppity Williamsburg niggers because they'll steal the house bare".