“When the Wolf Camped at Our Door: My Childhood in the Great Depression”
Author: Aileen Kilgore Henderson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa
2022
Pages: 126
Price: $24.95 (Hardcover)
Hard Times Survived Through Grit and Sharing
Two years ago, in 2020, when Aileen Henderson was only 99 years old, she published “The World Through the Dime Store Window,” her memoir of growing up in the mining community town of Cedar Cove and then living in Brookwood, Alabama in the later 1930s and early 1940s. She wrote of her work at Kress’, her meager salary, her sister’s love life, joining the military and becoming an airplane mechanic. With the G. I. Bill, Henderson would take the B.A. at Judson College and an M.A. at Alabama.
This book is a kind of prequel to “Dime Store.” Henderson here is focusing on the early ’30s, the depths of the Depression, when she and her sisters were still little girls. Again, she relies on her own childhood writings and drawings of the scenes around her.
The title is from a wry poem which says quite a lot:
“The wolf keeps camping at our door
He looks just like an apparition.
Alas, alack! We are so poor,
He’s bound to die of malnutrition.”
Supper was often cornbread crumbled in buttermilk, but families shared when they could.
One evening in November of 1931, Mama noticed they miraculously had some leftovers: butter beans, cornbread and buttermilk, and pickled peaches. She instructed Aileen to take it to the neighbors’ place.
Mama was right. The neighbors’ cupboard was completely bare. They would have gone to bed hungry.
Folks survived through individual strength AND through SHARING.
The Hendersons had some land and grew vegetables and fruits the best they could. Actual cash was hard to come by. She writes of her father’s perpetual search for work, sometimes getting on with the railroad but having to go wherever he was needed. It could be Arkansas or Pensacola. He faithfully sent his pay home, and they survived.
School was a bright spot in her young life. Unfortunately, it was sometimes closed.
The Henderson family were definitely not quitters but, when Aileen’s pet chicken, Ichabod, disappeared, she was heartbroken, searched day after day, refusing to give up hope. She remembers her father advising “Sometimes we just have to give up,” adding as consolation, she might very well see her chicken in heaven.
Along with hunger there was injury and illness.
There was no money for doctors or prescriptions so country folk used homemade remedies.
Some were sensible. Baking soda was a remedy for many ailments. Gall from oak trees was used for rheumatism. Asthma attacks were combatted by beating the patient on the back with a can of sardines. Who knew?
Some were even odder. White dog poop was made into tea to fight illness. How desperate people must have been.
One classmate, Clarence, died of appendicitis. So unnecessary.
Another friend, Rozelle, died of diphtheria because his parents had chosen not to have him inoculated at school. Parents were afraid that vaccinations might stunt the children’s growth or “turn them into dummies.”
Aileen herself nearly lost an eye to a dendritic ulcer, but Dr. Searcy saved it.
Oddly enough, rabies day for dogs was an annual social event. Everybody brought their dog and chatted happily.
There were good times, of course. Henderson writes of a wonderful Thanksgiving day with family, and the annual tent revivals generated a lot of enthusiasm. Henderson herself, a very rational young woman, did finally come forward and was baptized in Big Hurricane Creek, without incident.
The kids made money finding and washing bottles for a bootlegger and digging sassafras roots.
All eras must end, even terrible ones.
The Depression lifted and the good times were best demonstrated by the movies. For Henderson, movies were magic, the new Bama Theatre a paradise where one could be “bewitched and dazed.”
Henderson’s accounts are powerful and disturbing without melodrama or whining—tough folks surviving tough times.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
