«The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

Today Big Wis received a letter from her cat Rascal in Georgia. She has been feeding this stray cat for years on her back porch, and at night it sleeps on her bed. She has been worried that the cat would abandon her during her convalescence in Virginia, because a week-long trip has now become a month-long medical ordeal. Her faithful employee David, who has changed her lightbulbs and watered her flowers and filled her car with gas for decades, has been putting cat food outside her condo twice a day. Like many Southern white folks of her generation, Big Wis has a close, albeit complicated relationship with her black “help,” but David is like family to her. I always assumed that he liked my grandmother, but kept a certain distance because of the de facto social segregation that still exists in the South between black and white, not to mention employee and employer. They were so different, she with her genteel Sweet Briar education and he who learned to read and write only much later in life. And then today she got this letter in the mail, addressed to Wisteria, which made her cry:

Mama,

Thangs have gone to hell hear since you hav gone. David feeds me the same ole cat food. I miss u at nite. I stay wif Ellie & Barney [the condo neighbors] but it was not like u being here. Come home soon.

Rascal