In the House on Atkins Avenue

Editor's Note: Country Roads is thrilled to announce Emily Price's "In the House On Atkins Avenue" as its 2019 "All Roads Lead to Home" Young Writers winning submission. We felt that Emily's heartfelt, narrative approach to close-to-home storytelling struck a nerve—powerfully evoking the ways place and lineage embed themselves into our identities. Her story offers a valuable and raw portrait of Louisiana womanhood, generation after generation, and we are proud to include it in the December 2019 issue of our magazine. 

The two-story, federal-style home on Atkins Avenue in Shreveport has long served as both a meeting place and a refuge for those who have  passed through it. A white-washed brick exterior is punctuated by black shutters and an ash grey roof. My grandmother has a talent for gathering up all her pride and pouring it into the azalea bushes that line the red brick porch, the geraniums spilling from their round ceramic planters, and the St. Augustine grass that grows on the sloping front lawn. 

Inside, visitors are welcomed by warm pinewood floors and vibrant reds and golds that wrap the home up in an atmosphere of cozy elegance. When we’re all home, our family, whose members now sprawl from Texas to Arkansas to Pennsylvania, can be found huddling around the granite-topped kitchen island or lounging in the array of couches and recliners in the living room. From 2008 to 2014, I was one of four generations of women who lived here. My great-grandmother Elma, her daughter Margie, my mother Stephanie, and I all found ourselves living in that house at the same time for different reasons. My great-grandmother was recently widowed. My mother, divorced, needed help raising me. My grandmother was there to help us, the role she’s always played. 

During that time, in the evenings when we were all free, we’d eat dinner together. Conversations would slip, between bites of homemade sweet cornbread, from the day’s events to the goings-on of our family. We’d play cards in the den, usually Liverpool rummy or spades, as the cicadas called into the dusk. Sometimes, I watched Andy Griffith with my great-grandmother—whom I called Ma-Maw—from the bed in her room while she crocheted. 

I am different from the women who preceded me, and the uniqueness of their personal experiences, in turn, serves as a testament to how quickly the world changes from one generation to the next. But our family shares one history characterized by strength, loss, and triumph. In that house on Atkins Avenue, the separate stems of our stories were gathered together into one beautiful bouquet.

Elma

Ma-Maw was a quiet woman. It was only after she passed away in 2015, just one month after her 100th birthday, that I realized how little I knew about her life. 

When my grandmother Margie sent Ma-Maw’s memoir—103 pages of lined notebook paper—to my apartment in Philadelphia, I could hardly wait to open it. Her writing brought me into the house where she grew up with no electricity, where the well water was scooped up with a bucket. I walked beside her as an adult as she struggled and sometimes failed to make ends meet. 

“I am seventy-five years of age as I write this,” the memoir reads. At the time she began penning her story, she was living alone in her childhood home. “Part of this writing is to let my children…understand what my life has been like,” she wrote.

"When I fall in love it's forever unless the other person hurts me in such a way that I can't take it."

Elma Boies was born in 1915 into the Springhill Church Community, a rural area southeast of Ringgold, Louisiana. Her memoir details days spent working on her family’s land as early as thirteen years old—picking fruit from the apple and peach trees to make jellies, plucking corn from the stalk to take to town to grind in the mill. “As soon as we were old enough, we all worked in the fields. Farming was our living. It was a daylight to dark job for all of us.”

When it comes to love, my great-grandmother was never meek: “When I fall in love it’s forever unless the other person hurts me in such a way that I can’t take it.” As early as the fourth grade, Elma knew whom she wanted. “I was in love with only one boy, and that was Allums,” she wrote. He had impossibly blue eyes and could set a guitar to weeping. She was nineteen when they married.

During their time together, Allums was rarely home, ostensibly working as a gasoline truck driver and leaving Elma to take care of three children by herself. When she was pregnant with her fourth, Elma received an unexpected letter in the mail. 

[Read "All Roads Lead to Home" semifinalist Sydney Cheatham's personal essay on why—of all the places she's lived in the South—Louisiana is the closest to her heart.]

 “The letter said that Allums was living with a woman in Bossier City, and that [she] was pregnant with Allums’s child.” The letter had been written by the woman’s sister in an attempt to stop the sordid affair. “Allums had been living with her while I thought he was working,” Elma wrote.

Left alone with her children and no income to speak of, Elma got her first paying job working twelve-hour shifts at the Louisiana Ordinance Plant, where she assembled bomb parts and fashioned shells. It was 1951. World War II had come and gone, and Elma worked and worked, perpetually in want of more time, more food, more anything. “When I was younger and having trouble, my parents told me that God never puts more on us than we can take,” she wrote abruptly at the end of one entry. 

Though my great-grandmother struggled for most of her life, hope waited on the horizon as she wrote, “Now it is September 1993, and I have a new friend.” In 1994, Elma married John Schimmel. I remember that he spent his time gardening and raising pigeons. More importantly, John demonstrated his love for my great-grandmother at every opportunity, like how he would hug her from behind while she worked at the sink. Elma wrote, during her time with John, “I’m happy and contented with my life and I thank God every day for the love and peace I have now.” 

In 2008, John passed away, breaking my great-grandmother’s heart. That spring, Elma moved into the Atkins house with my grandmother, my mother, and me. “I have moved in with Margie,” she wrote. “I have to go on with my life as John would have wanted me to.”

Margie

This past September, so that I didn’t have to bring my car up to Philadelphia, my mother and grandmother offered to drive me up north from Shreveport. As we moved through familiar southern flatlands that morphed into Tennessee hills and northeastern traffic jams, I asked two of the most important women in my life to share their stories with me.  

My grandmother’s began, as many of hers do, with an aphorism from her own grandfather Boies:

“Margie, if you wanna eat, you gotta work.”

This advice came to shape the life of Elma’s only daughter. As a testament, Margie told me, laughing, “I’m 82, and I’m still workin’; I’ve been workin’ at the same job now for 42 years.”

Margie spent her teenage years in the 1950s attending classes, baton-twirling as a majorette, playing trombone in the band, and typing for the school newspaper. For extra money, she worked as a cashier for Burrough’s Dry Goods in Ringgold, making 25 cents an hour. When she was home, Margie acted as a second mother to her younger siblings while her mother was away working. She said, “I had to be independent as a young person because I had the responsibility of taking care of my three brothers. I cooked, I washed, I ironed.” 

She kept the ball rolling throughout her young adulthood, graduating from high school on a Friday and starting secretarial and bookkeeping classes at Spencer Draughton Business School the very next Monday. Six months later, after completing business school, she reported for work at the Hearne Dry Goods Company—you guessed it—the very next Monday. 

When she was nineteen, Margie married Bobby Warren Gay, a welder and horse breeder with dark hair and intense blue eyes. “I was muchly in love with him,” she declared with conviction. “We had a great love affair, I would say, for the first 25 years. We really did.”

"I didn't intend to tell the story of my life today." 

In 1974, Bobby’s nephew was looking for someone to care for his ranch in Grand Cane, so Bobby and Margie moved the family out to the country. By the next year, Margie found herself with two young children, a full-time job, and a house that always seemed to need cleaning. During this chapter of her life, Margie remembers sleeping about four hours a night. “Bobby was my king for all those years,” she said. “I did everything for him. Then one day I said, ‘I’m working, too, and you need to help me.’” 

After their kids set off on their own and they both began to age, their partnership came to an end in 1989. Margie recalled, “He couldn’t get away from that farm. He was literally in love with it. We just grew apart, was the thing.” 

At this juncture of her story, as smudges of loblolly pine rushed past the car windows, my grandmother’s breath caught in her throat. Margie pulled a tissue from the center console and said, “I didn’t intend to tell the story of my life today.” Mom and I held my grandmother as best we could—my hand reaching from the backseat to rest on her shoulder, Mom’s lifting from the steering wheel to rest on Margie’s leg. We sat for a moment. Then she sighed, ending the silence with the word, “Anyway,” and continued on. 

[Read "All Roads Lead to Home" semifinalist Mary Hawkins' exploration of language in St. Landry Parish.]

After leaving the ranch, Margie moved into a townhome in Shreveport with her dachshund Buffy. These were days of dancing at the Amigos Club in evening dresses and playing poker with her friends. “I probably had my best figure at 59,” my grandmother declared, playfully moving her shoulders back and forth. 

Though she occasionally dated, Margie said that at some point, she quietly decided never to marry again. “I didn’t want to take care of anybody else.And, too, I never really met the right person.” 

When her daughter Stephanie needed someone to take care of her baby while she worked nights, Margie and Stephanie decided it would be best to move in together. This is how the house on Atkins Avenue came to be ours. 

Stephanie

As we crossed into Virginia from Tennessee, my mother said, “Well, I guess it’s my turn.” 

At seventeen years old, my mother Stephanie was the first woman in her family to attend a university. She recalled the unbridled excitement she felt the day she left for Louisiana Tech: “The word that first comes to my mind is ecstatic. I was ready to be an adult, be on my own, do what I wanted when I wanted to do it.”  

She transferred to Northeast—or what is now the University of Louisiana Monroe—when she was eighteen, joined Phi Mu and the dance line, and readily placed her studies on the back burner. On our drive, she reminisced on days when she and her friends would binge on deep-fried ice cream at Cuco’s Mexican Restaurant, then go dancing until near-dawn. “I think I typically wasn’t that social, but when I went out, it just kind of opened up another side of me,” she said. “And I liked that other side.”

[Read "All Roads Lead to Home" semifinalist Breanna Smith's reflections on her childhood home St. Gabriel's legacy of exiles]

When she was asked to stay an extra semester to make up some missing credits, my mother instead decided to leave school and seek out the next parcel of freedom awaiting her.  She moved to Dallas, Texas, to work as an administrative assistant for a health food company.  This position allowed her to travel the country, visiting such places as Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Boston. “I got to see places that I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to otherwise,” she said. “Vegas was my favorite. You work all day, then Vegas is alive all night.” Each trip delivered that familiar dose of excitement, but at some point, even the newness started to sour.  

"We both wanted an older house with charm and character, and the Atkins house was the first and only house we looked at."

Today, my mother attributes this stubborn restlessness to something she calls Cinderella Syndrome—the experience of observing one’s life and wondering, in the words of Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?”  

One morning when she was 26, something shifted in her. “It was literally that quick. I woke up, and I was different.” Gratitude and guilt swirled in her stomach, and she began to better understand how hard her family had worked to provide her with the opportunities she now enjoyed. In her own words, “I grew up then,” suddenly and irreversibly. 

My mother moved back to Shreveport in 1994 to enroll in Northwestern’s nursing program. That same year, a nascent business was emerging in Shreveport that would soon come to dominate the small city’s economy; the casinos were moving in. Working nights at the Isle of Capri Casino & Resort allowed her to attend nursing classes in the day.  

She and a young man named David Price, having both scored well on their math tests, were assigned to the high limit craps tables.  At orientation, the CEO had told her and her co-workers “Somewhere in this room is your ex-husband or ex-wife.”  Telling this part of the story, my mother laughed heartily. 

To put it nicely, my arrival was unexpected. My father David proposed shortly after he heard the news, and the wedding was planned in a month. It took place in downtown Shreveport at the University Club, a venue lined with windows overlooking the city. 

After my birth, our family moved into a house on South Brookwood Drive in Shreveport. I still remember the large swath of yard where I observed a rabbit raising three bunnies, where I held squirming piles of earthworms in my hands as my mother gardened. 

In 1998, my parents’ ill-prophesied relationship came to a quiet end. Stephanie said, “We both agreed to be friends, to raise our daughter together, but separately.”

Even today, Christmas and Thanksgiving celebrations at the Atkins house always involve the entire family—including exes. My father attends our family dinners and so does my grandfather Bobby, Margie’s ex-husband, with his wife Jackie. 

While my mom was working night shifts as a new nurse, my grandmother Margie moved in to help care for me. A few years later, in 2001, my mother and grandmother were in the market for a new home. “All I can remember is that she wanted a bigger closet,” my mom joked. “We both wanted an older house with charm and character, and the Atkins house was the first and only house we looked at.” 

Emily

My mother, grandmother, and I arrived in Philadelphia on a Saturday. After parking on the street outside of my apartment, we began to unload the car as my boyfriend Joseph descended the front steps. He and I hugged for a long time; it had been weeks since I had seen him last. 

It’s different living in a big city. Instead of enjoying broad lawns and wide strips of green lining the sidewalk, I walk my dog Suki along bustling thoroughfares where only tufts of grass huddle around skinny gingko and oak trees. Often, especially when the blaring horns and sirens become too much for me, I think of my home on Atkins Avenue. I summon the smell of my grandmother’s pecan pie as if it were wafting through my own apartment. I think of my mother going about her day, and I wish I could simply walk beside her for an hour or two. When Ma-Maw enters my mind, I see her brown eyes, I hear her low voice, and I feel the movement of playing cards as they’re shuffled. I wish I could tell her how much she means to me, that I now know the story of her life, and that there’s so much I want to talk to her about. 

Instead, I call Mom or Granna Margie and simply ask them about their days. 

Every so often, since I’m away and my mother now lives in Texarkana with her husband Wayne, my grandmother talks about giving up the tall, white house on Atkins Avenue. After all, it’s too big for only one person to live in. However, part of me hopes she never sells. Within its old walls, that house holds memories of the years we were together. Perhaps I’m being sentimental. I probably get that from my great-grandmother, who wrote, “I only want the same thing everyone wants and needs, and that’s to love and be loved.”