The Minnie Years and Julia Town

My Aunt Minnie was a tyrant. Nothing gave her more pleasure than
to rear back on the hocks of her legs, arms akimbo, and Bellow at people
in such a belligerent voice they were reduced to a state of nothingness.
Cunning, greed and deceit were parts of her outward character discernible
at all times, but her strong filial tendencies were known only to those in
close contact with her.
Aunt Minnie was a tall woman, close to five feet ten inches in height,
weighing somewhere in the two hundreds. A wide face, small eyes spaced
close together, gave her the look of a pouncing hawk. Needless to say, we
stood in communal awe of her. We, being my nine brothers and sisters,
entrusted into her care by my well-meaning, misguided father, whose only
fault laid in his pride as sole provider of a family the size of ours. Father
looked on the acceptance of charily in any form as a cardinal sin. Therefore;
when times became hard, we were packed up and shipped off to a small
rural parish in North Carolina, under the auspices of Minnie
Although we were forced to submit to her absolute rule, there were times,
to give the Devil his due, when she was most kind to us. As time passed, we
learned to mistrust these moments of kindness . . . They seemed to precede
Aunt Minnie at her worst.
Now that I am grown and know something of Aunt Minnie's history,
I am more given to understand her whole character. She was, according to
my grandmother, never satisfied with her status in their small family which
consisted of herself, my grandmother, and their mother. Born some months
after the death of my great-grandfather, she was never sure she could rightfully
claim the legitimacy that fell naturally to my grandmother, who enjoyed
the safety of being born during the lifetime of their father. Consequently,
she was a difficult child who grew to womanhood with a warped sense of
love-hate toward her mother, sister and the whole world.
This too would explain her late marriage. Having developed a tongue
and temper akin to razor sharpness, it was a complete surprise when at the
"old-age" of twenty-nine, she married a "ships'-hang-about" in Newport
News, Virginia, and brought him home to the small house she rented on
Charles Street in Norfolk, Virginia. Her husband, Samuel Bell was born of a
dying mother in the early eighteen nineties. His birth date was never officially
recorded. After the death of his mother, with no one claiming relationship
and still an infant, he was sent by the authority in place to Suffolk Foundling,
the County Home for orphaned Negro children. There he remained until
he reached the age of eighteen. At age thirty two Sam, a loner with a heavy
drinking problem, attended a June Nineteenth Masonic Picnic. There he
met an unattached spinster; Miss Minnie DeComtessa Louisiana Blount,
my Aunt Minnie. After the marriage, she supplied him with a push cart,
work card, and a contract to sell bushels of wood from a local lumber yard,
and promptly set about making this poor spineles...