I remember getting a present one year through the mail. It came after we’d left Michigan to come back home to North Carolina when my Dad decided being threatened with a beating when he unknowingly broke a picket line at the Detroit plant where he worked wasn’t exactly his glass of sweet tea. The year was 1969, and unbeknownst to him, it was the start of something that would become known as DRUM.

I’d never received anything in the mail before, that I could recollect. I was nine years old, and one of my aunts up there sent me a birthday present. I came home from school, and on the table was a box wrapped in brown paper with string. It had stamps all over it, and my name – Miss Donna Lee Davis, then c/o Mrs. Claude A. Davis, etc. etc. It was very official looking, and I didn’t open it right away. I had to study the stamps, the handwriting, the strange inky stamped markings of where it had been, test the string to see how it was tied, and of course I had to sniff it to see what it smelled like. (paper)

Finally, my mother got a pair of scissors and we opened the box. Inside was a sewing kit, and inside the sewing kit was a tape measure, a tomato looking thing that was a pin cushion, a thimble, and all colors of thread, red, white, brown, yellow, orange, green, blue, etc., and other things I eventually learned to use. I loved it.  I  loved it so much, I still have it and some of the items that came in it. The second picture shows the original Simplicity pattern I bought to make my first sewing project – a skirt.

Unlike my gift, which I was excited to get, when Sonny receives a package one afternoon, it fills her with dread because she knows what’s going to be in it.

Chapter 18

Aunt Ruth had been gone only a couple of days when the mail carrier gave a quick honk in the late afternoon, which signaled there was a package.