"For a while it looked like trouble had made us closer friends with everybody, had drawn our whole family together and made us know each other better. But before long it was plainer than ever that it had been the breaking point for my mother. She got worse, and lost control of the muscles in her body; and two or three times a day she would have bad spells of epileptics, first getting angry at things in the house, then arguing at every stick of furniture in every room until she would be talking so loud that all of the neighbors heard and wondered about it. I noticed that every day she would spend a minute or two staring at a lump of melted glass crystals, a door stop about as big as your two fists, and she told me, “Before our new six room house burned down, this was a twenty-dollar cut-glass casserole. It was a present, and it was as pretty as I used to be. But now look how it looks, all crazy, all out of shape.. It don’t reflect pretty colors any more like it used to---it’s all twisted, like everything pretty gets twisted, like my whole life is twisted. God, I want to die! I want to die! Now! Now! Now! Now!”
And she broke dishes and furniture to pieces.
*******
"The whole town knew about her. She got careless with her appearance. She let herself run down. She walked around over the town, looking and thinking and crying. The doctor called it insanity and let it go at that. She lost control of the muscles of her face. Us kids would stand around in the house lost in silence, not saying a word for hours, and ashamed, somehow, to go out down the street and play with the kids, and wanting to stay there and see how long her spell would last, and if we could help her. She couldn’t control her arms, nor her legs, nor the muscles in her body, and she would go into spasms and fall on the floor, and wallow around through the house, and ruin her clothes, and yell till people blocks up the street could hear her.
She would be all right for a while and treat us kids as good as any mother, and all at once it would start in---something bad andawful---something would start coming over her, and it come by slow degrees. Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show. Spit would run out of her mouth and she would start in a low grumbling voice and gradually get to talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and her arms would draw up at her sides, then behind her back, and swing in all kinds of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she would double over into a terrible-looking hunch---and turn into another person, it looked like, standing right there before Roy and me.
I used to go to sleep at night and have dreams; it seemed like I dreamed the whole thing out. I dreamed that my mama was just like anybody else’s. I saw her talking, smiling, and working just like other kids’ mamas. But when I woke up it would still be all wrong, all twisted out of shape, helter-skelter, let go, the house not kept, the cooking skipped, the dishes not washed. Oh, Roy and me tried, I guess. We would take spells of working the house over, but I was only about nine years old, Roy about fifteen. Other things, things that kids of that age do, games they play, places they go, swimming holes, playing, running, laughing—we drifted into those things just to try to forget for a minute that a cyclone had hit our home, and how it was ripping and tearing away our family, and scattering it in the wind.
I hate a hundred times more to describe my own mother in any such words as these. You hate to read about a mother described in any such words as these. I know. I understand you. I hope you can understand me, for it must be broke down and said."
---from Chapter 7, Bound for Glory
