TOMORROW'S HEIRLOOMS
We watch the well-done “Antique Road Show” - the American version – on TV and some of imitators, and, quite often, I marvel at the value placed on rather common articles. The items evaluated often dated from not too many years ago, in many cases, and that can be bit shocking as one grows older.
Trivia is treasure in the mind of the eager, searching antique-seeking people I meet. The better ones, too, seem to come from families who, in their heyday, lived, one might say, below the mean average economic level of their time. The true antique seeker is a person who, for generations, had to do without the very things which seem to be so essential for them to enjoy life in those days.. The “better off” social and economic levels had such items, used them and, even now, think of them as common, rather than as special, much-desired items today.
Antique seekers, both professional and amateur, are given to chasing rainbows in the form of dream of what life would be like if such and such an items could be found. The quality of such things may vary greatly. I have witnessed deceit on more than one occasion, to, not maliciously done but through a convenient occasion of need. . A local antique gatherer I knew had on display in his kitchen a particular piece which he called a “kitchen cabinet” and I knew where he got it. The item was in the home of an aged old colored lady whom we knew as “Aunt Ebby” - short for “Elizabeth”. I used to see it when we called at her house to see what she needed in the way of firewood, coal oil, food supplies and other needs. She was fine old lady who had served various families up and down our road for many years. Her house was little more than a shack or shanty - one room with a wooden partition out from one wall which marked off the area she called her kitchen. There was was narrow front door on the wide wall and a double bed pretty much filled the living space. A box-like chest and two,odd, hand-me-down chairs. Along the inside of the kitchen partition stood her “kitchen cabinet”. I recognized it at once when I saw it in a collector home a year or two after Aunt Ebby's death.
One of Aunt Ebby's sons Clarence had build neat shelves on the partition wall on which they kept kitchen needs. In a creative week, shortly before his death in a rock quarry accident, that son had added boards as wide as he shelves to each end of the shelves on the wall. To those he added two boards across the front for two shelves which he hinged them at the ends. They opened as a door to show the shelves. He duplicated that same feature across the bottom two shelves He hinged a large board over the center it folded down a desk-like fold-down in front of the center trio of shelves. He nailed discarded pieces of decorative, do-dad porch molding to each of the doors a grab-on handles. To finish it all off, he burnt designs in each handle with a hot iron of some sort.
Mounted on the original partition wall for a backside, Aunt Ebby's kitchen cabinet stood in the new owner's fine home. Scrubbed, waxed and shiny, it look good . .I think of it as one antique which came to exist out of sheer, poverty-nurtured need and it was made with love and a deep desire of a young, black boy to provide his mother with a fine cabinet she needed.
I have not seen the collector for many years and wonder if the piece has been sold and re-sold. I cringe when I imagine it turning up as an item on “Road Show” some evening and I hear the price it might bring at a sale. Aunt Ebby is gone. Her boy, Clarence, too. Only that kitchen cabinet remains telling of their ever having been among us.
A.L.M. August 21, 2004 [c690wds]
