My Mama, Gertrude Knox, was born in 1927 to a dirt poor farming family in Madison, Alabama. She was taken out of school at the age of 11 (there were no truant officers back then) to help cook and keep house for her daddy, sisters and brothers.
Her own mother died when she was very young. When Mama wasn't doing chores around the old homestead she was dragging a 50 pound cotton sack through the dusty Alabama cotton fields.
She married young, only 14, and had her first baby a year later. She would eventually have three boys and a girl spaced out over a period of 20 years, and we kids became her focus in life.
Though we were dirt poor she always made sure we had enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, clean clothes on our backs, and enough hugs to keep us warm until we were back in her arms again.
And she always made sure that we understood that just because we weren't rich with money didn't mean we were worth less than anyone else. In all her children she instilled a sense of self-worth and ambition that most rich kids could never match.
This page contains a few photos of Mama over the years. She hates having her picture taken, which made finding an image for the book cover next to impossible. There are only two photographs of she and I together when I was younger. Both are displayed below.
This is the photo montage that was originally set to go on the cover of the book. Due to space limitations the publisher chose not to use the photo of me in my cowboy outfit. It was a huge loss to mankind, but what can you do? They did use the one of me with the cool baseball cap, so it wasn't a total loss.
The snapshot of Mama holding me was taken toward the end of 1960 when I was just a few months old. The cool cowboy outfit was around 1965. Mama used to have to fight me to get those boots off my feet. According to her I wore them night and day (even to bed) and she had to throw them out while I was taking a bath one day. It was a devastating loss that I have yet to recover from.
This is the only other photo of me and Mama taken before I was well into my teens. I was probably less than six months old in this shot and Mama was in her mid-thirties. This was taken on the old farm where we lived.
Check out that mansion we lived in and the old car in the background. This must have been taken on a Sunday because Mama's all dressed up and has on big earrings. Sunday was about the only time you'd catch my Mama wearing makeup and jewelry. I'm not quite sure what she had me dressed in.
OK, fast forward about 46 years. I told you Mama didn't like having her picture taken, so there isn't much to show you between the photos above and those below.
This photo was taken in June, 2007 on her 80th birthday. I presented her with the very first copy of the book and she was thrilled. Someone asked her if she was proud of her son now that he was a best selling author. She said, "Heck, I was proud of him when he was spraying houses for bugs!" That's my Mama for you.
A few weeks later she was at my first book signing. She did her best to blend into the background until people started asking her to sign books. She's a shy person and avoids the limelight and cameras, but I got the feeling that she was enjoying all the attention. At least she's having fun bragging to all her friends about it.
This is the famous "Biscuits & Business" photo that ran in our local paper. It accompanied a story they did about Mama and the book. The photographer happened to show up just as Mama was pulling a pan of biscuits out of the oven and that became the theme of the piece. You can read that
story here.
