Britomar's Road Diaries

Leaving Effie Street, we brought with us only what my father could carry in a hobo-style bedroll, inexpertly tied with rope and slung across his shoulder, and what Mother could carry in a satchel, which we called Mother's Boston Bag. I carried a canteen of water, and that was my role the whole time we were on the road: water carrier.

On this day, May 1^st, 1931, a date none of us ever forgot, I looked at my "pupils" and didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t know how to say goodbye. I just looked at them and felt numb inside.

The way I felt, especially about Tiddly, was reminiscent of the way I felt about the one other doll that had entered my life briefly two years before. We were living in the white house, at 333 1/3 Effie Street. Effie Street really wasn’t a street at all, it was several flights of concrete stairs that climbed a low but fairly steep hill most of which seemed to be owned by a little man, hardly bigger than myself, who lived in the big house toward the top of the hill. He owned the brown house, which we were leaving, as well as the white house where we had lived for over three years. That was the longest I could remember living in one place in my ten years.

The white house was one of two identical white houses tied to each other by a wooden deck. The whole complex hung over the side of the hill with a flight of wooden stairs leading down to another larger deck which was actually the roof of a storage shed built into the side of the hill. It was Christmas Day and I was not yet eight years old. I was outside on the deck between the two white houses. The lady who lived in the twin white house emerged from her front door and handed into my arms, un-boxed, un-gift wrapped (a concession no doubt to my father’s diatribes about Christmas being a pagan holiday), a life-size baby doll in a beautiful red and white dress with lace trim, with real panties underneath, and with black shoes and white sox on her feet and a bow in her hair. I carried her in my arms, looked at her numbly. There was no way she could come alive for me the way Tiddly was alive for me. I had no words for what I knew.

But what I knew became realized when my father came home from where he had been holding forth in Pershing Square, holding forth, I have no doubt, on the hypocrisy of people who professed to be Christians but celebrated a pagan holiday. He himself celebrated no holidays. Every day was a holy day for his God. He came home and his face was dark. There was no mercy in him or his God this day. On this day my father was a thundering prophet and this "graven image" before him was an "abomination before God" which could not be tolerated.

February 26, 1936 Plaster City Wednesday

This morning going into Seely under a cloudless sky I breathed deeply and said to myself "It's a grand thing to be a gypsy." I went on to think how free from convention and custom we are. No matter what one might say we are, we are that without pretense of being something else. We have no front to keep up, no social position to maintain, as Helen would say, no nothing.

Methinks, if I were suddenly thrust into even a modest home, I would be suffocated. There are an infinite number of compromises [sic] one must make no matter how humble one's status in the community, that would make me sickly disgusted and quickly fighting mad. Yes, I decided, it was a grand idea to be a gypsy.

I wondered to myself, why I insisted on thinking about gypsies and went on to think about them. There must have been gypsies in the air because when we came into Seely two dark skinned men in a car stopped us to talk -- said they were gypsies, and invited us to come on over and stay with them a few days. Ray said "No, I guess we'll go over the hill while the weather's good." But they insisted they were going over in a couple of days and could take us over then. Ray still said "No," and so after arguing that they might do us a big favor we left them and went on down the road and camped for dinner. Ray went back for water and here the gypsies were coming down the road looking for us.

This time they had the head of their crowd with them. They told Ray they'd give him a job at a dollar and a half an hour. They weren't specific about the job though. Ray countered that he had a job with God. And they said he could make more money with them. Ray laughed at that one, but they weren't to be laughed off. The chief said he had a grown son and wanted a wife for him. Well, Ray might want to "get rid of" me as he so frankly puts it, but he knows he can't give me away like that so we ate lunch and went on down the road.

About four miles out of Seely a man gave us a ride into Plaster City where we are now.

We started to walk out of here but we saw there were no camps ahead and so came back and camped under a Tamerix [sic] tree.

Sitting here on the desert, and looking upon a familiar mountain that is now to the southeast of us, I surrender my heart to the desert. The mountain there to the southeast of us may be familiar, but I have never seen it clothed in amethyst as it is now. Always in the afternoon, it has been blue because it has been more or less to the west of us.

I know now as I sit here [and] view yon mountain in her royal robes, and the cobalt hills over yonder, why Ray loves the desert. I love it too.

Yesterday morning we started out of Plaster City under a bright cloudless sky. I walked along the desert road fascinated. Never had I seen anything as beautiful. It surpasses all description. The desert stretched out sparsely covered with stunted shrubs and the hills rose out of it bare but full of marvelous colours.

As we came to the foothills and started going up the vegetation changed. There was one little bush with a warm orange flower that I pleased to call the Desert Checkerbloom because it seemed to be of the hollyhock family, that disappeared completely [as we climbed]. But there were many new ones to take its place. At first there was the Whip cactus and when we came into In-ko-pah Gorge there were others.