I loved to draw, my mother says, but there wasn’t any paper. It was the Depression, in Sweetwater, in East Tennessee, and a drawing pad was a treasure. When I’d get one for Christmas I used to fill both sides of the pages. I drew squirrels and milk cans and barn cats and my father’s wagon. My father was named Stephens, it used to be Van Stephens, because he was Dutch, and he had a full head of white hair till the day he died. My mother was Mary O’Cochran. Her mother came from Georgia to Tennessee in the back of a covered wagon when they heard that Sherman had reached the sea and turned and was coming back again; they’d survived the first march, and hidden the horses in a pit covered with brush, though the Yankee soldiers had stolen the bacon frying in the pan.

I had so many brothers—roughhousing boys who’d fight in the barn—and then my sister Mildred, then me, the youngest. Though there was another sister too. My mother had two fine things: a tall blue vase she bought on her honeymoon at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1914, and a red velvet cape she called her “opera cloak.” When my little sister died she cut up the cape and sewed her daughter a shroud. She doesn’t say she had a baby who died herself, a blue baby born between Sally and me who would have been my brother; boy without a name, as far as I know, buried in some Tennessee cemetery in a grave nobody will ever visit.