As announced on January 22, Grace Jones (’27) won the newly inaugural Edwin Hallman Writing Scholarship,
with her essay, “Mother Goose and the King,” which follows below.

Mother Goose and the King

In 2002, in the mountains of Montreat, North Carolina, the King was born. Not to be confused with Jesus or Elvis or any other ruler, the King is an entity entirely unto himself. While some sultans’ kingdoms may contain thousands of miles of terrain and millions of people, the King is limited to a few acres of woods inhabited solely by squirrels, worms, and the occasional bear. Many monarchs are adorned with gold and diamonds and pampered so that their skin shines like the sun; however, his majesty’s crown consists of sugar maple leaves, and while his face is striking, the only bath his stark white expression has seen is that of a mountain rain shower.

Fondly referred to by her grandchildren as “Mother Goose,” my grandmother was a woman like no other. To this day, I don’t know how or why she got the idea, but in the summer of 2002, Mother Goose decided that our family wasn’t weird enough already, and we needed our own idol in the woods by her house, thus, the King was born. Courtesy of Mother Goose’s imagination, his majesty, the King consists of a white plastic face nailed to a sugar maple tree.

Henry David Thoreau said that he “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately.” I don’t know if Mother Goose was very interested in the transcendentalist movement, but she struck out into the woods alone, plastic tree-face, hammer, and nails in hand, in search of the perfect spot for our effigy. Much traversing up and down the mountain, with the occasional help of a weed wacker, effectively cleared a path to the King’s palace. Carpeted in moss and decorated with the hues of a hundred different trees, his castle was more finely furnished than that of Midas.

The King’s palace consisted of two main rooms: the kitchen and the throne room. In this kitchen, the King’s servants concocted the same meal time and time again, consisting of delicious hotdogs (dead brown leaves) served with gourmet buns (live green leaves). The throne room housed the tree on which the face of the King resided and the throne for Mother Goose, a
tree stump on which only she was allowed to sit. The King’s palace stretched out beyond the main clearing into the surrounding woods, and all of his servants were allowed to pick out an area to serve as their personal living quarters. While my room consisted of a huge rock about twenty yards up the mountain, my sister claimed that hers was so deep in the King’s palace that she had to cross railroad tracks to reach it. There has never been a train on that part of the mountain, and now that I am older and more mature, I can call her out for being a big fat liar.

As part of our summers spent in the mountains, my sister, cousin, and I would hike into the woods in order to serve the King as his royal servants. Though we were few in number and in years, we served our ruler with great pride and dignity. We made his daily meals of hot dogs and ensured the cleanliness of his palace by keeping the moss carpet clean, or rather, my sister and cousin would decide where the carpet needed to be removed, tell me to remove it, and watch as I sat on the ground and pulled it up with a stick. Eventually, the King became a member of the family to me; my grandfather passed away in August of 1998. His death meant that neither I nor my sister or cousin ever knew our grandfather. In order to substitute for this loss, we decided that the King was Mother Goose’s new husband, effectively creating a convoluted family dynamic as the grandchildren of the King were also his servants.

Though I spent countless mountain mornings and afternoons playing in the forested halls of the King’s palace, like most childhood fancies, my seemingly indefinite visits to the King came to a close. First, my sister traded hot dogs and moss carpets for other interests, then my cousin, and finally, I too grew weary of our game. I have not been to visit the King in over eight years; the path to his palace has grown over, and the soft carpet of moss I obediently dug up has undoubtedly regrown. I wonder if that old white face still hangs on the tree, patiently awaiting my return, or if nature has overcome him– if the strain of time and rust and neglect was too much for the nails that held him up, and he lies in a heap on the decayed leaves we once fed him as hot dogs. Though I revered this figure during the formative part of my childhood, passing years have blurred his face from my memory, and I cannot picture him in my mind. What expression did he have; was he solemn or gleeful? Did he even have a nose? When exactly did I stop caring about a place that was once so important to me?

Though my trips to the King dwindled as I grew older, I never lacked in visits to his queen, her royal highness Mother Goose. My grandmother was a woman like no other. Mother Goose was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana, under the name Doris Raspberry; she absolutely despised her given name and went by the nickname Sissy for the entirety of her life. Mother Goose divorced her first husband in the early seventies in Texas, a time and place where divorce was neither common nor readily accepted. She took care of her two daughters for six years until she remarried my paternal grandfather, Walk Jones, and effectively became Sissy Raspberry Jones. After the marriage, my grandfather took my dad and his two brothers and moved in with Mother Goose and her two girls to create a great big Brady Bunch family.

Mother Goose suffered three strokes from 2007 to 2014, and eventually, the active, energetic grandmother that my older cousins grew up with was not the same as the one that I did. This is not to say that she wasn’t loving or caring, but as she aged, her personality changed, and the residual damage to her brain resulted in bouts of brain fog and questionable choices. In 2012, she adopted a five-year-old, seventeen-pound rat-dog whom she named Monkey Sugarlump Jones. She willingly adopted this monster, knowing it wasn’t potty trained, and it remained so until its death twelve years later. After her third stroke in 2014, she developed double vision and had to wear an eye patch, which she alone swore made her look as intimidating as a pirate. She loved music and art and adored playing her fiddle even after she became half-blind and couldn’t read the music, making it less enjoyable for her family to listen to her play the fiddle. One of Mother Goose’s more destructive quirks was that she was a night owl. She would stay up until the wee hours of the morning watching late-night television and purchasing dubious products from “as seen on TV commercials” such as shake weights and thigh masters. Her kind but gullible heart was also easily taken advantage of by scammers, exemplified by the time she sent money to a Nigerian man who contacted her by email, pleading for help bringing his wife and children to the U.S.

Aging is a cruel process. On the wall of the Montreat house hangs a beautiful painting depicting a river flowing into a mountain range as the sun sets on the horizon. Unimaginable purples and deep blues color the mountains as the sky is set aflame with oranges, scarlet reds, and blinding yellows. Years after her death, I learned that Mother Goose had painted this herself, an unimaginable concept to me. Age had rendered a pen nearly unusable in her hands, and I could not fathom that the woman I knew had been able to do such a thing.

Age may have limited her mental faculties and converted her into an eccentric old lady, but it did not take away her deliberation. She loved as best she could with the remaining power she had. Even as her body was slowly destroyed by time, she managed to make it to all of my birthday dinners and a few basketball games every year. She would sit on the sidelines cheering for me, though she was unable to tell me apart from the other blurry blobs on the court.

Three years after Mother Goose’s death, I was going through family photos with an older cousin when we saw a picture from before I was born of Mother Goose posing with her grandkids. She stood in the middle of a teeming pile of Joneses without the help of a walker or cane. “This is the Mother Goose I remember,” my cousin said as I examined the woman in the photo, unburdened by eyepatches and bruises from constant falls. As I looked at her, I did notice a tangible difference; yes, she looked younger than I had ever seen her, and her hair was more gray than white, but her smile and eyes seemed to emit a sort of pure life that I didn’t remember seeing. It was almost as if her body had exchanged its vivaciousness for deliberation; at the end of her life, every act she made to love and be loved was a conscious struggle, because living no longer came easily to her. After those strokes, after parts of her brain stopped receiving blood supply and became permanently damaged, each step she took and breath she breathed became like the deliberate stroke of paint on a canvas. The battle that raged inside her quieted as hands that saw a lifetime’s worth of hardships and joy dipped into pigment. Her foot dragged forward, and the outline of a meandering river appeared on the pale, smooth canvas. She stopped to release a slow breath, and color lit up the sky, rattling in and out as orange, red, and yellow hues exiled the emptiness of a blank beginning. I remember her kisses, and suddenly I can see the crisp peaks of a mountain come into focus, backlit by the setting sun and bathed in the glory of her effort. She deliberately decided to live alongside the pain that characterized that final decade of her life, not to triumph over it, but to live in spite of it.

One misty evening in the summer of 2019, four months after Mother Goose’s passing, her family and friends gathered to spread her ashes in the woods of North Carolina. We sang hymns of praise for the life of this remarkable woman and ate banana pudding in her memory. As I walked home that night up the mountain to the home that housed Mother Goose in the late stages of her life, memories one after another flashed through my mind. I summited the gasp-inducing hill that leads to the house and slid open the sliding glass door, casting a glance across the room to Mother Goose’s painting. At the time of her death, at least a decade had passed since she had last painted, but, perhaps now, in the heavens above a small clearing deep in the woods, Mother Goose is once again painting small, deliberate strokes on a canvas. On the earth beneath her, I hope, a stark white face hangs on a sugar maple, waiting for his grandchildren to come visit and make him a hot dog or two.

For more information about Edwin Hallman, for whom the scholarship is named, please see his memorial website.