Helen Granger Boss - Special Collections - University of Baltimore

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BOSS; 056 1:2:17
I was a mean kid, an ornery kid, a scrappy k.id. I admit it. I've got a
lot of penance before I ever leave this world. I hope the Lord will let
me stay to do them. I really was somebody like that••• and rough as could
be••• always down around the river and half the time my mother didn't know
I was there. I take the children now> when I see them running sort of wild•••
One of them went up to the swimming pool a couple of summers ago and the
screen around it was raised up from the bottom. He went up there with two
brothers and crawled under that screen and was drowned. They say the mother
was home in bed. Well, my mother wasn't home in bed. And my mother didn't
drink, for that matter. I'm not bragging about it, I'm just saying she
didn't know half the time when I was down the river.
Kupchyk: What did you do down at the river?
Boss: Walk around down there••• One morning, I remember to this day, it
was on a Monday. MY mother was washing. She washed in the back yard with
a tub and a board. This fellow that I knew that tended to the boatyard
he was my older brother's age and my brother was five or six years
older than me. So I went down. The tide had come in and my brother's
boat had been washed up. The bow was up on the wharf or on another boat
or something. I called to him and said, "Charlie, look, that will dry
out in the sun today." He said, "You stand on that back end and I'll
hit this and we'll get it off there." He did -- me and that boat!
Well, I wrung my clothes out. We only had to come up past those
two big lots. I guess I didn't meet nobody until I might have got to
that 2100 block that did have houses on it. We had a side gate, naturally,
so I come up and gathered this dress up and wrung it out down there by
the river. That's the kind of little girl I was.