The Struggle to Be Known

Okay, so I’m going to tell this story the way I’ve always heard it.

Whether or not every detail is accurate, I believe it’s true. This is how it’s always been told to me — by my mom, who’s 93 now. A friend of mine once said, “You should write that story down sometime.” And I thought, Maybe it’s more than a story. Maybe this needs to be a song. That was really the light-bulb moment.

My mom was about three years old when her father died. They were living on a piece of land in Mississippi at the time. The whole extended family lived there—her uncles, aunts, everyone. There were four houses on the property that the uncles had built, and all the families lived side by side. The kids played together. It sounds like an idyllic childhood, really.

Mom lived there until she was around three, so of course her memories from that time are faint. But when her father passed away, her mother eventually remarried, and they moved to Louisiana. After that, the family kind of lost day-to-day contact with the rest of the relatives who had stayed behind in Mississippi.

Then the war came. Many of the uncles were either drafted or enlisted. And here’s where the story takes a turn. One of the uncles, during training, was put into a gas chamber—a practice that was apparently common at the time. My dad talked about that, too. They wanted the soldiers to recognize the smell, to understand the effects. They’d be in there just long enough to learn.

But something went wrong.

This one particular uncle — he stayed in too long. Maybe he got too strong a dose. Whatever happened, he suffered some type of brain damage (or emotional damage) from the exposure. Not long after, he was sent home. But he was never the same again. He withdrew. Took to the woods on the old family land. Kept mostly to himself. He wasn’t the same man anymore.

Years later, my mom and her family went back to visit the family and property. They were standing up on the porch of one of the houses when someone saw him — her uncle — out in the trees. His mother called out to him, “Hey! Come here! Come see who’s come to visit!”

He stepped out of the woods and walked up to the porch. His mom said, “Look! Look! Do you know who this is?”

And he looked at my mom — and they say his face changed. It clicked. And he said, almost instantly, “Little Sister. Little Sister.”

That’s what they’d called her when she was little. She had been the youngest daughter back then, and everyone called her “Little Sister.”

And even years later, when the movie True Grit came out and one of the characters was called “Little Sister,” my mom would always say, “That’s what they called me. That’s what they all called me — Little Sister.”

So that’s where this song came from. I just felt like I needed to put this story out into the world. It’s such a powerful thing to hear stories from the past — especially ones like this. And I think we could all do a little more to honor where we come from … our families, our parents, the generations that came before us. Just recently I was reading a novel and one of the characters explained that maybe our most important duty in life is to tell our stories to the world.

Click below to listen.