WITH LOVE AND BLADES
PAMELA GARBER
"...Evidently Colleena Sue has more trust in Mother's aim than the audience has. It takes a steady eye and a stout heart to heave knives at the apple of your eye, but this female William Tell has no qualms and plenty of faith..." - announcer for Universal Newsreel, 1950s Texas.
Film Still of Colleena Sue Gallagher, age 2, from "Knife Throwing Family" (ca. 1950's)
Universal-International Newsreel Featuring Texas-based Gallagher family. 00:01:03.
From the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which "celebrates the state's home movies, industrial films, television output, and regional cine-club product as well as Hollywood and internationally produced images of Texas...an important collaborative role in the...larger motion picture heritage."
www.texasarchive.org/about.html
My siblings and I were completely dependent upon our parents (and especially our mother), to feed us, much like our palpable dependency on her for every other aspect of our lives. And we were in awe of her fearlessness about the kitchen: how to test the stove and not burn her thumbs, how she could de-vein shrimp without de-veining herself, how she could open a clam or peel a carrot with nary a drop of blood. We could not imagine a time where we would have the same confidence with such deadly tools.
Despite all of our reassuring memories of the kitchen, like the scent of stews brewing, the softening onions in a pan, or making cookies with Mom and Dad, we recall somewhat more gruesome ones as well. For me, it was when I was perhaps five or six, and my sister and I were fighting in the kitchen, pulling each other's hair and slapping each other into the refrigerator. There on the counter above me sat a forgotten meat pounder a few inches long. Compelled to grab the instrument by sheer animal-child madness, never having picked it up before, and, luckily for her, barely being strong enough to swing it near her face. The mallet hit her cheek to the side of her eye, and I have never touched it again. Another time, I remember when my younger brother discovered the perils of a freshly opened soup can. Out of curiosity, he jammed his little fist into the can's lid, and got stuck inside of the can, and we rushed him mystified and bawling to the hospital for stitches. The kitchen was filled with potential violence, and our collective clumsiness only added to the dazzle of Mom's cutlery skills.
Which makes a situation like Miss Louella Gallagher all the more mystifying. In a more public memory (though obscure at that), there exists a bizarre newsreel featured on the website for the Texas Archive of The Moving Image from 1950. The short clip involves Louella, a young mother, and her two daughters who are 5 and 2 1/2 years old. The film opens with Connie Ann (the older) and Colleena Sue walking hand-in-hand across a yard to a small platform with a flimsy plywood wall. Louella, with a fist full of chef's knives fanned before her, is winding up to throw with a look of distant concentration. Connie is the unlikely target, posed as though she is praying at her bed, her little hands sweetly held next to her face while knife after knife land next to her chubby cheeks. Louella finishes with grace and proudly turns toward the crowd, who are mostly made up of flinching young women and girls. Colleena Sue then gathers the chef's knives, which are almost as long as she is, and trades places with her sister. The close-up of her face reveals agitated confusion beneath her smile as the knives come hurtling toward her, particularly after one bounces off the board just inches from her tiny nose. It ends with Colleena Sue surprised that her curls are still attached to her head. Who would be as bold as her to stand in front of a very possible death dealt to her by her own mother?
In "The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking" by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, Giard writes of "Doing-Cooking."" Giard expounds on the pleasures and the under-recognized skills in routine kitchen work as a social function by examining "Gesture Sequences": those expressions happening within "the intimacy of kitchens...[the] tenderness or irritation that takes hold of you in the face of this continually repeated task.” Does Colleena Sue unknowingly take the skilled movements of her mother's wrists as a kind of "loving gestures" that other children may find that their mothers performed in their kitchens preparing food? Maybe it is a demonstration of perhaps the strongest faith in the lovingness of "Mother": that her every movement is for the pleasure and well-being of her children, and that she could not do them harm, even though she throws death-objects at their faces, it is not with malice...Or is it an over-the-top display of a kind of ownership over the child; that Colleena Sue becomes utterly aware on how dependent she is upon her mother's goodwill and skills for her own good health? We should quickly examine the consequences of watching one's mother in the kitchen.
"Nourishing" is a feature of: comfort and sociality; of celebration of either life (a festival) or death (a funeral); of survival. It is not just feeding but developing. Giard argued that "in the kitchen, one battles against time, the time of this life that is always heading towards death. The nourishing art has something to do with the art of loving, thus also with the art of dying." Her examination of women in the kitchen emphasizes how their private, unnoticed cooking practices makes them architects of corporeal and emotional development in their children. It is (quite often) Mom's daily, patient movements ("loving gestures") "...performed in the succession of meals and days, with attention given to the body of others." So every slice of carrot, every turn of the spoon, is potentially the greatest act of responsibility for the healthy functioning of their families' bodies and spirits.
It is interesting that Giard chose to use the word "battle" with regards to the kitchen. In this sense, the preparation of daily meals becomes a display of love and also a display of power: power in the skill needed to produce, with tools that could be deadly weapons, and power over the meal's beneficiaries' health. Louella Gallagher embodied this to the extreme by making her children targets in her exhibition of knife skills. Outside of the kitchen, in a public setting, her cold confidence is intimidating, seemingly devoid of motherliness. Her children are sweet and willing (although they may be trained as such), even when they are uncomfortable they stay against the board, waiting for their mother's throws. They must believe in their mother's talents with her tools and that she has their best interests at heart, otherwise, they cannot subsist. Did Louella ever desire for her children to learn anything from this dangerous experience? Was she just completely absorbed in the attention of the public spectacle of her performance?
While my mother or your's might not be such a show-off with her knife set, her skills in the kitchen could be thought of as representative of her accomplishment in the raising of her children, of nourishment, of love. With Louella, motherly affection becomes entwined with the danger of death, and what could (rightly) be seen as abuse can also be seen as public acknowledgment of the importance of her skills, both with cutlery and with her children, a showing of her "stout heart." To watch Mom perform, either in the kitchen or on the news, these "loving gestures" may remind us how much, as both a privilege and a burden, nourishment is a skilled and sometimes violent work for the sake of family.