spit-bath [& bird bath]

[Wilson Gray]

From: "Paul Frank" <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>"

> An American visitor used the expression "bird bath" yesterday
> to refer to a quick bath, or wash, with very little water. My paper edition
> of the OED doesn't include this meaning of bird bath. DARE does have an
> entry for it. My friend, who's originally from Massachusetts and who
> recently left the army, says that she's always used the term.


 When I was a child in Marshall, TX, the expression, "bird bath," was
used in my family to mean a washing given to a child using water from
a removable basin that was part of an apparatus that my grandfather
used for shaving on what was called the "backporch," but which was
more like an enclosed veranda.

Though my family was "wealthy" by local black standards, possessing a
fully-functional, amazingly-modern - e.g., a spring-loaded
toilet-paper roller attached to the wall by seeming magic - bathroom,
among other amenities, the family had gotten that way by not spending
a penny unnecessarily. Why shave in the bathroom and burn expensive
electricity, when granddad could shave on the backporch and burn free
daylight, using his late father's straight razor, instead of paying
King Gillette for the privilege of using a safety razor?

In winter, of course, granddad had to use the bathroom, though he got
hot water by boiling water from the family well, insteading of letting
the hot-water faucet run till the hot-water heater kicked in. Not that
the latter option was available, in any case. From first frost till
the first day of spring, there was no running water at all available
to *any* black household, regardless of its net worth.

To give the devil his due, this might also have been true of local
white households, but the "separarion of the races" under Jim Crow was
such that any black person found far enough into a white neighborhood
to find out the situation would, at the very least, have been shot
dead. Unless, of course, he was accompanied by his boss-man.

OTOH, the lynching shown in the film, The Great Debaters, which was
set in large part in Marshall, was entirely fictional. I hadn't yet
been born in those days. But I have relatives, now in their 90's, who
have indignantly - Texans, regardless of race, creed, color, etc.,
tend to take Texas seriously - assured me that that scene was a "dern
story!" i.e., a damned lie.

IAC, the method of using water heated on the kitchen stove and poured
into the bathroom sink to wash a child in winter was also called
giving a "bird bath."

Needless to say, among the poor, the country folk, and others without
indoor plumbing - not being poor didn't guarantee a black household
indoor plumbing, even though the house might be furnished with a
kitchen sink and a full bathroom; as has been noted, "[a black person]
couldn't do *nothin'*, 'less The Man said he could"; even Obama is
finding out the continuing truth of this, though, no doubt, he already
knew it - the bird bath was common. (Once we got running watter, my
granddad recycled the family outhouse into a shed for his gardening
tools.)

I've long assumed that what appears in literature as a "whore's bath"
is essentially a version of the bird bath for adults: hands, face,
neck, pits, crotch are washed at the bathroom sink; no bath, no
shower. Authors assume that everybody is familiar with this term, so
I've never seen a description of this "bath."

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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