The odds
and ends of reminiscences which follow are not intended to represent an
exhaustive treatment of any subject. They were gleaned from interviews with
these early citizens of East Bolivar County: Mr. and Mrs. R. L. Beevers,1
Mrs. George Rains,2 Mrs. Sparkman3, Mrs. Mary H. Janoush4,
Mrs. Dellie Tillman Gresham5, and Mrs. Frank Thomason6.
It is hoped that they may give some detail on how the people lived, especially
detail as seen by a woman.
The mere
physical work of keeping alive and clearing the woods challenged all the
energies of both men and women. Mrs. Beevers' opinion of her first sight of the
country, as a bride of seventeen, is typical, "I thought I had come to the
jumping off place." Mr. Beevers says of the wilderness, "A good
worker could cut one-fourth of an acre a day in the tall cane brakes." He
seems to have been the nineteenth century counterpart of our modern cotton
picking champions, for he recalls, "Once I needed some cash urgently, I
made it by picking four hundred pounds of cotton a day for two weeks, at
seventy-five cents a hundred."
When the
Beevers family came, they report, there were few Negroes in the section. For
the first year of their residence, therefore, they had a young white man in
their home to help with farm labor. Dr. Meek brought in the first Negroes as
farm workers-six families. "A howl went up," says Mr. Beevers.
"The white settlers did not want them."
Mrs.
Rains also reports that her family was usually augmented by three of four white
boys who were "the help" as "there were no Negroes at the
time."
Mrs.
Sparkman brought a servant, part Indian, from Winona. She recalls that there
were some white servants in Cleveland and that sometimes white women did
washing for pay.
Woman's
work was indeed never done. Mrs. Beevers at one time milked eighteen cows every
day and often milked as many as twelve a day. Much of this milk went to feed
the hogs, which furnished most of the meat, fresh or salted and dried.
In, this home, butter was preserved. The
mother worked out all the moisture, put the remaining butter into clean cloth
bags and weighed them down in strong brine. She would then work sweet milk into
the butter when it was to be used.
1 Data on
Mr. and Mrs. Beevers will be found elsewhere in this volume.
2 Mrs. Rains, born Seals, came from Hinds County with her family
at the age of three, settled at Walnut Grove on the edge
of Coahoma County. At eight, she moved to Bolivar County, to a place four miles
west of Alligator Lake. She married first Mr. Lockman, then George Rains.
3 Mrs.
Sparkman came to Cleveland by train in February, 1886, as the wife of Dr.
Sparkman. after the couple had lived six months in Leake County.
4Mrs. Janoush came to the Wall place near Skene in 1897 from
Iowa, having lived in Minnesota and Dakota. Her family bought land from the
railroad, uncleared, at six dollars per acre.
5 Mrs. Gresham is the daughter of Alex Morgan, who is reputed to
have given the name "Pea Vine" to the railroad. She came from Alabama
in 1895.
6 Mrs. Thomason,
born Hattie Staple at Six Mile Lake came to Merigold before the first train went through. She married in 1885.
Every season
brought its duties. According to Mrs. Rains, this was their yearly program:
Make the crop in the spring, gather it in the fall, pick cotton till Christmas
or even spring, go to school in summer.
Mrs.
Thomason recalls the making of hominy in great quantities in wash pots. Ashes
were sifted into a pot of corn, and the whole was boiled. The corn was then
taken out and washed twice; then it was put back to "finish," that
is, to become tender. At her childhood home also milk was kept in cellars dug
in the ground-with shelves around and a movable top1.
Mrs.
Janoush speaks of cleansing water with lye. The process was simple. Water was
pumped into a barrel, lye was poured in, and the mixture was allowed to settle.
Houses
must have satisfied only the most modest ambition for comfort. It is typical
that, as Mrs. Beevers says, the windows had wooden shutters since there were
few glass panes in the section. Most houses had chimneys of mud worked up with
grass to give body.
The
first cow of Mrs. Beevers' herd was the gift of Mr. Pearman. He had said to the
young bridegroom, "If I like Molly, I'll give her a cow." He sent for
her to come for inspection and spend a night with the family. She got the cow.
Other presents were a dozen chickens from Mr. Beevers' father and a hog from
Mr. Starkey Taylor. She also had the comparative luxury of a stove and kerosene
lamps.
Mrs.
Rains' memory furnishes details of how her mother, for her family of twelve,
cooked on a fireplace, washed, and ironed. Team work was the rule. Mrs. Rains,
for example, at the age of seven, stood on a soap box to increase her height
and ironed two nights a week till 10 o'clock, only to be up and picking cotton
all the next day. She had begun her cotton picking earlier, for she had gone to
the field at the age of three, with a bag, made from an indigo sack, that would
hold three pounds.
All her
family, she says, helped to string beans on threads for drying and to spread and
turn the okra, which was dried on planks. Popcorn they tied in bundles and hung
behind the kitchen stove (after they got a stove).
Her mother kept the household cleanly
dressed by primitive but effective methods. Clothes, including very dirty and
stained work clothes, were first soaked in warm suds in a half-barrel made into
a tub - to loosen the dirt. Then they were lifted to a battling block, I resembling a
butcher's block, and pounded with a batler, a wooden stick. Warm water was constantly
poured on them, and very little dirt was
left. Such as remained was scrubbed away by a washboard in a tub of suds.
Fabrics, of course, had to be sturdy to withstand this treatment. Lye soap was
made both in liquid form and in hard squares; an "indigo sack" was
used for bluing purposes.
1 Mrs. Thomason also recalls as
" child watching a horsepower gin operated by a treadmill. It was on
Sunflower River.
Amusement? There was not time for much,
but life ha_ some play. Friends gathered on Sunday afternoons around Mrs.
Beevers' organ to sing such sentimental favorites as "Whisper Softly,
Mother's Dying," "Put my Little Shoes Away," and "I Stood
on the Bridge at Midnight." Mrs. Beevers found time for embroidery,
crochet, and innumerable patch-work quilts. She also delighted in flowers and
shrubs. The huge box hedges now in her yard grew from roots brought from her
home in Tennessee and planted in 1887 or 1888.
Mrs. Rains' recollection is that
amusement, such as it was, was self-made, never artificially stimulated. When,
as a child, she had to "mind the gap," she kept herself from being
bored by performing on a corn-stalk fiddle. Children also made popguns and wind
instruments from cane. A gallop through the woods on a good horse was
refreshing recreation. The older children would ride (eight or ten miles to
dance all night by a guitar or fiddle played by a Negro at the home of their
friends. They would feast at midnight, go home about dawn, and work in the
fields all next day. Sometimes amusements were made to be useful. Mrs. Rains,
for example, at seven, pieced a quilt from the unfaded back widths of ladies'
four-breadth skirts' and lined it with the tails of men's hickory shirts. It
never wore out.
Mrs.
Janoush reports enjoying an occasional Fourth of July fish fry on the river
with a barbecue in Cleveland in 1898 to stimulate enlistment for the war with
Spain.
Mrs.
Sparkman was more sophisticated. "We had an embroidery club," she
says, "and entertained by turns. Later we played Five Hundred." They
also went "away" to circuses.
Mrs.
Johnnie Davis of Cleveland chuckles over a recollection of the first King's
Daughters meeting in Cleveland, which was at the home of Mrs. Sparkman and to
which she was invited as a young bride. Mrs. Sparkman owned a very talented
parrot, who occupied a small porch as his domain. So many guests arrived that
every chair was brought out, even the straight-backed chair from Polly's porch.
This was the one occupied by the bride-who had never seen or heard a parrot. As
the meeting progressed, she was mystified to hear a raucous voice repeating,
"Where is it? Where is it? WHERE IS IT?" Then in strutted the parrot,
every feather bristling with rage. He made his way from guest to guest, finally
reached his chair, shouted "Here it is," leaped up behind the
bride, and made circumstances so unpleasant
that she was forced to vacate, and the hostess had to send out and borrow a
chair.
For formal education, opportunities seem to
have been almost nil. Mrs. Rains reports that when she was twelve years old, a
school was established, "centrally located," though it was four miles
from her home in the settlement on Alligator Lake. She, however, knew how to
read and spell before she started this formal training, having had a
blue-backed speller and a McGuffey's Reader of her own. This school
"kept" three months in summer and was directed by a teacher who
boarded from house to house with patrons. During the overflow, children went to
school in a dug-out, with a smudge-pot burning at the stern and bow to keep
away the buffalo gnats. When the water receded, the second state was worse than
the first, for then they had to walk through the tenacious mud. Mrs. Rains
remembers that once in the mud her shoe sole pulled from the upper;
consequently, she was barefoot for the rest of the year. (The heavy, coarse
leather shoes with a gusset in each side, high tops, and brass-reinforced toes,
were bought only once a year for each child).
For lunch, the school children had baskets
nicely divided into compartments, the result of "ordering off."
Within these were always pieces of fried chicken, home-cured ham, or sausage,
baked sweet potatoes, cake or pie, or buttered biscuit to go with an
ever-present bottle of molasses. They kept bottles of milk cool in a boxed-in
spring on the school ground. At recesses they hunted pecans on an island but
were afraid of the wild hogs which also wanted the nuts.
Mrs. Beevers, though she came to the county as a bride and did not
attend school here, reports a four-month school held at a church where the old
Cleveland Cemetery now is.
Outside of formal schooling, children
got what they could from the meager bookshelves at home. Mrs. Rains recalls
that the first newspaper she saw was the Louisville Courier Journal. Someone
rode four miles to the post office twice a week after the boat had made its
landing on Tuesday and Friday.
Mr. Beevers as a young man "carried the
mail," making a weekly two-day trip to Carson's Landing. Previously all
mail for Jones' Bayou had been put in a box at Concordia and whoever happened
to be passing brought it back.
"Few books" is the lament of Mrs.
Beevers. She brought a few treasured volumes from Tennessee, and the family had
a Bible and an almanac. They took the weekly Atlanta Constitution and
admired the editorship of Henry W. Grady.
Mrs. Janoush recalls that her family
took a Chicago newspaper for awhile. Mrs. Thomason says, "We never saw a
newspaper. Sometimes
with our groceries from Rosedale
would come a bundle of old Commercial Appeals.
Actual
church services were real events. Mrs. Rains remembers that, when she was twelve,
a minister came to their community once a month for two services. Members went
in mule-drawn wagons and had dinner on the grounds.
Mrs. Beevers, in riding skirt and on a
sidesaddle, attended church services once a month in Cleveland. Progress in riding
was muleback, horseback, wagon, buggy. (Mrs. Coleman and Mr. Boss Beevers
eventually acquired a surrey each).
Mrs. Sparkman was impressed with the
religious unity which the comparative isolation promoted. Methodists and
Baptists alternated their service in the same church building, though the
women's societies of the two denominations functioned separately.
Mrs.
Janoush, a Roman Catholic, gives an account of early Baptist and Methodist
services held alternately at the schoolhouse in Skene. On special days in the
religious calendar, or whenever circumstances permitted, she and her family
boarded the Pea Vine and went to the Catholic Church in Greenville. Later they
were ministered to by a priest from Shelby.
Insects presented an insistent and annoying
problem. Buffalo gnats, for example, were savage enough to kill a mule. Mrs.
Rains tells of protecting mules by a tight roll of woolen rags fastened under
the hames and gradually burning with thick smoke.
Screens were unknown, though Mrs. Sparkman
remembers that her mother in Winona effectively screened her windows with
mosquito netting. Bars were used on beds; "very hot" is the universal
verdict concerning them.
Flies were frequently combated by a punkah, a
device suspended over the dining table, which could be pulled by a string and
thus at least keep the flies in motion by a rhythmic fanning. Failing that,
there might be a long cane with newspaper strips stitched on, gently swayed by
hand. Mrs. Sparkman grows reminiscent about a machine that was set on the
dinner table. It was wound up like a clock and had a miniature windmill on the
side. "But," she says, "it didn't disturb the flies; they rode
around on it."
Though Bolivar suffered in the great yellow
fever epidemic of 1878, the natives successfully escaped the disease in the
epidemics of the early part of the twentieth century. Trains were not allowed
to stop at Cleveland in times of such danger. Mrs. Gresham relates that she and
her husband had been back to their old home in Alabama while the county was
quarantined. They slipped off the train several stations away, hid out in the woods several days, and made their
way circuitously to their home in the Skene neighborhood. Their consciences
were clear, since they knew they had not been near the fever.
Before the wilderness began to blossom as the
rose, the original denizens, the wild animals, were both blessing and bane.
They were blessing in that they furnished both food and sport. Many shared Mrs.
Thomason's opinion that "Bear makes good roast and hash." She adds
that bear grease, which does not harden, makes good shortening for biscuit. She
could not eat coon, however, until a young boy advised her to try the forelegs
and ribs with pepper sauce. "Possums," she says, "were skinned
off with ashes and scraped like a hog, and looked pretty when dressed."
Hunting was both sport and necessity.
"Kill and divide" was the rule. One "Red" Taylor, uncle of
Starkey Taylor, with his twenty-five hounds was the most assiduous Nimrod.
At the
Sears home, Messrs. Bob Bobo, Felix Payne, Sam Dunn, and others with about
seventy-five dogs would gather for a week of bear hunting. Sometimes the kill
would be eight in a day. Choice cuts were roasted and eaten, the rest boiled in
huge outdoor pots for the dogs. Hunting brought its hazards. Once during a hunt
one of the boys with a bear at bay shot a gun which failed to fire. While the
dogs held off the bear, he cut a big cane and sharpened it. At first he aimed
poorly and struck the bear's side, breaking at once both the bear's rib and the
cane. While dogs and wounded bear fought, he resharpened the cane and thrust
again-this time at the bear's heart-fatally. Mrs. Rains is the authority for
this tale.
Animals were natural trespassers in what had
been their paradise. Mrs. Rains' recollection is that at Walnut Grove they
could not have a corn crop for several years on account of the bears. The corn
was pulled by the bears, carried by them as they walked on their hind legs,
thrown over the fence, picked up, and carried to a certain spot - always the
same - and eaten. At the end of the season the heap of ears would be as big as
a cotton house. Farmers trapped a few bears and watched many nights from a
scaffold erected in the fields, but they could never catch the canny marauders.
Bear cubs, says Mrs. Rains, cried with a sound like that of a crying Negro
baby, and a bear track in mud was hardly distinguishable from that of a grown
Negro.
Bears were a constant threat to hogs.
Mrs. Rains remembers that one day at noon she heard a vehement squealing from
the hogs that rested under the black locust bushes about seventy-five yards
from the house. A bear had caught a 150-pound hog. The bear, seated on its
hunkers," held a hog under its left arm, secured by a firm grip of the
jaws at the back of the neck, and was pommeling him with a strong right paw.
One of the boys shot. The bear staggered away on its hind feet and grasped the
wound in its side with its paw. The second shot, aimed at its mouth, finished
off the bear. The hog went to the house, where he was treated with a salve of
elder bark and leaves and put into a pen with a good wallowing hole. He
recovered and made good pork that winter.
Bears were not the only enemies of the
swine. Mrs. Gresham relates that she saw five wolves killing and eating a hog,
about 1897.
Though Mrs. Rains tells many good stories,
the following is her best, as she gives it:
After the 1882 overflow the
cane had been swept into drifts. On these drifts my brother and I stood to pick
blackberries. We heard a rattle.
Brother kicked at the
snake; the snake struck and barely grazed his shin. We started for home, but
Brother gave out. Iran home and gave the alarm.
The other brothers ran to
him and carried him to the house, where they laid him on the porch. Mother split down the back of
a three-pound live
chicken and placed the warm,
bleeding flesh of one half on the wound. The chicken's flesh turned green and
the eyes popped out of the head.
The other half was used
likewise and turned green and yellow. After an emetic, the boy vomited green
matter. Plasters of lard and salt were applied. The boy recovered.
Even the friendly
animals were sometimes a problem. When the Sparkmans got their first automobile
(many years, of course, after the preceding story), they did not use it at
night since it had no lights. Once, however, being belated, Dr. and Mrs.
Sparkman and a friend were caught on the road. Mrs. Sparkman and the friend
took turns walking ahead of the car and shooing out of the road the many cows
that were contentedly sleeping on it. Needless to say, this was in the summer.
In winter, even the streets in Cleveland, innocent of gravel, were so muddy
that they could not be traversed by wagon.
Obviously life was real and earnest for
early Bolivar Countians.