It’s awesome to think of it, but it’s true: my mother, Rose Zettie Emerson Williams, was born a hundred and twenty-six years ago. I feel very proud of her. I remember her every day and miss her.
My mom lived most of the first years of her life with her mother Florence Emerson Durham. She called her “Mammy”. That was a common way of addressing mothers in those days. The two lived in a small house on her Grandpa John Frank Emerson’s farm a little way off Calvary Ridge Road. Mom’s grandpa had a strong influence on her life. She loved him dearly. Her natural father was never there. When Mom was eleven in 1907, her mother married Billie Durham. Mom would sometimes talk about going places, (usually by walking), with her mother and Billie, but I know very little about him. Dad told me that Mom and her mother had life very hard, so perhaps things were a little better when Billie came into their picture.
Dad told me once that both Mom and her mother would go to people’s houses to work, to wait on them for whatever reason. It is not clear if they were sometimes paid or if they worked only for their meals. I do remember that Dad said that sometimes Mom went alone to stay with families and was not paid. It was just what people expected. Mom did not talk about these times to us very often. But Nancy does remember that one time Mom had said when she and her mother were staying with a family on Grove Ridge, she had to eat peas every day and learned to hate them. You would never have known this. Mom was a good cook. She made a white sauce with the fresh peas from our garden, and they were wonderful.
I often heard my mother talk about playing with her first cousins (who also were her best friends), Mamie and Chloe Emerson, daughters of her Uncle Lou. I wish I had listened more carefully to her stories. She never told long ones that I recall. She just would make a short comment about something that happened when she was little, then she would hurry on to finish whatever she was working on at that time. Once in a while, she would comment about going to school. I think she liked it. I assumed that she had gone to Calvary School since that appeared to be the nearest one, but Donald told me she did not. He said she went to two different schools, no longer there, of course. The first place was Durham Elementary School which was located on the road past the Nichols Cemetery. She also went to Pine Grove Elementary School which sat on a slight hill off what is now Highway 70 almost across the road from Alline’s old house. Donald said that school house was there for a long time. He could remember seeing it behind what was once Duggins’ Store. He also said he remembered Mom talking about one teacher named J.R. Statham. In his research Donald had found a teacher’s name, spelled Jr. Statham, but he could not be sure this was the same person.
I’m sure my mother wanted to complete her schooling, but she was not able to do that. Some time when she was still in grade school, her mother became ill with what was called heart dropsy. Can you imagine what a serious and sad responsibility Mom had – she became the main care giver for her mother. She was just 18 when Florence Emerson Durham passed away. Mom told Donald about the day it happened. They were living in the little house in the field at that time, and Dr. Creech had come. Mom had to go to the spring in the nearby woods to get water because there was no well near their home. She said when she started to come back, she saw Dr. Creech step out on the porch and she knew her mother had passed away.
Afterwards. according to what my sisters and I recall, Mom lived for a time with her Aunt Rexie Emerson Durham, her mom’s sister. She also lived with her Grandpa Emerson. Many years later Mom told my sisters , that she felt she did not have a real home anywhere after her mother died. I think this feeling may have influenced Mom when she absolutely refused to move anywhere after she and Dad had settled on the farm where we all grew up. I’m glad she refused.
After her mother passed away, I know my mom must have felt incredibly sad and lonely, but she did not give up. I guess she had learned her attitude early in her life She never bragged on herself, but I think she took pride in being strong. And she admired other people who were strong, especially strong women. She admired Bett Patterson, for example, one of her relatives who took care of multiple handicapped people in Bett’s family. Mom would say, “She has grit.”
A year or so after her mother died, Dad came along while Mom was living with her Grandpa Emerson. Dad came to ask permission to marry her. Apparently, my mom, Rose Zettie Emerson, the care giver, was already helping to take care of her grandfather. Dad told Donald that Grandpa Emerson said he would have nobody to cook for him if Zettie left. He loved Mom and I’m sure he still missed his daughter Florence. Dad told Donald that Grandpa Emerson had cried and said, “She’s all I got left.”
But it turned out he liked Dad because Dad’s grandfather had been on the Union side in the civil war. That fact pleased Grandpa Emerson who had been a Union soldier himself. Some other young man had shown interest in Mom, but that young man did not meet Grandpa Emerson’s requirements for his family had favored the south. (I don’t think he met Mom’s requirements either).
Sometimes in the 1980’s, Frank and Marcella bought the old Frank Emerson farm place. (The road leading to the farm now bears the name of my brother, Frank Williams. ) We had heard that the house where Mom and her mother had lived was still standing. One weekend when Kim and I were visiting, we asked Frank about walking out to the little house.
What Kim and I saw was very old, very plain walls of what remained. The floor was gone and there were just stones where a fireplace had been. These were rocks so huge we wondered how they could have been moved even by more than one man. I thought about how Mom had said many times she didn’t think much of a fireplace as a source for heat. She would say, “You burn up on one side and freeze on the other side.” I imagined that she and her mother had endured some cold winters there. It looked as though there had, at one time, been two rooms. There was sparse and ragged newspaper on the walls. I had seen old houses before where newspaper had been used to help keep out the cold, such as the old house across from our farmhouse. But whatever modest comfort and safety this little cabin had offered, I’m sure it had been loved because it had been a home.
I am thankful for a lot of the information presented here which came from my brother Donald whom we all respect as the keeper of our family history. When I had conversations with him, I knew I could not remember everything, so I would type up what had been said as quickly as I could get it on paper. In one of our phone conversations, I told him about what Kim and I had seen in the old house in the field. He said that Dad had told him that the house where Mom and her mother had lived was actually another one which was similar in age but closer to the woodland.
But I am not sorry for Kim’s and my visit. It was good for us to pause and consider how Mom and her mother had lived at a similar time and in a similar cabin probably. The visit made me consider just how rough day-to-day living was for them. …. with no social relief, no income from a regular source, no support from Mom’s father, no free meals from sponsoring churches because everybody was poor. They probably made it with just a little help from Grandpa Emerson and maybe Aunt Rexie and what money Mom and her mom were paid here and there. What they did have was determination and a trust in the Lord that better times would come. And for Mom, they did.