Week 17: Cemetery

Hickory Grove

I grew up hearing about Hickory Grove, the cemetery in rural southern Arkansas (Ashley County) where my mother's people are buried.  There is no charge for a plot, but you must pay for the actual burial, and there are other families buried there besides mine.

Among my mother's ancestors buried there is my grandmother, Ruby Little Leary.  It was a point of much consternation for years that Ruby, a widow who died in 1939 from tuberculosis, didn't have a marker until nearly 30 years after her death.  It's unclear to me how that was finally resolved, although I believe it may have been a family effort, involving contributions from various cousins and my mother.

My first visit to Hickory Grove was in 1979 upon my mother's death. My husband, Larry, and I followed a caravan of relatives on the 5-hour drive from Memphis, TN to Bastrop, LA where we spent the night with my great aunt, Edna, and her second husband, Tom.  Edna and her first husband, Fabe, had been my mother's guardian after Ruby died.

The next day we followed the same relatives across the state line for my mother's funeral at Hickory Grove.  It was an unimpressive affair as I recall. I do remember Aunt Edna remarking, as we lingered afterwards at the cemetery visiting with relatives, she "reckoned" we should leave since the grave diggers would not lower my mother's coffin into the ground until we were gone. We stayed one more night with Aunt Edna, and as we left the next day, we stopped and ordered a monument for my mother.  I didn't want her to suffer the same apparent injustice her own mother had suffered.  And who knew if or when I would ever return to this out of the way place.

As it turns out I've been back twice since then, once in 1998 when I buttonholed my mother's first cousin, Rudy, to make the trip with me. In the nearly 20 years since my mom had passed, Rudy had also buried his own mother (sweet Aunt Edna) as well as his first wife, Jeanne, at Hickory Grove.   I naively agreed for him to make our overnight arrangements, which turned into a comedy of errors. His original plans for us to stay with cousins fell through, a fact I did not know until I picked him up to start our trip.  I just presumed we would find a motel then, but after we arrived in the little town of Bastrop, LA, he got on the phone and, I guess, called everyone he ever knew until someone took pity on him and agreed to give us shelter for the night.   It was the filthiest house I've ever seen (and believe me when I say I am no domestic diva).  But on very short notice she baked a cake for us, and fed us breakfast the next morning.  And maybe if she had gotten more than an hour's notice, she would have swept up the crumbs, dog hair,  and dust bunnies that covered the floors.  So, really.  Who am I to complain?

Our visit to the cemetery was brief, and it seemed about as nondescript as it had in 1979.  On the way out of town, Rudy directed me to a local bank where we both made a deposit to a bank account established for maintaining the cemetery.  It had never occurred to me until then that indeed the upkeep was not free.

In spite of all the confusion surrounding our lodging, I enjoyed spending the 10 hours round trip with my cousin.  He was normally taciturn, but on our ride down and back, he enlightened me about different Mississippi personalities, including B.B. King, Jim Henson, and Jerry Rice.  He also shocked me with family history about a "non-parental event" in the not too distant past!

As we passed back through Indianola on our return, we narrowly missed being sideswiped by a large SUV.  I was driving a rental car and all I could think about was having declined all the optional rental insurance.  Then arriving back at Rudy's home, he realized he hadn't thought to bring house keys with him, and his wife was not yet home from work.  So I watched as this lithe 75-year old man managed to break in to his own home by stacking things collected from around the yard and wiggling his way in through the kitchen window.  I was relieved to get back to the relative tranquility of my friend's house in Memphis.

In 2016, Larry and I were planning a road trip to Memphis to attend a family reunion, and he agreed to a side trip to Hickory Grove.  By this time, I was interested in my family genealogy, and had more knowledge of my mother's family history, so I was actually relishing this part of the trip.  I took my grandmother's old photo albums to the reunion with me, and spent some time with the only living cousin of my mother's generation, Rudy's younger brother.  Although his vision was not good, he made his best effort and gave me names of some of the people in the photos, adding a little color by recounting what he could about a few.  I tried to write down much of what he said, but I know I missed a lot.

My husband and I left Memphis a few days later, and stopped to visit the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, MS.  We had seen him perform numerous times, so it was a joy to tour the museum.  We ate lunch at the Blue Biscuit across the street where I had some of the best fried okra ever.  We were entertained by the owner, Harlan, who filled us in on the music scene there and said it was hard to compete with Morgan Freeman's club up the road in Clarksdale.

We eventually got on our way and drove on to spend Halloween night in Monroe, LA, the largest town near Hickory Grove.

After breakfast the next morning at the local IHOP, as we were heading to the cemetery, we stopped at a nearby Home Depot and bought several pots of mums to plant on the graves of my mother, grandmother, Aunt Edna, and Jeanne.  Since we hadn't thought this through, we also had to buy a shovel!

I had gotten directions to the cemetery from its Facebook page, and fortunately that included the GPS coordinates.  Once we turned off the main road from Monroe leading to Crossett, AR, we turned twice on the wrong dirt roads. Having those GPS coordinates kept us moving until we finally saw the nice wooden sign showing us the way.

As we turned into the cemetery there was a pickup truck with a couple of people sitting in it; they claimed they were looking for a particular grave and couldn't find it and pulled away.  Since that time, I've read that occasionally there are people who take advantage of the remoteness of the cemetery to do who knows what.

The cemetery itself sits in the middle of a pine forest, five acres of flat land, with very little in the way of shrubbery or shade trees.  (Mercifully, there's some type of evergreen tree that gives shade to many of the Wombles and Littles.)  There's a gravel road that circles through the cemetery in one direction. We didn't have to drive too far before my husband spotted a marker with LITTLE on it, one of the surnames of my mother's family members.  So we pulled over and walked around looking at the various gravestones.  My grandmother was the youngest of 10 children, and several of her siblings are buried there.  So are my great-grandparents, and 2x grandparents.

Other than not bringing a shovel with us from home, we were otherwise well prepared to spend a few hours there.  It was a mild autumn day, sunny but not too hot or humid.  While Larry was digging up the hard soil to plant the mums, I got out the materials I had packed to make stone rubbings.  Besides my mother's and grandmother's markers, I also made rubbings on the stone of my 2x grandfather, Elisha R. Womble, 1836-1926.

I ruminated over the crude stones for Aunt Edna's two young children that looked as if they had been etched by hand, wondering if Fabe had made them as best as he could.  I sat in a folding chair and had a nice visit with Aunt Edna and Jeanne; then poured my heart out to my mom, crying all the while. Larry and I wondered about the significance of the butterflies that flew about landing here and there on the mums and Larry's shoes.

And then...mums planted, rubbings completed, prayers said, we packed up and pulled away.  I had kept the receipt from the deposit I had made to the bank in 1998, so we made a stop there only to find that the account had been closed.  After we returned home, I found out through the cemetery's Facebook page where to make a donation.  Now the cemetery has tax exempt status with the IRS, and I've encouraged my cousins to donate as well.  Yes, it appears I've become "that relative" who wants everyone to share the joy of learning our family history.

Rather than wait another 17-18 years for our next visit, we're planning to go back this fall when we once again have a trip scheduled to Memphis.  That afternoon in 2016 spent at Hickory Grove among my ancestors was really significant for me, and I hope this one coming up will be just as memorable.

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Week 15: Taxes

My mother, who died in 1979, worked her entire life as a secretary/stenographer and, as an extension of those skills, left behind well organized files. Going through her papers for the umpteenth time, I stopped to look at the business sized enveloped labeled "Tax Returns", stuffed with Forms 1040 dating back to 1948, the year she and my dad got married.

I found it interesting, and sad as well, to see her salary progress from earning $3,200 in 1948 working for the Texas & New Orleans Railroad in El Paso, TX, and topping out in 1972 at a little more than $6,500 as a clerk for the federal government in Memphis, TN.  Such was the life for a divorced woman, a single parent with lots of smarts, but only a high school education.  It's also a statement about the time and place(s) where she lived too.

Perusing these tax returns, I learned where she and my dad worked in El Paso.  I found the addresses where they lived before I was born, and before they bought their first and only house together.  And from those addresses, I can deduce they bought their house sometime in 1953.  In 1952 they claimed a combined income in excess of $8,000, a very comfortable income for a small family of 3 in El Paso, I would think. Their earnings were only slightly less in 1953.  I learned that my mom usually earned more than my dad.

Then...(cue dark clouds and ominous music)...things went bad for them in 1954 and 1955. It looks like they filed a joint return in 1954, but the 1955 return is filed in my mom's name only.  The attached earnings statements were from El Paso, Seattle, and Memphis. My parents separated, then divorced in July 1955, with my mother removing us from the drama in El Paso and settling in Memphis where she had a very small network of cousins she could rely on for support.  Memphis was also a big enough city where she could easily find employment, as opposed to the small towns in Louisiana where she grew up.

Her 1956 tax return includes a typed explanation of why she claimed a deduction for license plates from both Texas and Tennessee, a result of my father not living up to his end of their property agreement.  I remember the event when that car, a two-tone 1954 Mercury, was repossessed on a weekend while I played out front and watched, incredulous, as a strange man went into the apartment building, then returned and drove away with our car!

I can see it took her 5-6 years to regain the earning power she lost when she left her job at the railroad in El Paso and went to work in Memphis for several of the oil companies that had offices there.  She also would occasionally work a half day on Saturdays to earn a few extra dollars.  I would oftentimes get to go with her to those Saturday jobs, and I would run the halls of the empty office building, where my footsteps echoed off the marble floors and high ceilings.  I would always beg for a nickel to buy a cold bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine downstairs, sometimes starting to badger her just as we entered the building.  If I could sit still long enough, I would marvel at her taking shorthand and transcribing her scratches on the steno pad to the typewriter with lightning speed.  I heard more than once about her outstanding secretarial skills.  I think I could probably match her typing speed, but I never mastered shorthand well enough to get close to her expertise!

In 1966, a friend referred my mom for a job with a Federal bankruptcy judge, who also happened to be the friend's father-in-law.  My mom had to take a cut in pay, but the benefits such as health insurance, were enticing. There were several additional W-2s attached to her 1966 return for side jobs she took.  The side jobs continued for another year or two, then stopped.  This may be because of the built-in "step increases" the government offered, so her salary increased a little every year.  Or perhaps the timing coincided with my starting college, where I was able to live at home and work on campus to cover all my expenses.  At the same time, her health began to decline, and in 1972 she qualified for a disability pension.

Even though her disability and Social Security incomes were less than she had earned her last years of working, it was sufficient for her to live modestly.  She certainly deserved those last few years of not having to struggle financially.

Charlotte Leary Moskal (circa 1964)