Stories about my Father 6
My grandmother Eunice was born in Versailles, Kentucky twenty-two years before white women could vote in a federal election. Much of her childhood was spent in the Philippines with her parents who had moved there following the Spanish-American War. She finished her schooling in Virginia and graduated from Randolph-Macon’s Women’s College in Lynchburg. She taught school. She gave birth to my Aunt Helen at home in a house with no utilities. She was a talented artist - we have several of her paintings. She was an expert seamstress and made wonderful dresses both for my sister but also miniature versions for her dolls. She cooked some of the best Thanksgiving dinners I have ever had. Her corpse was the first dead body that I had ever laid eyes on.
My father wrote extensively about many generations of our family. The Hester women, however, do not figure in his accounting nearly as prominently as the men do. Many of the men in our family fought in various wars and had vivid stories to tell. While they were in battle, the women stayed behind and kept the home fires burning. While the men were fighting, they worked. When the men came home and sat around and told their stories, they worked. In my memories of my grandmother she is always moving, always on her feet.
Eunice’s mother is the only one of my great-grandparents that I ever met. Jennie Mastin, who became Jennie Wilson lived to be 92 years old and died when I was five.
She spent her last few years bedridden in a nursing home in Lynchburg. As far as I know, I only met her once and that was very soon after I was born so I, of course, have no memory of it. There is a picture, though, of me, my father, Eunice, and Jennie all together around Jennie’s bed. Four generations.
My father, however, knew Jennie very well. She had separated from her husband when he started drinking too much and moved in with Eunice and Morris in Rustburg when my dad was three or four years old. She lived with them for much of the rest of her life up until the time that she moved to the nursing home. Many of our family stories come down from her.
Three years before my father was born, Jennie wasn’t feeling well and called the doctor. She thought that she might be starting menopause. She was 45 at the time. Doctor Plunket came to the house, as doctors did in those days, and told her that she was not starting menopause, she was, instead, pregnant. My grandmother was already 21 and my great uncle Scott, her brother, was 17. My father wrote, “I think the story that she drove Dr. Plunket out of the house, beating him with her purse, is probably exaggerated.” She screamed at my great-grandfather for getting her pregnant. She yelled that having a baby at her age would kill her and it would be his fault. His response was, “It takes two, you know.”
When it came time for her to give birth, Dr. Plunket wanted to give her ether which had replaced chloroform as an anesthetic. Jennie would have none of it and insisted that my great-grandfather give her chloroform instead, which, he did. When she came to, Dr. Plunket and her husband were laughing, and Jennie demanded to know why. They told her that while she was under, she had cursed all men in general, but especially them.
My great-aunt Martha’s late arrival sent our family’s genealogy into a tailspin. While she was technically my father’s aunt, because she was only three years older, they grew up together more or less as brother and sister. The youngest of her children is only slightly older than I am so they always seemed like first cousins to me, but they aren’t.
I believe, and I have endless memories of sitting on my grandparents’ porch in Lynchburg with everyone trying to work this out, that they are, in fact, my first cousins once removed. I think, then, that their children are my second cousins. Not everyone agrees that this is right. I have been part of countless hours of very entertaining discussions with my dad’s family about this at the house on Elmwood Avenue. If I could beat my sister to it, I’d sit in one of the white wooden rocking chairs on the red cement porch and rock back and forth while everyone spoke during afternoon drinks. It was endlessly entertaining, and I realized that I only needed to ask one innocent question to trigger the whole thing. “So, who was that person to me?”
Beginning with my great-grandparents, the number of kids people in my dad’s family had, dropped significantly. In prior generations, almost every one of my direct antecedents was one of at least a dozen children. Family size in the United States peaked between 1860 and 1920 and, thereafter, started to decline. There were many reasons for that.
My family on both sides of my father’s line were all farmers. While some were successful, none were rich. One could only afford so many slaves, so you needed to supplement your workforce with your kids. The infant mortality rates were exponentially higher the further back you go, so you needed to have a lot of kids to make sure that some survived to carry on the line and take care of you in your old age. Having twelve kids meant that a woman had to devote the best forty or so years of her life to having and raising them. There wasn’t time for much else because while the men were off living their best lives trying to kill each other, the women, in all their spare time from childrearing, had to cover the men’s work back on the farm.
The Hester side of the family traces itself back to Buck Hester who was born in the late 1700s. He had a brood of children including one named Roling Hester who also had a brood of children. Roling was the father of my great-great-grandfather John Chesley Hester who, in turn, had a brood of children. Sometime in the 1930s, there was a reunion of all the decedents of Buck Hester. They were legion. There were hundreds of people present and those are just the ones who showed up.
My great-grandfather became a lawyer so having a large family wasn’t necessary. My other great-grandfather became a soldier and then a businessman so, similarly, having a huge bunch of kids would have wiped him out financially. For those who stayed on as farmers, the development of farming machines meant that the need to breed children to work the land started to evaporate. As healthcare improved, infant mortality rates dropped so more and more children were surviving. When the Depression struck in 1929, supporting a large family became impossible. Two kids became the norm.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the 19th Amendment which prohibits states from denying citizens the right to vote based on sex passed in August of 1920 coincided with the end of the statistical peak of family sizes. Women getting the vote also empowered them to start demanding better lives for themselves. They started being able to participate in areas of society that had previously only been open to men. As they started working, their families started getting smaller. As that became usual, more and more women started being able to enter the workforce,
Eunice was already sixty-four when I was born so I never knew her as anything other than an older woman. There was something amiss with the muscles in her very wrinkled eyelids. Her glasses had two wires that stuck out from the frames between her eyes and the lenses like little towel racks. She had to drape her lids over the wires to keep her eyes open. As they gradually slipped off, she’d have to re-drape them which she did almost reflexively. It was mesmerizing to watch. She often had to tilt her head up to look at you. She, like her mother, became very hard of hearing. When she’d miss something, she’d peer at you through the extra folds.
My father called his parents by their first names from the time he could remember and so did my sister and I. They were always Eunice and Morris to us and never Grandma and Grandpa. We visited them a lot when we were little but less and less as we got older and busier. We had a two-door un-airconditioned Ford Maverick for many years whose back windows only clicked open about an inch. My sister and I spent a lot of time in that airless back seat on the nine-hour drive down driving each other (and our parents in the front) crazy.
Whether or not we went with him, my father would still drive down periodically. One time he announced to my sister and me that he was going to drive down and would we like to come? Both of us said no. The day before he left, though, both of us, independently, changed our minds. It had been about two years since I’d seen my grandparents and my aunt, who was living with them, so it seemed like the time to go. My grandmother had taken a fall the day before but was resting comfortably and seemed to be fine. We finally got there in the early afternoon and chatted with her in the back bedroom. She was very happy to see us all. We left her alone to take a nap and decided to take our usual drive around Lynchburg to look at all the old family sites. When we got back Aunt Helen told us that she’d just died. We all went in to see her. Later, I went in and sat with her for a minute by myself. I touched her cheek. She wasn’t there.
When Eunice passed in 1989, she and Morris had been married sixty-seven years. We never thought of one of them without the other. Morris, while older than she was by six years, was in perfectly fine health when she died. He didn’t seem to have any idea what to do without her, though, so he died, himself, a couple of months later.
Although the quote is usually wrongly attributed to the actress herself, there was a cartoon by Bob Thaves in a Los Angeles newspaper where two guys are looking at a billboard advertising a Fred Astaire film festival. One of them says to the other, “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did… backwards and in high heels.”
The women on my father’s side of the family might not get the coverage in the stories I have that the men do, but that, frankly, makes them far more interesting to me.
I’m just going to have to dig deeper.