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Grandmother Hattie Weste (she always spelled Weste with an "e" in honor of her father) was born in late Victorian times at home in the house her parents built. She was named for both her parents (all the children were named for relatives), though at first they called her Hattie Bess. Grandmother told me that she was very premature, she was so small her father said her parents never expected her to live. As an example, her father told her she was born so tiny he could have put her in his housecoat pocket & closed...
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Grandmother Hattie Weste (she always spelled Weste with an "e" in honor of her father) was born in late Victorian times at home in the house her parents built. She was named for both her parents (all the children were named for relatives), though at first they called her Hattie Bess. Grandmother told me that she was very premature, she was so small her father said her parents never expected her to live. As an example, her father told her she was born so tiny he could have put her in his housecoat pocket & closed the flap & no one would have known she was in there, and when a visiting woman came to admire the new baby, she couldn't find her in the folds of the blanket on the bed.
Grandmother became a beautiful woman; she didn't believe it was godly to be proud of what God had given you, only of what you made of yourself, but I could tell by how she described herself that she was quietly pleased that her sisters were envious of her looks. In a time when women wore long dresses that completely covered their bodies and grew their hair as long as possible, she was aware her hourglass figure & especially her luxurious hair were exceptional. She told me it was more important what was inside a person than what was on the outside, but hair was supposed to be a woman's "crown and glory", Paul said so in the Bible and she took the Bible very literally. I well remember her taking her graying hair down when she was in her 60's and it was still very thick and past her waist and shiny. I asked to be allowed to brush it and she gave me the brush, but after one or two strokes she took the brush back, said it made her "shiver". (Mama said she was the same with her children when they were young, everyone wanted to brush her hair but she didn't like anyone else brushing her hair.) Her hair was so thick that when I put my child's hands around it, I couldn't close my fingers. Grandmother gave me instructions on how to grow hair long, one of them being to brush it out 100 strokes every night to distribute the important conditioning hair oil to the ends to keep them from splitting. She only washed her hair once a month when it was down to her ankles, it took that long for the oil to reach the ends; she said the oil conditioned & protected the hair shaft, especially the ends, & that one of the mistakes women made (including her sisters) was washing their hair too often. There were no artificial hair conditioners in her day, and they used harsh lye soap. She used the position of the oil to tell her when to wash it, when it reached the ends, it was time to wash the roots.
Grandmother told me matter-of-factly that her figure always looked good in anything she put on, her sisters would need to have clothes individually fitted to flatter them but she didn't, she said she could've cut holes for her head and arms in a burlap bag and slipped it on and put a belt around her waist and it would look flattering, she had inherited her mother's small waist & big hips and bust. She was exceptionally proud of the fact that her husband never saw any part of her skin except her hands & face until on their honeymoon. In my youth, she never dressed to attract the attention of men and she vocally disapproved of women who did, she always wore a simple modest cotton print dress in the 1950's style with fitted bodice and gathered skirt below her knees. She wasn't interested in being admired for her body, especially by men, she said she never had any problem looking attractive in clothes but that wasn't supposed to be important. Her motto was "Pretty is as pretty does." She didn't fit into a society that glorified fashion & sex appeal.
Being the 2nd oldest daughter of 4 girls & 9 children, she was the first to marry & have grandchildren. Grandmother greatly admired her older brother Lyles who had gone to Africa with a Baptist missionary group in 1912 and stayed overseas after the church group came home, and despite being married in 1918 she constantly tried in the 1920's to find a way to go to the mission fields herself. In her many letters to her sister Mella who was then at college, she constantly urged her always to educate herself in some career that could be used in the mission fields, ideally as a nurse. (Mella later told me that grandmother's constant harping on being a missionary drove her up the wall, but she never told her to stop because she knew she meant well.) Being a missionary was not to be for either of them, the Baptist church missionary office finally told grandmother they would not send her to Korea, which was her goal, because they would never send a woman alone, that both she and her husband had to be well-suited to the job & childless; she already had several children and her husband Tom Anderson was not at all interested in her missionary zeal, neither was her sister Mella, she became a teacher in the Spartanburg schools. So grandmother had to content herself with preaching to the locals, which she made a point of doing frequently. My mother said grandmother went to every church meeting she could, she used to host middle-of-the-week "Prayer Meetings" in her home, and later during the Depression after her family no longer had a car, no matter where a religious meeting was being held grandmother always took mama with her, even if they had to walk 15 miles on foot to get there; she walked so much in the late 40's after her husband passed away that her husband's cousin told me they became so worried about mama and grandmother losing weight that they started taking them meals every day. When I asked Aunt Happy what was her strongest memory of childhood, she said that in the 1920's grandmother would often be out somewhere in the neighborhood "witnessing" when she walked home from school to find a cold, empty winter house with no food to eat & no fire lit, she would have to light the kitchen stove herself & start the evening meal. Then when her father came home from delivering his mail route, she & her father would have to go out in his car looking for his wife after dark. It was clear to everyone that grandmother was not cut out to be a wife & mother; her main interest, which intensified as she got older, was to "preach to the heathen" and bring them to her God and her church.
Grandmother grew up in the Baptist church, her parents were both raised in the largest church in town, the Baptist Church on Main St Spartanburg, but she was baptized in a local Fairforest Baptist church near her home before she married, and she kept in regular touch with their congregation and pastor. After the marriage she joined her husband's family church, Nazareth Presbyterian on Nazareth Church Road, the first Christian church in the county where he was a Deacon when they married (she wrote her sister that his being a Deacon was one of the main reasons she married him, she believed he was religiously devout). But as time went on she started going back to Baptist churches and increasingly attending fundamentalist revival meetings without her husband (he became a Mason and shunned churches and became contemptuous of her accelerating extremist religious views, but it didn't change her mind, she decided the Masons were irreligious and a bad influence on him). Her religious views became more fundamentalist over time. She had a completely literal view of the Bible, she believed every word was written by God and was infallible, which made her very intolerant of anyone who did not agree with her. I remember she & my father had many arguments over religion in the 1960's when she would push him to stop drinking and smoking and start going to church and devote himself to living a god-fearing life, her intensity escalated over time and his inability to hide his amusement over some of her dogmatic statements left her fuming.
Grandmother had been educated in the Spartanburg public schools at Fairforest & Spartanburg, then when she was 16 her mother sent her to Greenville Women's College (which later merged with the men's school to become Furman University) to train as a teacher. She told me she had very little happiness at the college, the girls made fun of her because her mother made her cut her hair much shorter than theirs before she arrived (the reason being she would no longer have time to take care of it), and grandmother was not socially adept, she did not make friends there. Grandmother told me she had never wanted to cut her extremely long hair, she said it was only at her mother's insistence that she did so, & she blamed her mother for the ridicule it brought on her at college from the other girls. (She said when girls made fun of her relatively shorter hair she told them her hair had once been much longer than theirs, but they refused to believe her, even after she went home for the holidays & brought the section of cut hair back to show them.) Before she cut it, grandmother's dark hair reached to her ankles, and she said it took her 2 hrs every day to plait it & put it up in the morning, then take down the plaits at night & brush it out 100 strokes. At this time, about 1911, a woman's beauty was still judged greatly by the length and thickness she could grow her hair, and grandmother's hair was her "crown and glory". I don't think grandmother ever forgave her mother for making her cut her hair, especially as her mother never cut her own exceptionally long hair. I asked her why she cut it when she didn't want to, she said you never refused your parents anything, the Bible said it was your duty as a child to obey your parents. (I asked her if she forgave her mother, she tried to say she had but I don't think she did because she still felt anger and guilt for resenting her mother's behavior; she was taught it was her Christian duty to obey, and she didn't imply her mother meant to hurt her but her mother didn't seem to care about grandmother's feelings.)
Grandmother was not a good student in college, she was absent-minded and didn't follow orders well. She told me she most enjoyed the music & plays at school. She played the part of Hamlet in the Shakespearean story in her senior year, it being an all-girl's school, and she said she memorized the whole play, every line of it, during rehearsals she would give lines to the other girls. Grandmother was also graded on her version of "Chopsticks" on the piano, having written an elaborate adaptation of the simple tune that ran all over the keyboard with several glissando's; I well remember listening to her play it when I was a child, it was beautiful. Playing the piano or another instrument was another of the expected talents a Victorian woman was supposed to have accomplished to be "finished", but it also allowed her to participate more in church. Grandmother had a good voice and sang alto in hymns, her children also sang in church choirs and my mother said the three siblings Margo, Happy and Polly sometimes sang live as a trio on the local radio station WSPA during the Depression. Music, and especially Christian music, was a part of their lives, they always had a piano and violin and her youngest son later became a professional pianist & taught piano in private New England schools.
Grandmother was an extremely religious person, she attended church frequently and was always eager to stand up & give her "testimony", I think participating in religious activities was the only thing that made her happy. She gave a large percentage of her money to churches all her life; in the 1920's she told her sister in a letter that she was donating all her self-earned money to the "mission fields", despite the fact that she admitted in another letter that she was worried her husband was deep in financial debt having borrowed over $20,000 against his inheritance from the Federal Land Bank that he was not paying off. But she never seemed to consider that it was her responsibility too to help him pay off that debt, perhaps because he had taken out the loan on the farm against her advice to buy a big new house down the road that mama said she told him she didn't want or need. Grandmother was not focused on gaining worldly possessions, her mind was on building up spiritual treasures in Heaven.
Her husband Tom Anderson was from a large pioneer landowning family near Reidville on the South Tyger River that had been one of the first white families to move into the area, they had owned the land there since the King Charles grant in the 1760's to their progenitor William Anderson, and Tom's father Major Franklin Leland Anderson had given them a large parcel of that land as a wedding present along with one wing of his own father's old house, so they started off married life with enough land to sustain them & a two-story house to live in & no debt. Tom wasn't satisfied, when his brother Walter built a larger new house a mile away & offered to sell it to Tom, he borrowed on his dower land to buy it and moved. It was the 1920's, the economy was booming & loans from the Federal Land Bank were cheap & plentiful, but grandmother wrote she was worried because Tom was not paying off even his interest every year; he lost all the land around 1930 after giving the mortgage payment the year to a swindler hawking shares in a non-existent Cyclone Starter company, leaving his growing family destitute. After having lived 12 married years with two black house servants on their own land, they now had to spend the next 10 yrs moving around Spartanburg county sharecropping during the Great Depression while Tom, who had lost his mail delivery job, tried different jobs.
Tom Anderson's father had sent him to 2 different colleges but he didn't graduate from either, he was evidently not trained in any practical skill, he was the Switzer rural mail carrier when they married but at some time in the 1920's he lost that job. Tom tried managing the Spartanburg sewer plant south of the town, he also tried farming, and hog-raising, and growing sugar-cane, he was not good at these, he was a physically weak man with a heart condition which sounds like atrial fibrillation, and he smoked (which grandmother told him to stop but he didn't until he developed emphysema). They eventually ended up living on Fowler Rd. in the dilapidated former home of his deceased brother Ben Anderson who had died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, a house my mother remembers as large & unpainted & drafty with holes in the floor where sometimes a snake would come up. But it was a cheap home, and they lived there about 10 yrs until after her husband Tom died with emphysema in 1945 which at that time mama said they described as "asthma of the heart"; his brother Dr John Anderson was his physician. Mama said they lived on hand-me-downs and what food her mother could grow, and lots of charity, they didn't have much. Her uncle Walter was prospering though, he managed to hold onto his land thru the Depression, she said they worked in his cotton fields picking cotton or in his orchards picking peaches and apples.
After Tom lost his land around 1930, the older children were sent to live with others; the 2 oldest girls were taken in by grandmother's parents the Harris's about 1930; son Carlos was sent to live with strangers in Berry, GA by 1936 where he attended high school and then college on a work-study program, he said he never returned to live at home; the oldest son Thomas went off to the Navy in '39 against his father's wishes where he was killed in the Pacific Battle of Santa Cruz in 1942. Mama spent several of her early years living with her uncle Joe Harris and his wife Lyda Mae at the Harris home, she also lived with her uncle Willie Harris and his wife Jenny one summer, and at least one summer with her uncle Lyles & aunt Jan Harris in Blowing Rock, NC where they had an inn (he was back from the African mission fields in 1925 with a new British wife and two sons). Mary Ella the 6th child was also sent to live in Berry, GA to attend school on a work/study program & then to Duke University to study nursing, all on charity. All the children who graduated from college attended on charity and/or scholarships. The three youngest children stayed at home with grandmother the longest but two were sent into town daily to attend better schools than the small local Reidville High School could offer them. All the children but Thomas Jr & Polly graduated from college. There was a strong pressure from the family for the children to do well in school as a way out of the poverty caused by their parents losing their farm & inheritance.
Grandmother knew how to garden, she frequently had a garden of her own, her father had been an excellent farmer and the first County Demonstration Agent, and at one point during the Depression they had lived in a house with a greenhouse and grandmother grew tomatoes in the winter, mama said, and sold them to the neighbors; she also raised chickens & sold the eggs, she raised & sold turkeys, and they had several cows, which it was my mother's job to milk & churn butter which they sold in 2 and 3 lb molds.
Grandmother nursed her husband at home with his emphysema and heart problems until right to the end and said it made her feel worthwhile, she told me that one of her life's dreams had always been to become a nurse and care for others in their time of need. Missionary, nurse, artist, musician, these were her ideal careers, she said. But instead grandmother became a wife. She told me that her children would have to fulfill all her life's dreams. She was very proud of the fact that one of her daughters had become an artist, one had become a nurse, and a son had become a pianist, but she didn't approve of her daughter Happy's professional dancing career, she said dancing was from the Devil, it aroused sexual feelings. (She also did not approve of my mother marrying a non-Christian, in her mind anyone who was not a devout Christian believer was going to Hell, however none of her children became as religious as she was, Polly was the closest to her, she attended church every week all her life but even she didn't live and breathe religion like her mother did.)
Grandmother told me she benefited greatly from helping others in need. Grandmother emphasized to me the need to help others in order to better one's self. She said she had been told growing up to always obey her parents because the Bible said it would make her parents live longer, but it wasn't until she was an adult that she realized the Bible passage actually read "so that THY days will be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee". She was astonished, she had never thought obeying her parents was supposed to benefit her. Her goal was always to be a good Christian which meant to help others before yourself as Christ had unselfishly helped others.
My mother said a doctor once watched grandmother in action & told her she had "healing in her hands". Grandmother had many occasions to interact with doctors, she had several hernia operations, an appendectomy, a hysterectomy, & seven children all of which were born in the hospital except my mother. She loved to get up in religious meetings & tell everyone how God had brought her through so many trials & tribulations, it was her 'testimony'. (Mama's 1st cousin Elizabeth Epps Anderson said she remembered going to several religious meetings with grandmother and how she'd stand and start talking about her "trials and tribulations" that God had brought her through, Elizabeth said it never changed no matter how many times grandmother told it, and most of the local people had already heard it many times.)
Religion wasn't the only interest grandmother had, she had a strong interest in health and nutrition. I can remember grandmother talking often to us about health & healthy eating, she consulted doctors whenever she could for advice and listened intently to what they told her; she often urged my father to buy brown bread instead of the new fad white bread, and she insisting on keeping fresh fruit in the house, she ate a piece of fruit every day, usually a half a grapefruit or half an apple; she tried to get my mother to do the same and to drink less coffee & tea and to eat less candy. (Grandmother had learned the hard way that eating candy and sugar was not good for one's health, she had been an avid maker and eater of chocolate candy and peanut brittle when she was a young wife but had lost all her teeth to cavities by the age of 45, she had also had a constant battle with yeast infections until she cut out sugar, when I knew her she had eliminated table sugar from her diet and occasionally put honey in her food. It wasn't until she consulted doctors that she changed her dietary habits later in life. Her advice was good.) She often told my mother she should not wear the pointy spiked patent leather pumps that were so popular in the 50's & 60's as they would hurt her back, she always wore low-heeled shoes herself. She went to the chiropractor Dr. Sherman in the 1950's when it was not as acceptable to do so as it is today. Grandmother had inherited scoliosis from her Harris side of the family, a sideways curvature of the spine, and she suffered from back trouble all her life, as did many of her relatives.
In the early 1950's, grandmother bought about 30 acres of corner land with her late husband's life insurance money near Fowler Rd, it had an old 2-story wood house that was wired for electricity in the early 1900's and a shallow well and a small barn as well as a small creek. The house caught on fire from the faulty wiring the evening she was moving in & burned up almost everything grandmother owned, only a single wagon-load of odds & ends she was on the way to the house with survived the fire. The neighbors got together & bought her a few basic furniture items including a piano for her pianist son & a treadle New Home sewing machine, they put in doors & windows and a loft bedroom in the small barn. Grandmother lived in the converted barn on & off for several more years without heat, electricity or running water.
When my mother married in 1952, she married in a church on the corner of the same property. Grandmother had donated the corner three acres of her land for the new church, it was named the Beacon Light Baptist Church for the Spartanburg Airport beacon which was located about a mile away on Hwy 417 (Spartanburg had one of the first airports in the whole country and the first in the state). The church soon burned down, and the church Deacons came to grandmother & asked her to sign a new deed, they said the old one had burned up in the church, and grandmother signed it but neglected to notice that someone had changed the wording of the deed. The original deed had stipulated that if the church stopped being a church at any time, the land would revert in ownership back to her. Someone had deliberately removed that clause and lied to grandmother about the need to sign a new deed (the original deed was still on file in the county courthouse). They rebuilt the small church, then sold it & merged their congregation with another small church a few miles away. Grandmother was naive about money, she cared about nothing except helping people to become more godly. Her whole life was spent trying to figure out how to do God's work, as she saw it. And because of her naiveté, she was often taken advantage of financially. To her, money was just another way to help people, a means to an end.
Grandmother was generous to a great fault, I can well remember the argument that ensued when my father found out she had given away her monthly VA pension to a Negro cabbie who gave her a sad story of a child who needed an operation; this was in the early 1960's. Grandmother was living with us and paying my father rent from a VA pension which my uncle Richard had applied for her based on his oldest brother Thomas's death in the war. My father went to the cabbie to try to get her money back, he returned furious with just part of the money & said the cabbie was a liar & had already spent part of the money & that there was no child who needed an operation. My grandmother refused to believe it, she always wanted to believe she was a good judge of character, and she was already suffering the effects of dementia.
When I was in middle age, a member of my childhood church told me that she had known grandmother when I was a child, and one day grandmother had come to her & offered her a sizeable amount of money. When she asked her why, grandmother told her that unknown to her she had been criticizing her to other people and she realized she was wrong, this was her way of trying to apologize (she realized that criticizing a working mother for not spending enough time with her children was not helping her, but money would). Mary Harrison was surprised, and impressed with grandmother's honesty and generosity. She said grandmother always had good intentions and was a true Christian woman in actions not just words.
Grandmother was never afraid to correct people when she believed they were wrong, especially children but also adults, she acted like an ethics policeman, which irked others. After grandmother corrected two little neighborhood boys who were showing off their penis's to little girls, my father received complaints from the parents, and he told grandmother that she was getting a bad reputation in the neighborhood and had no right to discipline strangers children, especially about sex which was a very touchy issue but which was a passionate issue for her. She was completely unapologetic. Grandmother always believed that teaching the Bible was right no matter what people said about her; she was only the messenger. She said our goal should be to live in the world, but not be of the world. I think if she had been a man, she would have become a firebrand hellfire-and-damnation preacher, she had a strong, very deep authoritative voice, so did all her siblings; she was the only Harris child who acted like it was her religious duty to change the world's morals, but her siblings all became teachers at one point in their lives which is also a job whose goal is to improve other people.
I well remember being babysat by my grandmother while I was growing up, she lived with or near us the first 10 yrs of my life. She gave me the benefit of her college education and training as a teacher, and tried to instill in me her own Christian values without which I could have been a much worse person; when I went to Sunday School, I already knew more Bible stories than most of my Sunday School teachers, and she taught me their ethical significance. She read the Bible every day and tried to apply it in her daily life. Grandmother instilled in me the need for self-evaluation to develop my own personal ethics based on the teachings of Jesus; she also inadvertently instilled a desire to avoid her religious fanaticism. She was a very strong-willed person, very determined to believe that what she thought was always right. In her mind, she was doing God's wonderful work on earth, and one day it would end and she would go to Paradise and live forever with her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth. She believed she had the weight of God on her side, and you weren't supposed to argue with God. If grandmother had been Catholic, she would've made a natural and very happy nun. It's a shame the Baptist church has no equivalent.
Everything about grandmother was not always religious but it was always moral, I remember she tried to teach me how to be frugal & to make use of everything, something my father did not approve of since she would often bring home what he considered trash; she would pick up anything on the side of the road that looked like it could be used for something, even if she didn't need it then, but instead of using it she usually just stored it away. My father eventually forbade her from bringing such things back to the house as she was piling them up in our bedroom. It did not stop her, she never threw anything away, she said she was taught that everything has a use & that the mark of an effective person is to make proper & efficient use of everything. She was not used to living in a throw-away society; it caused many arguments between her & my father & led to her angrily leaving our house several times. But she always came back. She had nowhere else to go, all her other children had left the area & were living modern city lives without her religious/ethical emphasis, she was like a fish out of water in their secular & to her mind very immoral environment.
Grandmother wanted to live with my mother, my mother of all of her children was closest to her in mind & spirit. Mama didn't drink or gamble, two things which grandmother disapproved of intensely, and she also had me in the house to teach. Mama's siblings knew when she married my father that my mother wasn't competent to take care of a husband & children by herself, and obviously grandmother knew so too because she spent a great deal of time with us after I was born, my father moved several times to get away from her but she always followed us. I realize now that grandmother was often talking to mama when I thought she was talking just to me, she was quite frank about many subjects over my head, including sex. Grandmother was very negative toward men and the way they treated women, she said her husband had been 'oversexed' and had pushed himself on her when she didn't want any more children, she believed the only godly purpose of sex was to procreate. Grandmother was raised in an age when 'good' women didn't talk about sex or birth control, but she told Dr. Sam Black, who was advising her not to have any more children, that she could do nothing about it because of her husband, and he performed a hysterectomy after her last child. I remember very clearly that grandmother thought her husband was cowardly because he refused to have a vasectomy, she made the statement that if men had to experience the pain of childbirth, there would be many fewer children in the world because men couldn't stand pain. She did not think much of men, except for a few religious leaders like the Rev. Billy Sunday, a popular preacher of her era, she said women built up the world with everything good and then men tear it down with their male wars and feuds, their bad treatment of women and their gambling and alcoholism.
Grandmother had a strong understanding of the evil of alcoholism, she had grown up in a household with alcohol issues. Her uncle Saul had left his wife and children to go work on the railroad; he had died of alcoholism. And her father's sister Laura Harris who came to live with them the last years of her life was addicted to alcohol as well, my aunt Margo said when she was there she remembered her grandmother Hattie sending her with a bottle of gin to put beside her aunt's bedroom door in the evening, and in the morning the empty bottle was sitting outside the door, it was something her grandmother Hattie detested doing but she did it until Laura Harris died. Her mother Hattie Harris had joined the early Women's Temperance League and grandmother joined herself as an adult, she strongly disapproved of anyone serving alcohol and was not afraid to tell them so. She told me how much she admired Charles Lindbergh the pilot because when he came to visit Spartanburg's airport on his grand promotion tour of the country's new airports, her father J Weste Harris was one of the city dignitaries who attended and he told them how Lindbergh had refused alcohol at the dinner given in his honor by turning his glass upside down when the waiter came to serve him first as the guest of honor, she said as a result of his refusal, the next man also turned his glass upside down and then the next and the next, she said Lindbergh set a very good example to the other men of a fine Christian man in all aspects of his life, her highest accolade.
I remember often playing checkers with grandmother and her talking to me while mama fixed meals; I spent more time with grandmother than with my own mother; she always had something interesting to say & she was blunt & direct in her opinions of people. She often tried to get my mother to change her ways, usually not successfully. Grandmother often reminisced of her own childhood & of how raising children had changed, she said her own mother had believed in "spare the rod, spoil the child" and she had done the same with her children, but now she was told that this was considered child abuse; I could see the conflict it caused in her. She said she was punished by her mother for every mistake she made as a child, even unintentional ones, and her parents told her her mother did it because she loved her, but I could see that this late in life she was questioning this explanation and she wished her mother had treated her better, and she wondered out loud if she had been a good mother to her own children, all of whom had moved away & left her alone living out in the country by herself. Grandmother seemed to have felt no love from her own mother who had whipped her often & was emotionally unavailable, but she said her father was a kind and unemotional man who never raised his voice to anyone. He was the one who set her broken arm on the spot when she fell off the roof as a child & suffered a compound fracture; she sometimes cradled that forearm with the other and said that changes in the weather made it ache. She told her sister that her husband's calm demeanor reminded her of her father & was a major reason she had married him. Her favorite memory of her father was when her mother had whipped her for doing something wrong and she didn't understand why, she said her father sat down & put her on his knee & started talking to her, explaining, and by the time he finished explaining, she was crying because now she knew why what she did had been wrong, and therefore she would never want to do it again. She mused that she had benefited nothing from her mother's whippings but she learned a great deal from her father.
She told me once about seeing a "sun dog", she ran into the house & told her father to come quick because there was something very wrong, there was more than one sun in the sky. He went outside with her & knelt down and told her she was seeing something rare & beautiful that she would probably never see again in her lifetime, the sun was being reflected to a different part of the sky which looked like a fainter pair of 2nd companion suns on either side, making the sky much brighter than usual. I have since seen the sun dog phenomenon several times myself, usually after a storm in the late afternoon, and I thought of grandmother as a little girl pulling her father by the hand outside and pointing in fear & her father kneeling down beside her, gently explaining her fear away.
I remember grandmother telling me about the heavens & solar system & the different planets, and wondering what else was out there. She had a far-ranging curiosity, she mused about how things around her worked and she loved learning. In the Greenville Women's College she did not graduate, but it was obvious she listened & learned much from her 3 1/2 yrs. Mama said her mother didn't graduate because she had a college roommate who had epilepsy and she often stayed up with her all night to comfort & help her & then couldn't stay awake in class the next day, but the official reason was because she didn't do her assignments. At that time, the girls were required to compile a notebook of all their assignments, at the end of school they were graded on the quality of their completed book; when they asked to see grandmother's book, she didn't have one.
After grandmother dropped out of the Greenville Women's College shortly before graduation, her mother went back to the college and asked them if they would give her the diploma anyway to teach, she even offered to 'donate' money to the college, but they refused, later her mother sent her to another college in Rock Hill, probably Winthrop, to get her teaching certificate, I don't know if she got it but she was hired to teach 6 grades in the one-room schoolhouse at Poplar Springs near her husband's family home around 1918; before that, she was hired as a governess for a year to the big Anderson family's children near Reidville, this is how she met her future husband Tom Anderson, she was especially impressed with his mother Ada Anderson's religious focus. Ada was a strong Christian advocate in the neighborhood and taught Sunday School and hosted religious prayer meetings during the week, and she played piano in church, the Anderson family was known as a Christian pillar of the community. My mother's cousin Sadie Anderson Magill made a point of telling me she was one of grandmother's students and she learned a great deal from grandmother, she was very impressed with her wide range of knowledge and teaching ability when grandmother was her governess. The 1940 census asked about educational achievement, grandmother said she'd completed three years of college.
I remember grandmother doodling a lot, and making a lot of notes & drawings in the margins of books, she would write all over her Bible in the margins & on every clear spot, sometimes she'd write sideways over print, but I never saw her write a completed letter while I was a child. I now have many of her letters from the 1920's that she wrote, and a few later ones, she wrote clearly & eloquently as I am told all the Harris's did.
I believe grandmother would be diagnosed with ADHD today. She'd told me that when she was young she used to run everywhere, up and down stairs, she would sprint everywhere, and it wasn't until she went to college when she was 16 that they told her it was not ladylike to run, so she deliberately stopped; she said she regretted not continuing to run, she believed it had made her healthier. I believe her being born so premature caused her to have ADHD, she was very absentminded & would often stare off into the distance, and she was nervous, she picked at things with her hands if she didn't keep them busy. I think she had a lot of trouble concentrating, especially on things she didn't care about, like clothes, she wasn't interested in social activities or fashions. She told me once that she wished she were a squirrel; at the time she was standing at the window staring out at the pine tree in the front yard. I was surprised, I asked her why. She said she envied squirrels their permanent fur coat; they didn't have to sew their own fur or change their fur, fur didn't have to be laundered, it never wore out, it didn't have to be fashionable, and they didn't have to worry about whether or not they were appropriately dressed for different occasions.
Grandmother's family knew her mind was different, her niece told me that the family noticed in the 1930's that her behavior was more unconventional than usual, probably brought on by the stress of losing everything, but it wasn't that she had ever been typical. According to her niece Marjorie, grandmother Hattie Weste's mother called her "my bird with the broken wing". Marjorie recounted to me when she, her mother Julia and her grandmother Hattie had driven out in the country to see grandmother in the 1930's; at that time, if someone came a long way to visit you, manners dictated that you must entertain and feed your guests before they started the long trip back home, and they would do the same for you when you visited. She said grandmother let them into the house and they sat on the livingroom sofa and chairs and waited, but grandmother left the room and didn't come back. Eventually they heard singing outside; grandmother was out in an orchard next door walking among the trees and singing hymns to herself. Marjorie said her grandmother Hattie put her pocketbook beside her, got to her feet and removed her hairpin and took off her hat and said well, if they were going to get fed, looked like they'd have to fix it themselves, so they went in the kitchen and prepared their own meal.
I never remember grandmother cooking anything at any time in our home during the 10 or so years she lived with us, mama did the cooking and cleaning while grandmother usually sat and read her Bible or crocheted or went on long walks, sometimes she'd teach me or play checkers with me or try to talk to mama about something. I never remember grandmother being interested in the TV or radio like mama was, she would read her Bible or crochet or talk to us, sometimes she would play the piano. Grandmother bought my mother a Betty Crocker cookbook in the early 60's after my father complained that mama didn't know how to cook. (I asked mama once if grandmother ever taught her to cook, she said she had, but when I asked her specifically which foods she'd been taught, all she could remember was cornbread.) Grandmother had talked often in her 1920's letters about making candy and peanut brittle to send to her sister in college, and my aunt Margo said she remembered seeing grandmother sitting in a chair in the kitchen once whipping up a bowl of mayonnaise for guests who were coming, she said it took her about half an hour to whip the mayonnaise by hand until it was perfect. (We take it for granted now that we can just buy mayo anytime in the store, but back then most people had ice boxes, they bought big blocks of ice weekly to sit milk and butter on, few people had electric refrigerators, and mayonnaise had to be hand-made laboriously by the batch and used up quickly to prevent food poisoning.) Margo also told me that in the early days of their marriage before the Federal Land Bank foreclosed on her father about 1930, her mother didn't have to cook or clean, they had a live-in Negro woman to cook for them and her teen daughter did their house cleaning;, this was probably the golden age of their marriage for grandmother because it freed her to be able to go out preaching to the 'heathen' neighbors.
In her later years, grandmother was always nervously busy. I most remember her crocheting for hours sitting in a new green upholstered vinyl swivel rocking chair her daughter Margo had bought her for Christmas. Grandmother always kept her hands going; if she wasn't crocheting or knitting, she would pick at her clothes absentmindedly, she had a nervous disorder which my mother and I also have. (Her daughter Margo said when she visited grandmother in 1931 during the first summer after she had gone to live with her grandparents and aunts, grandmother had cut her hair short, the only time Margo ever saw it short, and she was nervously twisting and twisting it. It was a crisis time for her, grandmother was pregnant again with her last child and her husband was about to lose his job at the sewer treatment plant and the economy was in freefall, it was when she developed appendicitis and almost died giving birth to her youngest son. Grandmother told me her doctor wanted to operate on the appendix, but when she asked him about the baby, he said it probably would not survive the operation. Grandmother refused the operation, she said that God would take care of them both and she was determined the baby be born. He was, and then the doctor operated on the appendix and also gave her a full hysterectomy. Grandmother told me once that she'd had seven major operations in her lifetime and seven children.)
I asked grandmother once why she crocheted so much, she said "Idle hands are the devil's playground". After she died, my mother found a bag of crocheted doilies in her effects, she later sewed them together into a counterpane for her bed. They were all the same size & design but made with white or off-white threads she had gotten from many different places, many probably picked up on the side of the road. Grandmother wanted to be useful & productive, I remember her picking up a tangled mass of string from the gutter once and she sat in the chair for hours and untangled it and rolled it into a neat ball which she later crocheted. Once grandmother went to Woodruff and got a job in a textile mill, but she didn't stay for long, she was soon back living with us, she showed up one day in a taxi with a load of possessions and said she wanted to stay "for a while", she ended up staying with us for five more years. (Grandmother had worked in the textile mills during the war when mill owners sent representatives out in the countryside to urge women for the first time to come in and take the men's positions, the men were off to the war and the mills had to hire large numbers of women to keep up with war quotas, it was a big change which led to women working outside the home in increasingly larger numbers after the war ended.)
In Dec 1965, my father told my uncle Richard he had to get grandmother out of his house, he couldn't put up with her anymore with a new baby; she had become increasingly argumentative and was angry because she had decided mama had to leave daddy but mama wouldn't leave. I remember she even got so angry one day that she hit mama on the arm leaving a huge bruise. My father was actually afraid of her by then, they were arguing one day and she was very angry and while he wasn't looking she picked up a knife off the table while his back was to her, when he turned around and saw her holding the knife up so angrily he was shocked, he believed she could physically attack him, and he disarmed her. Soon after that he took her to a doctor and the doctor told him she was showing signs of dementia and hardening of the arteries, he gave daddy the option of committing her, but he didn't. But now that he had a new baby in the house my father was under a lot more stress, so he gave uncle Richard an ultimatum, and Richard found grandmother a place to board nearby. She was there for about three months when she fell one night while getting up to get a glass of water and broke her hip. (It was not the first time she had fallen and broken something, when I was about 8 or 9 yrs old, she had fallen into the open heater grate while mama had the top removed to vacuum it and she broke her leg.) After her hip healed, Richard found her another place to live but it was not a good place, it was in a row of about six windowless cement block rooms behind a woman's house near Cedar Springs. We would go to visit her on Sunday afternoons. Grandmother asked us for fruit one day, she said the woman who owned the place wouldn't give them any fresh fruit to eat. Grandmother had always eaten a piece of fresh fruit every day because the doctors had told her to make sure you eat fruit regularly. So mama took her several grapefruit the next week. And the following Sunday on our weekly visit the owner approached my parents as soon as we arrived and angrily said we could not bring grandmother any more fruit unless we provided all the elderly there with fruit, she said it was causing her problems with the other residents, they were jealous; when my mother suggested she should buy them all fruit, the woman got angrier and said she couldn't afford it for the low price she charged. Not long after that she told my father to get my grandmother another place to live because grandmother was complaining and making everyone else complain, so grandmother had to be placed in a nursing home since my father refused to have anything more to do with caring for her. I remember the discussion among the adults that day, my uncle Carlos and his wife Anna were down as well as Richard, and daddy absolutely refused to take care of grandmother's finances or make the arrangements, he said he'd washed his hands of her. Anna had been a registered nurse before she left nursing to become a businesswoman with her husband's company in Charlotte, she said she'd handle the arrangements if they would turn over grandmother's land out in the country to her, she refused to do it without being financially compensated and she got upset and raised her voice when grandmother said she should want to do it out of the goodness of her heart, Anna said it was too long a drive down and she had their company and a family to care for and she absolutely refused to do it without compensation. Grandmother had to sign over the deed to the land out in the country because no one wanted (or had enough money) to pay Anna or the nursing home, grandmother balked, she didn't want to give it all to Anna and Carlos, she said she wanted her other children to inherit too, especially mama and her two children, she said she wanted us to each have at least one acre apiece, and the other children if they wanted it. But everyone there told her someone had to handle her affairs and nobody else wanted to and Medicare wouldn't pay for her nursing home bill as long as she had the land in her name, they all pushed her into signing, and she did, but she protested all the way and no one was happy with the decision in the end except Anna. After that, Anna would drive down sometimes and talk to the nursing home to make decisions. My mother lived about a mile away and visited grandmother every day, riding the city bus to the nearest stop & walking the several blocks to the nursing home which was on 295 E Pearl St behind the hospital. Mama stayed with her mother all afternoon and took care of her, feeding her, washing her, taking her clothes home to wash, applying lotion & powder she also brought from home because the nursing home didn't provide any lotion or powder to any of the patients; mama said sometimes an employee would come in and beg mama to let her use her lotion on another patient whose skin was so dry it was cracking and bleeding, or they would come in while mama was gone and take the lotion without asking and she would have to ask daddy to buy another one. Mama stayed all day with grandmother, brushing her hair, feeding her, sitting with her, then leaving in time to prepare supper at home for us. She took care of grandmother this way for over a year.
(Congress later passed laws setting a higher standard for nursing homes, but a standard which still isn't high enough. Due to the low pay and job dissatisfaction in standard nursing homes today, they have high-turnover and frequent no-shows, they never hire enough employees to take care of the number of patients they have, and their employees are mostly untrained or low-trained people, not RN's, not even LPN's, some are CNA's which is a basic course that takes 3 months to complete. When I was staying with mama in the nursing home a few yrs ago, they had one RN with the responsibility of dispensing medicines for over 100 patients, I never saw her at any time interacting directly with patients in any other capacity, the rest of the caregivers were CNA's or less. And when a patient pressed the button to get help, they never responded quickly. I stood near the desk and watched them several times, I'd see them notice which room the board was lit up for, and the buzzer was sounding off continuously, but they'd just keep on with whatever they were doing; by the time they decided to go see what the patient wanted, there would be several buzzers going at the same time. I timed them several times, it took them 20 minutes to answer the first buzzer and sometimes longer, and that was normal for them, I never saw them respond to any buzzer immediately.)
In the 2 yrs grandmother Hattie Weste was in the White Oak nursing home, the only day my mother wasn't with her mother was on Sunday's because there was no city bus running and it was church day, and sometimes she'd get my father to drive her over there for an hour or two on Sunday afternoons. Mama was devastated when grandmother died of pneumonia, she cried silently for 2 weeks, tears pouring down her cheeks every day, and she blamed Anna and the doctors for not saving her, she insisted they could've and should've done more. The day of grandmother's funeral at Nazareth it was overcast and suddenly poured down rain at the cemetery, then it just as suddenly stopped. I rode to the cemetery in my cousin Billy Patton's car, he was President of High Point College at that time. Grandmother's brother John Harris showed up at our house the day before the funeral and signed the guest register, the first time I'd ever seen him, John gave mama a new hundred dollar bill, and after he left mama said he had not seen grandmother in many years despite the fact that when they were young they were close, she said grandmother told her she had been his favorite sibling and he had wanted to choose her husband for her, he had been very upset when he returned home to find she had already married someone the family didn't think much of. (John and grandmother Hattie did not have much in common, he focused on gaining worldly money, she focused on being spiritual and going to Heaven; he married a wealthy Judge's daughter, she married a farmer's son with no social standing and little business acumen.) John did not go to grandmother's funeral, but the next Christmas he showed up once again and gave mama another $100, and when I graduated a half year later he gave me $100. I never saw him again.
The Spartanburg Herald newspaper ran a story of White Oak nursing home picturing the manager standing with grandmother outside in the garden not long before she died. I have a copy of 2 pictures the photographer took that day because mama asked the newspaper for copies. Grandmother's beautiful hair was mostly gray by then, but it was still plentiful and put up with hairpins in the style she favored. Grandmother was photogenic enough for the manager to choose her of all the patients to be seen in the newspaper with, even though grandmother said she didn't like the woman and I'm sure would not have agreed to be photographed with her if she had asked her permission. It's the last picture we have of her.
My Grandmother was a quite unforgettable person. She was very eccentric, she marched to the beat of her own drummer, she was different and she knew it, she even was proud of it. She told me she had never fitted into the world, she lived apart from the world proudly as a Christian and often criticized it. She was content as long as she thought she was "doing God's work". She disliked sex and never understood her husband's sexual urges, but she gave him what the Bible's Paul said wives were supposed to do, even though she would've been much happier living as a nun. She had 7 children and knew this was more than she could handle, she tried to get her husband to have a vasectomy and was contemptuous of him because he was scared of the operation, in her mind I think it showed that he was selfish & didn't care enough about her & his family. She had trouble dealing with the physical world, she was nervous & didn't handle stress well, she also disliked being touched so she probably had Asperger's. She didn't really want to care about physical things; her head was in the clouds, always looking at the big picture, always wanting to be more Godly, wanting to know the meaning behind everything. Her feet were on the earth, but her head was far away. I wish I could talk to her today & hug her, tell her I understand how hard her life was, and that I appreciate all she did for me.
Jennie Rhinehart 10/2021 |
