HOW LONG AGO IS THE PAST?
The summer I turned eight, we went out to Friendship to visit Mrs. Cora Ferguson. It was 1961. My grandparents and Miss Cora had been friends for well over 40 years. It was her 100th birthday.
Miss Cora still lived in the house her father-in-law, Old Mr. Henry Ferguson, had built when he first cleared and drained that swath of the Mississippi Delta, named it Friendship, and began planting cotton. That was right after the War. At one time the land around the house for as far as you could see in that unrelentingly flat land had been Ferguson land. Then it became Catledge land, although retaining the name Friendship, when Mr. William Ferguson, Miss Cora’s husband, and his siblings sold it to Pop, all except one small part, the part with Old Mr. Henry’s house where Mr. William and Miss Cora continued to live even after Pop lost Friendship during the Depression. After Mr. William passed away, Miss Cora settled into a life of widowhood on that little remnant of Ferguson land surrounded by fields planted and harvested by the current owners.
My father, his brother Dick, and sister Lucille had all been born on Friendship, their other five siblings back in the hills of Choctaw County. I had heard stories about Friendship all my young life. It existed in my child’s mind as a near mythical, Eden-like place, a Camelot. This would be my first visit, and I dashed out of the house to hold the car door for Cat, then climbed into the back seat. We always took the Chevy sedan if Cat was with us. On all other occasions, whether around the farm or anywhere around the county, Pop and I got around in his pickup truck, a conveyance that to my knowledge Cat had never so much as sat in, much less ridden in.
As we neared Friendship, I was struck by the fact that, rather than Camelot, it looked exactly like the rest of the Delta that I had grown up in. And with Father’s family, as well as Mother’s large family, strung out the length and breadth of the Delta, even at eight years of age, I had seen most of it. Yet I was not particularly disappointed, maybe because I had never met anyone 100 years old, an impossibly old age to one as young as I and still a rarely attained milestone.
The Old Ferguson Place was a large, wood-framed house surrounded by spreading oaks to offer shade in the summer. Several cars were already parked in the front yard, and Pop pulled into a shady spot. We were greeted by a black maid who led us into the large front parlor. Although it was hot and humid that day, it felt dry, almost dusty, in that room filled with old people standing about or sitting on chairs and settees that looked like they were older than the old people sitting on them. A large, wooden-bladed ceiling fan turned slowly overhead and kept the air moving.
Mrs. Ferguson, thin and frail but with lively eyes and white hair pulled into a bun, sat in a platform rocker, smiling and chatting. At her elbow was an end table with one of those old lamps with two large globes, one for the coal oil, one for the lamp, both hand-painted with damask roses. It had been converted to electricity at some point and glowed softly even though it was daylight.
She looked up expectantly at our arrival and extended both arms in recognition. “Henry, Minnie, so kind of you to come. And who is this fine-looking young man?”
“This is Jimmy’s son, Greg,” Pop explained and squeezed my shoulder.
Hello, Mrs. Ferguson,” I muttered. Actually, I called her Miz Ferguson which in that time and place was how one addressed a married woman or in this case a widow that one does not yet know well. If I had known her better, I would have called her Miss Cora, Miss used with the first name being indiscriminately used for married and unmarried women who one knew well.
“Come closer, boy,” Miz Ferguson said and held out a boney hand and patted me on the arm. “Why, he’s the spirit and image of Jimmy, idn’t he?
I got that a lot growing up. I don’t see it when comparing pictures of my father and me when we were young boys, but the folks in Tallahatchie County sure seemed to think so.
All of the grown-ups were drinking coffee. I was offered lemonade and a cookie which I took and then sat cross-legged on the floor beside Miz Ferguson. There was a lot of talk, all of it about things far before I was born, things like the flood of ’27 as well as other years of high water and long dry spells and the Great Depression, but also about people that I did not know, children and grandchildren, those that had passed away or moved away, illnesses and other hardships, gossipy talk about things going on at the churches in Sumner and Webb. Miz Ferguson even talked about those bad days after the War, meaning the Civil War. Although she barely remembered the War being only a baby when it started, the Reconstruction that followed was still vivid.
It was a warm afternoon and after lemonade and a couple of cookies, the steady drone of adult conversation soon lulled me to sleep sitting there on the floor. I wish I had stayed awake and heard and remembered more of the stories told that afternoon. But I was only eight and drowsy. In later years I learned more about what those years were like, particularly as it affected my own family.
Practically the entire War had been fought in the South where in a state like Mississippi 95% of the people lived on farms. And these farms had been ravaged, crops and homes destroyed, livestock confiscated, slaughtered, or outright stolen. Railroads so essential to commerce had been destroyed.
The human toll was even more staggering. Over 258,000 Confederate soldiers never returned home, 94,000 killed and 164,000 lost to disease. One of those who did not return was my great-great-grandfather William Morrison Porter who died of pneumonia in North Carolina on his way home to Mississippi. His tombstone reads:
Sacred
To the memory of
W.M. PORTER
who fills a soldiers
Grave
Died March 18th
1865
Aged 42 years 2 mo
and 19 days.
Leaving a wife and seven
children in Mississippi.
My great-great-grandmother, Nancy Cleopatra Wallace Porter (I love the combination of the mundane and the exotic in her name!) was a 34-year-old widow with a farm and seven children, five daughters and two sons, whose ages ranged from 16 to three. Nancy Porter never remarried, whether because of inclination or lack of opportunity we will never know.
There was an obvious shortage of marriageable men. By the end of the War all men between the ages of 17 and 50 were drafted. Many that did return from the War were missing legs or arms. Nancy was certainly not the only widow in Winston County, and there must have been many young, unmarried women whose beaus did not return.
So, Nancy Porter never remarried. What she did do was hold onto the farm and raise her seven children on her own, no mean feat with opportunists flooding in, many from up North, ready to buy land for pennies on the dollar from people, many of them widows with children, like Nancy Porter, were struggling to hire enough farmhands, white or black, to make and sell a crop to pay taxes on their land lest they lose it to someone paying their defaulted tax bill.
One cannot help but admire Nancy Porter for all that she accomplished. Her next to youngest daughter Lucy Susannah, who never really knew her father being barely four years old when he left for the War, grew up, married John Bailey, and ironically died of pneumonia only days after giving birth to my grandmother, Cat.
But I learned all of that much later. All I knew that afternoon was that I was bored and wanted to go outside and play. I asked politely and was dismissed. I bounded outside and immediately began exploring. The thing I remember most vividly were the sunflowers. Miz Ferguson’s house faced west and on the south side of the house was a large patch of sunflowers, their golden faces the size of dinner plates atop stalks taller than I was. Remember, I was only eight. Small sparrows, bees, and other insects flitted in and out among the huge blossoms.
Soon Pop and Cat appeared on the front porch, and I went in to tell Miz Ferguson good-bye. We drove back to the farm through unending flat fields thick with cotton plants, their velvety green leaves hanging limp in the still air under the afternoon sun. Miz Ferguson passed away the following year.
Over the years, whenever in conversation someone refers to the Civil War as ancient history, I usually reply with something like, “Well, you are talking to someone who as a boy sat at the feet of a 100-year-old widow who was actually born before the Civil War.” You can imagine the surprised looks that elicits. I suppose that is because that time before electricity, cars, airplanes, radio, television, or computers seems like ancient history, like something from a Western movie. Well, it is like something from a Western, but it certainly not ancient history. After all, I heard some of it first-hand from Miz Ferguson on her 100th birthday.
jamesgregorycatledge 