Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 2)

T​he year 2020 will be remembered as a time of economic prosperity, followed by downturn and hardships that none of us ever imagined, as we dealt with global pandemic and social issues causing deep divides and civil unrest. Many watched their life savings disappear as they weathered the storm of closed businesses, loss of jobs, and for more than 575,000, loss of life itself! Our hearts hurt over social injustices played out over and over in prime time and on the internet, causing frustration and anger to manifest itself into sometimes angry mobs who pillaged and burned the property of the innocent.  We can only hope that the rest of this decade and the coming one will not be the same.

This was not the case in the last century, particularly in Northeast Louisiana and the surrounding area, where extreme economic hardship, loss of life,  and widespread destruction of property plagued the area all through the 1920s and 1930s as Jim and Etta Mae were raising their large family.

Jim’s businesses had begun to pay off, and he bought some lots and a house on the Ouachita River south of West Monroe. He set up a saw mill there and had O.D., who was seven years old, helping him float logs down the river to Brown Paper Mill. Although he continued to hunt, trap and fish, and sell whiskey, he had also entered into a partnership with a local businessman, Howard Griffin, in a small engine machine shop located on S. Grande in Monroe, which would later become a major business in the area.

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By the summer of 1925 they had six children under the age of nine, Nita, O.D., Oliver, Derwood, Carrie Mae, and John A., filling their house with the constant movement and sounds of children playing, or crying for their needs to be met. Birth control and prenatal care was virtually nonexistent in the area at the time, and Etta Mae relied solely on her family and friends for advice and guidance. She may have seen a public health nurse sometime during her early pregnancies, but had her mother, and possibly a midwife with her during the birth for her first five or six children. In later years, with her younger children, she was under the supervision of a doctor, but continued working hard throughout  all of her pregnancies, giving birth to every one of her children at home.

Under Etta Mae’s care, the family thrived and their days were filled with household chores, and church on Sundays, though Jim seldom attended. Their house was likely similar to many of the other frame houses in south West Monroe at the time, having minimal electricity, hand pumped water, and a wood stove. Clothes and dishes were washed by hand, and so were the children. (Reader’s Digest)

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There was a paved street, Old Trenton, and the grocery store, pharmacy, and churches were within a mile or two. Her mother had remarried and had another child the same age as Oliver, and she would sometimes take the children there on Sundays to play, although it was not an easy task.

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They lived on the banks of the Ouachita River in a yellow house on Old Trenton St., north of Brown’s Paper Mill when the rains came.  Unusual amounts of rainfall fell from August 1926 through May 1927 all through the Mississippi River Valley from Louisiana to Illinois causing the Mississippi River to rise higher than ever recorded before. By December 1926 towns in Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee were flooding because of the constant rain, and all bodies of water in Ouachita Parish and surrounding areas were full, but the rain kept coming. Jim and Etta Mae’s house was in one of the lower areas of West Monroe and close to the river near the sawmill operation. (Wikipedia)

The first levee broke on April 16 in Illinois, then another followed in Mississippi on April 21. This caused a domino effect where essentially the whole levee system started to collapse. Even before this happened, water was covering the streets in the area of West Monroe where they lived, and was up to the porch on many houses. (The News Star) After the levees broke, the Mississippi River flooded more than 23,000 sq. miles of land along its banks and was reported to be as much as 75 miles wide in some places. This created one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States, one that affected Louisiana greatly. (Britannica) “A sheet of water up to 15 feet deep in places covered such northeastern Louisiana towns as Lake Providence, Tallulah, Delhi, Winnsboro and Mer Rouge,” the News-Star-World reported in a 1981 retrospective. Ouachita Parish resident, Sitty McNeil, remembered what her husband shared, “You could get in a boat out here on Bayou DeSiard where the Edgewater Dam is . . . where the bayou comes close to DeSiard Road . . . you could go clear to Mounds, Louisiana, just pass Tallulah . . . except for Mason Ridge in Richland Parish” (McNeil 1993).

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A detailed description of the devastation appeared in a July 1927 issue of the Tensas Gazette newspaper in St. Joseph written by Dr. Henry M. Payne, an engineer traveling through the flooded areas. “The crest of the flood carried 19 times the force of Niagara Falls and brought the level of the water 4 ft. above all previous records, with a rushing torrent of 3,200,000 cubic ft. per second sweeping everything movable, and much that was considered immovable, before it………. These waters approaching with such force have wiped out village after village, plantation after plantation, homes, churches and schools………Not a living thing remains – not a car or a dog, a chicken or a pig; cows, horses and mules, alike, have been drowned, or escaping to isolated knolls have starved to death or been shot to put them out of misery…………..Decaying bodies of domestic animals hang putrefying in trees and hedges, unapproachable for weeks until the water has slowly receded and dried up and the jelly-like quagmire becomes stable. These sources of pollution to health and drinking water can neither be buried nor burned, until the forces of sanitation and rehabilitation can advance. “

I​t was to this devastation that thousands of families in northeast Louisiana returned after spending as much as a month in Red Cross relief camps located in higher areas such as Harrisonburg, Bastrop, and Ruston. Considering the location, Jim and Etta Mae’s house probably had as much as a foot of water in it, and the sawmill as well, with most of the cut lumber floating away. They relocated to the White’s Ferry Rd. area and higher ground, where Jim’s dad, Charley Willhite, operated  White’s Ferry across D’Arbonne Bayou,  and his younger sister Alice White and her family lived. When the waters receded, Jim continued to run the sawmill, fish, sell whiskey, and hunt and trap to support the family. They moved back into the yellow house for a time, since the lumber business was good for a while with people needing to rebuild after the flood. But any upswing in business was short-lived with more miseries to come, with a second flood in 1932. Glen remembers, “When the depression hit 1929, they say he had more than a million feet of lumber on the yard and couldn’t sell it all, had to leave some of it there when he moved to Tensas.”

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​ The beginning of The Great Depression in the United States is recognized by most as the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, otherwise known as Black Tuesday. It marked the beginning of eleven years of misery where unemployment reached as high as 25 percent, countless businesses failed, and thousands of acres of farmland fell to foreclosure. Human suffering and deprivation was widespread, in cities and small towns across the country where people did not have homes or enough to eat, forcing some to give up their own children, or send teenagers away to look for work. (Britannica) In the Monroe/West Monroe area, witnesses report that Newspaper headlines were full of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs including relief for farmers, CCC camps employing young men, and pictures of breadlines for the unemployed.  Some eyewitnesses remember….”The freight trains coming through with the hobos. If there was a boxcar with an open door, you could see a bunch of hobos riding. They could also ride underneath the passenger trains. They called that riding the rails . . . I can remember people coming to our door asking for food as they bummed their way through the country. (Lancaster 2009, Louisiana Folklife article by Betty Jo Harris.)

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I​n July 1927 Etta Mae gave birth to James Martin, Jr. (Jimmy), then by the end of 1931, she had Gustal Bartz (Boots), and George (Tut). The family kept growing, but their income was headed in the opposite direction. People were trying to recover from the floods of 1927 and 1932 which was actually worse, businesses were failing , and there was less money for people to buy lumber, fish, meat or whiskey. Jim and Etta Mae sometimes traded what they had for flour, medicine, clothes and other essentials. Like other rural families, they fared better than those in the cities. By growing their own garden, keeping chickens, and relying on their families for help, everyone struggled together, but managed to get by. Jim was still making and selling whiskey and the fur buyers were still buying, and he began to expand his trapping business on the Tensas River.

I​t was during this time that they got behind on taxes and other obligations, causing them to lose their lots where the sawmill was located, and the property sold at a sheriff’s auction by 1935. (The News-Star) Countless farmers and business owners across the country found themselves in the same situation with the Great Depression gripping the land. Families did whatever they could to survive, praying for the strength to hold out, holding on to the hope of better times which were painfully slow in coming.

“It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him.

Amos 5:19

​It’s hard for us here, well into the twenty-first century, to realize how different the world was at the beginning of the last century. The Monroe/West Monroe area was thriving, but outside of the main towns, it was rural, with dirt roads into town that were not more than trails in some places. Many rural families lived without electricity or running water, and if you needed to talk to your neighbors or get a message to your family, you went there in person by foot or mule, or horse. If they lived further away, you wrote a letter or sent a telegraph. Telephones were not widely used, and people like Jim and Etta Mae, who lived in remote areas, may have gone days, or even weeks, without seeing or talking to anyone other than those in their own households. Although cars were becoming more and more available, especially with the production of the Ford Model T, locals like them used horses and mules to ride, or pull their wagons and buggies. Bicycles were also widely used, and long journeys were made on the train.

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The world was raging the same as today, but people were not drunk on the constant flow of information and misinformation being poured into their brains as we are. Jim and Etta Mae, like many others in the area, were going about the business of surviving and making a life one day at a time, unaware of much of the chaos.  World news came to them via the newspapers, or magazines, when they could get one, word of mouth from informed friends and family, or local speakers and politicians. 

W​orld War I happened a world away from them when it began in 1914, then expanded with the involvement of France, Britain, and Russia (The Allied Powers) against Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria (The Central Powers.) They knew little of the horrific fighting in the rat infested trenches where thousands were being killed daily, not only by German artillery and bayonets, but also by disease from the filthy conditions, and by poison gas.(Encyclopedia.com) 

One account written by an American, Arthur Empey who joined the British Army in 1915, tells of the horror of the gas. In his book published in 1917, Over the Top, Empey describes what was called a gas helmet as made of cloth and treated with chemicals to neutralize the gas. It had two windows, or glass eyes, through which you could see and a rubber covered tube for the mouth. British soldiers were issued two gas helmets and required to carry them at all times, even when they slept.  “Gas travels quietly, so you must not lose any time; you generally have about eighteen or twenty seconds in which to adjust your gas helmet.” (Gas Attack, 1916) His book became a best seller and was made into a silent film by the same name in 1918. 

  By 1918, the war became the daily headlines in the Monroe News-Star after the United States joined the Allied Powers, when Germany sank the Lusitania, a British luxury ship with Americans on board.  President Woodrow Wilson outlined his famous Fourteen Points to winning the war, and The Selective Draft Act was enacted on May 18, 1917, requiring all men between the ages of 21 and 30 to register with local draft boards for military service.(Encyclopedia.com)  At 21, Jim had to register, but he was classified as class IV and exempted, due to being married with dependents that would not have enough income without him. His younger brother, John C. (Jack), did serve and reached the rank of sergeant in the 43rd infantry. He was not wounded in action, but later lost both his legs due to Buerger’s Disease, a rare disease of the arteries caused by using tobacco.

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A​s the war raged on, Jim and Etta Mae read about it in the papers or on flyers posted around town, or heard through Jack in an occasional letter sent to his mother.  Since radio was not commonly used before 1920, Wilson’s Committee for Public Information produced thousands of news releases for The Associated Press and sent out more than 75,000 speakers to promote his war plans ​around the country and rally Americans to the cause. (Smithonianmag.com) Wilson’s campaign worked, and most people in the Monroe area supported the war. Jim and Etta Mae may have seen the movie “Over the Top”, in the summer of 1918 when it was shown at the Picture Garden theater in Monroe, and described by the Monroe News-Star as “ the most noteworthy event in the history of the Picture Garden, and one of the most inspiring patriotic incidents this city has witnessed, since the United States entered the war!” (Monroe News-Star) They had a close family member who served, knew names that were prayed for at church, or friends and acquaintances that were drafted, but were relieved that Jim was not among them.

Alongside the war was another killer in the world that struck much closer to home, the Spanish flu epidemic, that began in the summer of 1917, a second wave hit in 1918, and it lasted until 1920. A recent post on History.com states, “Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918.” It was estimated that 500 million people were infected world wide, with 50 million deaths recorded, numbers that were probably only half of the actual cases. One internet source, cdc.com estimates “if the world population was 1.8 million, the infection rate was approximately 50% and death rates were at 10%-20%.”  In her book, Laura Spinney, journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, states: ” That pandemic obviously emerged when the world was at war; there were extraordinary circumstances. Lots of people were on the move, not only troops, but also civilians: refugees and displaced persons. And there was a lot of hunger.” 

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Reportedly, as many as 675,000 people died of the flu in the United States.  It struck young and healthy adults more than any other group, causing great hardships for children and the elderly when breadwinners and caregivers were lost. Across the nations, whole families were wiped out, funeral parlors were overwhelmed with bodies, basic services such as garbage and mail delivery were suspended due to so many workers being ill. Scientists and doctors knew little of how to diagnose or treat the disease, usually prescribing homeopathic remedies such as chicken soup, forcing fluids, and bed rest. Most deaths occurred because of complications such as pneumonia that developed in flu victims. (History.com)

By the fall of 1918 in the Monroe/West Monroe area, local officials set up an emergency headquarters at the Elks Lodge where people could call or come in for health care. Doctors responded to the calls night and day in an effort to keep the flu from spreading. All places of business were ordered to close at 5 p.m. each day, discouraging crowded conditions at night in the bars and movie theaters. The front page of the local newspaper in Monroe included daily headlines regarding the war, and recommendations on controlling the flu from the U.S. Department of Public Health, the state of Louisiana, and local health officials.  People were encouraged to avoid crowds, get fresh air, eat healthy, and cover their coughs and sneezes, and ads for remedies were common. Those who contracted the disease were to be isolated as much as possible, and caretakers were instructed to burn rags or cloths used for spital and to wear masks and aprons when caring for the sick ones.  St. Francis Sanatorium, the local hospital, had its seventy-five beds full, with extra beds in the waiting areas, but according to local health officials, the strain that infected the Monroe/West Monroe area was mild compared to other areas of the country, with 512 cases reported and 3 deaths.  (The News Star, Oct., 1918)

  ” At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies that signaled the end of a four-year global war that killed 14 million people and wounded 21 million others.” (Good Housekeeping.) At the same time, the flu epidemic began to subside. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, officially ending the war, the epidemic ended as well.

Miraculously, Jim and Etta Mae’s young family had stayed healthy, and Etta Mae was pregnant with their third child, Oliver.  Jim continued to hunt, trap and fish to support his growing family, but there was always a need for more money. He got help from an unusual source the following year. 

The Temperance Movement, made up of church groups, business men, women’s rights groups, and political reformers were moving toward a dry society and began to call for a nation-wide law banning alcoholic substances. Many of the supporters of the Temperance Movement, were also well-known activists for womens’ right to vote. They became so powerful that politicians were afraid to oppose them, so the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was proposed and ratified with little opposition in January 1919, and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Local women’s groups in Monroe were active in the movement and were elated, since a parish wide vote for prohibition had passed by a narrow margin in November, 1917. (The News-Star) 

 The 18th Amendment prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, but not the consumption of them, and was not imposed upon the nation until January 1920 to give the liquor industry time to adjust. The Volstead Act was a law written to define the process and procedures for banning alcohol, including beer and wine which led to much controversy, and later to the rise of organized crime in the United States. (History.com)

Prohibition created a market for liquor, so Jim built a still and peddled his brew, along with the pork and fish, out of a horse drawn wagon on the streets of Monroe and West Monroe. The magazines Etta Mae liked to read were filled with articles on nutrition, child care, and homemaking tips, as well as, women’s rights, religion and advice against smoking and drinking. She agreed with it all, including prohibition which was the law, but Jim did not feel the same, and they fought when he came home after drinking. When he drank, he was mean, and at times Etta Mae would have to fight him off the children. After Jim started making whiskey he was drinking more often, now that he had his own supply. 

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Local grocery and hardware stores legally sold everything that he needed to make whiskey – the still, corn, corn sugar, corn syrup, bottles, and corks. According to one online article on prohibition, the ban on alcohol was impossible to enforce because Americans across the country were making their own liquor in cities, towns and on farms. “The bureau seized almost 697,000 stills nationwide from 1921 to 1925. From mid-1928 to mid-1929 alone, the feds confiscated 11,416 stills, 15,700 distilleries and 1.1 million gallons of alcohol. The bigger stills were known to churn out five gallons of alcohol in only eight minutes. Commercial stills in New York could put out 50 to 100 gallons a day at a cost of 50 cents per gallon and sell each one for $3 to $12. By 1930, the U.S. government estimated that smuggling foreign-made liquor into the country was a $3 billion industry ($41 billion in 2016).” (The Mob Museum.org)

​ Prohibition was laughable. Local newspapers published jokes and puns about bootlegging while local law officials issued stern warnings against it. (The News-Star) Headlines often told of politicians and other people in power caught distributing illegal alcohol on a large scale. Mob killings and activities related to bootlegging were common in the cities, and news of  this made Jim more determined to get in on a small piece of the action. He continued to make and sell whiskey on and off over the next ten years until a tragic event caused him to stop.

“You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness nor the plague that destroys at midday.”

psalm 91:5-6

True love is a beautiful gift. It has a way of wrapping us in a cocoon of hopes and dreams that protects us from the world outside for a while. And for those fortunate ones, it grows and unfolds its wings into the splendor of something lasting. Its colors can distract us from the unpleasant, cover up the hurts, camouflage shortcomings, and serve as a banner of hope in a cynical world. Such was the love of Jim and Etta Mae.  

They were complete opposites of each other. He was tanned from outside work, with muscular arms from pulling up his nets and working with his traps, and his dark curly hair was sometimes uncombed. The eldest of his family, he embraced from a young age the work that involved living off the land.  As he grew up alongside his father in Union Parish near other Willhite relatives, he helped him farm the land they rented when needed, but much preferred earning money by selling fish he caught and hogs he killed in D’Arbonne Bayou,, which is now Lake D’Arbonne, and the Ouachita River, which was a main steamboat channel at the time. His hands were large and strong and served him well; cleaning and skinning the fish he caught or the game he killed, knitting nets, cutting and planing wood for the boat he built, carefully setting his steel traps, and drawing his bow across the strings of the fiddle he liked to play. 

She was well-dressed and well-mannered, loved playing the piano and singing, and had become an expert cook and housekeeper under her mother’s supervision. She cooked meals on a wood stove, gathered and canned vegetables from their garden, and helped do laundry for the family, which was an all day job. Her home was filled with items such as these listed in a 1914 Sears catalog, and many beautiful antiques, including a piano which she enjoyed playing and singing on Saturday afternoons. She attended school in the Drew community, and on Sundays her family went to church where she played and sang in the choir. 

Jan, the youngest daughter of Jim and Etta Mae remembers visiting her Granny Hart’s home this way. “It was an antebellum type house only a lot smaller. It had several steps up to the front porch which went all the way across the front. It had a wide porch going through the center of house. On the right as you entered was the living room and on the left was a bedroom. I don’t remember how many bedrooms there were, possibly three. The last room on the left was the kitchen, I remember the old times wood burning stove. There were a lot of very wide steps down the back of the house as it was built on the side of a hill. At the left of the steps was a well where they drew ice cold water. Granny Hart had a step daughter named Oma that was mentally challenged that always drew the water and carried it up those steps to the kitchen and to a dresser in the hall that had a pitcher and a bowl for washing your hands and water to drink. My grandmother had down feather beds and I loved to fluff them. Oma would get on one side of the bed and me on the other and punch them and they would almost touch the ceiling. Then Oma would pat them down to normal size. Granny was Dutch and her yard was typical Dutch garden with rows of flowers with paths in between the rows. When I was there, I loved to help her with the weeding, One day my hoe hit something I knew was metal. It was covered in hard green stuff, but where the hoe hit I could see gold color. I spent a long time carefully scraping it to discover a locket that Mother’s sister, Emma had when she was alive, having died at about 19 years old. The locket was sprung open and I had to glue it shut, and it has a dent on the back where the hoe hit. Granny gave it to me and I still have it. Granny had a good deal of land there and she had pear, apple, fig, as well as, pecan trees. We loved to climb in the trees and eat fruits.”

 

Born in Union Parish with a father that was a descendant of German immigrants,  and his mother from Cherokee, Jim had a spirit that yearned for the freedom of charting his own course, rather than working for others.  He had stopped going to school after the fourth grade, and at nineteen, was an expert woodsman and commercial fisherman in his own right. Within that year, he met Etta Mae, a farmer’s daughter who was thirteen at the time, but destined to share his future.  After that, when he would come to call on her, riding on his mule, her family had been less than impressed, considering he was six years older than her and much less refined than they had hoped for.

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  By the spring of 1916 Etta Mae Hart was in love, and she married Jim Willhite against her mother’s wishes.  Her dad, Seth Hart, had died suddenly a few months before, and her mother, and her older brothers were struggling to keep the farm at Drew in operation and pay the mortgage, selling off some of the land shortly after his death.  At sixteen, she was a beauty, tall and slender, with dark wavy hair and sparkling eyes. The attraction to Jim had been strong since they first met at a Christmas church social three years before. He was different from the farm boys in the Drew Community where she lived; intelligent, confident, and full of ideas. Although only in her second year of high school, and urged by her mother, Emma Louise, to finish, she left with him and never looked back. 

As a farmer’s daughter, Etta Mae was well aware of the hard work it took to run a household and get by on a small income, but when she and Jim moved into a house that was more like a barn, on the river near Rocky Branch, she had a challenge. Their families helped out, giving them furniture and household items, and Etta Mae created a home and went about her chores, with no electricity or running water, praying daily that she had made the right decision. Times were hard, and Jim was supporting them by commercial fishing on the Ouachita River, and hunting hogs in the D’Arbonne swamp, selling his meat and fish on the streets of West Monroe and Monroe, or to the local meat markets, out of his mule drawn wagon. Fur was in demand, so Jim was also trapping raccoon and mink, selling the hides to the local fur buyers in Monroe. 

On the farm where Etta Mae grew up, animals had been slaughtered for meat periodically, but Jim’s work required it daily. He would run his nets early in the morning, bringing home his catch and a block of ice, icing down the fish in a large wooden box he had built for the back of his wagon. Some of the fish were then gutted and scaled and cut up for her to cook, before he drove into West Monroe to sell the rest. On hog hunting days, he may have two or three hogs to clean at once, hanging them up in a tree near the pump behind the house. There they were also gutted and skinned, cut up and iced down before he took them to town. When he ran his traps, any animals he caught were brought home, where they were cleaned and skinned carefully. The furs were then stretched on small bamboo rods and hung to dry on the side of the house or the shed. 

Etta Mae would soak and wash his blood stained clothes, have meals ready for him when he got home, and sometimes sing as Jim played the fiddle at the end of the day.  He had bought them matching pump 22 rifles, and made sure she knew how to use hers. Embracing the role of his wife, she would shoot squirrels with it when they went hunting, and kept it near the door each day waiting for his return, which was sometimes after dark. After his day of fishing, hunting or trapping, he would knit nets at night, teaching her to help him, and how to stretch the hides of the animals he caught in his traps. She insisted that they respect the Lord’s Day, not working on Sundays, sometimes traveling to Drew to attend church with her family and stay for dinner, where she got to play the piano and sing.

She became pregnant before summer, and their first child, Juanita, arrived in January 1917. Her second baby, O.D., born in June 1918 weighed a little more than two pounds at birth, and Etta Mae placed him in a shoe box for a cradle. With little medical care, his survival was a testament to her skills as a mother, and the power of prayer, since the first year of life was highly dangerous for infants at the time, with one and ten babies dying before their first birthday. (America’s Health Rankings) Those skills would be much-needed as Etta Mae found herself pregnant, nursing or tending to a baby in diapers every year for the next twenty-five years, giving birth to thirteen babies who lived, one still born, and two miscarriages. 

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”

1 Peter 4:8

There’s a feral spirit that calls you to be outside, even in the thirty degree air. You can feel the wildness of this place as you notice the mangle of the briers that overtake the river bank and the untamed twitter of the robins and jays as they argue with the grackles. Beyond that is the river, following a snaking path through the frozen branches of pin oaks, red oaks, water chestnuts, cypress and gums that tower over the thick palmetto floor glistening with frost. 

We keep a camp near Newellton at Flower’s Landing, on the banks of the Tensas River, and I like to visit it in the quiet of January. It’s nothing special, a mobile home with a metal cover, much like the others littering the natural scenery of the riverbank.   To get to it we pass Aunt Nita’s house and pond, Flowers Landing Baptist Church, and the brick house my daddy built on the land where I was raised, now owned by a large farming company. I look at it all with aged eyes but see it with the eyes of youth, like a spotlight shining on what is, but seeing what was. 

The wild was there in the 1960s, and was hunted by my family. Although my daddy held other jobs and farmed, he continued to harvest much or our food from the woods and waters of the Tensas River, just as he had as a boy in the 1940s. I see hides stretched on the shed, venison being cleaned, processed and packaged, and fishing nets full of a catch from the river. We fought the wild plants like cockleburs, Johnson grass, and goat weed that were constant targets of our hoes in the garden and the cotton fields, along with the palmetto that grew thick in the woods and crept ever closer to our property. 

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Gone are the barefoot kids of the 1960s who were free of fence, or yard, or electronics. Whose bikes and motorbikes traveled the dirt turn rows and gravel roads in summer, with no particular purpose other than play. Whose voices rang as they swam in the river at the landing, or jumped on the loaded trailers of cotton in the fall that were parked by the fields. Today I see the dust on those toes, feel the sweat of a hot day on that brow, and hear the sounds of laughter and siblings bickering. I catch a glimpse of waking on a frosty morning like today, huddling by a space heater to get dressed, and seeing my breath as I walk to the school bus. 

The black delta land that stretches up and down the Tensas River has been the same for thousands of years, previously farmed by indigenous people, The Taensa, then by slaves, and now by modern machinery and chemicals, it borders one of the largest game reserves in the Mississippi Delta. Stretching over nearly 80,000 acres, the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge is home to the Louisiana black bear, eastern wild turkeys, white tailed deer, American alligator, and more than 400 other native species of birds, fish, amphibians, and fur bearing creatures. It is a remnant of the millions of acres of hardwood forest that once covered the southern Mississippi River valley. Our black dirt, (sometimes called “buckshot”), farm along the river at Flowers Landing was home for my family, alongside the wild.

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Cold bites my nose as I head for the comfort of our camp, a hot meal and a warm bed. As the night settles in, the wild makes itself known in the howls of far away coyotes and calls of the barred owls, and sleep is slow in coming. Some cold creature scrambles under the trailer, searching for the warmth of the heat ducts, as I doze off after midnight. Morning brings coffee and a hot shower before we close up the camp. One more walk outside and I gaze at the house across the way that was my grandparent’s, now my brother’s camp. 

They were the pioneers of my family, taking a chance that they could make a better life than the one offered in West Monroe at the time, they moved with nine children to the wilderness of Tensas in the 1930s. They cut trees and sawed them for lumber, hunted, fished, and farmed to feed the hungry mouths that, before long, numbered twelve. Towering pecan trees they planted stand between the camps where the pasture once offered grazing for their cattle. The unkempt trees and gnarled vines that cover them stand silent, waiting for the energy of spring. 

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The warmth of our car surrounds me as we follow the road towards home, as I switch on the seat heat, then check the messages on my phone. Frozen fields glisten in the emerging sunlight, while white smoke curls into the morning sky from the nuclear power plant churning in the distance on the Mississippi River. Nothing is growing on this January day, or is it? My eye finds the green spikes of a palmetto crouching on the edge of the field and I’m drawn back to the spotlight that illuminates the past. 

As we pass Legion Memorial Cemetery outside of Newellton, the ornamental cypress trees stand like sentinels over the gravestone that bears his name, WILLHITE, James M. (April 10, 1894 -June 17, 1983), and the name of his life long love, Etta Mae Hart (Jan. 19, 1900 – Oct. 10, 1992), but there’s much more to know about the dashes between their birth dates and deaths. What power gave them strength of mind and body through wars, pandemics, floods, and economic depression?  Where did their help come from, staying married for more than six decades and raising a dozen children to adulthood, with no conveniences that we view as essential today, and despite the challenges of poverty, tragedy, alcoholism, and health issues? Who among them had a faith so strong that it led to the founding of a church that is still active today? The answers are a story that begs to be told.

“It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

Acts 10:12-13