Country Women Cope With Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)

Rating:
Summary: Life Wasn't Easy for Some, But Then Again.....
Review: This is a collection of family histories as remembered by the women who endured such hardships. Oral histories are really stories about people and happenings of the past, memories of individuals. By telling stories, we pass our family histories on to others.

I chose Evelyn Lewellyn (nee Petree) out of all the interesting and diverse participants in this project which Melissa Walker used for her dissertation. Evelyn is her grandmother to whom she dedicates this book, making her 'special.' Actually, she's special in another way. She and my only sister share the name. This is written in remembrance of her Nov. 7 birthday.

This Evelyn's family moved around a lot -- must be a Knoxville trait, as we did, too. Her father was a church choir director and her mother played the piano and sang with a quartet. East Tennesseans have music in their blood.

We read of the depression and how it affected her family who returned to a rural area from Knoxville where they struggled with poverty on the farm. Quality of life was not the same as in town. She tells of TVA's first project in the 1930s, Norris Dam, which claimed farmland and displaced people.

This Evelyn worked at the same place as my sister, Standard Knitting Mill, before obtaining a better-paying position at ALCOA (Aluminun Company of America), now a town named after it where the Knoxville Airport is located. There she met and married Bill and, after his wartime stint, they lived in company housing before buying a farm. She speaks of CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and WPA (Works Progress Administration) which some of her relatives used to get through the rough times.

Her account of her younger sister's death from diphtheria is heartbreaking, which resulted in a quarantine sign being put on their house in Knoxville by the health department. Illness was prevalent with the poor and two of the children had scarlet fever, another quanantine before they moved back to the country.

Her description of the two-room log house with the primitive kitchen seemed to be identical to those closer to the Smoky Mountains (still standing) only as a novelty now -- no one could live that way today. As she said, "It's a wonder we didn't freeze to death." There they encountered typhoid fever, and a copperhead snake.

Moving back to town, they settled in the Burlington area where there is presently a Petree's florist. Another is on Broadway near where the family lived in earlier times. There are two photos of Evelyn (reminiscent of my sister again), her high school senior picture from Knoxville High (1942) and one at Christmas, 2001.

She didn't use restraint in telling about her peculiar aunt who refused to sell her share in the family home, and another who 'didn't get along with the rest of the family.' Guess those are in every family tree.

She speaks of the Museum of Appalachia which was put together by a State farm agent who purchased farm implements, even houses he reconstructed on a small acreage of land (made it a showplace for people from all over the country to come and to persue). Last Fall, I saw some beautiful peacocks and a contented cat there, outside the government built Norris.

She tells secrets about her aunts in particular, interesting but private. A wayfaring uncle who couldn't settle down until his later years and, after his death, her dad had to bargain for the family Bible offering an 8X10 photo to the grieving wife of the bereaved. Now, when this interview took place, Evelyn had it.

Similarities between this Evelyn and some of my family (except for living in town) is remarkable. Sixteen other lives are described in this, 20th in a series called "Women's Diaries and Letters of the South," but I chose Evelyn Lewellyn mainly because she and my only sister shared the same name.

Reconstructing the lives of elite women who kept diaries and wrote letters, such as Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, who lived almost a hundred years earlier than Ms. Lewellyn, as explained at the East Tennessee Historical Museum by the author, are just as important. Her diaries were kept in a trunk for years and passed around in the Fain family before John N., searching for old stamps to add to his collection, decided perhaps they had some historical significance. After some aborted tries, he was able to have parts of the diaries incorporated into a tale of a "Confederate woman in East Tennessee."

The women in this collection, born between 1890 and 1940 in the South, relate intimate details in their oral histories. Ms. Walker's dissertation culminated in an earlier book, ALL WE KNEW WAS TO FARM in 2000. She received her Ph.D. from Clark University in Massachuetts. Since then, she's written several books on diverse subjects, including PIKES PEAK REGION TRAVELER, DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, and others about Southern women.