| Aunt Eunice--The Legend | |
By Tom Carney, Editor Old Huntsville
"We were so poor we couldn't afford to pay
attention!" is how Aunt Eunice, with a twinkle in her eye, described
growing up in rural Madison County.
Eunice Merrill was born into a society, in 1919 that
had not changed much since the Civil War. Madison
County was still largely agricultural with most people living on small farms and
raising cotton as their sole cash crop.
Growing
Up in the South
Her father, Joseph Franklin Jenkins, had moved to
Madison County in the 1880s with his mother when he was three years old.
Known as a hard working and industrious man, he married Mary Madgehne
Hornbuckle and purchased a small farm near Piney Woods, now known as Cave
Springs. Even for a hard-working
man though, with little money to hire help, raising 250 acres of cotton with a
pair of mules was a backbreaking task.
"I started working in the fields before I was
ever old enough to go to school," recalls Eunice.
"I remember when I was just a little girl and Mama made me my first
(cotton) picking bag out of a flour sack. I
never was very good at picking cotton but we were all expected to do what we
could."
If Eunice wasn't very good at picking cotton, her brothers
and sisters probably made up the difference.
In all, there were a total of twelve siblings, six brothers and six
sisters.
"My father was a minister and named all of his children
after figures in the Bible. My
brothers were Phillip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James and John, and my
sisters were Martha, Ruth, Mary Madgehne, Naomi and Elizabeth. My friends used to tease me by saying we had the whole Bible
sitting at the supper table!
We had a two-horse wagon when I was young and I
remember once when we were coming back from church and Mama started counting
heads. No matter how she counted,
she kept coming up one short! Finally,
Mama made Daddy turn the horse around and go back to church where we found one
of my sisters curled up under a bench asleep.
"My father was a deeply religious man who never
missed a church service the whole time I was growing up. He and my mother were called on constantly whenever there
were sick folks in the community. I
remember many times when there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the
night from someone needing help. My
parents never said no to anyone.
"He performed a lot of marriage ceremonies.
I remember one time when a couple, wanting to get married, came to our
house late at night after we had gone to bed.
Daddy never said a word. He
just married them, wished them luck and went back to bed.
Another time, he married a couple in a cotton field, at the end of the
rows. I've often wondered if they
picked cotton for the rest of that day!
Only
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