Forgotten Grandmothers – Part 1

Recently my dad sent me an email of an essay he wrote. It is about his memories of his grandmother who passed away almost 20 years before I was born. I love reading these stories and having the chance to get to know more about her. So much so that I’m sharing them here 🙂

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Forgotten Grandmothers

by Robert Burkes

Preface

The Journey Begins

I was born in Belton, Texas, on November fourteenth, nineteen fifty one. I mention this because I believe it bears relevance to what I have to say in the following. It was fewer than one hundred years since the end of the war between the states. I will not call it the civil war, because, if you have done any research, or committed any time to the study of American history, you will agree that there was nothing “civil” about it. Not in its causes, the fighting of its battles, nor its aftermath. That said, I think that growing up in Texas during this time shaped the way I was taught to think about many things. I remember thinking as a boy how lucky I was, that against what seemed to be formidable odds, I was born a white boy in Texas, which at the time seemed even more important than being born in The United States. White, male, Texan…the three key ingredients to making someone just a cut above others. Never mind we were poor as dirt. Not only didn’t we have running water or plumbing, but not even a well of our own. I would walk with my Grandma twice a day all the way across town to the railroad tracks, to fetch a two and a half gallon bucket of water from the Santa Fe Rail Road pump. She also sometimes had a small barrel that she used to catch rain water as it ran off the roof of the house. We had no electricity. We lived in a three room shanty house with one space heater and a cook stove, both of which were fed from a single butane bottle behind the house with rubber hoses fed through holes in the wall. More than half the house was a single room with a wooden floor covered by a sheet of roll down linoleum, which would rise up off the floor from cold winter winds. But, my Grandma’s house was filled with love, and I just knew I was more than lucky to be me. I mentioned earlier that I was born in Belton, Texas, but I should note that I never actually lived there, but mostly, during this period, anyway, in a smaller town of about one hundred fifty residents called Nolanville. I knew that there were those in Nolanville who had bigger houses, but I still thought everyone lived pretty much like we did, since I had never been inside any of those big houses. I did notice, however, that some houses had water wells in the back yard instead of an outhouse, but never gave it too much thought. I loved the years I lived in my Grandma’s house. I remember how I cried when, after my mom was married to my second stepfather, we moved out of state to Arizona, in nineteen fifty eight. It seemed a long way from Grandma’s house.

My Grandma was born Ada Lee Forester, in Karnes County, Texas, on August third, eighteen eighty six. She couldn’t read or write. For her lack of formal education, Grandma was nobody’s fool. She couldn’t do arithmetic on paper, but she could count money, and knew if she didn’t get the correct change when she bought something. She dealt in “bits” instead of quarters. A quarter was two bits, fifty cents was four bits and seventy five cents was six bits. She would count increments in between starting from one of those points. Grandma had a memory like a steel trap, was not afraid of the Devil himself and even into her seventies, was able to travel by bus on her own to visit family and friends around much of the state. During the years at my Grandma’s house, she would tell me bedtime stories about her family and the times that she grew up in. Her daddy was a veteran of the Rebel Army. It was never called the Confederate Army, just the Rebel Army. The fact that her father was a Rebel soldier seemed to be evidence enough that the Rebels should have won the war. Who was I to disagree? I was not even in school yet. That, coupled by the fact that I was born on the birthday of the man, who at the time, was being celebrated in Texas as the last surviving Rebel soldier, was proof of just how special and lucky I was. I think my Grandma told me her stories at bedtime in hopes that when I drifted off to sleep, the dreams would engrave themselves into my memory. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that since she couldn’t read or write, she was passing to me the oral history of our family. I only regret that I was too young to be an adequate steward of that history. Those stories did, however, have an undeniable effect on how I thought. They taught me to have an inordinate pride in being both Texan and a grandson of the Confederacy. But they also planted the seeds of thirst for the knowledge of history, which would eventually become the unraveling of that pride. But, even more, they planted the seeds of being part Indian, which would ultimately become a driving force in that quest for knowledge…not only for the stories of my ancestors, but of all Native peoples.

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