Category: Annie Laura’s Triumph

 

Washington County, Florida

It’s a blistering hot day in August, 1898. Four months pregnant, my great grandmother, Minnie Clara Bertha Brock must find a way to survive. Her parents are dead, her land stolen. She has nothing, and no extended family to take her in. Only her parents emigrated with her from Germany.

She is not afraid of hard work. But farm work is hard to come by. No one wants to hire a pregnant woman. If she were a man, maybe.

This story might have ended in tragedy, and the baby my great-grandmother carried may not have made it were it not for two wonderful women, Mary Grantham Gilmore, and her daughter, Martha Ellen Gilmore. These strong women lived and farmed a land-grant in Washington County, Florida, secured by Mary.

They took my great-grandmother in, nursed her through her pregnancy, and took care of her when the baby, my grandmother, Esther Lee Corley Stewart, was newly born.

They had suffered their own tragedies, and knew what it was like to bring a fatherless child into rural northwest Florida in the late 1800s.  Martha’s illegitimate child, Christopher, carried their last name, Gilmore, rather than his absentee father’s.

Last night, I was having dinner with a dear friend who has faced some pretty dark moments over the past couple of years. And yet, she looks beautiful—her face glows with peace. She made this comment, “the Lord brought me through a really bad time. Maybe I can use it to help others who are going through the same thing. Maybe I can give them hope.”

The hope offered by friendship is life-giving.

 

My grandmother, Esther Lee Corley Stewart, was more terrified of water than she was of lightning.

I found out why when her fear became my pre-adolescent shame.

One hot summer day when I was ten, a friend invited me to join her swim team. I couldn’t wait.

“Show me what you can do,” the coach said.

I jumped in the pool and swam my very best stroke down the length of the pool, just like my mother taught me.

I surfaced at the end to the sound of laughter, and the coach’s eyes, wide as saucers.

Imagine Phelps swimming the freestyle with his head held high above the water, like a puppy paddling for land. That’s how my mom taught me to swim.

My mom inherited her fear of the water from my grandmother. But in her inimitable style, my mother conquered her fear and learned to swim.  Still, vestiges of her mother’s fear of being under the water modified her stroke, and by imitation, mine. We swam with our heads raised high.

“Why was Mommee scared of the water?” I asked my mother.

“When she was a little girl a man named Ben Ganey (who I later discovered was Mommee’s birth father) held her over a well and threatened to drop her in.”

“Who saved her?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said and turned to her weeds, pulling them with a new vigor.

The story haunted me.

Why would Ganey want to kill his own daughter? Wasn’t my grandmother adopted by Sarah Elizabeth and John Sebring Corley? Why was Ben Ganey even there?

I’ll never know the real answer to those questions, but in Annie Laura’s Triumph, I reimagine that scene.

On a hot, Florida afternoon a girl hangs suspended over a well, afraid she will never see daylight again.

My grandmother did not smile for pictures. I’m not sure why. She smiled at us, her grandchildren in real life, except for when there were thunderstorms. Then, she would purse her lips and herd us all into her cedar closet where we would wait out the lightning.

When I came across a picture with my grandmother sporting a Hollywood smile, I could hardly believe it. But there it was. My grandmother grinning, her arm slung around her best friend, Miss Ruth.

Miss Ruth and my grandmother raised their babies together. Miss Ruth was there when my grandmother lost her youngest son in an airplane crash in the 40s.

This picture of my grandmother’s lifelong friendship is hanging on the wall of my study. It makes me happy.

It reminds me of what I know. Friendship is vital.