When I was a little girl, there were two women who shaped my life more than anyone else, my mother and my grandmother Wilma Butler Hasty. She was born on June 3, 1899.
My mother said yesterday "Tomorrow is mother's birthday. I am a little sad."
My grandmother was born at a really turbulent time in history, in a place where the aftereffects of the Civil War were still being felt. The South struggled economically for years. Black people suffered under the harsh Jim Crow laws of the late 19th century. Women had few choices in life.
Women couldn't vote. They didn't win that right until 1920.
A woman who appeared in public wearing pants would have been shunned.
Women were expected to get married and have children. Period. Women didn't go to law school or medical school.
Women were virtually slaves to their reproductive systems because in America it was illegal to distribute birth control of any kind. So a healthy married woman would produce a child every year or two until her reproductive system stopped working or she died. My grandmother was the 7th child of about 14, 12 of whom lived to adulthood. She seldom had the attention of either of her parents because they simply had too much to do. (Note: I do not condemn big families, if that is what is chosen. Family size should be a choice.)
Yet, in the midst of all that, and in a crowd of siblings, Wilma Butler was her own unique self.
right, Memaw in a tree
As a child, she got into lots of trouble with her sister Hazel, who was also a very strong-willed child. At age 11, Memaw would drive through the streets of Marietta steering a car, Hazel working the pedals. Memaw's dad owned a car dealership, at a time when nobody needed a license to drive.
After years of being tutored at home by governesses, Memaw demanded to go to high school, and graduated from Marietta High School -- at a time when Latin and Greek were required subjects. She then went to Bessie Tift College for several years. At Tift, she studied Home Economics and wrote poetry.
Memaw was the first woman in Marietta Georgia to bob her long thick hair. She also liked to dance the Charleston.
She married my grandfather, Bob Hasty, in 1923, and started travelling - Philadelphia, Chicago, all over the East Coast, everywhere the Philadelphia Athletics played. Then Papa's contract was sold and they had to go out to Oregon and California for several years, away from her family. She learned to cook just about anything with over a hot plate in a boarding house.
Memaw would also take my uncle, an infant, and drive all the way home to Georgia, alone, to see her family, several times during those years. She always packed a hamper of food and a pistol. (There were no interstate highways in the 1920's, just FYI.)
(Editorial note: My mother wrote a wonderful blog called Working Mothers about a year ago, with her memories of Memaw.)
I didn't learn all that until I grew up, though. The lady I knew was old, but still fierce and brilliant and funny.
She liked to lean over and hold my little face and say "Elva, isn't she perfectly beautiful? She looks just like Princess Grace!"
right, Memaw and me, and my brother with Papa
My mom was sick a lot when I was small and I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. She influenced me a great deal, in ways I am still coming to understand decades later.
One of the many ways she molded me was that she was very confident, and she never allowed anyone to throw her off her game or treat her badly. She knew what she wanted. I watched her talk to butchers in stores and she always said "I want a nice piece of beef ground THREE TIMES." If the meat wasn't to her liking she didn't buy it. If a vegetable or piece of fruit wasn't good, she didn't buy it.
If my room wasn't clean enough, I had to go back and start over. If my hands weren't clean enough, I re-washed them.
If something at a restaurant didn't suit her, she was vocal about it. "This coffee is COLD," she told a waiter, after dumping the contents of her cup in a water glass, ignoring the terrified look of the waiter at Howard Johnsons.
At her home, when dinner was done she got up and left the table. It was up to someone else to clean up. She had fixed the meal and as far as she was concerned, her work was DONE. Either her children or her husband cleaned up.
At 4'11, she had to be assertive and she had to be fierce. Tiny people must be that way, so the world doesn't run over them. Case in point: her older brothers would pick her up, as a child, and throw her in the swimming pool. She never learned to swim and she was afraid of water for the rest of her life. (However, she outlived all her brothers and became a confident, strong woman..)
When I knew her, she epitomazed the word "lady." She came out of her room in the morning, she was fully dressed. I never saw her walk around the house in a bathrobe. She would start the day wearing a corset, a dress (or skirt and blouse), hose and heels. Hair fixed, makeup applied.
I was fascinated seeing her scrub lipstick off her teeth with a kleenex.
She loved games but she played to win. She was a world champion at Chinese Checkers and Old Maid. [Never occurred to me as a kid that decades later those games would be considered politically incorrect, and I would be just fine with being an old maid...]
Memaw's purse was, like Mary Poppins' carpetbag, a mysterious and wonderful thing. From it, she produced Chiclets (chewing gum), crossword puzzle books, coins, kleenex, lipstick, a compact (for nose powdering), a small notebook with the correct birthdates and all clothing and shoe sizes of every grandchild, pencils, combs, and any number of other items. One never knew what would come out of that purse.
One rainy day, after my grandfather had died and Memaw was staying with us, my brother and I got into a lengthy game of Monopoly with Memaw. By the end of the afternoon she owned every property on the board worth having and my brother and I couldn't land anywhere without having to pay an exorbitant rent.
My brother was really upset, as I recall. He was writing IOUs and doing anything he could to wriggle out from under the ruthless real estate domination of Memaw, who in another lifetime was undoubtedly a very powerful man, probably an empire builder in England or Rome. She took no prisoners.
She was also, I reflected much later, the daughter of a man who owned a real estate office, and numerous other businesses in Cobb County Georgia.
Memaw was a gifted seamstress. She made all my school clothes for years, at a time when little girls had to wear dresses or skirts to school, and pants weren't allowed. (I was in 6th grade when that changed.) She also made most of my mother's clothes, including formal dresses.
She made little dresses for my barbie dolls.
She made aprons for her 6 sisters.
She saved buttons and thread, and we found a large cache of them when we cleaned out her house after she had a stroke.
right, Memaw as a young girl
When I was 14, Memaw had a massive stroke and she spent the final 15 years of her life in a nursing home, not remembering her children or grandchildren.
It broke my heart to see her like that. The last time I saw her I was in college and I had driven over to Myrtle Beach to see my aunt and uncle. I visited Memaw at the nursing home. She was polite, but she had no idea who I was. I chatted for a minute and walked out and just started sobbing as soon as the door to the facility shut behind me. She was alive, yet not really alive.
Before that, though, she didn't live a half life. She LIVED.
I still think of her, every day, and I miss her. I am so grateful, though, that she was a big part of my life. After Mom and I moved in together in 2005 and we started talking about Memaw a lot, I came to know her better and to feel very blessed that she was my grandmother.
Happy Birthday in heaven Memaw! Love you always!
