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Interview with Ella May Nichols (maternal grandmother)
My mother and I slowly pulled up to the house in which my grandmother had raised ten children on her own. It is now condemned and used for storage. It was behind this house that my sixty-seven year old grandmother now resided with two of her daughters who traded places at night to watch over her. She was a strong woman that had lived a remarkably difficult life and now had to be cared for like a child. I tried to banish these thoughts from my mind as we walked past the old home place and up the weather worn steps of a small trailer. After knocking lightly, we entered to find Grandma sitting at the kitchen table with a big bowl of soup and cornbread. Dim light possessed the entire house. It had been this way since Grandma took sick. She was the only thing that seemed bright amongst the dull colors that surrounded her. She was wearing a baggy, bright pink sweat suit that had become the mainstay of her wardrobe in the last three months. A thinness had taken hold of her and she barely resembled the woman who had always been the loudest, most obvious center of attention at any family gathering. She smiled at us with the familiar spark in her bright, baby blue eyes.
After giving us a bone-crushing hug, she invited us to sit down with her and eat. She did not jump up to serve us, though. This had nothing to do with the sickness; it was simply Grandma’s way with her kids and grandkids. I turned down the bowl of soup but Mom heated up some on the stove and sat down with a coffee cup of the spicy stuff Grandma had concocted.
I quickly explained what the interview was going to entail and why it was being conducted. She simply waved it away with her calloused hands and said, “I’ve done this before with all you grandkids. There must be tapes of me blabberin’ on about my childhood all over the county.”
I began the interview by asking what she knew about the family heritage. I could tell her mind was as sharp as it had ever been as she began telling me bout her Indian mother. “She was almost full Cherokee with a roll number in Oklahoma. Had the blackest hair and eyes. Dad was Irish,” she smiled at me and leaned down, “that’s where we get all our freckles.” I soon discovered that his last name was Workman. Grandma did not know much about how they met or where they first lived but she and her sisters and brother had been raised in Arkansas. She also told me offhandedly that Grandpa Nichols had brought some Dutch and Irish into the family when she married him.
I then asked what her parents had been like and she become somewhat quiet as she told me that her mother had died when my mother was ten. “She looked ancient, always kept her long hair (it was white by that time) in two braids and sat in that old rocking chair.” Great grandma Workman had married young and had three daughters in her first marriage. She had four more daughters and a boy by Great grandpa Workman. She glanced down at her hands and said slowly, “Dad was a hard man.” I thought at first that she would stop there but soon continued, “He worked us girls in the field like boys. Had to I guess since Uncle Buddy was the only boy and spoiled rotten.” She went on to tell me of how the girls would often make up the work that their brother would not do to prevent him from getting beaten. She stiffened up and looked into my eyes without any hesitation and told me that when she was 14 she married Grandpa to get away from the house. The night before the wedding Great grandpa Workman beat her severely with check lines from the horse they plowed with. That was the last time she spoke to him for another ten years. She went on to tell me that when he was just a teenager, he had killed his own father for beating his little brother and that was most likely why he treated his kids so harshly.
I was shocked by this last story since it was hardly ever discussed in the family and I h
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