Tag: Jackson

Getting to Know My Grandmother

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner

Family movies show the plethora of flower sprays and large crowd at my paternal grandmother’s funeral. Effie Lee Galloway Scott died July1958, a year before I was born. From all the stories told, I feel I knew her and wish we had known each other.

She was a member of Jackson, MS’s pioneer Manship family, the daughter of Alfred Daniel Galloway and Annie Manship Galloway. Effie Lee was a devout member of Galloway Methodist Church, president of the garden club and Junior League, a member of the DAR and other civic organizations.

My older siblings called her Gaga and speak of how much they loved her, always upbeat up until the end and loved by many.

She endured enormous loss in her lifetime. Two of her four sons died.

Francis (Frank) Tomkeyes Scott, two years old, was hit by a trolley car in downtown Jackson while my grandmother helplessly watched from outside the Woolworth store screaming, “Oh my baby.” The newspaper article on this event is graphic and heartbreaking.

Her son, Walter W. Scott, 1920-1945, stationed in Italy and promoted to Captain was killed in action April 29th, 1945, five months before the war would end.

Effie Lee’s third child, Charles Scott, became a first pilot on a B-17 bomber that was shoot down during a raid. He was taken as a prisoner in a Nazi war camp for eighteen months returning to his family in Jackson, MS a forever changed man.

The fourth son, Bert Scott Sr., my father served in the Navy and outlived them all. I wish I had known to ask my father while he was alive, what all that must of been like for him. Did he feel undue pressure as the last remaining son of our prominent Southern family? Did he carry grief for his mother and lost brothers?
Certainly, Daddy was trying to bury some sort of pain through his drinking and alcoholism.

Effie Lee, it’s no wonder from all the loss and sadness she experienced that she died from stomach cancer at age 64. But she lived. She loved fishing and was saluted for her vivaciousness, charm and love during her life. (See newspaper clipping below.)

On writing, it’s magic and sharing writing

I love Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. It’s the perfect size book to keep by my bed or carry in my purse for a possible wait. Eudora was born and lived in Jackson, MS, my home town. Once we were buying underwear at the same time in McRae’s department store. That’s the closest I ever got to her. I was in awe. The old Sears building in downtown Jackson eventually converted to a library, The Eudora Welty Library.

The first chapter of One Writer’s Beginnings evokes a sense of peace, looking back at simpler times, her growing up in a home where reading was like breathing. Eudora reflects, “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of the day, was there to read in, or to be read to.” I am green with envy, wondering what would my life have been like if reading was encouraged, even a part of our everyday lives growing up. I don’t have any memories of books, of being read to. My introduction to books came in high school, from my older sisters who read Kathleen Woodiwiss, The Flame and the Flower, The Wolf and the Dove. We referred to her books as crotch burners. But I was reading and that got me going.

I was in heaven working at Lemuria bookstore in my late twenties, surrounded by books, overwhelmed with what to read next, meeting and talking with writers who came for readings and signings. Tom McGuane, Tom Robbins, Willie Morris, John Grisham, Jimmy Buffett, Lorri Moore, Tim O’Brien, Rick Bass, Mark Childress, Kaye Gibbons, and Jim Harrison are just some of the writer’s I was blessed to meet. My daughter was lucky to reap the benefits of my time working at Lemuria. Books were what she sleep with, not stuffed animals. I toted the boxes of children’s’ books I had acquired every where I moved to, so she would always have them and could pass them down to her own children. It was somewhat of a relief to hand off those heavy boxes once my twin grandchildren were born.

“It has been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.” Eudora Welty

This morning I read Chris LaTray’s newsletter, reflecting on the past four years of Presidential office and the new office we are entering. I find him gifted, able to put into words what I am feeling sometimes, a natural wonder. Read and find out for yourself.