[Granville-Hough] 25 Sep 2009 - Uncle Sance Arender
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough-trust at oakapple.net
Mon Sep 25 05:47:17 PDT 2017
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:05:02 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Uncle Sance Arender - 25 Sep 2009
Great-Uncle Sance Arender is one of the pleasant memories of my
childhood. He was older brother (1863 - 1939) to Grandma Mary (Arender)
Richardson, and he visited her for extended periods, interspersed with
weeks with us. It seems the rule was if we got a backlog of work, invite
Uncle Sance to visit us. He could pick cotton, hoe the garden, and do
light work, and he was in his late sixties when he stayed with us. He
went along where we working in the fields, and he certainly earned his
bed and keep. He had married Maggie Dilmore, and she had at least five
children before she died in 1895. (I knew some Dilmore families in
Sharon Community. They were short, stocky people whose women matured
early, married young, and were great breeders.) Uncle Tom Richardson
also recorded seven other children for Uncle Sance, some without dates,
and some after Aunt Maggie died. So I think Uncle Sance had a second
family with someone not recorded by Uncle Tom. What happened to this
wife or marriage is not known to me. Then the wife of this story is a
third and later one, with whom he had no children.
During his second widow-hood, I believe Uncle Sance married a third time
to a widow with grown children and her own farm. He and this new wife
had some altercation, and the grown sons took her side. They ran him
off, with just the clothes on his back, not even giving him time to grab
his false teeth on the clo'shelf. (The clo'shelf was a feature of the
early Smith County homes, which were built with no closet storage space.
If you became prosperous enough, you bought a clothes shelf, the
"clo'shelf," where you hung your Sunday clothes, kept your extra sheets,
and stored your valuables. The top was a handy place for hats, canes,
false teeth, and anything else for overnight safekeeping.) Consequently,
my mother and Grandma Mary had to prepare food especially for Uncle
Sance so he could "gum it," he having left his false teeth on the
clo'shelf when he was run off. So we had lots of pot likker, buttermilk
and corn bread, rice, and other foods which could be "gummed" readily.
We younger children grew fond of the same foods Uncle Sance liked so
that it was no problem for my mother.
One day we had something Uncle Sance could not "gum," and he was
relenting the loss of his teeth when he was "run off." My father
suggested he would take Uncle Sance back to the widow's house and get
the teeth. Uncle Sance said: "Oh no, It's way up in Smith County near
Scott County, and I am afraid of those sons." After more discussion and
apprehension by Uncle Sance, they agreed to make the trip that weekend.
So off they went.
When they reached the road where the widow lived, Uncle Sance had my
father stop the T-Model car out of sight of the house and would go no
further. He described the house and the family and said my father,
Elisha Hough, was safer to go alone. My father walked the rest of the
way, found the farmhouse, met the widow and her sons, and explained his
mission. The widow directed one of her sons to take a chair and climb up
to where he could see the whole top of the Clo'shelf, which he did, and
there, covered with years of dust, were Uncle Sance's false teeth, just
where he had placed them the night before he was run off. Then the
family was more sociable, asking: "How is Old Sance, anyway. We've
missed him since he left." My father answered as best he could and soon
left to get back to the anxious Uncle Sance. He was proud to get his
false teeth, but he would believe nothing good about the sons. He was
not happy until he was several miles away from that community. But,
alas, the effort was in vain. Uncle Sance has "gummed" his food so long,
the false teeth no longer fit, and were too painful to wear.
It was that autumn that I picked my first 100 pounds of cotton in one
day. It was before the Depression, probably 1928, or it could have been
in 1929 before Panic struck. It was on a Saturday, when I was not in
school. Uncle Sance was helping us in the "Old Newground," and stayed on
the row next to me. When he thought I was not looking he dropped lots of
cotton into my sack. The cotton in _my sack_ through the day weighed out
at a little more than 100 pounds. This added immensely to my ego and
gave me bragging rights. Uncle Sance was like that with all the children.
When he stayed with Grandma Mary, he lived in a narrow hallway between
the main house and the kitchen. (The main house had originally been
built separately from the kitchen, which was far enough away that it
could catch fire and burn without also burning the main house. All the
cooking was done in the kitchen over the open fireplace, as this was
before the days of cooking stoves When these stoves did arrive and were
successful, people began to move their kitchens so they could would be
part of the main houses. When this was done in Grandpa's house, the back
porch was trimmed down so that the kitchen would just fit it. So the
former back porch became a narrow hallway, which we considered Uncle
Sance's space. When my mother moved into the house in 1939, she enclosed
Uncle Sance's space into the adjacent bedroom. There was still about a
seven inch difference between the height of the main house and the old
kitchen, and that seven inches of difference exists to this day)
Uncle Sance then took up selling goat hide shoe strings in the towns of
Smith and Scott Counties. When he moved from town to town, he just got
aboard a Tri-State Bus, and the drivers never asked for tickets. He was
Uncle Sance to them just as he was to the passengers, just a harmless
and homeless old man, living on goat hide shoe strings.
I have always thanked Uncle Sance for understanding a small boy's need
for bragging rights.
I overheard conversation among adult relatives that one of Uncle Sance's
daughters had "gone to the bad." Eventually I equated that to running
away to Jackson and becoming a "hoar," (Recently I learned that our
neighborhood name of that occupation is more properly spelled whore.)
After the internet era, I got a query from a distant cousin in Ohio who
wanted any information I had on Sance Arender. She had been told she was
his descendant. I sent her all I could remember, but I did not suggest
she might descend from the young woman who "went bad." She did not
respond, so I lost out on tracing that line.
I have noted previously that Cousin Mathew Arender, the oldest son, as a
widower, married widow Cousin Nola Herrin, but they were too old to have
children. Grandpa Hough.
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Today on our Los Angeles Times editorial page, I see a condemnation of
Uzbekistan for its three month school recess for harvesting cotton so
that the Uzbek children can participate. This is deplored as forced
child labor. Well, I can say I share the pride of some Uzbek six or
seven year old who picks his or her first 100 pounds of cotton in one
day and of their bragging rights when they get back in school. In many
school districts in Mississippi, we started school in early August, then
had a one-month recess in late August and September for cotton picking,
then went back to school. Had we not done that, the desperate families
would have taken the children out of school anyway to pick the cotton.
The Uzbeks are lucky. It takes them three months to get the crop in. Our
yields were down so that one month was all we needed. I never heard our
cotton picking called child labor. My brothers and I, all under age 13
or 14, could pick a bale of cotton each week, working after school and
on Saturdays.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those with boisterous pre-tens. Every mother of Sullivan children
wondered - If a son would become another Preacher Sullivan -
And when this future they seriously pondered - One anxious mother
listened to her son pray - And learned what fate had in store when he said:
ôLord, if you canÆt make me a better boy, DonÆt worry about it !! IÆm
having a real good time like I am.ö
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