Mama was not born in Macon County. She was born at Morris in Blount County. She was the Daughter of William Dee Mote and Myrtie Stubbs Mote. She was part of a large family with five brothers and five sisters. Grandmother Mote’s family—the Stubbs family—was a large family, mostly in the Birmingham area, and we never knew them very well. Grandaddy Mote’s—the Mote family—was also a large family, mostly in the Birmingham area, and we never knew them very well, although there was and still is a Mote family reunion that we sometimes attended after we were almost grown. Grandmother and Grandaddy moved around a bit. Granddaddy Mote had been a coal miner in Birmingham, and a truck farmer operating from Shades Mountain. Granddaddy sold his interest in the farm on Shades Mountain to his brother, and bought a four-hundred-acre farm in the Blackbelt region of Macon County. The family moved to Downs, in south Macon County in 1934, near the Bullock County line.
Mama was born January 12th, 1918. The boys in Mama’s family included Dee, Wiltshire, Hickman, Archie and Emmette. All the boys remained in the general area of Macon and Bullock Counties. The girls were Sue, Maggie, Mama—whose name was Ella—Martha, and Tally. Aunt sue studied nursing in Birmingham, and married Sam Sommers, a Jewish doctor, and wound up in New York. Aunt Matt (Martha) joined the WAVES in World War II, and met and married Adam Goetz. They lived in Baltimore for a time, but wound up in California. Aunt Tally, visited with Aunt Sue in New York, met and married Joseph Abdallah, who was of Assyrian descent, and lived in Brooklyn. Aunt Maggie married Berry Spratlan, and they lived in Hardaway, near Downs, in south Macon County. There was another Sister, Tommie Her clothing caught fire from an open heater at the old Shorter School after they moved to Macon County, and she burned to death.
Mama and her family had lived on Shades Mountain before coming to Macon County. She told us about Uncle Dee and Aunt Maggie finding buzzard eggs under a rock on the mountain. She said she would take us there, but never did. We visited Shades Mountain after becoming adults, but didn’t see any buzzard eggs in the flourishing upscale housing that had developed there.
She attended Shades Cahaba High School while living on the Mountain. She didn’t finish, and didn’t finish at Shorter High School in Macon County either. Instead, she fell in love with one of the bus drivers. That was Daddy. She was eighteen when they married. Daddy was twenty-six. They married in 1936, and built the Little House after marriage. Wade was born two years later.
Mama was cheerful enough, especially publicly. But she was quite intent on doing whatever was necessary to get by. She was very frugal, and managed to get by on whatever Daddy managed to earn. Income was always limited. She was strict. She was the main practitioner of the dog belt, the hung between the rooms in the Little House! But she did nothing more with it than was needed. She more than made up for it with with her cooking. We ate well, on limited means. But I’ll come back to that. Mama read to us. There wasn’t that much to read at the Little House. But she came up with Heidi, Tom Sawyer, and a few other books. She read us the funny papers from the Montgomery Advertiser, and funny books. One book—it must have been a dictionary—had two pages of pictures that I remember, and I knew right where to find them. One was a page of dogs. I liked the Great Dane and the Chihuahua—the biggest and smallest. The other was sea creatures. I liked the sea horse.
She was a hard worker. She worked in the home, and she worked in the fields, chopping, hoeing and picking cotton. She worked in the garden, raising and picking vegetables: Butterbeans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, irish potatoes, hot pepper, bell pepper, watermelons, cantaloupes, eggplants, okra, just to name a few. And she “saved” the vegetables. She used a “canner”—a pot with a pressure top, that would process and seal seven jars of vegetables or fruit at a time. When refrigeration arrived, years later, she froze vegetables.
She was an intense, protective mother. She saw to it that we behaved. She insisted on school attendance. She helped with homework, a little, but fortunately I don’t remember any of us needing much help. She monitored our conduct and our companions. It was a lot easier to get into the branch to play than to visit with other children. She was determined to make things work for the best, even in difficult circumstances. She was cheerful, smiling a lot. But she could get up tight, even if it was just about getting housework done.
Mama’s flaw in those days was that she smoked. Grandmother, of course, never knew that Mama smoked. But she did. She smoked Prince Albert. Rolled her own with good “PA!” the ad on the Grand Ole Opera said, “Roll your own with good PA, and take a puff or two, you’ll get that extra smoking joy Prince Albert brings to you. The tobacco came in a red can with white writing, and Prince Albert himself was pictured right on the front. Made great targets for the BB guns.
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