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    Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama
    Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama
    Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama

    By Viola Goode Liddell

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    About this ebook

    An engaging account of one woman’s overcoming the Depression and small town mores.

    Viola Goode Liddell’s short memoir tells the story of her return to Alabama in search of a husband and a new life. Thirty years old and recently divorced, Liddell comes back to her home state—with her young son—determined to survive, during the depths of the Depression. Liddell narrates the obstacles she faces as a single mother in the 1930s Deep South with self-deprecating humor and a confessional tone that reveal both her intelligence and her unapologetic ambitions.

    Unable to earn, borrow, or beg enough money to support herself and her child, Liddell uses her family connections to secure a teaching position in Camden, Alabama. Even though an older sister’s status within the community helps her land the job, Liddell is warned that she must be very careful as she navigates the tricky social terrain of small town life, particularly when it comes to men. A commentary on the plight of women of the time is woven into the narrative as Liddell recounts her experience of being refused a loan at the local bank by her own brother-in-law.

    Despite all the restrictions on her behavior and the crushing reality that she has become "the biggest nuisance in the family" because of her past, Liddell cheerfully and successfully builds a new life of respectability and hope.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2011
    ISBN9780817382025
    Grass Widow: Making My Way in Depression Alabama

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      Book preview

      Grass Widow - Viola Goode Liddell

      Tide . . . "

      Preface

                Shortly after Viola Goode Liddell's death on May 16, 1998, one of her longtime friends, Mary H. God-bold, contacted her son, Will L. Liddell Jr., and gave him the very rough draft of a seven-chapter untitled manuscript, handwritten in pencil on eighty-six pages of yellowed notebook paper of three or four different sizes. The manuscript was in a used manila envelope which had been sent from Moore-Handly Hardware Company in Birmingham, Alabama, to Mr. W. L. Liddell, Liddell Power Co., Camden, Ala., and bore a June 14, 1950, postmark. Mrs. Godbold said that Viola had given her the manuscript in recent years and had asked her to keep it until I ask for it.

      Will and his wife, Ruth, typed and edited the manuscript with input from Ruth's brother, Robert M. Howe III, who suggested the title Grass Widow. The final version is given here. Portions of this manuscript appear in Viola's book, A Place of Springs, published by the University of Alabama Press in 1979, but this manuscript stands on its own as an account of Viola's life during 1933 and 1934 as she came to Camden to teach, and ultimately to meet and marry Will Lithgow Liddell, Sr.

      It remains uncertain when the manuscript was completed; the 1950s appears to be the most likely time, based on the recollections of Mrs. Godbold and the date of the postmark on the manila envelope that held the manuscript.

      one

      Crossing Over

                Occasional whirls of devil dust danced gaily down the rusty graveled road and zigzagged crazily across the ashen hedgerows and into the burnt fields beyond. Corn, matured early because of the drought, stood in gray-brown patches like congregations of stringy-haired crones, arms withered, heads wagging, whispering and gesticulating together. Pungent whiffs of a clothy odor hung in the air near the fields of cotton plants, whose prostrate leaves drooped over the white fiber drooling from the bolls. A single wagon hugged the road, groaning wearily on its way to the gin, wobbly wheels leaving serpentine tracks in the dust; another bounced and clapped emptily by, hurrying home to shade and water.

      A shimmering haze of heat rose from the dry earth to meet the snowy islands of lazy clouds ballooning majestically and hanging serenely in the brazen sky. For days they had come and gone, tantalizing, irritating, offering a deceptive and immature promise of rain.

      But it was September. The cotton farmers wanted it this way. Dry and hot. Dry and hot for cotton, always dry and hot from the planting time in April until the hoops were on the bale in the fall. Clean white cotton upgraded to middling; damp dirty cotton downgraded to low middling or low. The cattlemen would have hated the drought with pastures brown, streams dry, and water holes mud-caked, except that most of them still grow cotton; so they, too, had to hold their peace. Nobody in central Alabama with the sense of a dusting doodle would complain of drought or heat from August to November, no matter if it sweated the last ounce of moisture and energy out of him and sent him off suffocated with spasms of hay fever, reeling with sunstroke or wheezing with asthmatic fits.

      An early harvest . . . as if nature herself, weary of producing more and more only to have it worth less and less, wished to have it over and done with as soon as possible. 1933. Cotton, five cents a pound, cows, two cents a pound, corn, fifty cents a bushel. The ultimate humiliation after years of pernicious anemia. Emaciated, starved, beggared, paralyzed. Hopeless, it seemed, and helpless. For years on end the Good Lord, apparently unmoved, had seen fit to watch His benighted likenesses in the South turning on the spit; but now, since His long petted and pampered up-easterners and cross-westerners were praying and hollering so loud about the mess they, too, had finally gotten into, maybe He'd take some notice and pass a miracle on the whole lot of us, seeing as how half a people could hardly keep on starving and half keep on getting rich forever.

      True, some folks thought He had already passed the miracle which His appointed prestidigitator, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had called the New Deal, but if that was the miracle it had better get to working, quick and sure, or there would be nobody left to work it on. Though the president had been on stage since November, spring had come before the magician could get his legerdemain to working, and with Congress, clumsy and slow, for an assistant, it would take more time yet for coins pulled out of an empty hat in Washington to trickle down to Podunk,

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