Stephanie Newton’s Great-Grandmother & Recipe
Today a new Love Inspired Author shares a family story.
Here’s Stephanie:
My great-grandmother Helen was born in 1898. She lived in swampy lower Alabama. There were no buses, no public schools, not even many roads other than the dirt tracks that the farmers used to take their goods to market to sell. The War Between the States had been hard on the South, especially the rural areas. There was no money and very little food. Education was a luxury. Helen’s parents were determined that she would be able to read and write. The old stereotype that women didn’t need to be educated didn’t apply to her.
And even though times were hard, they would do everything they could to make that happen. Because there was no school in the rural area where she lived, she had a governess when she was young. When she was old enough to attend high school, the choice became harder. If she wanted to continue her education it meant leaving home. There was no high school in her area, but there was one in Selma, Alabama where her aunt lived. She would have to ride the riverboat to Selma and live with her aunt during the semesters, returning home only for holidays–if she was lucky. Sometimes the river was impassable–like the Christmas Eve when she made it halfway home before the boat ran aground. The crew on the boat gathered little trinkets from the staff and passengers for Helen and the other students on board. When she woke Christmas morning, she found a tattered stocking full of little baubles on the door of her cabin.
Helen went to college at Montevallo University (known as Alabama Girls Technical Institute and College for Women while she was there) at a time in history when not very many women did. She had a dream to be a teacher, to give other little girls and boys the opportunity to discover the world that she had discovered through the eyes of her governess and teachers in high school. When she graduated, she moved to the tiny town of Latham, Alabama and lived with a family, teaching in a tiny one-room schoolhouse until she married.
Those of us who knew her remember her as a funny, smart, opinionated, strong-willed woman. She loved to garden and had a showplace of a yard. She could do a crossword puzzle in ten minutes flat and loved to make her grandchildren and great-grandchildren laugh. I feel very lucky to have been born in a family where being educated isn’t considered a luxury, but a part of life. I was never asked, “Do you want to go to college,” but “Where do you want to go to college?” In my family, learning was an everyday occurrence and an expectation. The legacy of a strong woman named Helen.
In PERFECT TARGET, my heroine Bayley, comes from a privileged family. She doesn’t face the same issues that Helen did in her life. But certainly, Bayley does confront things in her life that she is unprepared for and feels unequipped to handle. She faces them with courage and a strength of spirit that reminds me of a certain steel magnolia great-grandmother.
Thanks for that great story, Stephanie.
Also Stephanie put Helen’s recipe for sour cream pound cake on her blog, so if you want that recipe, click this link.
http://stephanienewton.
