Katie Elizabeth Wright is the wife to Willie Ferrell and my great grandmother. She was born in 1899 in Tennessee, but moved to the Athens area where she shared a farm a family with Willie during the great depression. Mother of five, she represents the steadfast mother of the era stubborn in her desire to see her children raised and well cared for in the rural south.
What Makes Them
She had grown old, turned forty, only to find that she didn’t much care for the world she lived in. Oh, she loved her children, all one thousand of them that it sometimes seemed she had. And she loved her husband who gave them to her, but the world which they inhabited no longer seemed like a good enough place for them all. Continue reading “What Makes Them”
Baking Soda Is Magic
Clendening, Logan, “ Diet and Health.” Kansas City Star Nov. 4 1931. Rpt. In A friend in Need, Facts Worth Knowing About Arm and Hammer Baking Soda as a Proved Medical Agent. By Arm and Hammer Inc. 1933. Print
“A Friend in Need, Facts Worth Knowing About Arm and Hammer Baking Soda as a Proved Medical Agent” is a small booklet displaying a smiling mother offering her, also smiling, daughter a spoonful of baking soda. The booklet is a
Sometimes I Tell My Children
“Sometimes I tell my children that I would like to go to Mexico, but they tell me ‘We don’t want to go, we belong here.'” (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8b26837/?co=fsa) , or as I like to call it, �Chubby Jesus� is a picture we rarely see in the discussion of the Great Depression. In a theater of dirty white children and gaunt face fathers next to stern, tight lipped mothers, we have something that approximates… hope? The first thing to catch my eye was the face of the mother in this
Big Things in the Small
Katie Elizabeth woke early on August 21, 1934, before even the chickens had time to yell them all out of their dreams. The only one to beat her outside of the cabin and onto the porch was her husband who had left a small pile of cigarette ash on the porch before he went to tend to their pigs. One had just died, Continue reading “Big Things in the Small”