My Childhood
By
Vinnie Aday Houston Karp
August 28, 1984
I was born in Stone County, Missouri, April 1st, 1908 at Grandfather Dave Williams’ house, right by Little Indian Creek. There was a narrow valley, no more than a quarter of a mile across. Little Indian Creek ran through it. There were two tall popular trees that grew in his yard. I can still see those two trees in my imagination. There is a mountain on each side of the narrow valley. They look just about straight up. The mountains there are low but very steep. I have climbed them many a time. They are covered in timber. Ginseng grows there, and huckleberries, hickory nuts, black walnuts and a few white walnuts wild grapes. The spring where Grandpa got their water is called the Eureka Spring and just above it grew a lot of hazel nuts. I would go there in the fall and get them. They were delicious. I would love to go to the Eureka Spring once more. Indians had chipped out a little basin in the rock. One could dip up as much as a half gallon bucket of water. It was cold and good tasting water. I had to be on the lookout for rattle snakes and copperheads. Indian arrowheads were thick on Grandpa’s place when I was a little girl. There had once been a lot of them there before they were driven out.
Our post office for the little Indian Creek country was Nauvoo, Missouri; just a country post office and small grocery store ran by a man named Horace Cole. Tom Benton had a blacksmith shop and a little gristmill. He ground corn for meal. Back in them days people, or most people, ate more corn bread than they did flour. They didn’t grow wheat in the rocky Ozarks and had no mill to grind it on either. The ground corn meal in those days had to be sieved. It was half bran, but it really made good corn bread. People gave the bran to their chickens or hogs.
I never went back to Missouri many times after I was 11 years old, but I well remember a lot. Once we went to Oklahoma to pick cotton, me being the eldest of 5 children. I was 10 years of age. Papa was old and not well. Maggie was a baby. I mostly watched her, but Papa could do so little bit of work he took over taking care of Sister Maggie. So it was Mama and me and Marvin picking cotton. Marvin was only seven years old. We couldn’t do any good as they paid so cheap for picking cotton. I believe it was 50 cents a hundred, and it takes a lot of cotton to weigh 100 pounds. It rained a lot and we all got sick from being on the cold, wet ground. We went back to Indian Creek, Missouri.
I would show my cousins how I had to walk on the train. The train rocked and rattled. One could barely stand up. They got a kick out of that. They had never ridden a train at that time, and it was my first time on a train. I suppose I had it down pretty pat. At that age, I remembered everything as it was all new to me. I think I told them a pretty interesting story.
After I was 5 years of age, we moved to my Grandfather Aday’s place. It was 8 miles from Little Indian Creek and 1 mile from Nauvoo Post Office, and one half mile from Big Indian Creek. We lived there a few years. I believe that was the happiest time of my childhood days. We couldn’t see the creek from our house, but I would go over in the creek bottoms where the big black walnuts grew and hull as many as I could carry back home and put them out to dry. I kept that up until I had a lot of them. I was so small I couldn’t carry many at a load. I would put in all day at it, until I thought I had enough. They were extra large walnuts and food was scarce, especially in winter. They were like eating meat. I remember having some on top of a shed drying and I saw a rain cloud coming up. I was up on the shed trying to get my walnuts in a sack so I could take them to a dry place and I slipped and fell and cut a hunk of meat out of the back of my leg. It was sore for a long time and I still have the scar.
It was odd how people built their houses. Grandfather Aday’s house was where he raised his family and they were all grown and gone and Grandpa was dead when we moved there. The house, or the main house, was one real big log room down stairs with a fireplace and a big room same size upstairs. Then off a ways was another house, two rooms, a kitchen and dining room with a side room the length of the kitchen and dining room.
We only used the main house with the one big room downstairs. Mama cooked on the fireplace. She had an iron Dutch Oven she baked bread in and iron pots she stewed food in. Mama said the Adays used both houses. Some slept in the other house. In them days, country people didn’t have living rooms and dens and so on. They slept wherever they had rooms for beds.
We would do a lot of what we called browsing around through Spring, Summer and Fall. Lots of edibles grew wild. There was black walnuts, hickory nuts, hazel nuts, chinquapin nuts, papaws, persimmons, wild grapes, blackberries, dewberries, wild strawberries, and wild cherries and many, many kinds of wild greens to eat.
I once lived in the Desert state of Nevada. There was none of these things growing wild there. Pinion nuts, or some called them pine nuts, grew in some areas of the desert. Not an extra large tree, either.
In 1920, when Sister Arletha was a baby, we went back to Oklahoma around Shawnee, Oklahoma. Papa’s brother Ike Aday lived on a little farm there. They had a large family, 10 children. Most were grown and gone when we went there. They were not able to help us but very little, and we couldn’t make it picking cotton. I was 12 years old by then.
They decided that all they could so was take us back to Eureka Springs, Arkansas to the orphans home and leave us until they could some way get us back, if they ever got able to support us. I don’t blame Mama or Papa either one over this. Papa was too sick to work with heart trouble and poor Mama was uneducated. Besides, there was no work to be got, only maybe a few days now and then during the Summer at 50 cents a day.
I’ll never forget the last night we were together. We were in an old house somewhere around Shawnee, Oklahoma. I don’t remember what mama and Papa talked about, but I understood enough to get it that the next morning we were leaving, going somewhere that we would be separated from Mama and Papa. I never slept a wink that night. The house was near a pond or a wet, marshy place that water frogs croaked all night. Oh how lonesome I was and could never stand to hear them water frogs again. They would bring back memories of that last night we were all ever together.
Before daylight the next morning, a man came in a wagon to take us to the railroad station to catch the train back to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Papa didn’t go with us. That broke my heart. I believe it changed me forever. I was never very happy anymore. We went on in to the orphanage. I don’t know where Mama went, but I believe she went over on Little Indian Creek where her people lived. She kept Arletha for she was just a little baby. Maybe they wouldn’t take babies at the orphanage.
Mama almost grieved herself to death. It seems like a long time before she got back to see us and when she came she looked so bad I didn’t know her. All of it together left a mark on me that I never really ever got over.
After two and a half years, Mama met and married Ben Pinkley, a well respected man and then she got the children back. All but me. Lee Floyd, the man that founded the orphanage turned it over to somebody else and left taking me with him and his wife and the three Libby sisters. He had adopted the Libby girls and told me he adopted me. I never knew the difference until I went home to Mama and Ben. He tired to adopt me but Mama and Papa wouldn’t sign the papers. When he left Eureka with us, we went to Russellville, Arkansas. He rented a farm and bought horses and cows and chickens. Before long he seemed to get really scared up about something. He sold everything he bought and said we would have to leave there and go to Texas. He took me to his sister near Harrah, Oklahoma. He said he would come back and get me when they got located. He came back in 3 months or so after me but his sister wouldn’t let him take me. I think he got scared up about taking me because he knew he had no lawful right to take me.
Mama got Ben to get Tom Morris, the Sheriff of Carroll County, Arkansas to look me up. So Ben sent me money to come home on and Tom Morris the Sheriff wrote Fergusons, the people I was living with, giving
them so many days to put me on the train and send me home or else the law would come and get me and put them to some trouble. Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson were both crying when I left. They took me to the train station at Harrah, Oklahoma and stayed until I got on the train. I couldn’t understand then why they were crying, but it was because they didn’t want me to leave. They had become attached to me. I was with them some over two years. I don’t remember them ever saying one cross word to me. I never heard either one of them say a cuss word or a vulgar word and at that time they weren’t Church members. Me and their oldest child, John, went to Sunday School when weather permitted
I never heard my father and mother quarrel and I was 12 years of age when they separated. I could well have remembered had I ever heard them quarrel. Mama was always jolly. She would laugh a lot, always happy to see our neighbors and got along good with everyone, but something happened to her later. I have always thought it was because she had to take us children to the orphanage. She grieved so much over us that it changed her completely. After we were all back home, I have heard her talking to herself and she would say, Oh my poor children. She never got over it. She loved us dearly and she blamed Papa in it all. She said he was lazy and no account. Well, he was a sick man but a good man. I don’t believe a better man ever lived. He was so harmless. Would not harm anybody in any kind of way. He was as kind and decent a person as ever lived.
All I am writing is the truth in my last days on earth. I wouldn’t write anything unless it was true. I don’t believe Mama ever realized how sick Papa was and grieved so much over giving us up. She really thought Papa was to blame.
Papa was 18 years older than Mama. My father John Aday was born January 16, 1861 and died August 5, 1931. Mama, Tempie Armenta Williams was born January 3, 1879 and died July 7, 1977. They grew up about a mile apart and knew each other all their life near Nauvoo, Missouri. That was a poor, rocky, hilly country, very hard to make a living. No work for wages. The only way to make it was own a little farm, have a team of horses or mules. A cow or two, some pigs and chickens. One had to grow their living. Try to grow their potatoes, pick wild berries and can everything they could get a hold of or dry it. Fruit such as apples, peaches, pears and so forth were very scarce and some years frost or freeze got it all.
My Grandfather, Mama’s father, was David Arnold Williams born September 22, 1849 and died March 5, 1922. His wife, Grandma Williams, was born January 3, 1848 and died April 4, 1906. They all grew up over there along Indian Creek in Missouri. Oh, Yes, her name was Elizabeth but she was called Betty. Her maiden name was Bilyeu. She died of cancer.
Papa’s father, Grandpa Aday died at age 70 from pneumonia fever. Grandmother Aday died at age 48 from heart trouble. Her name was Amanda Jane Walters before marrying Grandpa Aday.
So ends the story of Vinnie’s childhood days as she wrote it. Vinnie Aday Houston Karp died September 3, 1994 in California.
Submitted by
Tanna Robinson, Vinnie’s daughter
Stockton, California
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