It was at about the time we were moving back and forth from Brownwood to the country that I saw many of my parents relatives who occasionally came to visit us or whom we might go to see. My mother’s family had some relatives who seemed strange to me but later, as I thought of it, I realized that they were kinsfolk of my parents and were probably no stranger than we seemed to be to them.
Although I was very young, I remember Minnie May, a niece to my grandmother, who lived down the street on Belle Plain because she was so tall and skinny and her language was rather earthy. Like so many things that I heard at the time, I had no idea what they were talking about but, it came more into focus as I grew older and thought about what they said. I remember that once when someone commented to Minnie May on how skinny she was, she replied, “The closer the bone, the sweeter the meat”. I am sure that she had developed this punch line as she had gotten tired of being teased about her size.
Some of my maternal Grandmothers’ brothers or brother-in-laws were Thomas “Doc”, Joe or Joseph and Bob White or Robert Franklin and several others. I remember one of them (I believe to be Bob White), as he got older and would walk up and down Belle Plain street and had once painted his shoes with aluminum paint to make them look not so old and worn out. I also remember that Bob White would sometimes whistle to make the onomatopoeic sound of the bird that would whistle his and its own name (Bob White).
This is the only time in my life that I have had the chance to show how much I remember about one of my favorite figures of speech I had learned somewhere back in English grammar class in high school.
My mother’s mother, whom we always called ‘Mama Johnnie’, was really John Annie (White) Johnson and the youngest daughter of Charity Rose and John White. When she had first married my grandfather, John Hilmer Johnson, who had immigrated from Göteborg, Sweden in about 1872, she showed no signs of mental disorder, but with age, began to show signs of schizophrenia.
Her illness was often frightening to family members. My mother often told of how she once was upset at a neighbor and took an axe and walked down the street to the neighbor’s house. The neighbor was fearful but all my grandmother did was to return the axe to their woodpile and leave. I think some thought she was dangerous, but mother felt she was just using this tactic to intimidate the neighbor and it seemed to have worked.
Another time, my mother said that there were some men working under a house as they were leveling up the unstable foundation. My grandmother told the men under the house to get out as she felt it was about to fall off the wooden piers they were installing. After they exited from under the house, it did fall and mother felt that ‘Mama Johnnie’ had psychic powers in that she had warned and had saved the lives of the men in getting them out before it fell.
I remember when I was younger, my grandmother would treat all the grandchildren well and loved to make one of her favorite dishes for us, sweet and sour dumplings. I remember ‘Mama Johnnie’ most because she began to read people’s fortunes by using her coffee grounds, rather than using tea leaves. I think she preferred coffee so it was really a dual benefit for her – she enjoyed her coffee and then got a dollar or so from her clients for giving a demonstration of her clairvoyant ability.
Later, after high school, some of my friends and I used to drink coffee at Mrs. Ray’s Restaurant, where she had a café near the intersection of Highway 183 and 377 in Early, TX. She read fortunes for people who stopped by the café and I came to understand that she was just craftier than the people who wanted their fortunes told.
She would meet them at the door of her café and she recognized the area from which most license plates came and other bit of information which helped her in her guesswork. She soon would have people telling her more about themselves than she did about them and they were convinced that she had some special gift as a seer and soothsayer.
I believe that my grandmother, Mama Johnson, had developed a knack for this and people were willing to pay her to tell them things they wanted to hear. Even with her mental problems, she was smart enough to convince people she had some special and unique psychic powers.
I also remember some of Dad’s aunts who lived in Brownwood. One of my paternal grandmother, Cordelia’s, sister was Minnie Russell and my folks thought she was odd because she was a Jehovah Witness and would spend so much of her time on the town square near the courthouse passing out Watch Tower magazines. Her religion was foreign to the rest of the family members as we considered everyone to be unstable who was not a Baptist and who did not go to the same church as us.
Another sister of my grandmother was Frances F. Russell or Aunt Fannie and was born about 1873, never married and was rewarded for this by living to be quite old. She lived with Dad and Mom for three months at one time and Mother said that she was only visiting them but Mom had to wash, iron and cook for her, along with the rest of her family. Aunt Fannie owned a whole block of land on Avenue I in Brownwood. She lived in such great fear that someone was going to steal her money that she constantly carried her little bank book around with her.
Someone did end up stealing her money. Meek and Johnnie Russell’s daughter, Viola, and her husband, Isaac, sold her on the idea that they would take care of her and her money – and they did! They gained her confidence and her money which they had used to build houses on her land. They did so until they finally lost (or gained) all of her fortune, as well as the land. It was not known how much they ended up getting from her but they eventually left her alone and broke. Without food or anything of value, she ended up in the County Home (poor farm) where died in 1930 at 57 years of age.
As I have gotten into genealogy and gotten to know a little about some of these people, they seem to me to be caricatures of individuals from really bad “B” movies. I was blessed that I did not realize that they were kin to us until I was much older. Other relatives of my mother and relatives of these relatives who lived near my grandparents seem to range from peculiar to bizarre in my mind as I ponder about why my mother would ever want to be around them, especially having so many young children of her own. It did not seem as weird at the time as there were a few cousins with whom we would play.