Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [8]
My grandmother’s posture is stiff-backed, almost to the point of appearing uncomfortable. Her very demeanor, her serious expression, and her deliberately erect carriage remind me of my mother. In their shared demeanor, my grandmother and mother are alike in a way that my mother and I will never be. Ida Elliott did the impossible, giving birth to thirteen children and raising fourteen with none of the benefits of the modern conveniences we take for granted today. Amazingly, she lived until 1937 to the age of sixty-four, surviving my grandfather by one year, if not the Great Depression.
Alice Elliott lived with her stepson and his wife, Henery and Ida, until the three could no longer care for each other. By that time, my mother and her siblings were adults with homes of their own. In 1932 Henery, Ida, and Alice Elliott moved to my Uncle Tutulus and Aunt Fanny Elliott’s home. There were no pension programs for aging farmers and the family chose home care rather than nursing home care partly because of cost, partly because of tradition, and partly because of love. Their step-granddaughter- and daughter-in-law, my Aunt Fanny, cooked and cared for them. My mother and her siblings helped to look after her parents and step-grandmother as first Henery, then Ida, and finally in 1939 Alice Elliott died. She was the last member of the generation that had experienced slavery firsthand. Sadly her thoughts on it and life after it are unrecorded.
My paternal grandparents were Allen and Ollie Hill. Allen Hill was the youngest of four children. According to my father, his grandparents had come to Oklahoma “as hoboes” before the turn of the century, before Oklahoma became a state. Along with two other families of freed slaves and their children, my paternal great-grandparents, Ed and Sally Hill, hopped freight trains from North Carolina to Oklahoma when my grandfather was just a small boy. This, too, was a blended family. My great-grandfather had two children by a previous “slave” marriage. My great-grandmother had one under similar circumstances. Together they then had two children including my grandfather. In Oklahoma Ed Hill farmed and ran a junk business, scrapping spare parts from the junked equipment of the many oil fields that sprang up throughout Oklahoma Territory.
Ollie Nelson Hill, my paternal grandmother, was born in Texas and lived there until, when she was twelve, her mother, Nellie Nelson, died. Gus Nelson was her father. He was born Gus Simms but he’d been given the name Nelson as a slave when purchased by a man with that name and retained it throughout his life. Upon his wife’s death, Gus Nelson, a minister, brought my grandmother, Ollie, a brother, and two sisters, along with a younger sister of Nellie’s, to Oklahoma, where he raised them alone. Late in his life, after his children were adults, he remarried.
Allen Hill and Ollie Nelson were married when they were in their late teens and served as proof to the theory that opposites attract. Though married for over thirty years, they appear to have lived separate lives. Mama Ollie, a religious woman, was a member of the fundamentalist Church of God in Christ. Musically gifted, she was quiet and reserved. She happily shared her talent with her children but allowed them to play only the music of the church. Daddy Allen, on the other hand, loved to go to dance halls and baseball games. Always outgoing and gregarious, he joined church only late in life. According to my mother, Allen Hill’s confession of his sins came when he was well past committing most of them—as he stood at death’s door.
For a time, Allen Hill ran a taxi service with a surrey between Muskogee and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. It was the first of its kind in the area. But mostly, Allen and Ollie Hill were farmers.