Growing Not Controlling People

Love can make a difference

My mother who grew up as Susie Blanche Styers was part of family that had lived in and around the hills north and west of Winston-Salem since the Revolutionary War. Our first ancestor in the area is recorded on the 1790 census and is buried with his wife forty-five minutes away from our current home.
Mother’s grandfather Abe Styers ran Styers ferry which crossed the Yadkin River from Yadkin County to Forsyth County. Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem, was destined to be a county that pulled itself into the manufacturing boom of the second half of the twentieth century. Yadkin County would remain solidly agricultural.
Mother was born on a mill pond in the heart of Yadkin County in 1910. It was a time before electricity and when horse drawn buggies were more likely to be found on the dirt roads than those new Model T Fords. Her mother, Sallie Shore Styers, died in the 1919 flu epidemic. By the time my mother was nine years old she was cooking for the family of eight.
That presented some challenges since she was too small to lift the heavy cast iron pan used to bake biscuits each morning from the flour mixed up weekly by one her older female relatives. Fortunately, her older brother Henry would help her with the pan after he had taken care of bringing the wood inside and starting a fire in the stove.
While life around a millpond in the early part of the twentieth century might sound idyllic, it was actually a lot of hard work, and a life that didn’t leave a lot of time for play. While Walter, mother’s father, was a miller, most of the rest of the food for the large family with six children had to be grown and preserved on the spot.
There was no yard to mow, just some bare ground to sweep around the house with homemade brooms made from the readily available broom straw. Preserving food for winter was a skill mother and her sisters never lost.
The stories of watching men cut blocks of ice from the pond during the winter and haul the loads of ice with teams of horses to their sawdust insulated ice house in the ground seem hard to believe in our warming world. Yet life was very different then. They kept their milk and butter cooled in a spring house which was little more that a small building with a roof set on top of a spring flowing out of the ground.
Mother had places to go and things to do in her life so it didn’t take much time with her new stepmother before she left home as a teenager for the big city of Mount Airy, NC. Eventually she got a license as a beautician and had her own shop on Main Street. She even claimed to have spanked Andy Griffith when he was misbehaving in her shop while she did his mother’s hair.
When she was in her nineties, she used to joke that she had walked by Snappy Lunch for most of her long life and never tasted one of their pork chop sandwiches. We bought her one, and she declared that she had not missed much.
While mother made it out of Yadkin County, her sisters never did. With the determination that only a true southern matriarch demonstrates, she was determined that her nieces and nephews would have a taste of life beyond the red dirt fields of Yadkin County. She was the only one of the sisters to learn how to drive as a teenager.
I’ve been told many times by cousins that they never would have enjoyed much of a Christmas without my mother. She was famous for braving the muddy roads to get back to her sister Mollie’s house. I remember her stories of getting stuck and having to knock on the door of a farmer’s house to be pulled out.

Goose and I just sent out a new newsletter, Goose Speaks: Memories of Love, Black Friday 2024. It has more about my mother. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, and there is a free subscription that will get most of the posts.