The Life of a Mountain Girl

THE LIFE OF A MOUNTAIN GIRL A MEMOIR

CHAPTER 1

Only in my older days do I realize what my childhood was really like. Ignored, like an apple left on the tree when all the others are picked or fallen to the ground. That’s the way I look at it now. I never felt neglected or unwanted then. A quiet, contented child, I loved my father and mother, sisters and brothers. I was number five in a family of ten. That would have been bad enough; I also came fourteen months after my sister Kathleen who seemed to be the star of the family, especially with mother. I never knew if mother loved me.

Mother, Forest Roger Carter, a quiet, gentle woman who yielded to father’s every whim. She was fifteen and he was twenty when they married in1917.

Father, Guss Haze Carter, also a gentle soul. He didn’t have much schooling. His mother died when he was very young. He had to quit school and go to work to help support his family. However that did not stop him from learning. A self-made man. Through books and any source available, he taught himself music and played all string instruments. He loved to sing and play music. He became an electrician, and believed one could accomplish anything if they worked at it.

Everything I learned about myself came from my oldest sister, Lenora. She was seven when I was born and became a mother to me. She and our oldest brother Foster, who was nine at the time, came home from school on October 31, 1927 and there I was, coal black hair and eyes that looked like black marbles, in bed with mother, Kathleen playing on the bed. I imagine God looked down that day and said to his angels “we must look after this little one.” And they did. I have had many angels in my life.

Mother refused to name me. Now that I have had children close together I understand how she felt. My father called me Madge no middle name. I never knew where he got the name but since I am older I’ve sort of guessed. Father was away a lot at the time, either working of looking for work. Now that I watch old movies on TCM from the late twenties and thirties I find some of the female actors named Madge. My dad may have had a dime, or sneaked in the movie house. I like to think that is where he got my name.

I was born in a coal town in Widen, West Virginia but my first memory was about three. We lived in an old farm house on the side of a mountain near the little town of Strange Creek, West Virginia. In the winter the snow blew in the cracks. Mother heated flat irons, wrapped them in towels and put them at our feet at night to keep us warm. We slept two or three to a bed at that time there were only seven of us in this order. Foster Elmo, Lenora Geneva, Daymon Monroe, Kathleen Issobelle, Madge, Buddy Vance, Jefferson David. Daddy nick-named Kathleen “Toots.” She went by that name until she was married.

We had two mules, Cora, a mare and Bob, a gilding. A milk cow, chickens, and a pig which we butchered every winter and replaced in the spring. One year we had a litter of pigs. Daddy gave Toots the runt for a pet. She named him Gussie. She fed that pig her food, wrapped him in a blanket and held him in her lap until he outweighed her three times, and mother said it was time for Gussie to go. We had some good ham after that!

Toots may have been in charge of me, we were together constantly. Toots was a “Pippy Long stocking” character. She was not afraid of anything, and lived life to the fullest. I was the opposite. I watched, looked up to her, and sometimes tried to follow. One time she was climbing a tree (she could climb trees like a monkey). I stood on the ground looking up at her. “Come on up scaredy cat” she yelled. There was a smaller tree nearby, and I thought maybe I could make it to the first limb, which I did and immediately fell to the ground, my breath knock out of me! When I could breathe I went running toward the house. Toots was out of the tree and caught me before I could get there. We never ran to our parents, and I believe their faith in God kept us alive.

We had the neatest place to play along the path that went around the mountain. A big flat rock! In the spring it was covered with beautiful green moss. We played house for hours, making furniture from rocks and sticks. Of course Toots was always the mother, and a bossy one! When we played school she was always the teacher. Another place was the spring. It had a concrete ledge built up around it and there were coins set in the concrete. Down from the spring, just before the creek, there was a place where after it rained the water ran across the path leaving wet sand. We could always find crawdads there. My favorite place, I Believe, in the summer was a knoll covered completely with daises. We would stretch out on our backs and lay in them, looking up at the sky. When we got tired of that we would pick daises and do the “he loves me, he loves me not” thing. Then we would take a fist full home to Mother.