The Other Side:  The Emmonses

Just hang in there, as I promised, I will tell you the story of the Great Flood of 1919, but you need to understand the other side of my family, the Emmonses, in order to fully appreciate it.

My full name is Wiley Harold Anderson.  I come from a long line of Wileys.  You Anderson cousins probably know this but I will cover it anyway: that unfortunate name pops up every now and then, and a few of us less fortunate Andersons get stuck with.  When I was a kid, I kept my first name a secret.  If some kid found out, and taunted me with Wiiiii-ley, a fight would ensue.  A professor in college found out and called me “Wiley Fox” in class.  I put tacks under his tires.  Since people of late have started giving their children odd names (Can you believe Konye West named his child “North,” and Michael Jackson named his daughter “Blanket?), I am no longer quite so sensitive about it.

Anyway, I have Wileys on both side of the family. (I once looked that name up on the internet and found that it is derived from William, and peaked in popularity in 1890.)  I was actually named for my maternal grandfather, Wiley Washington Emmons.  When I was just a “wee chap” (as they say in Kemper County), I heard some of the old folks refer to him as “uncle Wile.”

 My great-grandmother was named Wiley Jane (Roberts) Anderson.  She was named after her father, John Wiley Roberts, who was a Sergeant in the Confederate Army.  (He fought in and around Iuka, MS, died “in hospital” and is buried in the Confederate Cemetery at Lauderdale Springs, just north of Meridian, MS.  I have visited his grave.) Wiley Jane was the mother of John Cook, who was the father of Bardie Harlis Anderson (“Bardie” – now how is that for a name?  For years, Daddy got mail from the American Legion addressed to “Birdie Anderson.”), who was the father of your humble, obedient servant, Wiley Harold.

Here is a bit of Anderson family trivia: John Cook was named after the doctor who delivered him, and Wiley Jane was known as “Illa,” thank God; what woman would want to be known as “Wiley.”  So, here is a hint to all you younger cousins, if you name your daughter “Wiley,” feel free to call her Illa – or Frank, or George or LeRoy – anything but Wiley!

But, as my ol’ Navy Chum, Popeye, used to say, “I yam what I yam.”

My mother’s side of the family was strange (in fact, one of my ancestors died in an insane asylum.  That probably explains a lot.  Ever heard of genetics?) Wiley Washington was born in 1860.  That is right.  My GRANDFATHER was born the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president. He was born in north Florida and came to Jones County, Mississippi on a logging crew.  He was married to a woman whose maiden name was “Diamond.” I don’t remember her first name.  I guess I could look it up, but you DO remember what I told you about my affinity for Maynard G. Krebbs, don’t you?  They had three children that I know of:  Leonard, Walter and (for years, I did not know this) a daughter named “Josie.” She and my Grandmother Emmons (Wiley’s second wife) had some sort of falling out and she became “She-Whose-Name-Will-Not-Be-Spoken.” My grandmother had “falling-outs” with a lot of people, including her step-son Leonard.  He cut some timber off “the place” and she claimed he did not give her her fair share. Walter went to work for the railroad and died in Ohio during the flue pandemic of 1917.  He was 18 years old.  Leonard, married Vera – I don’t know her maiden name -- and he, with the help of his sons Reese and Bobby, ran a county store next to the old Rainey School.  Leonard lived into his 90’s.

Wiley moved to Jones County sometimes around 1900.  He was part of a logging crew that cut timber along the Leaf River.  When the spring floods came, they rolled the logs into the river, built a raft with a shack on it as living quarters and floated the whole she-bang down to “Scranton” (now Pascagoula) – a distance of probably about 200 river miles -- and sold them to a sawmill.  They took the train back home.  Wiley never learned to swim.  I remember Daddy saying that he had an uncle who also floated logs down the river.

Wiley’s wife died and he married a spinster named “Lilly Abigale Idallia Shows” She was known as “Dallie.” She was 38 years old when my mother, Myrtis Iva (Emmons), Anderson was born in 1913, and was 40 when my Uncle Currie was born in 1915. Wiley was a talented craftsman.  He gave up logging, bought a small farm about a half-mile from the Leaf River (directions to his old place – go south from Soul’s Chapel Church to the “T” Intersection – I think that is called “The Sanford Road” – turn left and it was about ¼ mile on the left.)  The land was poor and sandy, but Wiley made his living as a blacksmith, beekeeper -- Mother said he had 100 hives -- and woodworker.  As a child, after he had been dead for more than 25 years, I remember the remains of his shop across the road from the house.

Among other things, he built coffins.  Mother said he decorated children’s coffins with bows, and he let her tie them. He had a contract with that “beat” of the county to sharpen their road-grader blades, which was done by heating them on the forge and beating the cutting edge out thin, and he had a contract to paint and erect road signs.  Daddy said he was good at it, for every intersection in the beat had signs directing you to So-And-So’s house, store, watermill, etc.  I have never seen any of his lettering, but have notes, documents, etc. in his handwriting and it is excellent.

He also built boats, from time to time, a fact that will figure into the next chapter, which is about the Great Flood of 1919.

Mother described him as a “big-liver” (by “liver” she meant approach to life, not digestive organ).  She said her mother always prepared for four extra people for “dinner” – the noon meal, as distinguished from supper, the evening meal – because men were always hanging around the blacksmith shop, and Wiley would invite them to eat.

Wiley had a surplus WWI truck with an open cab.  In January of 1925, he was called to jury duty in Ellisville.  On the way home he was caught in a cold rain, caught pneumonia and died.  He was 65 years old and left behind a wife, twelve-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son to make a living on a poor, sandy farm. I gather that Leonard had moved out by this time.

I have one picture of Wiley.  It is a family portrait taken about 1916.  He is a big-chested man with a big, very bristly mustache (could that man not afford a pair of scissors?).  He is wearing suspenders and a broad-brimmed black hat.  Daddy said the hat was his trade-mark:  One never saw him without it.  He was an interesting character.  I think I take after him.  When I get to heaven, he is the first person I want to meet.

Times were tough for the Emmons family, even in these pre-depression years of the “Roaring 20’s.” They raised a few animals, vegetables, a bale or two of cotton, and foraged from the woods, Leaf River and the little creek that ran behind the house.

They lived in fear of two things:  The tax man and “September gales” (hurricanes).  And the two were intertwined.  They depended on that little cotton crop for money to pay land taxes, for if they could not, their land would be possessed by the county and sold at tax auction. There was no “social safety net” at the time, and they would be at the mercy of relatives – or even the poor house. As soon as the cotton bolls begin to open, they started picking.  A “September gale” would beat the cotton into the mud and ruin it, or blow it out of the bolls – an event that happened one time, and they were hard pressed to salvage enough of a crop to pay their taxes. 

About foraging from the woods – They scrounged for wild vegetables, fruits and nuts and fishing was not a recreational activity.  Mother said they gathered hickory nuts from one special tree that made thin-shelled nuts.  When I took dendrology as part of the Forestry curriculum at Mississippi State University, I learned that this was a shellbark hickory – a fairly scare tree.  They were lucky to have one.  They gathered, cracked and “picked out” a barrel of black walnuts at night “sitting around the fire.” Friends, if you are familiar with black walnuts, you will recognize this as a formidable task.

Biologically, the fruit of the black walnut is described as an “indehisant nut” – that is, the husk does not shed, as it does on a pecan.  The entire fruit is about the size of a tangerine, and most of it is a thick, spongy, difficult-to-remove husk.  The nut is about the size of, well, an English walnut, with which you are probably more familiar.  The shell is thick-walled and rock hard. The preferred method of removing the husk today (I am serious) is to spread them on a driveway and run over them, back and forth, with a vehicle until all the husk is ground off. I have no idea how the Emmonses did it.

I don’t know how they are processed in industry, but they are.  Once the husk is removed, most of the remainder is shell – only about 17% is edible nut-meat.  The biggest commercial use for walnut meat is in ice cream (my favorite, by the way).  The shells are used in industry – they are ground and used as an abrasive for sandblasting.  Dye is made from the husk.

Well, the Emmonses eked out a living.  The children grew up and got married.  Dallie stayed on the farm (with the support of Iva and Currie) until she “broke up housekeeping” in about 1953 or ’54.  She lived with us a couple of years until her death.  More about that later.

Well, that is a premier on the Emmons family. Sorry if I bored you, but you will be better prepared for the story of the Great Flood of 1919, which is more entertaining.  I promise.