Monnie Louise Morton was my mother. She was born on November 28, 1903, in Banner, Calhoun County, Mississippi to Sam and Minnie Byrd Morton. She was the third child and second girl up to that time. The Morton's had six children in all. The family lived in a log house near Banner, Mississippi, six miles north of Bruce, Mississippi. She was named after a neighbor woman who delivered her and who went by the name of Nannie Calratus, therefore, was given the neighbor woman's first name and given the name of her mother's first cousin, Monnie Averett Stanfield. Thus, her name became Monnie Nannie Morton. I don't think Mama ever liked her middle name because she would repeat it to me at times and say that her mother named her after every old woman who walked by. When I would ask her what name she was really given, she would say, "Monnie Nannie Moncer Morton." I don't know where the "Moncer" came from, except maybe that she just threw that in there to be scarcastic at the time. Mama had a certain wit about her and could be quite funny about things. She later legally changed her given name to Monnie Louise.
Around December of 1909, after being in Mississippi for ten years, Grandpa Sam moved his family to Hardin County, Tennessee. Mama was six years old at this time and another brother and sister had been added to the Morton family. She lost one sister, Mary Elizabeth, while they lived in Mississippi. Mary was born July 21, 1906, approximately 3 years before Mama, and was only 4 1/2 years old when she died from eating green plums. So at the time that the Morton's moved to Tennessee, there were only 4 children. Mary Elizabeth was buried in the churchyard of the Antioch Baptist Church at the SW corner of the church near Bruce, Mississippi where they lived. She was given a small marble headstone to mark her grave.
It was on Clifton Road in Hardin County, Tennessee that Mama's last brother was born, Dero Hezekiah Morton. He was the last child born to the Morton's.
Mama and her siblings started school in Hardin County. They probably didn't go the full 9 months of school since it was customary for school to let out so that the children could help out on the farm during part of the school year. Mama said that Grandma Morton would put the children's school lunches into a syrup pail which usually consisted of cold biscuits filled with fried salt pork or sorghum syrup and send them on their way. They would meet up with schoolmates who also lived along Clifton Road and walk barefoot about a mile or so to the school on Hardin's Creek. There were fifty children in Hardin School coming from up and down Clifton Road. The school had eight grades and one teacher.
In December 1915, Sam again moved his family, this time to far away Titus County, Texas. Minnie's brother, John Byrd, already lived in Titus County and had arranged for Sam to farm part of his neighbor's land in thirds and fourths. The neighbor's name was John Hargrove and he later became Mama's first husband. "Thirding and fourthing" meant that Sam would pay Mr. Hargrove one-third of the corn he raised and one fourth of the cotton while he himself furnished everything else.
Mama, along with her parents, siblings, and grandmother, lived on the Hargrove Lower Farm, as it was called. When they moved there they moved into a "dog-trot" log house. The older children helped Sam on the farm, sometimes doing the work of an adult, chopping cotton and picking it in the fall, besides doing other household and farming chores. Mama could sometimes be found trudging along in the fields behind a plow pulled by a mule. She and her siblings learned to work hard at a very young age. From all accounts, it was not an easy life and not a prosperous one. The family was poor and worked very hard.
Mama was only fifteen years old when she married Mr. Hargrove, a man forty-three years older than she. When I would ask Mama why her parents would let her marry at that young age and marry a man so much older, she would say, "They felt that I might be able to help the family." And I guess she was able to do just that at times.
I remember that she loved her siblings very much and she always felt that their spouses were just as important as they were. She was very close to all of them, and I was raised to not know the difference in them either. Mama was a very good daughter, sister, and in-law and any of them would tell you just that.
