Mary Mann Hamilton - Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman

by Helen Dick Davis

I FIRST SAW Mary Hamilton on a raw November day. The wheels of our Ford had mired down to the running board in the black gumbo mud of the Mississippi Delta and had been dug out twice in the course of the four miles that lay between our house and that of my friend Edris. The third time it stuck we abandoned the car, my husband and I, and walked the remaining half-mile. Clumping across the wide open hall that extended the full length of the house, our feet still heavy with gumbo although we had scraped pounds of it off outside, we opened the door upon a tiny, hunchbacked, white-haired old lady sitting by the fire. She was patching some hunting pants and at the sight of us gathered them hastily into her arms, as if to protect them, since she could not protect herself from our gaze, which clearly embarrassed her. She spoke a little breathlessly, getting quickly to her feet.

You must be Helen. Edie never dreamed youd get hereits such a bad day. Ill go tell her.

And with a step surprisingly strong for one who looked so desperately frail, she swung down the hall towards the kitchen. I knew it was Edriss mother, but I didnt see her again that day. When I knew her better and saw her run always at the sight of strangers, I knew she did it because she is as vain as a girl and is embarrassed by the hump on her back, caused by a bad fall about fifteen years ago. She is afraid she doesnt look just right, with the hump and with her soft white hair that will hang in a fringe around her forehead no matter how many times a day she combs it. I came to know this about her, because when spring came and the four miles of gumbo between our house and Edriss dried out from a bottomless loblolly to a surface so hard you couldnt drive an axe into it, I saw Mary Hamilton often. She began to talk to me of her life nearly half a century ago in this same Mississippi Delta where we live now, and which then was a wilderness of untouched timber and canebrakes, a jungle of briars and vines and undergrowth.

At first she talked to me only in snatches, half apologetically, as if expecting to be interrupted any minute. I realized she had never before talked of those old days to anyone but her children, to whom the events she described must have been harrowing enough at the time. Hearing the stories retold must be difficult, because her children are all still young enough to dream of a future easier than the past. But to me those memories were more fascinating than any tales I had ever heard, and hearing them firsthand added to the enchantment. I would listen to her, spellbound, for hours.

From the beginning, her life has been one of tragedy, violence, and incredible adventure, although it would be hard to imagine anyone seemingly less fitted for that kind of life than Mary Hamilton. But if Henry James is right, and I am inclined to agree with him, that we carry in our own souls or egos or cores of our beings the germs of every event that happens to us, then Mary Hamiltons essence must be tragedy and courage. For as Stephen Crane once wrote of a Canadian gentleman, Destiny sets an alarm clock so as to be up early and strew banana peels in front of him. If he trusts a friend, he is betrayed; if he starts a journey, he breaks an ankle. If he loves, death comes to her without a smile.

Nevertheless, this is not a book of repining; it is a tale simply told of what one woman has lived through in the Mississippi Delta. I say lived through because at times this history reads like a record of the extreme limits of human endurance. One of its most amazing qualities is the writers own unawareness of this fact. At the very end of the book, when she speaks of dying, she is still able to say, innocently and with no thought of irony, that she will soon be going to a better world if such can be. The italics are mine. In spite of everything, Mrs. Hamilton has found this world good, and so this is a book of much laughter as well as tragedy. For a picture of courage and a spirit that can know no defeat, I do not know its equal. It was always the dream of a home that carried her through the hardships of pioneering, seemingly unbearable tragedies with her children, and a relationship with her husband that was, to the end, filled with mystery. Yet she remains today, as she has been all her life, homeless. In that sense it is a record of defeat, but only in that sense.

When I began to beg her to write down the account of her life, if only as a record for her children and grandchildren, she did it just to please me. She wrote it piecemeal at first, just scattered experiences, ten or fifteen pages at a time written with pencil on cheap tablet paper: stories of terrible floodwaters, cyclones, feuds to the death, escaped Negro convicts. I became zealous about letting a larger audience have a chance to read so unique and interesting a record. When I first made the suggestion, Mrs. Hamilton hesitated. It looked like too big an undertaking. She write a book? Why, shed never written more than a few letters in her life until she began writing those little sketches for me.

But the following fall she had a severe hemorrhage while visiting at her sons home, and on the first day that she was able to write, I got this letter from her: