SHE WAS MY MEMAW

In his speech to the Republican National Convention, J D Vance gave credit for his success to his grandmother, the woman he called Memaw.  As he spoke with such love about his hardscrabble grandmother, it took me back to the northwestern hills of West Virginia and the woman who was my own memaw…

Her name was Margaret Jane Rush Green.  To me she was Aunt Maggie.  She was born in 1887, the fourth of eight children of Irish immigrants; in 1910 married a coalminer in Grantown, West Virginia, welcomed her first child a year later and was pregnant with her second child when her beloved Charles was killed in a mine accident in 1913. 

A year later, her small, five room bungalow home on a hill above Pitrolo’s Garage in Grantown was bursting with her elderly parents, her dead brother’s five orphans, the youngest of whom was my mother Kathrine, and Aunt Maggie’s younger brother, Patrick.  The bathroom facility was a two-hole outhouse about fifty or sixty steps up a rise from the back door.  Clothes washing was done in Paw Paw Creek.  And Saturday night the heavy porcelain coated steel tub was pulled from the pantry and filled with water heated on the wood stove.  Adults bathed first, then children.  It was the same routine when I came to live with Aunt Maggie, except she bathed me first, herself second. 

My father saw me after my birth.  And stayed mostly absent after that.  My mother found a nurse’s job with the State of West Virginia in Charleston, 140 miles south.  It was early 1941.  The Great Depression continued its grip and WWII was still months off.  I was left with Aunt Maggie. 

Maggie Green was an amazon of a woman, standing five-foot-nine or ten.  Her wardrobe was made from fifty-pound flour bags, cut from a single Butterick pattern, and put together on a Singer treadle sewing machine.  She planted and tended a large garden; shopped for her other needs at the coal company’s store in Grantown.  A devout Catholic, she wore her lone store-bought dress to Mass every Sunday, cooked the main meal for the parish priest for the better part of four decades, wore her long, salt and pepper hair in a bun at the back of her neck, and cursed like an Irish sailor.  Damns and hells were as frequent as the’s and and’s along with a smattering of the Lord’s name being taken in vain.  When her patience was sorely challenged, she would exclaim in her gruff voice, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”  Then she would look down at me with those stern blue eyes and explain, “Just praying, Alice Ann.”

Aunt Maggie never attended school.  She was taught to read and write, probably by her mother, giving her just enough skill to read the Bible.  Lost in those parental lessons were punctuation, starting sentences with a capital letter and spelling.  Deciphering Aunt Maggie’s letters and postcards could give birth to a new game, Hillybilly Scrabble.  Before I passed my second birthday though…she had taught me my ABC’s.

In mid-1943, my mother collected me and we traveled to California where she found work at an Army hospital.  Aunt Maggie made the same five-day train trip in late November, 1944, to celebrate my fourth birthday, traveling cross-country in wartime, when civilians could be bumped to make room for any military heading to the west coast.  I remember Aunt Maggie in a three-quarter length black wool coat, a somewhat crumpled black hat held in place by the largest hat pin I ever saw, then or since.  On her arm was a sturdy black leather purse.  Inside was a coin purse that held the money she would be spending more immediately.  Safely nestled between her ample bosoms was a tied hanky pinned to her brassier that held the remainder of her travel funds.  Maggie Green was such a gruff-spoken, formidable figure, I do not believe such an extra precaution was probably necessary.

In the ensuing years I spent the better part of every summer with Aunt Maggie, even sometimes during the school year.  I can still feel the warmth of her arm around me, holding me close as she pushed the porch swing back and forth with her large feet, telling me how proud she was of me and that I could be whatever I chose to be.  And about those size eleven feet.  She never left her house without washing her feet first, then pulling on a pair of hose that she would secure at the knee with strong garters.  I recall my childhood impatience waiting for her to complete the ritual.   When I once questioned why the foot bathing, she replied simply, she did not want to meet her maker with smelling feet.  Perhaps it’s an Irish thing.

Aunt Maggie was nearing seventy when she left Grantown to move to New Jersey to care for her youngest grandson when her daughter was dying of cancer.  There she would spend the rest of her life.  I last saw her on a chilly September morning in 1974.  She was about a block away, walking home from Mass, wearing the same black coat she had worn to California three decades earlier, the same crumpled black hat shadowing her face, the same black oxford-styled leather shoes with thick elevated heels.  Her legs were swollen.  “Bad knees,” she explained, brushing aside my concern.  She would pass away two years later.

Aunt Maggie never drove a car, never had an air conditioner, never voted for a Republican, never had more than a hundred dollars to her name until she sold her home in Grantown; never complained about her lot in life.  She never failed to drop something in the collection plate on Sunday and in later years she would enclose two crisp dollar bills inside a folded sheet of paper and send it to the Irish Republican Army in Ireland.  I once dared mention the Marxist links of the group, at which she scoffed, and dismissed my concerns in a gruff voice saying, “They’re my boys.”  Though born in northern England, she despised the British to the end of her days.

Maggie Green cared for four generations of her family.  For me, she was a surrogate mother, a principled example, a strict disciplinarian when I disregarded her principles, a loving shelter during the storms of my childhood.

I hope to see her one day.   She’ll probably be wearing that black coat and hat and carrying the large purse on her arm, brushing past St. Peter at the gate with her trademark scowl, my Memaw opening her arms to welcome me back.