Free Write on Wilma
Wilma the Ruffrider
Photography by Annette Hollowell
“Straighten your back up! Pull your shoulders back and stick your chest out,” my mother would say. “Walking around here like Wilma!” My heavy steps have always hurriedly carried me, slightly leaning forward. Charging towards the future. I remember Ms. Wilma’s stride as she walked down her long hill to the mailbox at the end of her drive on McClatchy Road. Her “exercise” she would call it as she made this daily trek well into her 90th year.
Her back bent as she tended to her garden of collards, sweet potatoes, and peas. The squat she would assume to milk her cows, the downward thrust of her biceps as she demonstrated the churning of butter in a big, chipped clay jug. The scatter of the chicken feed falling from calloused hands as her guinea fowl and hens would gather around.
I remember exploring the land with my grandmother. Crouching under and over barbed wires to journey deep into the pasture in search of wild black berries, climbing along the rusty fence line. She’d wear a straw hat out in the sun, I think. But memory is a fickle thing; my own thoughts have merged with the family albums, my parents’ stories, and pure invention now. I can say assuredly that Ms. Wilma never wore pants. In fact, the only time I ever saw her in something resembling jeans was on her 85th birthday. She called my father, her 4th born, and told him she wanted to ride a horse to commemorate the day. She drove herself out to Foxfire Ranch, where her horse was groomed and saddled, waiting for her. Dad carefully helped her mount the horse, placing a chair on Margarita’s left side. He then slowly led these two matriarchs down the long drive leading from the big family house to the mailbox and back, a few times. I don’t recall if he ever turned over the reins to her freely. But I do recount her adamant assertions that, “Wilma is a rough rider!” At 100 years old now, she is still the only person I know who can effectively speak of themselves in the 3rd person without sounding completely obnoxious. I’m resolved to do the same once I live to see the world through more evolutionary transitions. “Yas, Wilma been married 3 times, but the good Lawd took all of em’, Wilma didn’t kill naannn!”
On July 14th of this year, blood family and her church family gathered in Cleveland, Ohio, to celebrate Miss Wilma’s 100th birthday in the city 5 of her children moved to - young, hopeful, and tired of a farmer’s lot in life. She has lived through 8 cold winters there since the siblings decided it was no longer safe for Mama to live alone. So the 99th and 100th celebrations were held in Ohio. Executed by Aunt Vivian with a level of care and isolation sufficient to let us know the dates and locations, but without clarity on what was expected of the grandkids until a couple of days beforehand. Typically, a generic ass poem that speaks of love forever and gentile realities of Me-maws and Gammies that didn’t farm and quilt and bury 3 husbands and a son. Her celebrations were predictable, churchy as church services, as I call them. And we dress up, pitch in, quietly critique, and play our part as good grandchildren.
Wilma is the grandparent I have had the most physical connection with. My grandfathers passed on to their next lives before my birth. My mother’s mother, Connie Mae Nunnally, transitioned while I was 12 or so and we were living in Saudi Arabia. So Ms. Wilma is the one I’ve had the opportunity to know the best. She taught my sister and me how to sew, shoot a shotgun, and make safety pin bracelets. She is a future ancestor whom I have had the most connection to on this 3D plane. Yet her first husband, my grandfather Albert Hollowell, has had the strongest influence on me. Casting an irresistible calling for my gifts, dreams, and talents – pulling me back to Marshall County and the 80 acres of land he saw fit to procure 100 years ago. Somehow, a man who died when my father was just 9 years old speaks so clearly to me that I am changing my life’s work to be oriented around red clay, forests of piney woods, underground springs, and magical bioluminescent fungus that grows along stream banks, Foxfire.
