Emory's Ember

After the death of my mother in 2006, unseen photographs of her mother, Winnie Potts Bridges, magically appeared.  Like long lost spirits freed from the prison of a cardboard box, those buried treasures  sprang  to life... images  from the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century. Creased and faded from time, they became a bittersweet  study in what might have been and why it had not. Contributors: Cousin Ileene Dillard and  citizens of Rains and Hopkins Counties: Woody and Gail Garmon, Kathey Russell Weatherford and The Rains County Leader.

                                                   

Winnie Potts and friend.

Mother knew I would find the photos of her mother after she passed away. Those surprising, long ago images  presented a  tender  chapter  in the story of Winnie and Clyde... before our grandfather Harold rewrote the ending . Mother may have known that an ember of girlhood romance died when her mother Winnie took her last breath. She had never shown me those pictures for a reason and kept them separate from the family albums, as if they were part of an old secret.

Before I found the photos,  I never really knew my grandmother in depth. She  was frozen in time .... as simply  "Gram-ma"of my early childhood,  in Angelina County, Texas. In my mind's eye, she is still in her garden pulling okra and butter beans, working  silently, her face half hidden by her cotton  bonnet with the tiny blue flowers, looking back to make sure I am close by. I see her churning  butter on the back porch,  sleeves rolled up, expression determined, working the wooden paddle  endlessly and pressing the final product into the round butter mold  with the daisy pattern.The image of that glorious mound of pressed fragrant spread, was and is an amazement to me.

 Then the intricate butter flowers  melt slowly in the heat of my grandmother's kitchen...as if a thing of perfection can hardly be expected to last... 

Winnie Elizabeth Potts Bridges was as  solid and enduring as a boulder...she who secretly watched from behind the curtains, as I rode my bike around the bend and past  my grandparents' little rock  house...right up until I arrived safely at the school across the road. There is little doubt that she checked on me at recess from her front porch. It was she who sent my uncles over with the huge old upright piano, so I could practice my lessons at home, and of course, it was a misplaced good deed, as I preferred the woods to sitting at the piano bench... try as I did to conform in a family of musicians.

Without a doubt, my grandmother Winnie was a good woman and even a fun-loving woman when she had the chance to be. Yet , sometimes, there was about her a slight sense of detachment, as if she were somewhere else in time.

Then many years later, after my grandparents were gone and mother had joined them, I pulled the first photograph from the box while going through my mother's personal effects. I would not have known it was my grandmother had I not read her name scrawled at the top. She was a dark haired teenager, smiling coyily at a WWI soldier sitting beside her on a bale of hay. His name was written beside hers: Clyde Kearney.

Winnie Potts and Clyde Kearney, 1918.

Winnie, Clyde with sister and beau, 1918.

My naive assumption that Winnie had no suitor except Harold Bridges  flew out the window.I call the photo above, left,  the "hay bale picture". It was taken during World War I. The soldier's name was Clyde Edward Kearney. Of Irish descent, he was born in Bristol, Tennessee in 1897 and arrived with his parents to Emory, Texas around 1910. He went to war in 1918 and returned  home safely. Winnie's life, however, took a different direction...away from that quiet rural village, away from a  flame that  may or may not have been  fully extinquished .

The "bouquet photo" below is haunting in its somber, even sad feel. We can guess forever as to what the circumstances might have been. Clyde and Winnie appear younger  and quite serious. Whatever the situation may have been, they are outdoors and dressed up. This image might depict nothing more than  a problem that Clyde resolved with  hand picked wildflowers. Yet  the moment seems significant to me somehow.It may have been the day he shipped out. It may have been something even more tragic.The completion of the puzzle is impossible, as Winnie took the final misssing piece of it with her.

 A pensive Clyde and Winnie, before 1918.

What happened to Clyde and Winnie?

We know by the first "hay bale" photo that the couple continued to be friendly, even after he entered the army in 1918. During his service abroad, Winnie must have met Harold Bridges, they married in 1920 and settled in Lufkin.  Winnie left her home town of Emory  and all she had known.

 My grandfather Harold Bridges was a tall man in his youth, with chiseled features and dark skin. Clyde, in contrast, was slighter of frame with softer features and fair skin. Something makes me sense that he was quiet and sensitive. So what happened? All I know is what my grandparents told me when I was seventeen...but Clyde's name was never spoken.

 "I chased your grandma 'round a lake on horseback 'till I  caught 'er," Grandpa boasted.  I picture Harold on horseback galloping after Winnie and swooping her off her feet, swinging her up into the saddle . Why was Winnie running? Apparently, she was reluctant to allow Harold to court her, because, as she told me:" The girls told me to watch out for Harold."  She then, in certain terms, let me know that  Harold had been  a romeo of sorts...as are many men in their youth. I finally decided, Harold simply swept Winnie off her feet and stole her away most likely while Clyde was away at war.

Harold and Winnie Bridges, married 1920.

The marriage had his challenges. The depression hit and jobs were scarce in East Texas. Nine children were born at home with the use of chloroform to ease the pain. Eight survived until adulthood. Winnie's grief must have been profound after the loss of her baby boy, but there was little time to mend a broken heart, as the next child was soon to arrive.  My guess is the loss of her baby was another reason for the change in her personality.

My mother Ruth, who was the oldest child, related  to me that Winnie was often frail  during pregnancy, and the smell of meat cooking made her deathly ill. When mother was old enough to reach the stove,  it was she who cooked the meat....if there was any to be had. The family's diet consisted primarily of garden vegetables and sometimes milk. The girls  hauled water from a creek  for boiling and washing clothes in the black cast iron pot outdoors. Their hands were raw and numb from scrubbing laundry on wash boards and hanging the clothing in the  chilling wind of winter....a wind that blew through the gaps between the boards of their primitive little house as they shivered in bed after a hard day.

Harold was a proud man who would not accept food subsidies as did many families during those years. In the early years, he got on with the Lufkin Ice Company in the 1920s and delivered blocks of ice by horse and wagon. He was  often  late coming home, causing Winnie to go in search of him. There's was the story of many in that era...clinging to life , surviving, and somehow finding  joy in their music. The marriage was not idyllic. It was real.  The union lasted as much out of  love, I think, as necessity.

 During the thirties and forties, Harold worked for a government program called Civil Conservation Corp. and was a stone mason, traveling all over Texas to  build stone walls and edifices at State Parks. His work remains a tribute to one man's effort to keep his family alive. Harold was not a perfect man, but he matured through the years to become, at last, the man that Winnie wanted him to be...the one who loved her enough to pursue her  on horseback.

And what happened to Clyde Kearney, the old flame who brought Winnie a bouquet of wildflowers? The soldier came home to Emory from World War I,  eventually married, had  a successful business and lived out his days,  uneventfully, until his death in 1979. Did the two old sweethearts ever see each other again? My guess is that they ran into each other at some point on Winnie's visit to family. But it could never be the same. The lively, carefree  girl of  the old photographs was gone, and in her place was a stoic woman who had been tempered to steel. But in my heart I know that the ember from the old flame in Emory glowed dimly... until  1985, when Winnie at last took her rightful place... with Harold in Paradise.