Woman Born in 1838 Talks About the Night the Creek Rose and Took Everything

Описание: Woman Born in 1838 Talks About the Night the Creek Rose and Took Everything

Eliza Bower (1838–1926) was born in a river-farming hollow in Kentucky, the third child of a family that worked bottomland corn along the Cumberland River drainage for two generations. She married at nineteen and built a house with her husband thirty yards above Digby Creek — close enough to hear the water on still nights in June, close enough that the smell of a rising branch reached the porch before the color of it reached the ford. In this account, given in her eighty-fourth year, Mrs. Bower describes the farm as it was before the spring of 1861: the corn and the hogs and the kitchen garden, the household routines of a young wife and mother in the border country in the years the war was beginning. She describes Lottie Bower, the fourteen-year-old cousin's child who came to stay the summer of 1860 — her habit of going quiet when she was thinking, her ease with small children, her careful handwriting, her quickness at sums. And she describes the night in May of 1861 when Digby Creek crossed the yard in flood and she went into the moving water with a lantern and a child on her hip and made a choice she has not spoken of plainly in the sixty-three years since. The tin lantern Lottie carried that night, the silence her husband kept until his death, and the weight of every lantern she has held in the decades after are set down here together for the first time.

#1800s #19thcentury