I will never forget the day my father took my sister and me to Ludie’s to live. When we were ushered into her small cozy living room, she was not there. My father was surprised because she knew we were coming. Our clothes had been brought in advance. He set us down in chairs and went outside to call her. She was in the garden and would be back in a few minutes. She told him to go on if he was in such a hurry. So we sat there alone.
Florence was frightened and began to cry. I tried to comfort her. I looked down in the chair and saw it was wet. Investigating further I found her panties were wet also. Panic struck me. I was sure she would get a spanking. She had got so many lately about the wet panties, and each time I cried too. Soon Ludie came in. “Why, child, what is the trouble?” she asked.
“Oh, oh,” I told her between sobs, “Florence has on wet pants.”
Ludie smiled and said, “Well, that is nothing. I can fix that in a jiffy. She will just have to wear a didie until we get better acquainted.”
“You are not going to spank her?” I asked with my hand on her knee and looking into her face.
She smiled again and said, “Why, of course not. Come we will go to the kitchen. We must start supper soon.” She put Florence in the highchair and gave her a cold biscuit with butter. “Now,” she said, “Caroline, you may help me.”
I remember stirring something on the stove with a large wooden spoon standing on a stool chair and turning the coffee grinder. Ludie won my heart and trust that day and a love that was to last her lifetime and mine. Her picture stands on my night table and I kiss her good night every night, and it has been fifty years since that first day at her house.
The next day a neighbor lady, Mrs. McCool, came in to see how we were all getting along. “What are you going to call your aunt and Mr. Fowler?” she asked. Ludie answered for me. “She is just going to call me Ludie like her father does, and William wants the children to call him Fowler just like I do.”
Ludie built a playhouse for us under the trees in the backyard. We played in mud pies and with the white cats wrapped up in a shawl pinned around their necks every day. The poor cats were always so glad to be turned loose after two or three hours of being babies. Ludie was happy when we were old enough to go to school. She had taught us the A B C’s and to count to one hundred and we had memorized the books of the Bible. Fowler read stories of the Bible every night, and of course, Sunday School was a must.
Our lives seemed to be much like every other little girl in our neighborhood, except for one thing – the war between the North and the South. Never a day went by that it was not mentioned. Fowler did not approve of Ludie’s telling us so much about the war and especially not telling both sides. Although Ludie lived in the North now and had for many years, she was still a real Southerner. At least three or four mornings of every week at the breakfast table she told Fowler of the dream she had about her home in North Carolina. Sometimes they were about her father coming home from the war or her mother washing in the backyard, but always that she was going back to her old home and Pappy was there.
I remember one day I came home from school with my third reader. I sat down at the table where Ludie was having a cup of coffee and began to read Barbara Fritchie. I thought Ludie would like it because there was something in it about Stonewall Jackson. She started to stop me two or three times, but I kept on reading. In my excitement, I stood up and waved my hand and shouted,
“Who touches a hair on yon gray head dies like a dog! March on!”
She laughed in spite of herself but told me she didn’t like Barbara Fritchie and didn’t want me to read it out loud any more.
Florence was supposed to memorize something about Mr. Lincoln once, but Ludie wouldn’t help her. She said he was a soft-hearted silly joke teller who didn’t know anything about war, and the only reason he won the war was because General Robert E. Lee ran out of money.
Fowler was horrified. “Why, oh why, do you tell these children such things? He asked. Then he tried to explain to us how it all came about. Since we had heard so much about it, we argued with him, “Oh, no, Ludie said we bought the negroes to do the work and the North took them away. And you know, Fowler, they never gave us any money for them either.” He was at his wits ends not knowing how to handle this situation. He would scold Ludie, and she would cry.
WE talked about the war to some of the children we played with, but they didn’t know what we were talking about. Florence and I seemed to think it happened only last week, or not long ago; we didn’t know just when. Fowler said it happened long years ago and everybody had forgotten it but Ludie. So the discussion went on for years.
We were both little rebels, almost as much so as the children of 1865. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson’s pictures hung over our mantel. Everyone asked who they were, and Ludie was always so angry to think people were so ignorant. “Why, what a question,” she would exclaim. Then she would explain. She told everyone who would listen about Pappy and how he had served his time two years and more and how he had gone back in another man’s place and was killed, all about the equivalent of $1,000.00 in land. They all just looked at her unbelieving and I am sure they thought it was a tale. They would say, ‘It was too much for you to lose your father like that.’ And they would leave smiling inwardly. One day after one of these scenes, she said to Fowler, “I don’t think they believe me.” He said, “I am sure they don’t. Why don’t you stop trying to convince them? You know it is so and that is enough.”
Ludie loved to visit with her sister Lucy Ann. Nearly always after one of these scenes over the war and Pappy, she would pack an overnight bag and take my sister and me to visit her. Lucy Ann was the only sister living now that our grandmother, Caroline, was gone. Ludie loved to visit with her, but since her death, Lucy Ann was her only comfort.
Lora Johnson & Lucy Ann (Little) Johnson
Florence and I always had a good time at Lucy Ann’s house. She was never too busy or too tired to play a few games with us before we went to bed. After we were in bed she and Ludie would sit up for hours and talk of their old home and Mother and Pappy. Lucy Ann smoked a clay pipe in her old days, and she always looked so comfortable sitting in the old reed rocking chair by the fire, looking into the past. Oh, the tales she could tell! They would laugh and say, “Yes, I remember.”
Mr. Johnson, Lucy Ann’s husband, was old and not well. He was a Northern soldier, but he and Lucy Ann never argued about the war. Their son Walter was very ambitious. He wanted to be a carpenter but there was the farming someone must do. He had taken over all the farming since his father was not well. In the wintertime he tried other things.
Around the turn of the century, Edison’s phonograph was becoming popular. Walter talked his father into getting one; he was sure they could make a lot of money. They made arrangements with the school board to rent every schoolhouse within a radius of twenty-five or thirty miles for one night stands. Very few people had heard the phonograph. The night they played at our school my sister and I felt like real important people because the children at school asked us all about it. The day before the performance all the records were packed in a small trunk. They were round black cylinders, not at all like the disc records of later years. Ludie and Fowler and we children got in free, of course. I think admission was a quarter; twenty-five cents in those days seemed like a big sum. All the farmers for miles around came with their families. The schoolhouse was bulging. I remember some of the songs that were played:
“Listen to the Mocking Bird,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America,” and all the church songs of the day. Ludie and Lucy Ann were at the door as the people left and nearly everyone said it was wonderful. But the next day at school some of the children said their mothers didn’t like the concert, there should have been some dance music. A little boy said his father said if he wanted to hear church songs he would go to church and he would not be asked to pay a quarter either. We didn’t know what to say so we just looked at them and were saved by the bell ringing for classes.
Walter was happy all winter because he was busy, but in the following summer when the corn was all taken care of, the urge to build came back. “Please, Ma, let me build you a nice big bedroom on the north side of the house,” he begged. She would say no, it would be spending money foolishly and they didn’t need a bedroom. He would persist saying, “But you could sleep alone. You always say Pa is so restless.” The following year Mr. Johnson passed away and Lucy Ann received a government pension. Walter begged in earnest so she said he could have the pension to build whatever he liked, bedroom or parlor, but he was to leave the kitchen alone. Every winter for five or six years he built or changed a room. He finally turned the house around, with the kitchen to the front, and built a store. You could step out of the store into a little hall and into the kitchen.
Walter married and had two children and a wonderful wife, Annie. She was so neat and clean and so sweet to Lucy Ann than Lucy Ann at last gave in and said she liked her and it was nice for Walter to be married.
Walter Johnson, Son of Lora & Lucy Ann
Annie took care of the store and did all her own work. They had a good business and Annie got along fine with the bookwork until they put in tobacco. Cigarettes were made by hand then. When you bought a little cloth bag of tobacco, you received cigarette papers. In the evening after supper all the boys in the neighborhood came to loaf. They sat around the fire and talked until it was too late for the farmers to come in with their eggs and buy groceries. In the spring Annie reported to Walter that they were not making any money on the tobacco. He couldn’t understand that because at the commission house where he bought the supplies they said there was a good profit. They decided to try something else. Then revival meeting started in the little church up the road and all the boys left the store early every night to go to church. Walter said to Annie, “Gee, all the boys seem to be getting religion.” Everett Garrard, a boy who lived in a house near the store, wanted to be a minister. He had always been a good boy. Now that all the boys were going to church, they had a problem that was worrying them so they went to Everett and made a confession. All winter when Annie would call Walter for supper, one of the boys would take the yardstick measure for yard goods and sit on the counter hooking the strings of the tobacco sacks and passing them around to the other boys. By the time Walter was back from supper everyone had a free sack of tobacco. Everett was horrified and advised them to beg or borrow but pay back what they had stolen. They all marched in one day and gave Annie what they thought was about the sum they had taken. She was so surprised. She and Walter sat together that night and wondered how they could have been so stupid.
Ludie bought some of her groceries from Walter. He would stop in to visit as he went to the blacksmith shop with his horses. She would give him a list and he would bring them the next time he came our way. Walter loved to chat with Ludie. He was always full of jokes and she thought they were funny. Fowler thought Walter didn’t have his right mind because he was always smiling or laughing or telling a joke. Ludie became real angry at Fowler’s remarks. “It was good to see someone smiley.”
We had many callers; drop-in-company, Ludie called them. We lived near the general store and the blacksmith shop and everyone in the county for miles around went there every week. David and his boys and Bob often stopped to visit. We often came home from a walk in the woods to find a basket of something they had an abundance of.
Ludie liked to go to cemeteries to fix up the graves of her loved ones and the friends she liked best. She would always read the inscription on the stones and say a fine man or a wonderful woman. I remember the good times we had together there. She would read so many, my sister and I wondered if she knew everybody, we of course, remembered a few. Mrs. Foster was an old friend of Ludie’s. She and her husband raised strawberries. When they were at their best and they couldn’t get them to market fast enough, she would let us pick all we wanted. We always placed a few flowers on her grave. And there were many others that we remembered.
After an hour or two at the cemetery, we often took a shortcut through the woods home. As we walked along Ludie would pick up little pieces of wood and dry sticks in her apron and five minutes after she was in the kitchen she would have a roaring hot fire and supper would be ready on time. The only thing that ever slowed us was when she decided to bring home black dirt for the flowers.
In January after I had just passed my twelfth birthday, Ludie died. This tragic thing changed our lives so completely. We were like two little scared animals. No one babied us anymore. They said it was time we acted our age. We were told to wash our own faces, comb each other’s hair, make our own beds, dry the dishes, and think about something beside play and Tiny, our little dog. We were so upset. Our new life was so completely different that we didn’t like anyone. We worried about leaving Fowler alone. He had always read to us, and we missed that very much.
We were two miserable little girls. In the daytime while attending school, we were free from thoughts of Ludie, but at night when I went to bed I cried myself to sleep for almost a year. I thought often of the time Florence and I had behaved very badly and Ludie had scolded us. I went out in back of the house and sat down in a flower bed to pout. I thought I heard someone talking, and to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I looked in the window. There on her knees by her rocking chair where she always sat was Ludie in prayer. She was praying aloud,
“Dear God, please help me,
that I may do the right thing for these motherless children.
Help me to bear this responsibility that I must do,
and grant me the power to control my temper
and make their lives worthwhile.”
She said something about her love for us and then put her head in her hands and cried. A very sad and ashamed little girl turned away from that window and promised herself she would never be naughty or sassy to Ludie again. All the spankings or scolding in the world could never have done what that prayer did for me. Now that Ludie was gone I thought of it every night and wondered how I could prove to her how much I loved her.
Florence went to live with Grandpa Shane’s widow Mary. She was a real grandmother to Florence, as she had been to our mother. Louisa, Mary’s daughter, was only a few years older than Florence and they were like sisters. I lived with my uncle, my mother’s brother. They were sweet and young and expecting their first child. As time went by I was very happy there.
Florence and I kept in touch with Fowler as long as he lived. We were with him when he passed away. His interest in us never changed.
William Serene Fowler
Ludie’s Husband
Barbara Fritchie was a Unionist during the Civil War. She lived from 1766-1862 (yep, 96 years) and as an adult lived in Frederick, Maryland. As Stonewall Jackson led troops pass her home she defied the Confederates by walking into the middle of the street and waved the US Flag. This event led to John Greenleaf Whitter’s 1864 poem titled, “Barbara Frietchie”. Her home was made into a museum. In 1943 Winston Churchill stopped at the house and recited the poem from memory (TL 2012):
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag, she said,
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came.
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word.
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on! He said.
Lora Johnson II was born in 1825 in Scott, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. He died on December 20, 1906 at his home in Vermilion County, Indiana. (TL 2012)
The little church up the road was less than a quarter mile from the Robert Little home. You could stand on the front porch of their home and clearly see the church. (TL 2012)
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