Little Old Lady From Lawley

Granny Hopper was an amazing Christian.  Born in 1892, she was one-eighth Native American, or as she would say, “Indian.”  She was Creek or Cherokee.  I do not remember, but I was proud to know I had “Indian” blood. 

She married at age thirteen and was a mother at fourteen.  She always said she went from changing doll babies to changing real babies.  She would have a total of nine children, one of those dying as an infant.  There were five girls and four boys. 

In 1935, during the Great Depression she became a widow.  Her husband, my granddad, committed suicide after a bout with depression resulting from an accident where a longhorn steer gored him.  The injury crippled him and he had severe health problems.  My dad was eleven.

By this time, Granny was helping raise six grandchildren.  One daughter’s husband was killed and another abandoned the family.  Granny was caring for fifteen family members, one her aging daddy, as a sharecropper with no government assistance.

Granny Hopper never had any modern conveniences.  She cooked on an old wood-burning stove, drew water from a well by rope and bucket, washed and scrubbed clothes in an old iron, black wash pot.  She did have a nice two-seater outdoor toilet with a bucket of corn cobs and an old Sears catalogs for tissue.

She raised pigs, cows, and chickens and worked a garden for food.  Talking about food, Granny Hopper could cook the best “Gumbo” soup.  She always had a pot on the stove and in the two warmers on top of the old wood stove were cornbread and biscuits.  Later in life when she was unable to raise livestock and garden she used commodities to make the gumbo and it was still good.

I used to help Granny Hopper stir clothes in the wash pot.  I helped her sling chitterlin’s when we killed hogs.  She loved them and canned them.  She canned everything in glass jars that we called “fruit jars”.  She canned fried sausage.  She would fry sausage, put them in the jars and pour hot lard over them.  They were good.  She canned collards which she had pickled and they were good.  If it was edible, Granny Hopper canned it.

Granny Hopper was a worker.  I remember one time daddy and I went to cut her some firewood for her large pot-bellied stove.  Daddy cut the pieces of a big red oak for me to split.  I was sixteen years old and Granny was seventy-six.  Granny and daddy taught me how to split wood.  The key is to slap the axe against the wood rather hit it straight.  I was splitting it and loading it.  Going too slow for Granny, she took the axe and split it faster than I could load it.  It was embarrassing for this big Jemison football star to be outworked by his 5’ 4” granny.  She told me that I was sorry and that I had better learn how to work.  I guess for her my loading paperwood by shoulder and throwing hay did not qualify as work.  She almost worked me to death.

Granny Hopper toted a pistol in her apron when working around the farm and in her purse when she traveled.  It was a long barrel Smith & Wesson 38 caliber.  I have watched her empty the six-shooter target practicing.  With all six shots she could keep a tin can bouncing.

She went everywhere.  Sometimes when we went to her house there would be notes saying, “Gone to Cecil’s in Death Valley, California, gone to North Carolina, gone to Mobile, or gone to visit Clifton in Illinois.”  She traveled by bus.

She wanted to drive, but she did not have a license.  Her family did not want her driving, but a nephew taught her how to drive.  Granny bought a 1961 Ford Galaxy.  She trained in an old pasture somewhere in Perry County.  She kept it secret.

At eighty-three years of age she went to the Bibb County Courthouse and tried for her license.  She failed the driving test.  She tried again and again.  After eleven attempts, she got her license.  I never will forget her picture in the Centreville Press.  Granny and her sisters posed as Granny held her license.  She was not the “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”, but the little old lady from Lawley.

Her tenacity for getting a driving license is a testimony of her life and her faith.  She is listed as a messenger of Rehobeth Baptist Church in Baptists of Bibb County, A Denominational Salute to the people called Baptists, in Cahawba (Bibb) County, Alabama 1817-1974 by Howard F. McCord.  Rehobeth is one of the churched burned by Birmingham Southern students.

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint Isaiah 40:31 (KJV).