VECIE PLEMONS GRAY
Vecie turned 97 Wednesday, but her memories and her personality remain more vivid than those most folks half her age can claim.
That small East Marion house held the first electric lights her family ever had. It wasn't fancy but the Plemmons' weren't accustomed to luxury. In Madison County, they had been sharecroppers, often moving from place to place, and Vecie's first job was hoeing corn for 10 cents an hour.
"When it came a snow,
the snow would come in that house some way or another," she said.
"Daddy would keep a quilt over the fire when it went out, so in the
morning it would still be dry enough to burn."
Leaving Madison County meant Vecie and her
family no longer had to walk miles to go to school or church. The work in the
cotton mill was tough, but no more so than the farming that had sustained them
before the move to Marion. And the pay was steady.
Still, she missed her old
life, tramping through the woods to hunt huckleberries with her brother,
catching June bugs or, in the winter, sliding through the hills on a makeshift
sled.
"I'd like to go over those mountains
again," said Vecie, casting a faraway glance at the window. "We didn't have a lot but we were happy.
It was fun back then."
In her younger years, she spent her days in the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. She and a sibling would buy a pencil for a penny and split it between them. One teacher was responsible for the first- through sixth-grade and Vecie laughs when she remembers how the instructor once made a problem student stand in the emptied potbelly stove, threatening to close the lid on him if he didn't stay quiet.
At 14, "before there was anybody to get after you if you didn't go," she quit school to help take care of her ailing mother.
Though Marion has now been home for more than 70 years, she makes time to go back to Madison County annually.
"I still go back to our church every year Flats of Spring Creek Baptist Church, every year," she said. The Clinchfield schedule didn't leave much time for hunting huckleberries. Vecie's whole family went to work full-time, which, in 1929, translated to more than 60 hours a week. They would report to the mill at 6 a.m. and work until 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, then labor a half-day from 6 a.m. to noon Saturdays.
Her pay came in cash, tucked inside a small brown envelope with insurance and social security deductions handwritten on the outside. One, from 1942, lists her week's wage at $17.58. In another, she drew $9 even.
On Sundays, Vecie's only day off, the young people would meet at Oak Grove Cemetery and walk on the railroad tracks to socialize.
"Boyfriends and
girlfriends would be together and they'd walk the tracks to the railroad
trestle," she recalls.
Vecie won't own up to strolling through the
cemetery with any boyfriends, but tells a heart-wrenching tale of her
tragically short marriage.
She married Claywell Gray in April of 1935. His death from Bright's disease, an affliction of the kidneys, less than six-months later left her a lifelong widow.
"It was Sept. 5, 1935, at 20 minutes until 10 on a Thursday morning," said Vecie without faltering. "I was making up his bed and ... he said 'where's sweetheart?' That's what he always called me - sweetheart. And I told him I was there. He said 'I want to kiss you one more time' and then he was gone."
She keeps his watch in a glass case in the front room and focuses on it when she speaks of her late husband. Realizing he may die, he begged her to marry again, but it's the one thing she couldn't do for him.
"I couldn't love anybody else," she said. "I figured I'd just live alone." And she has. Until recently, she even walked to the end of her road and back everyday, mowed her own lawn and kept a garden.
"I'd still do some mowing," she said.
What keeps her from it is a nephew who confiscated her lawnmower after she took
a spill with it. Taking it was the only way to make sure the strong-willed
woman wouldn't be mowing as soon as her family was out of earshot, he
explained.
"I'm thankful I've been able to go for as
long as I have," said Vecie. She doesn't
look like she's slowing down anytime soon.
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