Hellcat Women

My grandmother was one of ten children growing up in the early 1900’s. (That makes me sound awful old but I’m just an old soul.) Her mother died when she was really young but before she died, she made their older brother, Whit, promise to keep the family together. He stayed single and helped his father raise the younger kids. The reason he stayed single probably had a little something to do with my Nannie and her sisters.

As the story has been told for years, Uncle Whit had invited a girl home for supper to meet his family. Being much younger and somewhat uncultured, the sisters probably felt pretty threatened by this young lady coming to steal their brother away. They concocted a plan that involved an angry cat. Well, any good Southerner knows that when there’s an angry cat involved in the story, it’s bound to be a good one.

The girls had been told to keep the cat out of the house while his girlfriend was there. That was like an invitation to bring the cat and all of his feline friends inside for these scheming girls. Dinner was going along pretty fine until the girls unleashed the mad cat into the dining room. The cat went to bouncing all over the room, the table, and up and down the curtains. The girls hid so they could have front row seats to all of the action. Eventually they couldn’t hold their laughter but this didn’t sit too well with Uncle Whit’s lady friend, who promptly made her exit.

Another time, there was a group of boys that were picking on Uncle Whit. The girls might have liked to be mischievous but they were not going to sit idly by while their big brother got treated poorly. These were the original women of wrestling, folks. Imagine a tumbleweed of at least three scrawny girls flying in and whooping a boy twice their size. After the dust settled, the boy was heard saying if he had only known about Uncle Whit’s “hellcat sisters,” he would have left him alone.

Nannie’s big toe was missing and for the longest time, I thought maybe it just fell off. I later learned that she shot it off while trying to reload a rifle. There were some wild dogs or something close to her house and she felt like they were going to hurt the kids. She pulled out her rifle and went to shooting. In between her shots, something happened and the gun either jammed or she accidentally discharged it, taking her big toe. I can imagine her in her cotton house dress and an apron, running on an old wooden porch waving a gun. I can also imagine her bandaging up her bleeding foot and going on about her day.

These “hellcat sisters” raised children during the Great Depression, sent sons off to war, brought some sons home from war, dipped snuff, and some smoked Camel cigarettes. They worked hard, since hard work was all they’d ever known. And born from these “hellcat sisters” were a long lineage of more hellcat women.

Several years back, Mama was landscaping the church property in my hometown. It was a gift to our church but she didn’t want to hire it out. She and Daddy did it themselves. One day, Mama went to check on the plants to be sure the sprinklers were working properly. A strange man quickly approached her but before he got close, Mama whisked a wooden baseball bat from her van and waved it in the air. She wasn’t scared of him even though she could have gotten hurt or worse. That man started hollering that he wasn’t going to mess with her and he promptly went the other way. I can only imagine his injuries if that hellcat woman had gotten ahold of him.

When the boys were small, I made the dreadful decision to wait until the last minute to get school supplies. I took them and their older cousin to Walmart after dark, which is definitely not something I recommend. Two wild boys who thought it was always comedy hour and their cousin as the audience traipsing through Walmart was bad enough. But, knowing the world we live in, I am always on alert of my surroundings. When we were exiting the store, I noticed a man parked next to my vehicle. He was propped up on the trunk of his car, smoking a cigarette. I told the kids that we needed to hurry and get the stuff in the car. I felt uneasy walking to the car because his eyes followed my every step. I rushed the kids through unloading the supplies into my car and we jumped in. No sooner than I had shut the door and locked it, the man approached my window. But, being tired and full of PMS, I pulled out a pair of safety scissors from my purse. I waved them at him and gave him the “look.” You know the “look.” It’s the look that if you make one inch closer, I will castrate you like a pig on the farm with these dull scissors. He shook his head and I could hear him through the glass, “No problem here, lady.” Well, I guess not because you were about to be SIr No Balls At All.

Hellcat, backbone, grit. Whatever you want to call it, they had it. My mama has it. I sorta have it though safety scissors just make me look like I have a mental health condition. This long line of determined women were survivors. They didn’t hunker down in a corner of a room drenched in tears. No, they kicked butt — sometimes literally. To look at them, you’d never have known it. Sweet little faces, small stature, Sunday school teachers who loved the Lord. Never in a million years would you think that these ladies had done as much and been through as much in their lives. But the one thing that set them apart from so many others is that they didn’t give up. They didn’t let whatever life threw at them get in their way. They stood up for what was right, kicked a little butt, and had fun along the way. I’m sure life knocked them down a time or two. But it was the getting up that counted.