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A Few Words About Elven Brown
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One of the kindest and most gentle men I ever knew was my paternal grandfather, Elven Brown. Actually Elven Brown was my father’s stepfather and thus not truly a blood relative of mine at all. My real paternal grandfather, John Alfred Arrington Turrentine, had disappeared on his way to the Panama Canal to accept a job there in 1912. He had taken passage aboard a ship at New Orleans and sent my grandmother a telegram to that effect. The ship burned and sank at sea and Jack Turrentine was never heard from again----yet, strangely enough Jack Turrentine’s name was not to be found on the passenger list and the life insurance policy which he had made out to his wife Dora was not paid until seven years had passed with no sign of Jack Turrentine. So Grandma Brown farmed her five children out to various relatives and went to live herself with her brother Rufus Roark. After collecting the insurance in 1919 (I think that it was $10,000) Dora married Elven Brown. To me he was "Dad Brown" and I came to love him dearly.
Elven Brown was a man of small stature. He was wizened and wrinkled by a farmer’s lifetime in the sun and his hands were callused and worn. At sometime in the past he had been thrown from a horse when a teenager and had broken his left leg. It did not heal well and for the rest of his life he walked with a slight roll to his gait. His eyebrows were bushy and long and overhung a pair of crystal clear blue eyes which seemed always to be smiling and alert.. He was broad shouldered for his stature and stocky despite his small size and he possessed enormous strength in his arms and shoulders and in his hands..
I was nine years old when I first met Dad Brown. He was totally illiterate then and could not sign even his name. Two years later however he had learned to write at least his name and could and did sign checks and letters written by someone else for him to sign. Never at any time I knew him did I see Dad Brown read a magazine, a book or a newspaper.
Dad Brown was a farmer, and he was very skilled in those arts that made for a good crop and were necessary for a farmer in the first half of the twentieth century. He was an expert tree nurseryman and he grafted a number of pecan and walnut trees every year. He was a tolerable blacksmith and was about as skilled at keeping livestock alive as the local veterinarian. But his real forte was the curing of meat. Dad Brown killed from six to twenty hogs a year and cured the hams and made the sausage from them. The first really cold snap of the winter triggered the activity of "hog-killin’ day", which nearly always was twenty-four hours long with Dad Brown working all night long to get the first steps of curing accomplished and smoking certain cuts. His hams, sausage, and smoked meats were famous throughout the county, and he supplied Mom Brown’s brothers with all of their cured meat also.
It was Dad Brown’s contention that every meal of every day for the whole year must have at least two different types of meat—and it must be cured by him. Usually these two types of meat were pork and beef but occasionally he would be satisfied with chicken and pork. Dad Brown considered each meal of every day to be a social event. Normally there were ten people at table for every meal and many times there would be visiting cousins, aunts and uncles. At each meal in addition to the two meats we would have at least two usually three garden vegetables, cornbread at lunch and biscuits at breakfast and probably both at supper. Three or four types of jams jellies and preserves were included and fresh fruit in season came from the orchard in the back yard which never in my time ever had a failure. Lightbread was rare—store bought bread was too expensive at ten cents a loaf. Home churned butter was always on the table and it was one of my tasks at nine years old to do the churning . Coffee was always available both at and between meals..At breakfasts we always had oatmeal with heavy cream. "Red eye" gravy as well as as "whitenen" flour gravy at every breakfast. Ribbon cane syrup, sorghum molasses and honey were there at every meal.
We ate well despite the poverty of the family but nearly everything we ate was produced right there on the farm or gathered from the banks of Ten-Mile creek just on the other side of the corn field. We almost never went to the grocery store. In the six months that I lived in Dad Brown’s house I saw no "store bought" fruit or vegetables. Elven Brown was a "subsistence farmer". He wasn’t sure that any one could produce food as clean and healthy to eat as he did and was always a little suspicious of anything that came from the store. Coffee, tea , salt, sugar, flour and exotic spices he allowed as store bought, but he didn’t like to do so.. We never missed the dewberries, blackberries, pecans, walnuts, "poke" salad and wild honey available in the woods along side Ten-Mile Creek.
Deserts were served at every meal. Pies, puddings, custards, cakes, muffins, were available almost every day and fudge, taffy, divinity or caramel candy served in the evening while we played checkers or monopoly.
Pecans, walnuts and black walnuts were a major crop at the farm in addition to those trees in the woods by the creek and there was always a 100 pounds or so in a burlap bag beside the fireplace, and it was fun to eat nuts and throw the shells in the fire. Most evening in the winter we also had pans of peanuts roasting in the wood stove to eat during the winter evenings and farm raised popcorn laced with home churned butter to eat in the evening while we played games or just watched the fire burn in the fireplace.
So I started to tell about Elven Brown and ended up by telling about life on his farm. That was no mistake. The farm WAS Elven Brown. He lived and breathed that farm and the cows and hogs and chickens and horses that made it all he had to have to make him and his family comfortable even though he didn’t have a dime in his pocket or couldn’t read. He loved the farm.
After the farm work and while waiting for supper Elven Brown and I used to sit out on the front porch and pet old Carlo (the collie dog) and talk about my future. Everyday Dad Brown would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d tell him something or other different nearly everyday, and he would mull this a bit and then agree with me that that was the best thing to do.
It was sort of a little game between us.
When I was eighteen and in the Navy, stationed at Corpus Christi Elven Brown died. He and my grandmother had moved into town and bought a house on the outskirts of Lancaster and the entire land about the house was only a city lot —about 60 by 90 feet. They left that 240 acres of prime black land that under Elvens care would grow anything and had maybe fifty prime nut trees and plenty of room for a cow herd and maybe twenty or so hogs and moved those two into Lancaster across the street from the cotton gin - Elven Brown died in six months. I am convinced that Elven died because he had no purpose in living any more. He had no weeds to fight or land to plow or trees to graft — so he died. He was a good man.
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