This week and next week, I’m going to change up my usual format. Instead of stories I wrote for “Corvairs and Horny Toads,” I’d like to share a couple of real-life stories.
Last Mother’s Day, my husband Alan and I held a memorial for my mother—a gathering of our family of friends at our house.
Mama embraced our friends, and they adored and embraced her. When speaking about her that day, one of my closest friends said, “I could talk to her about anything. She was a girlfriend!” It’s true—Mama was ageless.
The weather was Southern California perfect, and we held the gathering in our backyard. Mama wasn’t the outdoorsy type, but she loved our yard. We have a sunroom with a glass wall that allows the outside to seem inside. It was in the sunroom that Mama and I spent so many hours together. I write there on my laptop where I can take breaks and gaze out at the birds of paradise, the palm trees, all the tropical landscaping and citrus trees. And Mama’s favorite, the plumeria that seem to grow and bloom especially for her.
When we first talked about having a memorial, I knew that nothing would do but for me to write and deliver her eulogy. I’m so happy I held up and did it for Mama. Most of the stories I told about her were things our friends didn’t know already. Mama had a long life that was rich with experiences and success. My mother was strong. And the excerpt you’re going to hear from my eulogy has to do with that aspect of her.
I hope you enjoy this story that’s taken from a recording of the actual service, so it’s backyard-quality sound, not studio sound.
Mama was little but mighty. She was born at a time when—even more than now—the world was dominated by men. But she was undaunted by that. She blazed her own trail, an exemplary trail worthy of following. I never saw her flinch in her personal life or her professional life. She was respected—sometimes grudgingly but nevertheless… I inherited a lot of strength from both my parents, but from as early as I can remember, I learned about being a feminist from Mama. It was on full display in her life and in our lives—as a matter of fact, not as a matter of rhetoric. I realized when I was grown and heard other women talking about their own upbringings in the '50s and '60s that I hadn’t experienced a mother—or a household—that operated with the burden of traditional male/female roles. My parents did not adhere to it, and so it was a foreign concept to me and I’m grateful for that. And I have to believe it was chiefly Mama’s doing.
Where did her strength come from? A few years ago, Mama and I decided to join the trend to trace our ancestry. I believed we needed to choose one notable person to start with, so as to avoid becoming overwhelmed by branches and limbs and roots, getting lost in a quagmire. And preferably, it would be a woman. So we agreed it would be my mother’s maternal grandmother—my great-grandmother—Patience Melinda Rogers Maxwell.
She was enigmatic to Mama—stoic to an extreme degree. Almost nonverbal, Mama said. Mama herself could be accurately described as quiet, not real talkative. But her grandmother Patience Melinda was a woman of so few words, it would be accurate to describe her as terse. The negative connotation is surely mitigated when considering her circumstances which would be enough to make anyone either clam up or explode with fury.
She was married to William Maxwell, my great grandfather—we called him Paw or Pawpaw—who was nothing short of an old reprobate. He brought her to a desolate place on the high plains, the Llano Estacado in New Mexico.
They had three children: my grandmother Maude—Maudie Nell—Mama’s irrepressible mother; a son Bill, Mama’s good-hearted uncle and the very salt of the earth; and the youngest, Evelyn, Mama’s aunt we called Auntie, who was born with a malformed hand and developed a maladjusted, often disagreeable personality to match.
So Patience Melinda lived with those three children and a ne’er-do-well husband in a half dugout on a dry, flat, desolate homestead in Knowles, New Mexico about 6 miles from the Texas line, in close proximity to a horse trail that was used by cowboys from nearby ranches to travel back and forth to the bars and saloons at the state line. Paw was seldom home. Many women in her circumstances literally lost their minds.
Patience was left there to make do—cooking, battling the wind and blowing sand and dirt, killing rattlesnakes, and warding off drunken men on horseback. And that is the source of the story my grandmother Maude remembered so clearly and related to Mama about the close-mouthed Patience Melinda.
One day, the kids were outside when a man on horseback approached their half-dugout home. He sat astride his horse for a while, assessing the situation and possibly deciding what kind of mischief he was about to wreak when Patience appeared out of nowhere, leveled a shotgun straight at him and said, “I’m not afraid of man nor devil, long or short range. Ride on.” He did.
The story her mother had told her made the decision about which of our relatives to research easy when we considered Patience Melinda’s fierce bravery. And so we began. And soon after we’d traced her birth to North Carolina in the 1880s, our sources evaporated because so much of the 1880 census records were destroyed. I threw up my hands. But Alan Bailey to the rescue, and with his research skills, computer software, and patience (no pun intended), he traced Patience Melinda Rogers' lineage to Maryland in the 1600s, then across the pond. Ultimately, he uncovered an ancestral history that was beyond our wildest dreams.
Mama’s grandmother Patience Melinda was descended from royalty and nobility. Queens, kings, barons, baronesses, lords and ladies—for generation after generation, spanning centuries. But obviously, something had gone MIGHTY WRONG by the time we got to the part about Patience Melinda standing on the hard dirt, looking down the barrel of a shotgun protecting her young’uns in front of a half dugout. I doubt she knew she was descended from the likes of Llywelyn the Great, first king of Wales, and King John of Magna Carta fame.
But the women we descend from is what struck Mama and me as notable. Fierce, brave, cunning, resourceful women who worked the societal restrictions designed to keep women in their places to their advantage—never letting those dictates stop them from kicking ass. My dainty, tiny, perfectly turned-out mother—who was also a spitfire and a badass Texas woman—came by it honestly.
One notable ancestor is Maud de Braose—Baroness Mortimer—whose home, Wigmore Castle, built around 1075, still stands in England.
When Maud de Braose was just six, her father stepped in it—big time—and by order of Llywelyn the Great was hanged for alleged adultery with Llywelyn's wife, Joan. Maud never forgave or forgot. In medieval England, when her role as a woman was restricted beyond what we can imagine now, through clever, patient, and long-sighted planning and finesse, she managed to gain immense power of her own. History abounds with stories about her. But it was the revenge of her father that is the most affecting story for me. In the Battle of Evesham, Maud de Braose's husband slew her longtime rival who'd been in on the betrayal of her father and, at her direction, had his severed head and other parts of his anatomy—including his genitals—delivered to her. She held a grand feast that very night at Wigmore Castle where she displayed her enemy’s head still attached to the point of a lance. Seems she wasn’t afraid of man nor devil either. Mama carried ferocity and feminism in her DNA. And remember—her own mother was named Maude.
So although I feel I owe a great debt to the activist women of my era—Gloria, Bella, Betty, Shirley, Angela—I owe the greatest and most meaningful debt to my mother Billy Jo, who decades before the #MeToo movement proved that a woman could hold her own in a man’s world if she had enough courage and conviction and backbone.
When Mama was in high school, she worked summers at the Hobbs Air Base. It was the end of World War II, and planes were being retired and warehoused there at the airbase. They called it pickling. Mama kept files on the planes that were stored there, drawers and drawers of files recording the fighter planes, huge bombers and cargo aircraft. She was one of a bevy of young women who did the clerical work, and they were surrounded by military men—their bosses—who were especially unrestrained, as you can imagine, around those girls.
One day, an officer buzzed for Mama to bring a file into a meeting. She did, and on her way out of the room as she passed the conference table filled with men—officers, her superiors—one of them reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands. Without hesitation, she rared back and slapped him across the face. Me too? Try HELL NO! Not Billy Jo. Oh, hell no.
She was like her mother, who ran off a yard full of men my grandfather had gathered in her absence and held a cockfight, complete with gambling and drinking, blood and gore. Firing a shotgun into the air, she sent them all running, then chased my grandfather through the house and yard, finally catching up with him as he was fleeing across the front seat of their car. She spun him around and landed her fist in his face, causing a gash and blood to pour.
Her name was Maudie Nell. I’m named after her. She probably had it in her to display a head on a pike.
As did Patience Melinda.
And Billy Jo.
And…well…me, too.
I'll be back with another personal story next week.
Share this post