Old Gillums Revisited

Since I first started researching and reading up on the old Gillums a few years ago, I have done a lot of thinking.  I’m very good at thinking.  One of the major frustrations in my wife’s life is that often, when she starts talking to me, I do not respond appropriately. A single grunt is not good enough. This often causes her to look more closely into my eyes, then realizing; nobody is home. I am off somewhere, just thinking.  Not necessarily thinking with great insight, not necessarily productively thinking. Just thinking.

With enough thinking, anyone, even one such as I, can begin to get some good insight. Even a blind hog can find an acorn occasionally, if it roots around long enough.

I have decided that nobody influenced her generation of Gillums as much as grandma Martha Jane Tucker Gillum, commonly called, early on, Tennessee, and later, Matty. She was not born a Gillum at all, but let’s take a look at her.

She was born in 1859. Her early life was emersed in our Civil War and the Reconstruction.  One of our country’s most horrible times. And I’m sure there was no more horrible place to be than in the South. A baby in her family was eaten by a wild hog. A young boy was killed by a runaway horse. At sixteen, a man broke into her house one night, and attacked her and her sister in their bedroom. He was caught by her father and brother, a crowd gathered, and the man was lynched within the hour by her brother and Harry Poynter, her sister’s husband. For some reason, nobody in the family knows why, she soon started living in Harry Poynter’s house. She stayed there until she married John Wesley Gillum. Soon after she and John Wesley began seeing each other, John Wesley started trying very hard to get her out of Harry Poynter’s house. Nobody seems to know why that came about, either.

The Pope County Militia war started getting hot and heavy in 1872, and Harry was a leading figure in that conflict, getting into a gunfight with the County Sheriff, clerk, and deputy, right in the middle of Dover. Harry killed the clerk, and chased the other two out of town to Russellville, followed by much flying lead. Harry was cleared by an over-the-body inquest in Dover, but officials in Russellville disagreed. A thirty man posse rode to Dover to arrest Harry, and they had no trouble finding him, leaning against a tree in downtown Dover, two pistols strapped on and a double barrel shotgun in his hands. Everyone, even the women, had armed themselves, and swore Harry would not be taken. The deputy asked for his guns – Harry replied, “I will give up my guns with my life, and will make the man who takes it pay a heavy price.” Nobody in the posse stepped forward to be that man, and the posse went back home to Russellville. During that war, Harry had carried Grandma, her sister Dozie, and babies to a cave 20 miles away, and they apparently lived there for the duration. Grandma remained very close to Harry Poynter for the remainder of his life, and she seemed to be the major influence in seeing to it that my oldest brother was named Harry in honor of Harry Poynter.

Years later, after the war settled down, Harry became a leading citizen of Dover, became wealthy, founded the Bank of Dover. But when Grandma’s four milk cows were stolen, Harry promptly came over to Wing, chased down the thief, and recovered the cows, no questions asked, no answers given. But since a man was missing, the Law in Yell County wished to question Grandma about that event, but, I am told, he was afraid to. Was she  too close to Harry Poynter?

Grandma’s life was full of enough trauma to make her a very serious woman. Hard, I suspect, and stern. I think she was a product of her hard early life, and the sons and daughters she produced were largely a product of her.  Her and Grandpa seemed to be very good in business, and their farm at Wing prospered, adding sharecroppers , more land; their business of breeding super mules did well. King Leo, a huge Black Mammoth  jack purchased out of Texas for $1000, was the heart if this business.

 A photo of the family taken on their front porch in the original Gillum home in 1910 seems to show telephone wires running in. They were one of the first to have electricity in the 1930's. The children were all well-educated, producing a doctor, a school administrator, a Peabody College educated teacher, and the others went to the Normal School at Danville, getting enough education to qualify them to be a teacher, though they never were.  After Grandpa died, in his early sixties in 1922, she lived on until l941, often visited by Harry Poynter until his death in 1932. At the final birthday party given for Grandma in 1941, shortly before her death, only one Poynter woman was present. It seems the Gillum family’s connection to the Poynters, Pryors, and others from Dover died that year with Grandma. Every single member of the Gillum clan was there that day. Except me. I was born three years later.

     Those thirty some-odd family members in that photo were the people who loved me, and surrounded me, as I grew up. As I look at that photo today, I note that only four survive. Love your family. Life is short.

Grandma worked very hard as a widow. She continued with her cattle, and raised Rhode Island Red chickens and eggs, and saved enough money from that buy Lula Belle a car. Though my brothers, who lived there with her as small boys, remember her as being extremely harsh at times, chances are they deserved it. It seems they were a little rowdy. My sister Jonnie, as an infant and small girl, was often sick, and she remembers Grandma holding and rocking her all day long.  When she got too big to be held, she sat beside grandma in her chair and rocked with her. Grandma  made many quilts still in use today.

When I was told how hard she made my mother’s life, as they lived with her, I reacted the way one would expect me to. I thought very badly of a grandma I never knew. My mother, I knew, was about the sweetest woman on earth. I also know grandma had earlier picked out another woman for Dad, and he had already built a house for her in the meadow.  After they were engaged, she died. Sarah Turner said, “The first woman, who died, is put upon a pedestal. No wrong can she ever do.” I think that was going on here, through no fault of my sweet mother.

I have three photos of my mom that I placed side by side. In the 1920’s photo before they moved in with Grandma, Mom was young, beautiful, and smiling. In the 1941 photo taken at Grandma’s last birthday party she was mature, still beautiful, but there was deep sadness in her eyes. The smile and the fun were gone from her life.  In a 1950’s photo, after Grandma died, the joy, the smiling was back. I think that says it all.

However, as I learned more and more about Grandma Mattie, I think she was a strong, hard-working, moral woman who came along in the history of the Gillum clan at a very good time, adding rock-solid stability and integrity to the clan still in evidence today. She loved her family deeply, I think, but never spoke of it openly. Nowadays, thank goodness, the Gillums  seem to have moved away from that. I have seen to it that my branch of the family did. I fear that most all of the many times I told my mother I loved her occurred after she entered her final coma. I made a vow the night Mom died that there would never be a shortage of open expressions of love in my family again. And I have kept that vow.