Nanny was my maternal grandmother, Ethel Blevins Privett, born in 1867, daughter of Dr. John Faulkner Blevins of Selma, Alabama, born 1838, 18th graduate of Tulane Medical School in 1858, Captain and Assistant Surgeon in Law’s 44th Alabama, present at the Sunken Road at the Battle of Antietam and a half dozen major Virginia battles of the Civil War, and afterward assigned to hospital duty to care for the wounded in Richmond, and after that war, a practicing physician in Selma until his death there in 1901.
When I was a small child Nanny was my most beloved companion, entertainer, teacher and storyteller. She had been widowed penniless in 1913 with four dependent children (my mother, Mary Anita Privett, was thirteen) by the death from tuberculosis of her husband, Len Privett, Passenger Station Agent at Calera, Alabama for the Southern Railway. Nanny then, with two maiden sisters, moved to Birmingham, rented a large house and opened a boarding house for schoolteachers, among the few ways women of her day could make a respectable living for a family.
My father, born in 1897, moved from mountain Southwest Virginia to Birmingham to sell life insurance in 1924 and rented a room in a boarding house in the same neighborhood, run by a friend of Nanny, and through that connection met my mother, then teaching math and music in a primary school. They married in 1925 and moved to Bradenton, Florida where they were enjoying the first Florida Land Boom, when it proved a Bubble, burst by the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 which killed nearly 300 people and did $160 Billion damage (in today’s dollars). That Bust sent my parents limping jobless back to the Virginia mountains, with their first child, Mary Ann, born February 5, 1929, just in time for the October Stock Market Crash and the ensuing Great Depression.
Her children grown and gone from her home, Nanny soon became homeless and remained so the rest of her life. Like many widows of her generation, she lived with her children, splitting each year among them (son John, a home builder in Birmingham, daughter Len in Chicago where her husband served as president of Underwriters Labratories, and my mother Mary in Christiansburg where my father served as Clerk of Circuit Court 1931-1936 and after reading law and passing the Bar in 1934 practiced law until his death of injuries in a car crash in 1954 when I was 15 and a high school junior.
Nanny always arrived on a Pullman Car of the Birmingham Special, pulled by a gleaming coal-fired steam engine. She would be helped down its steep stairs by a tall black Pullman Porter. Less than five feet tall, she wore always an ankle-length shiny black dress and patent leather low-heeled shoes, her blue-white hair tucked under a small black hat, and her age-lined face lit by a smile and twinkling eyes. To me she seemed an angel.
For the months of her sojourn with us, we spent together many hours, as she taught me card games like fish and setback, dominoes and Chinese checkers. She read me stories and chapters from a volume titled Stories of the Bible (I always requested the Old Testament ones, entertained by the many gory battles and the Jews’ trek from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land). But my favorite of Nanny’s entertainments came when late in a session I asked her for a story from her childhood, “Nanny, tell me about the time the bees bit you.”
I never tired of that story, told dozens of times. As a small child Nanny had stuck a small tree branch in a hole in the outside wall of her father’s home. Unbeknownst to her, the hole lead to a bees’ nest. They swarmed and bit (stung) her all over. Her father was summonsed from his office nearby and saved her life. She told it with great realistic drama, as a near-death experience.
Then in what seemed no time, Nanny would tell me she had to leave tomorrow for Birmingham or Chicago, and I would cry and wail, “Please don’t leave, Nanny!” But next day my father would drive Nanny to the depot in Cambria and Nanny would struggle up the stairs of the Pullman, helped by the tall Porter. At the top she would turn and waive, and toss kisses to me.
A child reared without a resident grandmother misses many of the joys of childhood,