MS. EMMA

It’s time to go back for a visit on the Knob. There are more stories to tell and folks to meet.

Although the people I write about have long been gone from this earth, they live on within my heart.

Ms. Emma was one of my favorite people, ever! To know her was to love her. She was a true hills woman with little book knowledge but a whole library filled with head knowledge. She could milk a herd of cows before daylight, kill and dress out a hog, wring the heads off a chicken to fry up golden brown and crispy, and chewed tobacco. It was nothing to see Ms. Emma chewing a wad of her favorite chewing gum on one side of her mouth and have a huge cud of tobacco stuck in her jaw on the other side.  What was most amazing to my brother and me, was that Ms. Em could stand in our front door and spit amber tobacco juice from the door all the way across the front porch and it would land next to mama’s rose bush that was planted several feet from the porch. It was a shame that Ms. Em did not enter in a tobacco-spitting contest. She would surely have won hands-down for the distance she could spit.

Ms. Emma helped to birth most of the babies on the Knob during the 1940s and early 50s. If the traveling doctor did not get there in time, no worry, Ms. Emma could. She raised five sons and two daughters of her own and had a whole passel of grandchildren.  Therefore, she knew how to handle their birthing and was good at helping the young first-time mothers care for their babies through all the childhood diseases and sicknesses that came upon them. She brought them through serious flu epidemics, chicken pox, German measles, and whooping cough. Many nights she left her home and went to stay with a family the entire night caring for and mixing up her herbal medicines to care for 
 a feverish child. As the dawn approached and the child’s fever broke, Ms. Em went home to milk and as she spoke it “get her day started.”

There wasn’t much going on that Ms. Emma did not know about. It was strange that she knew all the news and traveled no more than three miles away from her home. But travel those three miles she did. Not many weeks passed that the neighbors didn’t get a visit from Ms. Emma. She managed to visit all of the thirty plus families that lived on the Knob at least once a month. She knew who was sick, who was going to get married, who was having a baby, who was misbehaving and what they were doing, and who was not following the “Golden Rule.” She knew who was stealing chickens from their neighbor, who was sneaking in the early morning hours, milking a cow on the sly, who was selling moonshine, and who was making it.   “I ain’t calling no names” she would say, “but that boy is up to no good and he is gonna have the "revenuers"  comin' up here on the hill if he keeps them fires going down in that holler."  

Most of the time it proved out to be just like Ms. Emma spoke it. When a thin stream of smoke started boiling out of them hollows you could be sure someone had set up a "moonshine still" and before long the law would come on horseback snooping around in the woods...(Moonshine stills were often set up in between two hills and close to a spring for the water they needed.)

In the late 1950s, Ms. Emma and her husband did something that shocked the whole population of the Knob. They sold their farm and bought one in the flat lands. Nobody could believe they were leaving. Their ancestors had been a part of the Knob since the very beginning.  Ms. Emma and her husband Mr. Ivy were the backbone of the community, been married for more than fifty years.  They just could not be leaving.  But they did!  A truck pulled up at the front door and moved them lock, stock, and taking the handy-dandy kitchen knife that was so neat for plugging watermelons with them…  

The Knob was never quite the same without Ms. Em. Even my daddy said so....

Mary Frances King