I peeled the banana and took a bite.
It’s a unique taste, texture and aroma.
And, it got me to thinking...
Anna has managed to hold on to the farm and keep her little family together. It is the early 1920s in rural, southeastern Wayne County.
She has four children all under the age of 12. The two oldest, Dalton and Herman, are her sons by love, if not by nature. She always loved them and took care of them like they were her own.
Roan, the love of her life, who she affectionately called “her little man”, had died a few years before, following a bout with typhoid fever. The disease, an epidemic then, is curable now. He was just 34 when he died. They had barely been married three years. She loved him very much.
She and Roan had a daughter together, Carrie, near their first wedding anniversary. Roan would not live to see the birth of his baby girl. She would be named for her Daddy — and her Mama. Anna was four months pregnant with her when Roan died.
Roan had purchased or been gifted — or a little bit of both — a 100 acre tract he got from his father,, Martin E. Rogers.
It was good land, with high ground and then a gentle slope with hardwoods down to the Coleman Creek, a tea-colored water tributary of Big Satilla Creek. It bottomed out into a pool near the land line that was named the Mikell Lake for a neighboring family, that included one of his sisters-in-law.
Roan built a big house there with a wrap around porch shaded by pecan and chinaberry trees.
He had big plans and had secured a loan from a banker in Odum.
Then, the Lord called him home.
At the time, there was a crop in the field, Anna was pregnant and she had three children under the age of 12. She was 27 years old. Education opportunities for a woman in the Long Branch community of Georgia during that era did not afford her formal learning beyond the second grade level. Before women’s suffrage, she could not inherit or seek relief from the courts. There was no such thing as a social safety net.
Times were tought and Anna was in a tight spot.
Anna leaned on God and her faith, joining the Big Creek Primitive Baptist Church by experience of grace and baptism during those days.
Two of her brothers-inlaw, her sister Lindy’s husband, Frank, and Roan’s older brother, Horace, helped her maneuver through the courts and through the banker to get the land in her name to be able to support her and her kids and keep the family together.
She loved big. She used grit and determination. She never wavered. She never faltered. She was tough.
Anna said she hated to see the night time come, but she kept pressing on. She had suitors, but no one else would do. Roan was the love of her life. She said often she never wanted anyone else. She would live to be 89 years old, 62 of those as a widow. It was love that lasted a lifetime.
Baby girl Roanna always remembered a happy childhood with Dalton, Herman and Carrie. She would always be short, barely 5 feet, like her father. Her brothers would call her “Boy” because she would tag along with them everywhere they went.
And one of the things she remembered was Christmas.
It would always include family gathered around. Her brothers would get slingshots, likely made from forked sticks and any sort of band that would give it some tension to be used. Roanna and Carrie would get corn cob baby dolls, probably gleaned from the harvest and attired with hand sewn clothes.
A treat for all of them was fresh apples, oranges and bananas at Christmas I look around and see how far we have come. We call it progress, but I’m not sure all the progress is for the best.
While, I don’t want to know what it is like to experience the hard times and loss I’ve just described, I realize that we’ve been blessed far beyond our ability to comprehend.
“Boy” would want you to know that you can be content with the simple things, which really are the most important things — the love of the Savior and the love of your family.
I know it first hand, even if I didn’t always appreciate it. I heard these things recounted by her when I was a child. I knew Anna briefly in my life, but I didn’t fully know or appreciate her story until much later in life. “Boy”, Roanna Rogers Deal, was my grandmother.
I looked at the banana in my fingers and I thank God for all of my many blessings.
