Aunt Ada

Ada Battle Atkinson, with an unidentified child, possibly a grandchild

“AUNT ADA”

She was one of the most loved and respected people in the Pender’s Crossroads neighborhood. I never heard her called by any other name than “Aunt Ada.” Children and adults alike, whether they were three years old or the older generation in their seventies and eighties, called her Aunt Ada. My first memory of her was in 1940 when I was four years old.  At that time I didn’t know much about her except that I heard her name called so many times. She was always close by. Aunt Ada was a tall woman, probably close to six feet tall. She was slender, with very light skin, and had mid-length wavy hair that she kept pulled back in a knot or bun. She stood straight, and her expression was one of confidence, and she always appeared to almost smile. When she smiled I remember her teeth as white as her dress and as straight as an arrow. She wore a long white cotton or linen dress that had long sleeves and white buttons. Although she worked in the fields and close to the dirt most days, that dress always looked perfectly clean and as white as fresh snow. I never saw her wear anything except a long white dress. In the winter she would wear some kind of black coat over her dress. Her maiden name was Ada Battle and she was born in 1885. She married Mark Atkinson and they had several children. I cannot recall all of her children’s names but some of them were Henry Atkinson, Boose (maybe Rufus)  Atkinson, Willie (Bruh) Atkinson. There were others but I don’t recall their names. 

I worked alongside Aunt Ada and other family members, both hers and mine, and always knew she was something special.  When I was a child she appeared to me to be some kind of Holy Woman who was here to guide us and answer questions. People were always asking her about the best time to plant crops or garden peas or potatoes.  She knew the food value of the different colors of corn. She knew the wooded areas where huckleberries were more plentiful. I remember seeing her walk into the woods holding an empty tin lard bucket. When she came out that lard bucket was full of huckleberries. (huckleberries are like wild blue berries).  Aunt Ada didn’t talk a lot but when she spoke it was with wisdom and everyone listened to her.

When I was about five or six years old I had a mosquito bite on my arm. I must have scratched it with my outdoors grimy hands and it got infected. We were at the tobacco barns one day and my dad asked Aunt Ada to look at Montress’s arm. She took my arm and looked and spoke very softly and said something like, “when I go to the house at dinner time (lunch for most now) I will bring something to put on it.”  She came back after dinner time to work at the tobacco barns and had a small paper bag with her. She opened it up and took out a small jar with some kind of liquid in it. She also had cotton balls in that sack. They were not cotton balls like we purchase at the drug stores today. It was cotton balls picked from the cotton fields right there on the farm and cleaned by her. She moistened one of those locally grown cotton balls in the mixture and pressed it onto my infected mosquito bite. Then she took two pieces of tobacco twine and tied tightly around my forearm on either side of the bite.  She wiped my arm with a cotton ball and pressed around the bite. She untied the tobacco twine and removed the string. She moistened a second cotton ball and took out some white rags (looked like strips torn from a sheet or sugar sack) and she bandaged my arm with that cotton ball securely on the bite. Then she tied some twine around the bandage and told me to leave it just like she fixed it for three days. She looked at me with her half smile and showing the most perfect set of teeth I have ever seen and just said, “don’t take it off for three days and then I will take it off.”  After three days she did remove the bandage and the cotton ball. The infected mosquito bite was almost invisible. I have no idea what she put on it. I couldn’t scratch it and that probably helped too.

My great grandparents, Tom and Nannie Wiggins, owned a farm at Pender’s Crossroads and there were eight tenant houses on the farm. For a number of years Aunt Ada occupied one of those houses and my family occupied another. She did move away to a place near Town Creek and to some other nearby neighborhoods. She seemed to always be close to Pender’s Crossroads. I do remember conversations between my great-grandparents about their hog killing that took place on a cold day, usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They slaughtered as many as eight or ten hogs at a time that provided meat, lard, cracklings, and box lye soap for all those who lived on the farm. Even during the times Aunt Ada moved from the Wiggins farm, they still called on her for advice. My great-grandmother, Nannie Wiggins, would not schedule a hog killing until a day when Aunt Ada could be there to supervise. Aunt Ada knew the best zodiac signs to schedule these events. She supervised all the workers on how the sausage should be mixed, ground, and stuffed, and how the chitterlings were cleaned. She supervised those who stirred the large iron pots, cooking the fat to make cracklings and lard. Wood fires underneath and around the pots heated them to a high cooking temperature. I remember my grandfather saying that the chitterlings were cleaned properly if Aunt Ada approved it. She advised how to hang the hams and shoulders in the smoke houses and how to stack the cuts of meat packed in salt and seasonings.  She made sure that there was some sausage stuffed in the pig’s appendix. It was called the “Tom Thumb,” which was mostly used to season collards and turnip greens.

After the hog killing some of the fat trimmed from the meat was cooked down to grease and that grease was lard. Lard was stored in five-gallon tin buckets and used throughout the year for frying and baking, and even for medicinal purposes. Some of that grease was used to make box lye soap.  Lye soap is a mixture of fat, lye and ash and probably other stuff, cooked in a large iron wash pot and stirred with a wooden paddle. It was important to make the lye soap when the moon was not shrinking. If the soap was made at the wrong time it would shrink. I do not know the science on this but she did, and the lye soap always turned out perfect. It was cut into squares and used for wash clothes, bathing, scrubbing floors, as a hand soap and to wash dishes.

A by-product of cooking this fat was cracklings. The cracklings are what is left of the pieces of fat when the grease is cooked out. These cracklings are crunchy and a delicious treat when cooked in cornbread or biscuits.

I have many memories of Aunt Ada and her high collar, long-sleeved, long dresses that reached almost to the ground. It was more than the clothing she wore. It was like there was an aura around her. I never heard her raise her voice.  She didn’t have to because when she spoke everyone listened. I worked around so many people back on the farm and in my life in the public and private sector, and even in my own business and met thousands of people in my eighty nine years. Aunt Ada still stands out in my mind as a special person and it wasn’t all childhood awe. I knew her until I was an adult and she remained the same statuesque lady in that white dress and an expression that appeared could become a smile any second. I moved out of state and lost track of her in the 1960’s.  She passed away in 1971.  She said she had raised or helped to raise twenty- one children and grandchildren.

The world is a richer place because Aunt Ada passed through.

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