Well, she remembered that she resented her in the early part of
her—but she said she blamed that on relatives. They would
talk about her, call her lazy and things like that, because she didn't
get out and work on the farm like most people did, and she would take a
nap after lunch and things like that, and she put those little children
standing on stools to wash dishes and things like that. Aunt Nellie and
Mama. Mama washed dishes from the time she can remember. Five years old,
she was on a little stool washing dishes or drying them, at
the—I don't know—probably at the table then with a
dishpan because they didn't have running water or heated water, they had
to heat it on an old wood stove. So they poured it in a dishpan and
washed them at the kitchen table. They didn't have sinks and things like
they do now, or like we did when we were growing up. But they would talk
about her and of course that influenced Mama, so Mama resented her and
didn't like her, but she realized after she got grown that that she was
really good to the children. Course she didn't care about them like she
did her own, but she was good to them, she said. She was fair and good
to them and she could have—if it hadn't been for the
influence of relatives or if they had had more positive influence she
could have probably thought a lot of her stepmother and she did go visit
her a lot after—or she didn't visit any of her relatives a
lot except her sister, Aunt Nellie. She would go visit her. Her
stepmother in her later life had TB and went to a sanatorium down at
Wilson and was there for a year or so and we did go visit her there
after I was married. I went with Mama and I think Leonard and I went
with Mama and Aunt Nellie, took them down there to visit her stepmother,
so she did appreciate her stepmother in her later life, what she'd done
for her.