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Aunt Mamie and MaKitsey: Cousins, Aunt, and Niece
After serving in the War Between the States two doctors who were father
and son, Dr. James Sims and Dr. Sam Sims, returned to live and work in
Tunis, Texas. They found two sisters there who suited them just fine.
One was called Sister Mary and she married Dr. Sims the father. The
other was Margaret Rose Eubank and she married Dr. Sims the son. Sister
Mary had a son, Johnny, and a daughter, Mamie. When Mamie was just
learning to walk and talk, Margaret Rose, called Little Mama, had a baby
daughter. They named the baby Virginia Rose and put her in a box on the
floor at the side of the bed. When they brought Mamie in to see her new
niece, who was also her cousin, Virginia was crying just a little bit
and Mamie thought she was a baby kitten. She said "Kitsey? Kitsey?" and
that was the name Virginia went by for the rest of her life. Mamie
became Aunt Mamie at the tender age of two.
Papa, as Aunt Mamie called him, built two houses side by side in Bryan
and both families moved there. When I came along sixty-some-odd years
later, I called my grandmother MaKitsey. I always felt I had two
grandmothers in Bryan, MaKitsey and Aunt Mamie. I loved to visit them
and sit on their wide and deep front porch and swing on the porch swing.
I didn't really mind that they didn't have air conditioning or TV. I
loved listening to the mourning doves and cicadas.
Both Aunt Mamie and MaKitsey were experts with a needle and thread. I
remember Aunt Mamie showing me a white cotton dress she sewed by hand,
and you couldn't even see the stitches. Those stitches were invisible,
as if she had glued the fabric together. I have some spiderweb-like lace
collars she crocheted and the fine wire hook she used to make them. I
don't know how she could see to make those fine loops. MaKitsey mostly
did embroidery and I have a lot of her handiwork too. She tried to teach
me to do cross-stitching when I was a child, but it didn't really take
until I was grown. After MaKitsey died, I found a box of needlework in
her closet. It is a dresser set that she had begun to embroider with
pink shiny yarn, but left unfinished. I knew it had been there forever,
because I had asked her about it years earlier. She had never really
answered me when I asked her why she didn't finish it. Not too long ago,
I got it out to look at it and I saw that it had a date stamped on it,
1910. That was two years before my father was born and the year she lost
her own baby girl. I think she had been making it for her baby girl and
couldn't bring herself to either finish it or dispose of it after the
baby died. I have been working on finally finishing it in honor of that
long-ago baby aunt of mine and in honor of MaKitsey's love.
Aunt Mamie had Papa's picture of General Lee, a Confederate battle flag,
and a $10,000 CSA bill framed and hanging inside the front door. I
thought they must have been mighty rich to have $10,000 just hanging
around on the wall! My brother has Great-great-grandfather Sims's Civil
War medicine chest with blown-glass beakers, mortar and pestle, and
traveling medicine kit. I have his ebony CSA swagger stick and field
binoculars in a leather case. The last time we visited Aunt Mamie was in
1977. She was well into her nineties and my daughter was seven. As I
looked at them talking together, it struck me how amazingly close the
Civil War still was. Here was my daughter talking to the daughter of a
Civil War veteran. I felt like I was looking across time and seeing
history directly. What a treasure really old people are!
Aunt Mamie's and MaKitsey's houses still stand today, but instead of
having cotton fields across the street, there are houses all around.
Aunt Mamie's cotton farms in Burleson County outside Tunis are still
owned by the family. They are farmed by the same family that has farmed
them for three generations and I think the fourth generation is standing
in line. And I am moving back to Texas after a fifty-six year exile. I'm
bringing my family heirlooms back home to Texas where they belong.
Janet E. Brown
Richmond, Virginia
Published:
November 14,
2005
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