The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation

by Carry Amelia Nation

I shall not in this book give to the public the details of my life as a wife of David Nation any more than possible. He and I agreed in but few things, and still we did not have the outbreaks many husbands and wives have. The most serious trouble that ever rose between us was in regard to Christianity. My whole Christian life was an offense unto him, and I found out if I yielded to his ideas and views that I would be false to every true motive. He saw that I resented this influence and it caused him to be suspicious and jealous. I think my combative nature was largely developed by living with him, for I had to fight for everything that I kept. About two years after we were married, we exchanged our mutual properties for seventeen hundred acres of land on the San Bernard River in Texas, part of which was a cotton plantation. We knew nothing of the cultivation of cotton or of plantation life. We took a car load of good furniture with us and some fine stock, hogs and cattle. In packing up to go to Texas there was a widow who assisted me. In paying her for her services, I gave her some worthless things, because I was so avaricious. I would not pay her money, but gave her the things I did not want to carry with me. I remember I left about eight bushels of potatoes in the cellar for her and the night we left they froze. I felt very much condemned the way I treated this poor woman.

We were as helpless on the plantation as little children. The cultivation of cotton was very different from anything we had been used to. A bad neighbor threw all of our plows in the Bernard River and everything seemed to go wrong. We had eight horses die in the pasture the spring after we moved there. Soon the money we took with us was gone and Mr. Nation got discouraged. He went to Brazoria, the county seat, and stayed six weeks during court, for the purpose of entering the practice of law again.

The cotton had been planted before he left. A neighbor named Martin Hanks came over and told me not to allow the cotton to go to waste, said he would lend me his plows, and advised me to get a colored man named Edmond, who was his master's overseer in slave time, to manage this crop for me. I hired five other negroes, paying them with things I had in the house, for I had not a cent of money. The result was a fine crop of cotton. Mr. Nation's daughter Lola, was then eleven years old, and Charlien was three years younger. We lived six miles from a school, and just at a time when the girls needed school most. I began to see what a disastrous move we had made. I became very dispondant and sick at heart. I was young and did not know then how to contend with disappointments on every hand. At one time I was quite sick with chills and fever. I had nothing in the house but meal, some fat bacon and sweet potatoes. There was a poor old man that we took in for charity who was with us, named Mr. Holt. I called him to my bedside and asked him to go to the patch and dig a bushel of sweet potatoes and take them to town and exchange them for a little tea, sugar, lemons and bread. He failed in this and was returning when, he met a dear, sweet woman, Mrs. Underwood, that I called my "Texas Mother." She called to Mr. Holt, and asked him how I was. He told her I was sick and out of anything to eat. She took the potatoes and sent the articles I wanted. I believe I should have died had he returned without them, for I was almost famished for food and sick besides.

I was in Columbia one day and stopped at the Old Columbia Hotel, owned by the Messrs. Park, two bachelors. Mrs. Ballenger a widow was renting it from Messrs. Park. I said to them: "If you ever need a tenant, send for me." In a few months Mrs. Ballenger's daughter died and she left. Mr. Park sent for me to come. We had a car load of good plain furniture and bedding, some handsome tableware, but no money to buy provisions.

Dear old mother Gloyd was a great help to me. She had once kept hotel herself. I did not ask credit, and this is how I got the money to begin keeping hotel: There was an Irish ditcher named Dunn whose wife did my work. She was a good cook. I borrowed of Mr. Dunn three dollars and fifty cents, and with this money began the hotel business. The house was a rattle trap, plastering off, and a regular bed-bug nest. I fumigated, pasted the walls over with cloth and newspapers, where the plastering was off, and made curtains out of old sheets. My purchases were about like this for the first day: Fifty cents worth of meat, coffee ten cents, rice ten cents and sugar twenty-five cents, potatoes five, etc. The transients at one meal would give me something to spend for the next. I assisted about the cooking and helped in the dining-room. Mother Gloyd and Lola attended to the chamber work, and little Charlien was the one who did the buying for the house. I would often wash out my tablecloths at night myself and iron them in the morning before breakfast. I would take boarders' washing, hire a woman to wash, then do the ironing myself. Columbia was a small village of not more than five hundred people. It was the terminal of a railroad called the Columbia Tap. Mr. Painter, the conductor, began boarding with us right off and in three or four days he brought a family there to board by the name of Oastram, father, mother and two boys, having come south to buy a plantation. Mrs. Oastrom handed me a ten dollar bill. I called Lola and Charlien upstairs and showed them the ten dollar bill. We were overjoyed; we danced, laughed, and cried. Charlien said: "Now we can buy a whole ham." For several months my little children and I ate nothing but broken food. I can never put on paper the struggles of this life. I would not know one day how we would get along the next.

The bitterest sorrows of my life have come from not having the love of a husband. I must here say that I have had, at times, in the society of those I love, a foretaste of what this could be. For years I never saw a loving husband that I did not envy the wife; it was a cry of my heart for love. I used to ask God why He denied me this. I can see now why it was. I know it was God's will for me to marry Mr. Nation. Had I married a man I could have loved, God could never have used me. Phrenologists who have examined my head have said: "How can you, who are such a lover of home be without one?" The very thing that I was denied caused me to have a desire to secure it to others. Payne who wrote "Home Sweet Home" never had one. There is in my life a cause of sadness and bitter sorrow that God only knows. I shall not write it here. Oh! how the heart will break almost for a loving word! I believe the great want of the world is love. Jesus came to bring love to earth.

During these severe afflictions I began to see how little there was in life. I wondered at the gaiety of people. Seemed like a pall hung over the earth. I would wonder that the birds sung, or the sun would shine. I might say that for years this was my experience. I would go to God but got very little relief; yet I never gave up. It was all the hope I could see for me. About this time my little Charlien, who had been such a help to me, began to go into a decline, until she was taken down with typhoid fever. Her case was violent and she was delirious from the first. This my only child was peculiar. She was the result of a drunken father and a distracted mother. The curse of heredity is one of the most heart-breaking results of the saloon. Poor little children are brought into the world, cursed by disposition and disease, entailed on them. How can mothers be true to their offspring with a constant dread of the nameless horrors wives are exposed to by being drunkards' wives. Men will not raise domestic animals under conditions where the mothers may bring forth weak or deformed offspring. My precious child seemed to have taken a perfect dislike to Christianity. This was a great grief to me, and I used to pray to God to save her soul at any cost; I often prayed for bodily affliction on her, if that was what would make her love and serve God. Anything for her eternal salvation.

Her right cheek was very much swollen, and on examination we found there was an eating sore inside her cheek. This kept up in spite of all remedies, and at last the whole of her right cheek fell out, leaving the teeth bare. My friends and boarders were very angry at the physician, saying she was salivated. From the first something told me this is an answer to your prayer. At this time, when her life was despaired of, I had an intense longing to save my child, who was so dear to me. I said: "Oh, God, let me keep a piece of my child." A minister said: "Don't pray for the life of your child; she will be so deformed it were better she were dead." I could not feel this way. After being at death's door for nine days, she began to recover. The wound in her face healed up to a hole about the size of a twenty-five cent piece. Her jaws closed and remained so for eight years. The sickness of my daughter and the keeping up of the hotel was such a tax on my mind, that for six months all transactions would recede from my memory. For instance, if anyone told me something, in an hour afterwards, I could not tell whether it had been hours, days or months since it was told me. I never entirely recovered from this, still being forgetful of names, dates and circumstances, unless they are particularly impressed upon my mind. When I could afford it, I took my child, then twelve years old, down to Galveston, put her under the care of Dr. Dowell for the purpose of closing the hole in her cheek. I had to leave the little one down there among strangers, for I could not afford to stay with her. A mother only will know what this means. After four operations the place was closed up in her cheek, still her mouth was closed, her teeth close together. I suffered torture all these years for fear she might strangle to death. I took her to San Antonio, Texas, to Dr. Herff, and he and his two sons removed a section of the jawbone, expecting to make an artificial joint, enabling her to use the other side of her jaw. After all this, the operation was a failure, and her jaws closed up again. We, in the meantime, moved to Richmond from Columbia. We became very successful in the hotel business and I saved money enough to send her to New York City, where her father, Dr. Gloyd, had a cousin, Dr. Messinger, who would see that she had the best relief possible. None of the surgeons there gave her any hope of opening her jaws. She went to Dr. John Wyeth to have him perform the plastic surgery; that is, he cut off a flap from under her chin, turning it over the scar on her cheek.

Although Charlien was not a Christian, she had faith in God. Once
she complained of my being too strict with her, but said: "Mamma I owe
it to you that I have any faith in God, even if you are severe with me."
She always believed that her mother had a God. Finding no physician
in New York that could open her jaws, she wrote me this: "No one but
God can open my mouth, Mamma; ask him to do it." There was a Catholic
woman, Miss Doregan, who boarded with me and had a store around
the corner from the hotel, and I could think of no one else who had as
much faith as this woman. She said she believed that God would heal
my child according to prayer, so I went for seven mornings before breakfast
to this saint of God. She taught me many holy truths and she
explained the Scriptures to me. I learned from her a prayer that we said
in concert, that was written by one of the Old Fathers, and is one of the
most complete in devotion I have ever read. I will record it here:
"Come Holy Ghost send down those beams,
That sweetly flow in silent streams,
From thy bright throne above;
Oh, Come Father of the poor,
Thou bounteous source of all our store;
Come fire our hearts with love.
Come thou of comforters the best,
Come thou the soul's delicious guest,
The pilgrim's sweet relief:
Thou art our rest in toil and sweat,
Refreshment in excessive heat
And solace in our grief.
Oh! sacred light shoot home the darts,
Oh! pierce the center of those hearts
Whose faith aspires to thee.
Without thy God-head nothing can
Have any worth a price in man,
Nothing can harmless be."
"Lord wash our sinful stains away,
Water from heaven our barren clay,
Our wounds and bruises heal.
To thy sweet yoke our stiff necks bow,
Warm with thy fire our hearts of snow,
Our wandering feet repair.
Oh, grant thy faithful dearest Lord,
Whose only hope is thy sure word,
The seven gifts of thy spirit.
Grant us in life to obey thy grace,
Grant us in death to see thy face
And endless joys inherit,
Through the same Christ our Lord."
"Amen."

And now I often use this beautiful and comprehensive petition to my Dear
Lord.