I can smell the house with its iron water, staining the sink and commode, the slightly musty unused bedrooms, and the lazy hydrangeas along the porch. A swing with its feather-pillow pad hung on the porch. For a small boy it was just right, if you propped your feet on the arm and the dirt daubers didn’t pester you. Inside, the Victrola, which I was allowed to use, sat behind the oak table in the dining room. It played “Forty Cent Cotton and ’Leven Cent Meat—How Can a Poor Man Live” perfectly, if you didn’t mind the scratching noises.
My mother was the youngest of fourteen children, ten of them living into adulthood.“Granddaddy,” Thomas Alva Almarine Carter, was a beloved patriarch of a man. Born just after the Civil War in 1870, he lived through the Reconstruction, the Gay Nineties, the Depression, World War I and II, and the moon landing. He died at nearly 98 years of age. His family moved from another Deep South state (we’re unsure of which one) on a covered wagon to their log cabin home near Bluff City, Nevada County, Arkansas, sometime between 1850-1853. The cabin burned down in 1883. As a young man he moved to farmland outside of Warren in Bradley County, Arkansas, the county seat, where he lived the rest of his life.
T. A. built a home for his new bride, Molly Moseley, in1897. It is still standing, owned by my wealthy, now deceased cousin who died at 101. This cousin, also named Warren, founded the Carter Lumber Companies with its two hundred fifty stores in nine states. The house still has its original exterior, but is refurbished inside. Warren visited there for extended times each year while he surveyed his 60,000 acres of Arkansas timber. That house, a mile away down the dirt and gravel road, was exchanged for the home my mother grew up in not long after T. A. and Molly married
T. A. Carter was a school teacher at first. We have his teaching contract with a promise of $1.00 a day in 1898. Later he would become a surveyor, a superintendent of schools (though he never graduated himself), and a county judge. Underneath all of this, he was a farmer with a couple of hundred acres of Bradley County, Arkansas dirt. He was never wealthy, except in children, joy, and Christ.
My mother, the pet of the home, was the youngest. Jewell Canille Carter was born in 1916. As a child she looked amazingly like my own daughter, slight and pretty. “Sweet” was the word most often used for my mother. When I read through the inscriptions in the Ouachita (“WASH-a-taw”) College annuals passed down to us, the word “sweet” appeared in almost every one. I believe they had it right. As a child my mother attended the one-room school house a couple of miles away from the home place, just like all her siblings. Her sisters reported that she was only disciplined once, for sticking out her tongue at her father, though she was quite a disciplinarian herself. She claimed that it just did not occur to her to disobey her parents. The older boys were regularly and often disciplined, however. At the end of ten living kids, patterns of obedience were firmly established in the home.
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This memory will be part of a future book entitled The Stories I Tell.
Copyright © Jim Elliff, 2026