The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

                 The Gift of Community

One of my favorite stories of all time is a story that came with my marriage.  Dan Kidd had the best grandmother in the world.  I had one grandmother who was a passive and almost shadowy figure and one who lived 600 miles away, and I saw her only twice a year.  So, as Dan began to tell me about Nanny, I was fascinated by this woman. She was funny, kind, resourceful, and determined to live on her terms. However, life was not always kind to her, yet she persevered.

Her family, who at one time had been very well-off, had fallen on hard times even before the Depression era.  We know that because of her stories and the lovely furniture that was passed down.  She was one of three sisters but the only one to marry and have children. She was a nurse at a time when that was an interesting choice for women, but it paid better than the alternative traditional options of teacher and office worker, and that was an important factor that served her well over the years.

She was a company nurse for a logging company when she met Mr. Smith. After they married, she discovered that he was “bad to drink,” as we say in the South, but she honored her commitment to love and cherish, and they began to grow their family. They were getting by, but at some point, Nanny’s husband got religion and became a Pentecostal preacher.  While that was a good personal decision for their family, they almost starved. 

Preachers, especially untrained preachers, were notoriously underpaid in those days. I had several ministers of that ilk in my family, and the churches they often served were made up of hard-working blue-collared workers who had little to put in the offering plate.  They contributed with their skills and time, which made for very nice and well-kept small churches but with pastors who could barely feed their families.

As time went along, their family grew to include seven girls. When the oldest was sixteen and the youngest was eighteen months, Dan’s grandfather died.  It was unexpected and devastating and left them in a dire financial situation.  He died in the fall, and Nanny immediately went back to work as a nurse. The older girls got jobs, and the middle children looked after the youngest. Yet it was not enough. 

With no time to grieve or catch her breath, in December, the landlord of their rental house served an eviction notice on the widow and her seven daughters. This is where the story gets creative.  Nanny had stayed on as a member of the church her husband had pastored, and, ironically, in 1940, she was the teacher of the men’s Sunday school class. That was not a role afforded many women in Southern churches during that era. I suspect it was not just her formal education, but who Nanny was; wise, compassionate and insightful.

While the story was often retold, who informed the Sunday School class of the family’s dilemma is unclear. It does not seem like something Nanny would have shared, but nonetheless, word got out about the problem, and the men of the Sunday school class developed a plan.  It seems there was a law on the books in South Carolina, that as long as there was a crop in the ground, the family living on the property could not be evicted. So the men gathered their resources and, in the dead of night in December, in a low-income residential part of town, they came with mules and plows and planted cotton in her front and back yards; some of the men came to be with her when the landlord came to enforce the eviction, which gave her months to get her affairs in order instead of days. During that grace period, she bought a piece of land and put a Jim Walters home on it.  She lived at that address until she died forty-five years later.

I love this story.  I love what happens when you underestimate a creative thinker in the face of a bully. I appreciate that those men allowed a woman they respected to teach them some things of importance and how she was willing to let them help her with things they brought to the friendship. It is always best if we can lean into our giftedness and, at the same time, allow others to lean into theirs.  It was not magic that allowed each person in this story to create a miracle.  It was relationships, trust, expertise, and action that were the formula for the miracle.  It still is.