Pieced Together: Lucy Belle Friddle Davis and George Washington Davis

There is a photograph on my wall, taken from an airplane sometime in the last century: a white-roofed brick farmhouse, a dark stand of oaks, plowed fields running off in every direction, and a dirt road going by. It was the home George and Lucy Davis built, and it reached my wall the way nearly everything of theirs has reached me — hand to hand, mother to daughter, down through the women of my family until it eventually made its way to me.

I never met them. George died in 1963 and Lucy in 1974, both before I was born. What I have of them is a stack of documents, a handful of photographs, two long remembrances their daughter Martha wrote, the memories of my grandmother and my mother, and some photos of quilts. So this is not a story I remember. It is one I pieced together — which, given how these two spent their lives, feels like the only honest way to tell it.

The home George and Lucy built near Piedmont — the photograph that hangs on my wall.

Let me start where they started.

Lucy

Lucy Belle Friddle was born on November 28, 1888, in Pickens County, South Carolina, and she never knew her father. He died a few months before she came. That left her mother, Katherine Nalley Friddle, "Kate," with a ten-year-old son, a four-year-old daughter, and a baby on the way, trying to hold a family together on a hoe crop at the Maxwell Farm. A hoe and a patch of dirt will keep you poor and tired, and not much else. One by one they left - Lucy’s brother Robert first, as a teenager, to the cotton mill at Easley; then Kate; then, finally, Lucy.

She was nine years old.

Lucy Belle Friddle Davis as a young woman.

Read that again, because I had to. Nine. She got four years of school before the mill took her, and she made those four years count. Martha wrote that even as a child, Lucy decided she would have nothing to do with the girls who cursed or dipped snuff or told dirty jokes — that she was “every ounce a lady and refined, with a love for poetry and good books.” A mill child with almost no schooling, who taught herself to be refined and never let it go. That is not a small thing. That is a whole character, set by the time she was ten.

George

George Washington Davis was born January 4, 1886, in Greenville County, the youngest of seven children and one of only two boys. He grew up a farmer’s son and went to the Reedy River School. George could do nearly anything he set his hand to. He built bridges, houses, and schools. He shod horses and sharpened plows, and his own children would take turns working the bellows to keep his forge hot while he did it — for people, Martha noted with some heat, who would ask him to do all their work on credit and then never pay. He farmed, he carpentered, he worked bridge construction. There was not much he couldn’t make or mend.

He never told Martha outright that he wanted her to go to college. But she remembered the pride in his voice years later, when she’d catch him saying to someone, “Oh, my daughter teaches at Easley High.”

1905

Here is how they met, and I promise I’m not dressing it up. George had a sister, Minnie, who had married a Hawkins and moved to the mill town of Pelzer. George took to riding his bicycle the long miles over to see her — a whole lot of miles, my mother says. Because Minnie had a neighbor. Lucy Friddle worked the Pelzer Mill.

George and Lucy at home.

They married on November 5, 1905, at Minnie’s home in Pelzer. Lucy was three weeks shy of seventeen. (Martha wrote “before her sixteenth birthday,” and Martha was off by a year on her mother’s age more than once — a daughter’s prerogative, I guess, to keep her mama young.) George was nineteen. They would stay married fifty-eight years, until the day he died.

George and Lucy, late in their fifty-eight years together.

The Children (and the one they lost)

Six children came. Ruth Beatrice in 1908, William Henry in 1911, then — seven years later, on the same April day in 1918 — twins, Martha Jane and Mary Elizabeth. Two more sons would follow: Jack in 1921 and Woodrow in 1924.

But I can’t hurry past those two little twin girls. Lucy was so near death after their birth that she could not care for the babies, and Martha believed all her life that her father fought twice as hard to keep her — the surviving twin — alive, because of what came next. Mary Elizabeth was born alive — her birth certificate says so plainly, April 12, 1918 — but she did not stay. According to Martha, she died that May. She lived about a month. They buried her, most likely, in some church cemetery near the family home. The exact place is lost to us now, which is its own small grief. The record of a life that short is mostly the record of who remembered it — and Martha remembered her twin until Martha herself was an old woman.

The year before Martha was to start school — she had been promised a satchel with ribbons on it, and she had been counting the days — typhoid fever came through the house. George had it. Ruth had it. Three-year-old Jack had it, and then on top of it came scarlet fever, and Jack nearly died and had to learn to walk all over again. There was no satchel with ribbons that year. Martha carried a flour sack, and walked the two miles to school alone. And still, she wrote, her mother found the time to encourage her. They got by on next to nothing, and Lucy made next to nothing feel like plenty.

Money stayed scarce while the children were small, so George made things. He made toys out of pine cones and whatever the woods gave him. He carved Martha a basket out of a peach kernel. He once gave her a big green marble he’d turned up in the field, and she kept that marble her whole life. When he could, George bought her store-bought dresses, each one costing what three of Lucy’s homemade ones would have. Martha admitted she held her head a little higher in them. (I come from people who could not afford much and bought beauty anyway, when they could, for the ones they loved. I think that is worth knowing about a family.)

Three Generations Under One Roof

There is something running underneath all of this that I nearly walked right past.

Nancy Jane Knight Davis, George’s mother, who lived in Lucy’s home for some twenty years.

George’s mother, Nancy Jane, was widowed in 1907 and lived out her years in her children’s homes — and for some twenty of them, the census places her under George and Lucy’s roof. Now, Nancy Jane had come up hard herself: a girl who lost her own father young, who walked barefoot to keep her one pair of shoes good, slipping them on only when the church came into sight. And Martha tells this: when Lucy first married into the family — a poor mill girl with nothing — one of the first things she did was buy her mother-in-law her first lace-trimmed slip and her first pair of patent shoes. A gift. Nancy Jane told that story again and again for the rest of her life.

The barefoot girl, given patent shoes by her son’s penniless young wife. I did not invent that. I just found it, and I have not gotten over it.

And it did not stop with Nancy Jane. When Lucy was forty-seven, her grandson William Henry Jr. came to live with her, and she and George raised him, and their own children — grown by then — were proud of the boy rather than jealous of him. Lucy spent her life putting her children, her husband, and yes, her husband’s mother ahead of herself. And then, when she was old, the next generation’s women — Catherine, who had married Woodrow, and Claudia, Jack’s daughter — moved in to care for her.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like a greeting card. So let me just say it flat: in my family, the women have always taken in their husbands’ aging people while raising their own babies. Nancy Jane in Lucy’s house. Grandma Black, my grandfather’s grandmother, in Betty and Vealon’s house. My own mother, helping care for my father’s parents next door while she raised us. I thought it was a coincidence the first time I noticed it. It is not a coincidence. It is an inheritance.

The Dairy

George in his later years, with the cane that turns up in every story my family tells about him.

By the late 1930s, George and his son Woodrow had made their farm — the Long Place — into something people drove past to look at, and George was named Farmer of the Year. Then they sold up, bought land down toward Piedmont in the Anderson County countryside, built the house in that photograph on my wall, raised a dairy barn beside it, and went into milk. They ran that dairy for twenty-eight years. George worked it as hard as any man on it, alongside Woodrow, Jack, and Jack’s son Douglas — Doug, who had been hurt at birth and who would spend his whole life there, tending the animals, the work that was his and that he did well.

My mother saw that dairy as a little girl, and what she remembers is the milking barn. She begged to go up with George (“Grandpa Davis”) one Sunday evening — cows do not take Sundays off, after all — and walking into that barn, she said, was like walking into a spaceship. Cement block on the outside, a great stainless-steel PET tank on a stand by the door. Inside, steel partway up the walls and a cement floor so clean you could have eaten off it. The cows came in on their own, in order, the same one leading every time, down into the milking pit, and George stood there working and telling her how all of it ran while the machines lowered from the ceiling like something at the dentist’s office. By the time the milking was done, the PET truck was already idling beside the tank to carry it to the plant in downtown Greenville. Then out came the hoses and the long brushes, and they scrubbed the whole place back to spotless.

She fell on the ramp that day and tore a chunk out of her knee, crying too hard to walk. And George — who by then never went anywhere without his cane — still managed, leaning on it, to pick her up and carry her across to Woodrow and Catherine’s so Catherine could bandage her up.

Grandpa Davis had a way with the children on that farm. There’s another story, older, that my Grandma Betty used to tell. George would take her out on the tractor when she was about six, drive to the watermelon patch, pick one, lift it high over his head, and let it drop so it burst open in the field — and the two of them would sit right there in the dirt and eat it out of their hands. He timed his whole working day, his daughter wrote, so he would be back at the house in time for the Lone Ranger on the radio. He followed politics like a hawk and was a yellow-dog Democrat of a kind, my mother is quick to point out, that bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything you would call a Democrat today.

Lucy in her later years — bent by the osteoporosis that runs down through the women of our line.

And Lucy, through all the dairy years, sat in her chair in the den with something always in her hands. Quilting. Tatting. Piecing hexagons one at a time and joining them into a garden of cloth flowers. Her porch ran over with flowers she grew. If anyone ever had a green thumb, Martha wrote, it was her. Out in the cotton field years before, she had hoed and picked and sung the whole time — “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad,” the old hymn, with an engineer that’s brave. By the time my mother knew her, she could no longer hold her head up. Osteoporosis had bent her over, the same disease that runs down through the women of my line and bends us still. She walked slow and careful with her cane, head down. But her hands kept working.

The Leaving

George’s health had been failing for years — diabetes, his heart — and in November 1963 it gave out. Martha and Lucy sat by his bed at Anderson Memorial Hospital and watched his breath grow shorter. He was the first person Martha ever saw die. For weeks afterward she heard his footsteps in the house at night, and caught herself getting up to check whether he needed anything. He was seventy-seven.

George and Lucy lie side by side at Greenville Memorial
Gardens, each marked with a carved Bible.

Lucy lived almost eleven more years without him. She lived through losing her son, Willie, too. She had a stroke and kept going, anyway — kept trying to cook, kept trying to look after herself, kept quilting. She had made each of her children two quilts. After the stroke, she made two more. The stitches in those last quilts are longer and looser than the careful ones that came before, because her hands could no longer do what her hands had always done. Martha kept the after-the-stroke quilts for herself. “The stitches are longer,” she wrote, “but that only made the quilts more precious to me.”

She died on October 31, 1974, at eighty-five, in the hospital, away from home — and Martha never made her peace with that. “She looked so little and frightened,” she wrote, “with all those bruises where the needles went in.” They laid her beside George. Her marker reads LUCY FRIDDLE, 1888–1974, with the same carved Bible — fitting, for a woman who, as Martha wrote, “wore her thumb prints on the Bible where she held it so often.” She loved to read, and loved the Psalms most of all. We have lost track of the Bible itself. It likely passed to Woodrow’s family when the house was emptied. But that image of it — worn through where her thumbs held it — is the one I would keep if I could keep only one.

What They Left

A Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt — hexagons of the kind my mother
watched Lucy piece, one at a time, from her chair.

When Martha cleared out the closet in Lucy’s bedroom after she died, it was full of quilt tops. Some were Lucy’s. Some were her best friend Carrie’s — Aunt Carrie Davis, who had married George’s brother and become Lucy’s closest companion, the two of them quilting side by side for years. Those tops scattered out into the family and waited. Decades later, my Grandma Betty finished some of them — sat down and quilted the tops these two women had pieced a half-century before.

Grandma Betty’s label on the back of a quilt:
a top begun by Aunt Carrie Davis in the early 1900s,
 finished by Betty Foster in 2009.

There is one with a little muslin label on the back, in Grandma Betty’s hand: Quilt started in early to mid 1900s by aunt Carry Davis, finished by Betty Foster Jan 2009. My mother and my aunt Sharon hold those quilts now — some finished, some still tops, still waiting. The work passes down, and the women keep finishing each other’s handiwork.

Lucy’s tatted lace, edging a handkerchief —
fine handwork from a woman who, by the end, could barely lift her head.

The tatting survives too — Lucy’s handmade lace, edging handkerchiefs in thread so fine it makes you wonder how a woman bent double with her head down ever saw to do it. One of those handkerchiefs holds both their hands at once: Lucy’s lace around the edge, my Grandma Betty’s initials embroidered in the middle. Lucy did the tatting by hand, but she sewed and quilted on a machine too — an all-metal Singer that George bought her, a young husband buying his young wife the best thing he could afford. That very machine sits today in my mother’s living room. My mother believes it a Singer Model 27, the “Sphinx,” the kind the company built from the 1890s into the 1930s. It came down from Lucy to Martha to Betty to my mother, and one day, most likely, it will come to me.

Photograph of Lucy’s Singer sewing machine

The aerial photo on my wall of the homestead. The quilts in my mother’s closet. The machine in her living room. The lace in the drawer. I keep noticing that everything these two left behind has traveled the same road to reach me — down through the women, one set of hands to the next.

I started this looking for two people I never met, and I found a mill girl who taught herself to be a lady, a dairyman who hid his pride, and a long line of women who kept finishing what the women before them had started. I am one more set of hands in that line.

This is me, finishing the quilt.