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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 131
Aunt Dump. She said she once told Aunt Dump, “I'll sleep with you if you won't make me get black.” She added, “Aunt Dump always made me say my prayers.” Marcy said Aunt Dump loved Mrs. Eliff more than anything: When my Momma was sick, Aunt Dump put Momma in bed, put her in sheets and blankets and had jars with hot water. She heated rocks in the fireplace [to make the bed warm]. Momma sweated and sweated and sweated. The sheets turned green. Aunt Dump would put Momma in a chair and push her through the house. She made double tansy tea for Momma; it's something like, maybe sage. I don't know if it was tame or wild. The Store Every two weeks or so Marcy's father went to the store. The groceries were charged to his crop, because “poor people didn't have any money back then.” We got about $5.00 worth of groceries a month. One store her father went to was Browns, in Triana. The School Marcy went to school in Madison. She rode on a school bus that had oilcloth windows that you pulled down. She said, “You snapped the windows down. There was an old ford to cross. We had to walk to the road to get on the bus; when it was wet, the bus would get stuck.” Tom Bagsby Marcy's father remarried after her mother died. She said: “When Daddy brought home his new bride, they found me up at a spring crying. I didn't want another mother.” However, it seems Marcy adjusted. She seemed to like her stepmother's father, John Thomas (Tom) Bagsby, and she referred to him as her grandpa. He sharecropped on D.G. Foster's place (Parcel A-21). The Bagsbys lived in a two-story house. Marcy said: They had six boys and six girls, and then he had three of each by his next wife. He had a total of eighteen children. Some died. One fell off the porch into a rain barrel and drown. His second wife was Ruth Callahan. He was a hard-shelled Baptist preacher, but he didn't preach out there on the arsenal land. His son Dan is into his 80s now (in 2001); Naomi Bagsby never married. She lives on Rison Street. While Marcy mentioned other people, and said she would ask if they would talk with the researcher, but that was a far as it went. 131 - (4164)