Carroll sisters

Another good photo, this one of all of Ruth Mae's sisters and her mother. This had to be extracted from a Word document that Randall sent, so it's a bit fuzzy, but I really like it as it seemed to capture all of their characters. Left to right they are: Florence "Maggie" Carroll, the mother; Lil, Ruth, Ruby, Jack, Jessie, Dell. As I noted before, I never knew Jessie nor Grandma Carroll, but the others I knew to varying degrees. The picture of Lil, smiling, posing, really strikes me as her; she was always fun-loving, flirtatious, full of laughter and ready for a good time. Ruth Mae, our mother, also has a smile and is ready for a joke or a laugh, as she was until our father died in 1970. Ruby looks guarded, unsmiling; Jack is likewise smiling and happy, but is there a hint, a foreshadow, of tragedies to come? Jessie, what was she like? No idea. Finally, Dell, on the end, looks remarkably like Ruby in this shot; they could be twins (and indeed I'm not sure I got those two in the right order), and they both look exactly like their mother. Ruby and Dell I remember fairly well, but by the time I knew them they were much older than this. Still, even in this shot, it seems that they both look careworn, Ruby with a husband who was in poor health and a disabled son, Dell from a life of near-poverty and a whole herd of kids of her own.

Now here's another one:

This also came out of the same Word document, and is from an old and damaged print (not sure where the original is). As Randall said, "In this picture it is everyman for himself. I think the smallest is Lillian, first row left is Ruth. Second row left is Aunt Jack (Maude Almeda). The tallest is either Grandmother Carroll or the grand mother of the girls! The other three are probably Ruby, Dell and Jessie." Actually, I was thinking that the one on the far right, second row, was Jack; but the others it's hard to make out. But at any rate, if Randall is right, and the girl in the striped dress with the little collar is Ruth Mae, she looks about eight to ten years old; that would date this photo at about 1916-1918 or so.

I've never really heard much about my mother's early life; she used to say that they were very poor, that they were all forced to work from an early age, picking cotton for one thing, which she described as backbreaking labor. Here's a quote from Guinn:

"[I]n Mom's case there was crushing poverty. I know she had to stay out of school every fall to pick cotton. When Grandpa [Carroll] was young there was land everywhere for the working and I have often wondered why he never took advantage of it. Everything he did was like sharecropper or working for wages. "

I know that Mom had a constant ringing in one ear; when I asked her about it one time, she told me that her father had gotten mad at her for something and hit on the side of the head with his cupped hand, damaging her eardrum.