![]() ![]() ![]() At her request, Mary Hamilton began to record memories on scraps of paper. "She began to talk to me of her life nearly half a century ago in this same Mississippi Delta," Davis says, "which then was a wilderness of untouched timber, canebrakes, a jungle of briars and vines and undergrowth." Spellbound during her visits to the cabin, Davis would listen for hours. On a raw November day in 1932 Helen Dick Davis entered a backwoods cabin in the Delta and encountered Mary Hamilton, a tiny, hunchbacked old woman sitting by the fire and patching a pair of hunting trousers. She reveals the unbelievably arduous role a woman played in the taming of the Delta wilderness, a position marked by unspeakably harsh, bone-breaking toil. It is the only known first-hand account by an ordinary woman depicting the extraordinary routines demanded in this time and this place. Near the end of her life Mary Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was urged to record this astonishing narrative. Withheld for almost a lifetime, it is a tragic story of a woman's trial of surviving against brutal odds. This wrenching memoir of love, courage, and survival was waiting to he told. ![]()
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