Funny thing about our memories. Sometimes we have vivid recollections of events that we didn’t actually participate in but have heard about so often that we truly believe our recollections are based on first hand experience. I suppose Miss Hattie Daniel was one of those memories for me.
Every one called her Hattie or Miss Hattie. She lived most of her life alone with the exception of her final years when she moved in with another elderly woman we all called Grandma Breland. Hattie was considered to be a loner with few friends. She could be difficult at times, but when you are answerable to no one, it’s a lot easier to be difficult.
Unlike my parents, two recent college graduates with high hopes for the future but empty bank accounts, Miss Hattie owned a house she had inherited and she rented it as the primary source of her income. My parents lived in that house for approximately a year and a half, leaving it when I was three years old to buy a house three blocks away that would become the Dantzler Street ‘home’ for the Shields family that would eventually grow to six.
Miss Hattie’s house was on Griffin Street - a street that was still unpaved in the early 1940's when we lived there although it had provided the bed foundation for an old streetcar line. The streetcar had run between Moss Point and the Pascagoula beach during the times prior to the depression when the local sawmill and timber industries led the world in exporting yellow pine lumber. No one could have remotely suspected that after more than 60 years later, I would have lived at an address across the street from Hattie’s house for almost a half century. I still do.
But true to the stereotype of the old spinster woman, Hattie’s reputation was that she didn’t like children. Couldn’t abide them. Wouldn’t abide them! But as legend would have it, she made a single exception. Me.
According to my mother (and some of her friends) Hattie actually volunteered to baby sit me once during the time my parents were moving their belongings to the new address on Dantzler Street. I have no idea whether or not I was being difficult (aren’t all three year olds?) but apparently Hattie thought I was and proceeded to admonish or threaten me…depending on whose version of the story you choose to believe. But, as the tale progresses, she turned her back for a brief period and like a flash, I disappeared. Could not be found.
Hattie panicked. What was she going to tell my mother? Why had she agreed to do this anyway? The search party was quickly formed although I suspect that my mother might have considered its ultimate function of the posse to be that of a lynch mob. An hour passed. Almost another hour elapsed before I was found. Safe…sound…and hiding from Miss Hattie. When asked why I had done it, I told them I was afraid of her.
I have no doubt that Hattie never considered for a minute that a three year old would actually be so fearful of her that they would run and hide. And when she realized it, it made a huge impression. Gifts began to come. A solid wood wardrobe closet that was hand-made by her uncle from heart pine cut in the mill a quarter of a mile down the street. A mahogany bed that was used by one of her ancestors (probably Francis B. Daniel who is buried next to Hattie in Griffin Cemetery) to convalesce when he came home wounded from the Civil War. And a steamer trunk that was alleged to have belonged to a ship’s Captain on one of the sailing ships that came up the river to the sawmills empty and sailed back loaded with lumber for the Caribbean. All gifts to Richard from Hattie. My Mother called them peace offerings.
I called them great. They were my prized possessions. I slept in that bed for years and still have it in what I now refer to as a guest bedroom. Still have the wardrobe and trunk as well. But more importantly, I still have the memories of Miss Hattie And they’re all good.
