Mike Kilgore remembers his grandmother, Sara Louisa Matilda Elizabeth Nowles, who played a large role in his upbringing and helped him stay out of trouble while teaching him about life.
Originally aired November 21, 2008, on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Transcript
Mike Kilgore (MK)
MK: Her full name was Sara Louisa Matilda Elizabeth Nowles. I think she was named after all her grandmothers and probably some other people. She was small woman, had long hair, and ah, she was very protective of me. I remember one night I went to my grandmother’s and cousin Jimmy was staying with me and uh, we were doing the things that boys would do and we decided that we were going to smoke rabbit tobacco. And we rolled it up in newspaper and we sat right there and we not inhaling it but you know we thought we were big shots. But anyway, I saw the pickup lights coming up the hill and I knew it was daddy coming to check on us. And my granny, she had an old pot-belly peter and we grabbed up that big-ole-pile of rabbit tobacco and instead of shoving it under the bed, we put it in that old potbelly stove, and of course, smoke just went everywhere. We opened it up and one of use was trying to get all the smoke out, daddy started beating on the door, wanting to make sure everybody was alright. Daddy came in and he smelled it and said, ”you boys y’all been smoking”, and he pulled off his belt, he could pull it out in one flash like that, and she said, ”Cecil Kilgore, you are not going to lay a hand on those boys! This is my house, and as long as you’re here you’re not going to lay a hand on them.” And she was his mother, and he respected his mother and he left. From that night on, off and on basically I would spend the night with her, and we would talk, you know bad things would happen in school, little things would happen, I remember she’d say, ”Mikey, if you look at the bad, the good is gonna always pass you by…” and, ”the birds always sing after the storm”. She’d just say things like that all the time. And when I was 15 years of age, my aunt called my daddy up and said, ”Cecil, we need to take mama to the hospital to the doctor, she’s having trouble breathing”. I heard the call, the phone was on the wall in the hallway where my bedroom door was at. And so I said, ”well let me go in”, so I was with her when she passed away, and she had a smile on her face. And uh, she said, ”I wish you could hear the angels…”, she said she could hear them singing, and I never will forget that.