Mrs. Johnnie Henderson’s place on Walker Street offers summer sanctuary

Frome East Texas Journal, July 2008

By Hudson Old, Journal Publisher

Pittsburg, Texas – Mrs. Johnnie Henderson’s skipping the “empty nest” phase of family life. A daughter lives next door and there’s a son with a big garden at the end of the family plot on Walker Street. An assortment of nieces, nephews and neighborhood friends all call her “Granny.” They’ve worn a summer trail between the swing set by the flower garden in the shade of a century-old red oak at the side of her yard and the swimming pool in the daughter’s front yard next door.

Blind since birth, her daughter Evelyn has never left her.

“My husband had passed and after my heart attack we moved in from the country,” Mrs. Henderson said.

Running water was a plus for a woman who raised 13 children drawing water from a well. In those days, the family would have been gearing up about now for their annual cotton-picking pilgrimage to the black lands.

“The man would come in a truck,” she said. “We’d ride on back half the day out to Nevada, north of Caddo Mills. After they got the gins good enough to separate the bowl from the cotton I could pick a thousand pounds a day.”

Evenings, she mended the long cotton sacks they dragged down dusty rows, all working together until the harvest was done in the waning days of summer. It usually meant their children missed the first few weeks of school but the $500 to $600 they earned in those weeks was the biggest payday of the year.

In the earlier part of the summer she worked alongside her husband in his truck patch.

“We raised cucumbers, peas and squash,” she said.

He died too young in 1970. She stayed on the farm another five years before her heart attack made coming to town make sense.

She settled here, across the tracks and past the feed mill. When Pittsburg went wet, a package store went up on the corner where she turns coming home from town.

Five of her 13 children are now gone.

Early each morning Mrs. Henderson tends her yard. She hoes her flowers and sweeps with a yard broom.

When fall comes and the leaves of the oak shading the swing set begin withering, when the leaves begin falling she’ll often sweep the lawn again in the late afternoon.

The house sits close to the street. From the front porch she can visit with friends who stop in the shade that covers the road.

There’s just enough room between the chairs lining every edge of the porch to move about and it’s a good place to sit in the cool of each evening, watching it melt into another summer’s night.