Aunt Florida by Ernie Jackson

Aunt Florida was my mother’s second oldest sister. Aunt Florida and her second husband Joshua Williams was an interesting couple. They lived in a quaint little cottage with a decorative fieldstone front. As often as grandmother would allow, we would spend a night with Aunt Florida and Uncle Josh. Aunt Florida raised turkeys, chickens, guineas, hogs and cows. (The stone front of the house still stands even though it has not been occupied for thirty years. The water from the well was always cool and satisfying as was most of the well in Menifee.

On one of our stay over nights, we discovered that Uncle Josh could crack hickory nuts with his teeth. We (my siblings and I) would find hickory nuts on the ground and line up for Uncle Josh to place the seam of the hickory nut on his molars and crack down on it breaking in into smaller pieces so we could pick out the nut meats and eat them. There were any old wild plum thickets. We would pick plums to eat, can or make preserves, or Aunt Florida would make one of Uncle Josh’s favorite desserts, a “trashy” fruit cobbler. The trash in the cobbler would be pieces of cinnamon bark, coarsely grated nutmeg, whole cloves, with plenty of flaky pastry, sugar and butter. The trashy fruit cobblers were not limited to any particular fruit. Apples, Apricots, blackberries, dewberries, peaches and pears would be used individually or in a mixture. Aunt Florida was known for her tomato pies. She always wanted a little something sweet after dinner.

To keep us entertained she and Uncle Josh would take us fishing. They make fishing poles so each of us would have a pole with which to fish with. Preparation for the fishing trip always included digging for bait, earthworms or sometimes grub worms. Our reactions to the worms provoked lots of laughter from Aunt Florida and Uncle Josh. My mother’s children were the only grandchildren in the family for quite a few years. This gave us unique status in the Hines family.


Dinner preparation usually started in the garden. One of her favorite meals in season was new potatoes and English peas in cream sauce with cornbread or biscuits and always milk, cool and sweet or buttermilk, sweet milk that had soured and been churned. Aunt Florida had been to “normal” training school for two years and usually taught during the school season. She never missed a chance to be sure we understood the inner workings of “things” and that verb subject agreement was incorporated in our speech. Good times with Aunt Florida and Uncle Josh ended in 1937. We moved to our farm in 1938.

Aunt Florida was a woman who wanted to be financially able to provide things she considered to be necessities such as a car, a farm, and a few new things to water. To that end shoe would do whatever days work she could find such as chopping or picking cotton, picking strawberries or doing a days work in the home of people who could afford it. Uncle Josh died sometime in the forties while I was away in College. There is a saying in the family that Aunt Florida divorced the odd husbands and buried the even ones. A few months after Josh’s burial Aunt Florida went to Kansas City, Kansas to live with Aunt Margie, the third daughter born in the Hines family, to seek work. While there she met a “gentlemen” known to his peers as Crook Jackson. She accumulated a few dollars and returned to Menifee with Crook, her third husband. Crook hadn’t found any work and wasn’t doing what he could to help raise food. Verbally, shoe gave him a brow-beating. His anger spilled over and he resorted to violence. She came to tell the Hines clan and the search was on. Aunt Margie and Uncle Cliff went to Aunt Florida’s looking for Crook but he was gone.

Somehow, Crook knew he shouldn’t be there when she got back. He told the neighbors he was going to Morrilton, Arkansas to catch a bus to Kansas City. They drove to Morrilton to confront him but he wasn’t there. He had gone to Conway, Arkansas south to Menifee to catch the bus. They were foxed. Husband number three was divorced.

Aunt Florida then moved to North Little Rock, Arkansas. She was able to find a house she could rent. She found work. She was frugal. She saved her money and bought a lot. She bought a second hand truck and with it she would scout the area looking for good lumber in old houses being torn down and any bathroom fixtures that could be salvaged. During these searches she met her fourth husband to be, Robert Floyd, a carpenter. She hired him to be a carpenter. They began to build a house on the lot she bought. By the time the house was nearly finished they got married and moved into the house.

Aunt Florida returned to College to finish her college degree on a part-time basis. It took her quite a few years to finish going part-time. Meanwhile, she would buy additional lots and both of them would scout for good old lumber and bathroom and kitchen fixtures. This process continued until they had built four houses including one they lived in. By this time grandmother had her first stroke but rallied rather quickly. Aunt Florida was the only free aunt who could actually go to the home and be there to take care of grandmother. Mama always told Papa she could not leave those boys and her husband. After more strokes and more years of interference with her time, Aunt Florida let it be known that she thought it was unfair for her to be the only child spending time taking care of grandmother. Aunt Margie agreed and came down to spend weeks being nurse maid. Aunt Val could only come in the summertime so she sent them (the grandparents) forty dollars a month.

By now she and Robert had moved into an acquired home that needed a great deal of hard work even though Robert wasn’t feeling too good most of the time. The home was supposed to represent suburbia in a way that gave Aunt Florida time to return to her roots. She raised chickens and guineas and kept a couple of goats to mow the lawn. She had a huge St. Bernard dog named Bobo. Grandmother died in September of 1957 after 57 years of marriage. Aunt Florida was now free to take care of Uncle Robert.

Even though Aunt Florida was busy taking care of her husband, she continued to look out for real estate bargains. They bought one more house before Uncle Robert died. By now Aunt Florida was dubbed by her siblings the “real estate tycoon”, she enjoyed the title. Her dress style and other personal facts would never suggest to anyone that she was any kind of tycoon. She was one out of five that Papa had learned he would not be able to turn into a lady.

In 1938 I purchased the little stone faced cottage from Aunt Florida that gave me so many pleasant childhood memories. As she aged and had accidents, (driving with advanced arthritis) she began to sell off the properties one by one and invest the money. She sold the suburban property and moved back to Little Rock when the neighbors demonstrated to her that they would collect her eggs, catch her chickens and enter her home for whatever they could find during her absence. She loved Amanda’s children and remembered all of them in her will. She had her favorites. All nieces and nephews were included and a favorite first cousin. She is still fondly remembered by us all.