Remembering Aunt Rosey Scurlock
Aunt Rosey was born into the old-fashioned Carr world in 1885, when wagons still had more right-of-way than automobiles, water had to be drawn from wells, and family history was written in little books and remembered in fragments.
Stern and to the point, Rosey was a woman from whom no one seems to have coaxed a long account of herself. What remains of her life had to be pieced together from other people’s keeping, mostly from cousins and nieces who stayed up too late (on many a night) trying to make sense of it all.
Rosey Exile Carr Scurlock was the oldest surviving child of James Austin Carr and Almeda Elizabeth Ewing Carr, which means Rosey had dibs on the front seat in the old Carr family story. In a letter written to Rosey’s daughter Nellie Hefner, Nellie’s cousin Altha Benoit explained the whole cousinly puzzle with bullet-proof logic: “Since your mother & my mother are sisters,” she wrote, “their ancestors would be the same.” She cited her source: “a little book that our grandma Carr wrote a lot of things in.” The book was useful, though far from complete. As Altha put it, “Grandma wasn’t big on names of towns & countys,” but “with the dates someone can piece it all together.”
For years after Almeda died (16 April 1902), the family continued to write in her little book. On Christmas Day, 1907, her daughter, Rosey wrote: “Mrs. Rosey Exil Skirlock – Born September 27, 1885.”
On July 28, 1902, Rosey and Claud William Scurlock got hitched in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Claud and Rosey became the outnumbered parents of eight children, six of whom lived to adulthood. Their early household made its way through Oklahoma and Arkansas, carrying with it the work, losses, and stubborn endurance of the old ways.
It had long been known that Rosey never remarried after Claud’s death in 1932. But in the mid-2000s, Rosey’s story wandered off the family path and into the county records. When those records became available online, they spilled the truth, spoiling a perfectly settled family fact. On September 29, 1933, in Alma, Arkansas, Rosey Exile Scurlock married Harvey Elephalet Rowe. The marriage added another branch to the family tree, and, as family trees sometimes do, this one would soon reach across the fence and twist itself into a knot.
That knot would tighten a little further down the road. But first came the road west, and Rosey already had one foot on the far side of it. Oklahoma had gone dry, work had grown scarce, and Arizona’s irrigated fields were beckoning families across the state line. Rosey wrote to her brother John Carr and his wife, Nancy, to say that she and her family had found work in the cotton fields.
Rosey provided John and Nancy with directions to the farm labor camp, together with an Aunt-Rosey-style no-nonsense warning: the family should wash and boil their cotton sacks before reaching the Arizona state line, or the sacks would travel no farther than the inspection station. In 1938, the pink bollworm was also being beckoned across state lines, apparently sometimes hitching a ride in well-used cotton sacks. Needless to say, a cotton sack is no trivial commodity for cotton pickers, and boiling them was the surest way to prevent confiscation by a well-meaning inspector.
For John and Nancy, the road to Arizona was long, dry, and loaded from running boards to roof with seven people, mattresses, and everything the family hadn’t left behind. Little Nadine, their youngest daughter at the time, watched the passing freight trains and boxcars as the family motored down Route 66 in their 1920s Buick. “Mama, there’s people living in those boxcars!” Nadine exclaimed. “I wish I had a nice boxcar like that to live in,” Nancy answered.
A nice boxcar.
When they reached Buckeye and found the farm labor camp, Rosey was there, sleeves rolled up, with enough hard-earned know-how to help the next wagonload of Carrs find its way in. Within days, Nancy and John’s family moved into a tent. Not as big as a boxcar, but at least it stayed put.
And at the Buckeye camp, still more Carrs were added to the story. When the time came for Nancy to deliver twins in 1939, Rosey stepped in. According to Viola, the elder of the twins, “Despite Aunt Rosey’s years of midwife expertise, the delivery was not going well. She sent Elmer, Mama’s second born, running miles to the nearest town to find a doctor, a luxury absent with Mama’s other eight deliveries. Before Elmer returned with the doctor, identical twin girls had made their appearance.”
For most of the twins’ childhood, Rosey was always just down the road. In adulthood, Violet, the younger of the twins, remembered her this way: “Aunt Rosey Scurlock, my father’s older sister, lived in Merced, about 20 miles north of Chowchilla.” That was close enough for visits, close enough for cousins, close enough for children to sit still while adults talked, and close enough for the details of Aunt Rosey’s house to lodge forever in memory.
The star of the house, at least to the children, was not paper dolls, a piano, or a Radio Flyer wagon. It was water. In Violet’s words, “A gleaming red water pump attached to the counter over the kitchen sink brought water from Aunt Rosey’s private well.”
There it was, bold as a rooster and twice as interesting. A red pump perched on the side of the kitchen sink. A bucket of water nearby, waiting for its sacred duty. To the twins, this was a world of mystery—the prime-it-first and pump-till-it-gushes world, where water had to be urged up with effort, patience, and a little leftover water from the last time it was used.
“One twin poured water into the pump while the other pumped the handle furiously,” Violet wrote. Her words painted a picture of two little girls working hard at a mystery adults clearly already understood. Pump, pour, wait. Pump harder. Listen. Hope. Then, at last, clear water rushing into the sink like a small miracle.
Aunt Rosey knew the law of the pump, and she expected others to know it too: “Remember to leave a little water in the bucket for the next prime.” That rule left its mark on Carr family wisdom: leave something for next time; don’t use up the thing that makes the next thing possible. A house, like a family, runs better when somebody remembers to leave a little water in the bucket.
Rosey’s house was plain, practical, and kept in its own old ways. Violet wrote, “In all those visits to Aunt Rosey’s, we never ate there.” The water was clean, drawn from Rosey’s private well, and the children were allowed to drink it. But Nancy had her doubts about the food and dishes at Aunt Rosey’s, and she took no chances. Violet remembered that her mother drank from her cupped hands rather than from a glass. “We never asked why she didn’t drink from a glass,” Violet wrote. “We knew it must have been the same reason we didn’t eat there.” Children did not need the reason named aloud. The grownups had reasons, and the children had eyes. Aunt Rosey’s snuff tin and her spittoon were not hard to miss.
Violet, unable to look away from such a spectacle, remembered the ritual with precision. Aunt Rosey took snuff from a small round tin. “With her other hand, she pulled the side of her bottom lip out into a V shape and dropped the snuff into it.” Then came the apron, the waiting, the pucker, the aim. Rosey “puckered and spit far across the room into a spittoon.” Later, when age dimmed her sight, “she kept a small spit can near her chair.”
Rosey’s son Will lived with her. Violet remembered that Will smoked a pipe, spoke little, and often retreated to his room behind a curtain that served as a door. He made silence into furniture, and he sat in it comfortably.
In her later years, Viola said, “Rosey went nowhere; she stayed home, and Will stayed with her.” Rosey, in Viola’s words, “depended on him for everything.” Will “moved in with his mother to take care of her and paid for everything for the rest of her life.”
Viola recalled hearing that Will had once been engaged, but his mother did not approve of the woman and talked him out of marrying her. But Mary, the eldest Carr sister, tugged the story sideways: “Will did marry.” And he did not wander far from the family thicket. On January 2, 1936, he married Vinie Rowe, daughter of Harvey Elephalet Rowe, the man Rosey had married after Claud’s death.
For a brief season, the curtain over Will’s doorway seemed to draw back, making room for a wife, a baby, and a life of his own. On January 7, 1938, Will and Vinie had a daughter, Alice. Nine days later, Vinie died in Corcoran, California, at only nineteen. On August 11 of that same year, little Alice was gone too.
Rosey’s family knew sorrow. Their son, Homer Ewing Scurlock, was born in 1903 and died in 1913; little Della May Scurlock died in Arkansas in 1929 at only three years old. In 1938, grief came twice more, first with young Vinie, and then with baby Alice. Long before the death of her son Jesse Newton “Newt” Scurlock brought the family to a military funeral in Merced, sorrow had already found Rosey more than once: one boy, two little girls, and the kind of loss no mother or grandmother should have to hold once, much less again and again.
Rosey comes most clearly into view at Newt’s funeral. Newt had survived World War II, only to die in an automobile accident in Arizona. At his military funeral in Merced, he lay in uniform, gloved and formal, presented to the family with the solemn dignity the Army knew how to give.
According to Violet, Rosey did not accept it. “It’s not my boy,” she said, over and over. His face looked wrong to her. His coloring was too dark. His white gloves concealed the proof she needed most. Newt had a hand she knew, a hand marked by the absence of a finger — and no ceremony, no uniform, no funeral director’s assurance could replace what his mother knew.
She would not believe it was Newt until she could observe that un-gloved hand. So, the glove was removed. Rosey touched him, and only then did she accept the terrible truth.
After that came the military honors: the rifles, the salute, the bugle, the folded flag. The ceremony ended, but Rosey was not finished being his mother. Violet explained it with heartbreaking plainness: “Her son was dead. She wanted to be certain he would be buried in the place his family chose for him.” That was Aunt Rosey. She wanted certainty. It was as if eternity itself needed a proper address for Newt, and Rosey aimed to provide it.
Whatever Rosey believed about heaven, she believed in seeing things through on earth. Viola also remembered Aunt Rosey outside the religious expectations of the family. “Aunt Rosey Scurlock was not religious,” she said. If Rosey practiced devotion, it seems to have been in the household, in the children, in the burial place chosen for a son, and in the need to know the truth with her own eyes.
Hers was not lace-curtain auntliness. No, Aunt Rosey belonged to the world of wells, aprons, spittoons, and sons in overalls. Like the red pump over the sink, she stood at the center of her household. She had her own way, and everyone knew which questions to pump and which to leave alone.
For Violet, the memory of Aunt Rosey’s house always returned to the pump. “I was always glad to go home and turn on the water faucet in our kitchen to watch the water flow absent of snuff and priming.” And yet, Aunt Rosey’s house had mystery and intrigue: a silent son, guarded conversations, a red pump that made drinking water into a chore, and an aunt who reminded everyone to leave a little behind for the next person. And, so they did.