This is My Life and I'm Still Here by the Grace of God

By Shirlene Everett

Shirlene.

She was born in a small town called Bonham, Texas, in 1945. Her mother, Ivory Teresa, married Corinthian Doss. They had five children with one on the way. She named her Shirlene. Their father was working at a service station, not making enough money to support his family. He discussed with her about going out to west Texas to look for a better job, and she agreed, not knowing that would be the last time she would see him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662428593

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This is My Life and I'm Still Here by the Grace of God

Shirlene Everett

Copyright © 2021 Shirlene Everett

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-3608-6 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-2859-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 1

My mother, Ivory Teresa Johnson, was born in North Texas in a small town called Bonham. This is where it all began. My mother met and married my father, Corinthian Doss. They had five children, all girls, and were four months pregnant with me when he told my mother that he was going to West Texas to find a better job. Leaving her and the kids behind, that was the last time she saw him. He never came back.

My mother was a Christian woman. Because she was a faithful church member, the church helped her with the kids. My mother had a brother named Henry Johnson. He was married to a woman named Mosella. Aunt Mosella told my mother that she knew a nice man that was about twenty-five years older than she was. His name was Howard Hughes. She said that he was a good Christian man. Later, my mother met him, and they started dating. At this time, my mother had six girls with me as the youngest. I was only eight months old. Her children’s names are LaDon, Billie Fae, Lelia Mae, Cecilia Ann, Electra, and me. My mother named me Shirlene.

My mother’s father lived in a small town in California called Fresno. He would send my mother eighty dollars a month to take care of us. My mother told us children later that we never went hungry because of the money that he would send to us. Not long after my mother and Howard began dating, they were married. My mother told us that when we would see him coming down the street, we would all run to meet him.

Howard was a crippled man with one leg shorter than the other. Because of that, he walked cross-legged and moved a bit slower than other men. My mother told us that we really loved him. She said that he would bring us a hamburger, a whole one for each of us. We started calling him Daddy, but he didn’t like that. He preferred that we call him Brother Hughes. So that is what we called him. Brother Hughes had a sister named Martha. Aunt Martha lived on a huge farm in a town called Sherman. Brother Hughes told my mother that the farm was his and that we were moving there. My mother said that she was so excited to move there. It was about thirty miles from where we were living. Mama told us that on the farm was every kind of farm animal that you can name. According to my mother, the farm was beautiful. She told us that when she walked into the house, there were a lot of people living there. After having lived there for a while, my mother began to wonder when the other people were moving out. So she asked my Aunt Martha when they were planning on moving out. Honey, this is our farm, Aunt Martha said. Aunt Martha and her husband, George, had five teenage children, and it was their family farm. My mother was shocked and didn’t know what to say.

My mother soon found out that she was pregnant again. So we moved to a house about five miles away from the farm. It was a small three-room house, and we were really poor. Because Brother Hughes was crippled, there was a limit to what he could do, but he did work. Every chance that she had, my mother would also work. She cooked for white people. We didn’t have a car, so she would walk six miles to work and six miles back.

Brother Hughes had a brother named Orange. Brother Orange was also crippled with the same condition as Brother Hughes. But Brother Orange had a car and would pick Brother Hughes up for work. By the time I was six years old, my mother had four more children, two boys and two girls. Their names were Larry, Teresa, Cecil, and Thelma. Things were really hard at this time. My mother and stepfather decided that since cotton season was in, we would all go to pick cotton. There was a white man that needed a family to come to his farm and help pick cotton. His house was in a town in East Texas called Honey Grove. He had a small house that he let us live in. There was no electricity or gas, and we had to get water from a well. My mother had us dismissed from school until cotton season was over. We didn’t take everything that we had because we were going back when cotton season was over. Honey Grove is seventy miles from Sherman.

The white people that we worked for lived in a large white house up the road from where we were to live. They were nice people. They made sure that we had everything that we needed. They grew potatoes and would give us some. We would keep them in the nearby barn.

At this time, I was seven years old, and my older sister, Electra, was eighteen months older than me. We would take turns looking after the younger children while everyone else went to work. Because we were so young, we couldn’t pick as much cotton and make as much money as the older children. I remember washing clothes and hanging them over the fence to dry. I enjoyed doing that and didn’t think anything about it. It was, however, hard for me to get water from the well, but I did it. I would also cook for the younger kids on a wood stove that my stepfather had built himself outside the house. It was made out of a washtub with a hole cut in it and a pipe placed in the hole. Me and the younger kids would find firewood to put under the tub. I learned how to do it by watching my stepfather do it. By the time they would come home, I had washed and cooked enough food for them as well. I would cook the potatoes that the white people had given us. I would feel good when they would come home and see what I had done.

I was, however, glad when it was my turn to go pick cotton. My stepfather had fashioned a croaker sack with a man’s tie for my sister Electra and me to carry our cotton in. It worked for us because we couldn’t carry as much and make as much money as the others.

We were a happy family. At night, we would sit on the porch, and Mama would tell us stories about God. She always did that. Sometimes she would tell us ghost stories. They were so scary that we would be scared to go to bed at night. The only light we had was moonlight from outside. We had one kerosene lamp and an oil stove inside (that we never used because my stepfather was afraid it could set the house on fire). We did well with what we had.

One day, it was my turn to stay home and take care of the other kids. Behind the house was a very thick-wooded area. I walked behind the house and just looked at it as I had never seen anything like it before. I remember feeling really scared and thinking that something, or someone was out there in the woods and coming to get us. I didn’t let the younger kids know how scared I was because I didn’t want them to be scared too. I told them that we were going to find the field that Mama and the others were working in. I gathered them all up and began walking down the road to find Mama. I don’t remember getting tired, nor the other kids complaining about the long walk. I was just determined to find Mama. When we finally found Mama, we ran to her, and she ran to us. She was wondering what happened, and when I told her, she told us to go sit under a wagon, out of the sun, and in the shade. It was really hot that day. We stayed under the cotton wagon until it was time for everyone to quit working for the day. We lived there on that farm until the cotton season was over.

So now we were back in Sherman. We didn’t have much food, so my mother began working again cooking for white people. From the house that we lived in, we could see Mama coming from a long way off. We were always really happy to see her as we knew that she would always have food for us to eat. She knew that we hadn’t eaten all day. Sometimes, she would work late but would wake us up when she got home to make sure that we eat. We didn’t think anything about the way that we lived. We just knew that our mother loved us, and we loved her. We were happy children. I remember that I used to go to school without shoes, or underwear. Because of that, I couldn’t play with the other kids during recess. I used to love to jump rope, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have underwear. I couldn’t play in the grass because there were stickers, and I didn’t have shoes. I had a teacher named Ms. A. V. I remember that she really liked me. She knew that I didn’t have shoes but not that I didn’t have underwear. One day when school let out, she took me by the hand and walked me home. As we were walking to my house, she told me that she wanted to adopt me. When we got to my house, she wanted to talk to my mother to ask her.

Oh no! my mother said. You can’t have Shirlene. That was the end of that but not the end of Ms. A. V. She would later buy shoes and underwear for me and bring them to my house.

As time went on, my mother would cook whatever she could to feed us. We also raised rabbits to eat. Sometimes, the people that my mother would work for would clean their freezer out and allow Mama to bring home some of the food that they had. Sometimes it was a lot of food. When this happened, my mother would cook enough food to feed the other kids in my neighborhood as well. All the kids in my neighborhood loved my mama. She would also talk to the other kids, and anyone else that would come by about God. We were a happy family and, as far as we knew, lived a normal life. We didn’t think of ourselves as poor. All that mattered to us was that Mama loved us and that was all that we needed. Mama would always take us to church making sure that we knew about Jesus. I look back on my childhood, and I realize that God was always with us, making sure that had exactly what we needed. Mama prayed a lot, and I used to wonder what she would talk to God about.

As time went on, we were blessed to be able to move to a larger house on the south side of Sherman. The new school that we were going to went from first grade to the sixth grade. Only two of my sisters, Cecelia and Electra, would be going to this school with me. We all liked our new school, and I had a really sweet teacher named Miss Maxey. She was a heavyset woman, and only she and another teacher taught at this school. The other teacher’s name was Ms. Ausba, and she taught first, second, and third grade. My teacher Miss Maxey taught third grade through sixth grade. My other sisters still had to go to school in north Sherman and had to walk two miles to school. My school was only a block away from our new house. My teacher knew that we were a poor family and would sometimes take us home to clean her house for money. I was about ten years old at this time. I was always glad to go to Miss Maxey’s house because I could use the money that she paid me to buy myself something pretty.

I remember that there was an old man that lived in the north part of Sherman named Mr. Hawkins. He had a wagon and that was pulled by two mules. Every day, my sister Electra and I would watch him riding down the road toward South Sherman. One day, we asked him where he was going. He told us that he was going to the dumping ground. We had heard about the dumping ground and knew we could find some neat stuff there. So we asked if we could go with him. When we got there, we found all kinds of good stuff like clothes and shoes. After that, we would look forward to riding with him every chance we got.

Chapter 2

Iwas nine years old, and by this time, my oldest sister, LaDon, had gotten married at a young age and now had three children of her own. Her husband’s name was Richard. After having been married a short time, Richard told LaDon that he was going to visit his parents in Virginia. My mother was at work when she told us kids that she was going to go with him. She packed some of her things and jumped in the car with him leaving her children behind. I think that she left with him like that because she wasn’t sure if he was planning on coming back. All we knew was that she had left her children behind with me and her other siblings to look after them. Her youngest child was only a month old. Later on that night, I went to check on the baby because I hadn’t heard her cry in a while. I looked at her, and she didn’t look too good. I told Electra to look at the baby because I thought something was wrong with her and that she looked sick. I told her that we needed to take the baby to the hospital. The hospital was three miles away, and it was really dark outside. We knew we had to go, so we told the other kids where we were going. We wrapped the baby up and left walking into the night. It took us a while, but we made it. We walked into the hospital, and the nurses were just standing around. They finally noticed us and asked what they could do for us. We told them that we had brought the baby to the hospital because we thought that she was going to die. They looked at us like we were crazy and asked who the baby’s mother was. We told