The hundreds of hours I spent sitting with my maternal grandmother listening to her stories left me with an indelible memory of her memories.
Nana—May Penland Ray—was born in 1889 in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the youngest of four surviving children.
Her mother, Harriet Roxanna Jones Penland, died giving birth when Nana (pronounced Nanny) was young, so they were raised by their father, William Nelson Penland, whose father had died of illness in a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. Now, William wasn’t the only one who raised Nana and her siblings—it was a family affair, but I cannot recall the many names of those who helped out. That’s the thing about hearing stories when you are a child; some stick with you like tales from your own life, but details can fade as the years pass.
Of all the stories I recall—of floods, farming, riding the wagon to downtown Asheville, or raising four children of her own—some of the most vivid are Nana’s recollections of her life while attending college at the Asheville Normal and Collegiate Institute, which was located atop the hill where Mission Hospital now sits.
The young women attending school at the Normal were being trained to be teachers, missionaries or nurses. Nana’s sister Della went on to be a missionary in the Caribbean and married a Canadian engineer she met there.
Nana wanted to train as a nurse to follow Della to the islands but wasn’t allowed to for some unknown reason. However, she did go on to be the neighbor sent for when women in the Riceville community of East Buncombe were in labor. For want of a better word, Nana was the midwife. When the doctor couldn’t arrive Nana was the one in charge.
But back in the days at the Normal, she was a rambunctious and risk-taking teenager.
She told me about how she and her friends would sneak out on Saturday to go get onion sandwiches—yes, onion sandwiches—from a business on Biltmore Avenue. The girls would keep an eye out for professors, for they weren’t supposed to be off campus. If they spotted a teacher coming near the shopkeeper allowed the girls to hide behind the counter, crouched down out of sight until the coast was clear.
With a big smile and a chuckle, Nana told me about how she and the girls would ride the streetcars in Asheville. They had figured out that the electricity powering the car wasn’t fatal—how they determined this I don’t know; a professor probably mentioned it at one time—so the group would stand and form a line as the car barreled down the street. Holding hands, they’d form a single-file daisy chain stretched down the center aisle. Then the girl at the front of the line would reach up to grasp the electrical power cord, sending the electricity through the line of young women. Nana said all of them had long hair, which would stand out from their heads as the electricity coursed through them. They were frozen in place by the surge.
One girl was always tasked with standing aside free of the charge so she could slap the first girl’s hand away from the electrical connection, breaking the link and allowing all of them to collapse in a pile, laughing and busily trying to straighten their normally restrained hairdos.
Somewhere at my sister’s house in Nana’s book of sewing samples, a book required as part of their college education that was filled with samples of stitches, pleats, gussets and other needle-and-thread techniques. The book was turned in to a teacher to prove that each student had mastered the skills required for sewing clothes.
Nana and farm girls like her knew how to sew and cook, but some of the students only learned there at the Normal.
My sister says Nana told her how the cook running the kitchen at the Normal frequently tasked Nana and other farm girls with cooking skills to help out “because they knew what they were doing.”
Apparently other students had never learned how to boil water.
I guess some things never change.
—Jonathan Austin