Biographical Sketch: Huretta J. Davis
My mother, Huretta Davis, was born Huretta Clementine Joines on October 29, 1913, in a large farmhouse with a wraparound porch in the country surrounding Madisonville, Tennessee. As best I can tell, Mom had a very secure early life. The farmhouse belonged to her paternal grandfather who apparently was reasonably well off and who doted on her. She was named for her grandmother Joines, who died before Mom was born. When I once asked how my great grandfather had gotten his money, Mom replied in her best conversation-stopper voice, “Like the Kennedys. Ok?”
The fact that Mom liked to run the show was apparent from at least age 2 when her identical twin sisters were born. Mom’s maternal grandparents died quite young, and my grandmother was raised by her mother’s brother, Tom, and his wife, Harriet. When Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet went to visit the day-old twins, my mother proudly took them into the room, pointed to the twins – both girls -- and said, “This one’s Tommie, and that one’s Harriet.” Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet were delighted, and my grandparents didn’t have the heart to give the twins whatever names they had selected.
Mom fondly recalled her father taking her on horseback through the snow to her one-room school house. She not-so-fondly recalled working on the farm, especially milking cows, which she hated. She and her twin sisters were close, but she complained to the end of her life that “I had to work at home and school both, but the twins got away with everything because they were so cute.” All in all, Mom was the oldest of seven sisters, all of whom are still living, ranging in age from 71 to Mom’s 91, all but one in reasonably good health. Over time, Mom had been the healthiest of them all, and no one expected her to be the first to pass away.
When it was time for Mom to enter high school, her parents moved to within a mile of “center city” Madisonville, which consisted of a courthouse, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, a movie theater, a dime store, a drug store with a soda fountain, a jewelry store, a pool hall, and a handful of other stores. Madisonville was also the home of soon-to-be U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, Adlai Stevenson’s vice-presidential running mate in 1956. Senator Kefauver was 10 years older than Mom, and her admiration of him strengthened her genetic predisposition toward Democratic politics. The Kefauver house was right downtown and fairly large, but not as large as Doc Stickley’s mansion, which was rumored to be haunted.
My grandparents house was set on a slight hill and built to catch the breeze. Mom and her sisters walked to school. She enjoyed school and from early on wanted to become a teacher. She was a cheerleader and a basketball player. My grandmother objected to such unladylike endeavors, but my grandfather overruled her. He taught Mom to drive when she was 14, and he seemed to enjoy and encourage her competence and independence. She warmly recalled going with him to Sunday afternoon baseball games where she learned how the game should be played.
After Mom graduated from Madisonville High School in 1932, she attended Hiwassee College, a 2-year Methodist college in Madisonville. But the Depression was raging, and in 1934, she went to live with an aunt in Chattanooga, where she found a job in the notions department of McClellan’s for something like $10 a week. At lunchtime, she and her girlfriend, Sadie, often went to the Home Plate Restaurant, where she met Charlie Davis, the handsome young waiter fresh from Oakdale, Tennessee (which is even more remote than Madisonville) whom she married in 1936. She was 23, and he was 24. They were married for 58 years, until his death in 1994.
My parents told wonderful stories of their life during the 7 years before I was born. Apparently many were the nights they walked from their downtown studio apartment to Engle Stadium to watch the Chattanooga Lookouts play baseball. My father went to work at Combustion Engineering as a sheet metal worker, then later as a draftsman. He took pride in his work, and on vacations, we often took detours to see smoke stacks or boilers that he had laid out. On their first trip to Boston, he insisted we visit the Saugus Iron Works, an historical bellows or something of the sort. Mom was always quite tolerant of -- though not necessarily invested in -- my father’s puttering around historical sites, even loud clanky ones.
Mom and Dad had only one biological child, but they parented hundreds. A friend of mine or a child or two who needed a place to stay till their parents could pick them up were always at our house. That was a treat for me; I never much liked being an only child. Mom never finished college, but it is probably no accident that this only child of the oldest of seven sisters graduated from about the 26th grade.
Mother was a stay-at-home mom till I was in the 4th grade, when she began teaching the second grade. A college degree wasn’t necessary in the early 1950s in Chattanooga. Once it became necessary, she switched to teaching kindergarten at Red Bank Baptist Church, where she taught for many years. She retired in 1977 at age 64 after she fell while chasing a little boy who was running toward the street. The child was safe, but she broke her left hip and walked with a limp thereafter. My father was 65 at the time, and he was having a dreadful struggle with rheumatoid arthritis, long before decent medicines were on the market. Mom was his primary caretaker through multiple surgeries and thereafter.
Mom came to Maryland in April 2001 to take care of me when I had heart surgery. She stayed on to take care of me because I was having such trouble with rheumatoid arthritis. She was really quite healthy until November 2002, when her health began to go downhill. She was treated by wonderful doctors and nurses who tried virtually everything they could to help her. But it was not to be. She passed away at home on Wednesday, December 22, at about 8:15 p.m., surrounded by friends and family. About her passing, she would probably say two things: “You wont go until your time,” and “It’s all a part of life.” She most certainly could also say, in the words of Paul to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”
