Lillian was my great-grandmother on my mother’s side. She moved from Haywood county in the last years of the 19th century and came to live in the mill village where I now live. She and her husband (but mostly she) ran a little grocery store.
As I rewrite “1916”–my play about the French Broad flood–I am thinking of her rather a lot. I wrote the play because my grandmother’s memories of the event were so vivid. She was almost 12 years old when the old river flooded the old community.
One of the characters in the play is named Lillian, in fact, to honor her.
For several years now, I’ve been sketching her from an old photo. In the picture, she is sitting on the back steps of the store/house and she looks exhausted. Her face is deeply shadowed, her still-dark hair pulled back, but her dress is bathed in sunlight, as are her hands and forearms.
As I peer at the picture, I can almost see her eyes behind her round specs, eyes like my grandmother’s (her daughter). Her mouth is a straight line, turned down at the ends and her eyes are squinting into the light.
I don’t know who took the picture–it was in with other family photos.
Her forearms are strong-looking, as though they had done a lifetime of child-lifting, hoeing, hand-wrung laundry. And her hands seem large and capable, the same hands I remember on my grandmother, her daughter.
I penciled in the shadows tonight, working from a triangle at the side of her mouth, then circling the deep shadows at her neck. And then there is that dress–bright whiteness against the bone-aching solid heft of her.
What must she have thought that day, when the water rose and rose, spreading over the railroad tracks and lapping towards the wooden store over which they lived? She was younger than in this picture, a little younger. Was there a moment when she thought she must gather everyone up and escape? Or did she wait, with the children, on the upper floor, watching and waiting, motionless, powerless?