A major turning point in my life began during the typhoid epidemic in 1908 in the Oklahoma Land Rush before statehood.
My mother was a perpetual story teller! As sad as her stories were I am glad I listened because I learned so much.
My mother, Marcella May Morris-Hudson, would be 119 years old today if she were alive.
I cherish her story, as sad as it was for so many.
Even though I always sensed that there was something wrong with my mother, I didn’t fully understand her story until the summer of 1989, when I spoke to Clara Knox by phone. She was then about ninety-five, and her mind was as clear as a bell. I always knew that Clara and her husband had served as my mother’s foster parents for about six years after my grand mother, Myrtle Mae Maples-Morris died, of typhoid fever, at the age of twenty-five, in 1908, while living in that underground sod Indian dwelling where my mom was born two years earlier because her parents had been in the Land Rush in Oklahoma before Statehood. It was so sad to hear mom speak of losing her mother so young along with her six year old brother, Jerry. The sadness of losing her mother cast a spell on my childlike mother. She went to her grave grieving for a mother she never knew and she always wore a tiny gold locket with her mother’s picture inside. My mother couldn’t articulate what happened to her to leave her unable to function as an adult but I soon realized something was wrong with her.It took talking to Clara to comprehend my mother’s injury. She told me in graphic detail how she was watching my mother play on top of that sod roof unaware of the soft spot where Mother fell into the one room dwelling below. She landed on the hard floor, probably not far from my grandmother’s sickbed. The fall caused her to lapse into a coma where she would remain for sometime.
Clara said they didn’t expect her to live.
In the meantime my grandmother died leaving two orphaned girls, along with my grandfather, James Oliver Morris, who was also critically ill with typhoid fever, then known as “the germ in the water.”
Being the caregivers that Clara and Ben were they took in my mom and Aunt Gladys and served as their parents until my grandfather regained his health, remarried and reclaimed his children six years later.
In the meantime my mom bonded to Clara and I sensed that it grieved her to lose another mother figure in her young life.
I believe God prompted me to call Clara in September, 1989, and to hear first hand what happened to Mother. I located other relatives who confirmed her story.
I was stunned to learn that Clara Eden Knox passed away in October of 1989 just weeks after she spoke so lucidly of this traumatic experience, that Mother suffered so many years before!
Making this connection was one more time that God stepped out of the wood work making His presence known in my life! This has been one of many “God Wink” moments that I delight in sharing.
My mother didn’t marry until the age of thirty-nine due to a prearranged courtship by her neighbors to my father, Roy Earnest Hudson, a confirmed bachelor, after my grandfather died. And to this union our parents brought into this world my sister Alice Hudson-Roberts, a well known artist, and myself.
Even though the way was difficult and we eventually ended iup n an orphanage after our father’s death when I was ten, I am so grateful for all that I possess because I’ve been so blest!
It’s not what happens to us but how we are able to work it into the tapestry of our lives!
Had it not been for going into the orphanage, as abusive as it was, I am not sure I would be here today. God has always been so good to me, stepping out of the woodwork just when I needed it the most
Contact Sarah at [email protected]