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22. Betty Hamilton Branham
- The University of Alabama Press
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22 Betty Hamilton Branham I am Betty H. Branham. My maternal grandparents were Rob and Rose Johns. My paternal grandparents were Reece and Alice Hamilton. My parents were Dudley Hamilton and Rose Johns Hamilton. I’m married to Colonel Branham.Colonel is not really a colonel in the armed forces. He doesn’t know why his parents so named him. I’m fifty-seven years old this year of 1997 and Colonel and I have six grown children. My daddy said the St. Pauls Mission School was too many miles from us and we were too young to walk that far to school.What little I learned, I taught myself . I’m thankful I can read well enough to read the letters my children write to me since they’ve moved away to other states. I so wish I could read well enough to read books and newspapers. My dad rented land upon which he grew crops of corn and tobacco.We children worked in the fields. As children, we didn’t know much about the grown-up world. It was as though children and adults lived in two separate worlds. Our parents believed children’s minds must never be burdened with adult concerns, needs, and hurts. Whenever relatives or friends came to visit, all we children were sent to a bedroom to play jack rocks or outdoors, weather permitting, to play yard games. So, in that avenue, too, our educational opportunities were shortchanged. I can talk to you,the interviewer,as we sit here in my living room.I can share with you my memories of growing up at the foot of Bear Mountain here in Amherst County,Virginia;but when the book we’re helping you to write about us, the Monacan Indians, is published, I will sit here in my living room and hold the book in my hands. I will look at the written pages. I will long to read the book and cannot. Once again I will be shut out of the adult world because Amherst Betty Hamilton Branham / 131 County refused to allow me to ride the school buses and attend the public schools and learn to read. All I will be able to do is hold the book in my hands and look at the pictures of my people. ...