A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

Afterword

❙ AFTERWORD ❙ ❙ 149 ❙ Preparing Frances Minerva Nunnery’s life story for publication, I began to detect a number of themes that ran through it like subliminal tracings. What called itself to my attention was the similarity of her story to women’s lives from as far back as preRevolutionary War journals and continuing through the journals of pioneer women.These tell us what ills women experienced.Perhaps a woman could not feed her children, or perhaps she lost her home when her husband died or even, in one case, went to jail. Likewise when good things happened—a recovery from illness, a marriage, childbirth—we’re usually told only that it happened,hardly ever how the woman felt about it. On the journey west in covered wagons, women’s diaries and journals tell of fending off Indian attacks, of mules or oxen swept away in a river crossing,of treasured household goods—a bedstead, a chiffonier, a rocking chair or pie chest—abandoned to lighten the animals’ load, or of a child dying along the trail and left in a scratched-out grave. The most we can do is guess what the woman felt when grandma’s rocker had to be left along the trail, or when the little one who “had a sweet look about him . . . couldn’t nurse ❙ AFTERWORD ❙ and lasted only a fortnight.”One woman writes that she was“some months pregnant but her husband Matthew was in a lather to go.” We hear of Matthew’s“lather”but nothing of her terror of heading pregnant into the unknown in an ox-drawn wagon without springs. Similarly,as Frances tells her life story she says little about her feelings . We learn all about what she did but not necessarily how she felt.We do hear early that she“felt like an orphan,”but also that she was proud to be her mother’s daughter, and later that she“couldn’t stand” the man her mother made her marry. She tells us that her mother was a remarkable woman, that Amelia Jane Hill, twice and perhaps thrice married,“could do anything,”and we discover as we read that Frances certainly took after Amelia Jane in that. Frances never passes judgment on her mother for favoring sister Irene, for taking all the wages Frances earned from the time she was a child of thirteen to pay off the mortgage on the farm, for marrying her off at age twenty to a man she had seen only once and came to hate for what sounds like marital rape and continued sexual abuse in the name of a husband’s“rights.”We do learn that when her mother disapproved of the divorce because“we never had a divorce in this family ,”Frances stood up for herself:“Yes,”she said,“but you don’t have to live with him.” We don’t know how she felt when she learned of her mother’s further betrayal: keeping in touch with the hated husband and telling him where Anita was, enabling him to kidnap the child and take her out of the country.And we can but guess how she felt when her beloved ranches were sold,though she does tell us that the winters alone on Spur Ranch and Centerfire were the happiest times of her life. We learn who Frances was from what she did. Like the pioneer women, she was nothing if not a survivor, and like her mother she could do anything. Her success was based on her willingness to undertake any job and, if it didn’t work out to suit her, to try something else. We learn of her strength and self-sufficiency from the story of her horse’s slip on ice that landed horse and rider at the bottom of a rocky canyon, when she mounted again sore and bleeding 150 ❙ AFTERWORD ❙ and rode four miles back home, got in her truck, and drove to the hospital in Springerville where she had to stay for some days,or from the story of her careening ride down Salt River Canyon with a truckload of horses after her air brakes popped, and at the bottom getting out, reconnecting the air brakes, and driving on into Phoenix. Though twice married, she spent most of her life alone but for the friends, younger and younger as she got older, who were drawn to her stories and her...