Originally published November 27, 1996, in The Reidsville Review, Reidsville, NC.
She used to love to dance.
“I’d go to dances and me and the boy would get out on the floor, just get on the floor and dance,” recalls Fannie Hairston. “Three or four boys would fan my feet.”
Born in 1890, Hairston has lived most of her 106 years in the Williamsburg community of Rockingham County, where she helped raise her nine siblings, said sister Annie Gwynn, 86.
Hairston is unable to walk much and hard-of-hearing. She now spends her time at home surrounded by her loved ones’ photographs, which occupy every thinkable space in her trailer off Mizpah Church Road.
She never had children of her own but has helped raise three generations, Gwynn said.
“I don’t have my thinking cap on,” Hairston said, but went on to remember many of the things she loved most in her “day”—dancing, eating, church, and fishing.
“She liked to dig the worms,” said Gwynn, but putting the worm on the hook was always the best part, added Hairston.
Her most memorable fishing experience, Hairston said, was when she reached over the grab what she thought was her fishing pole, and it turned out to be a snake.
“I was moving fast from there!”
Gwynn’s granddaughter Laurie McCain said she believes Hairston last went fishing about five years ago—at 101.
Until the last few years, Hairston was active in the Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church, where she was involved with the usher board and Methodist Women, Gwynn and McCain agreed.
“She loved going to church,” said McCain.
Born into a farming family, Hairston pulled her weight in the family fields in a time before tractors were common.
“After I’d quit work,” she said, “I’d come home and help my daddy with tobacco.”
McCain said Hairston “used to talk about how farming was all she ever knew.”
For the only three years Hairston attended school, she said, “I didn’t go then half the time because I was too busy playing. I’d go into Red Gully on a board. I’d get on and give myself a push and down the hill I’d go.”
Although she cannot remember how old she was or in whose car she rode, Hairston can vividly recall her reaction the first time she rode in an automobile:
“It scared me to death, I tell you. I jumped out.”
Hairston never got her driver’s license.
“I was going to teach her how to drive one day,” said Gwynn. “It was probably back in the ’50s. I told her to watch and she said she was. Then she went off in a ditch.”
When she was about 16, in 1906, Hairston married her first husband, Charles Andrew Isaacs, by family accounts. The couple moved to Steelton, Pa., when Isaacs was transferred from a local steel mill and took boarders into their home.
“I had six men in my house at one time,” Hairston said with a laugh, noting she stayed in Pennsylvania after Isaacs died in 1925 “because I had my hands full. I got tired from being off from home a while and came on back here,” where she moved back in with her family.
Sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Hairston married her second husband Eugene Hairston, owner of Hairston’s Cafe on Market Street in downtown Reidsville. He died in the late 1940s or early 1950s, Gwynn estimated.
Hairston never married again.
If she could change anything about her life, she would have remained single. Hairston said, not specific about whether she meant she never would have married or that she would have married only once: “I wouldn’t have married no more.”
Having lived through the Great Depression and both World Wars, Hairston has seen many changes in the world—cultural changes as well.
As a young girl working in a department store, Hairston recalls she had an encounter with racial prejudice.
“A woman came in—a White lady. She wanted a dress and they sent her upstairs for me. She looked and looked, and I asked, ‘Could I help you?’
“She said, ‘No, you can get away from me.’ She didn’t want me to sell her anything.”
Of all Hairston’s memories, however, possibly the most vivid are more positive. Of a day when the community was close-knit, when neighborhoods got together to sing and dance.
“Some people had banjos and some had guitars,” she said. “A boy, he’d sing about ‘John Henry was a little itty bitty boy sitting on his Daddy’s knee.'”
“We used to have good old times.”
©1996-2024 Jo R. Hawke. All rights reserved.
Update: I haven’t been able to find Mrs. Nannie Hairston’s obituary yet, but her granddaughter Mrs. Annie Gwynn died in 2011. Her obituary is here.
