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Mrs. Brown / By Reba Roscoe

This is a story of a woman about whom I know almost nothing. I only know that one cold, rainy October night in 1937 she died in a rabbit hutch on the property adjoining our farm. We knew that an elderly woman and her retarded son had moved into a small structure on the Evans' property. They hadn't been there very long and, of course, there had been no connection between our family and these "squatters." In 1937, in Arkansas, there were a lot of people who took shelter where shelter was found. So it was not too unusual that these two people were there on this cold dreary night.

It was about six o'clock in the evening when the son came running to our door and told us his mother had just died. Mama and I went with him back to the hut and sure enough, Mrs. Brown was dead. When Mrs. Moorehead, the only other mature white woman in the neighborhood came, Mama went home and left me there with the neighbor to "sit-up" with the corpse.

The structure in which we were to spend this strange night had been built to house Chinchilla rabbits. The owner of the land always had some scheme going. Of course the rabbits had all died and the hut had been vacant for some time. But on this eerie night a hot fire burned in the tin stove set up near the front door. The floor was of dirt, packed hard. There was a small table and two chairs and on the table the remains of their supper -black eye peas and baked sweet potatoes. It has later come to me that maybe the gas from the dried peas and potatoes caused Mrs. Brown's death, but "no" I guess it was a heart attack. There was a full-sized bed and a cot in back, separated from the entry by a sheet hung from the ceiling. Mrs. Brown's body lay on the bed.

The neighbor woman and I sat through the night, the son coming and going with wood to fuel the fire, with us keeping the cat away from Mrs. Brown's body behind the curtain.

Early the next morning the officials of our nearby town were alerted about the death and they promised to help. There was no money in the Brown family for a burial.

Now it was up to Mrs. Morehead and me to take care of the body. In a small trunk we found clean underwear and a folded cotton dress with pink sprigged flowers. We took a small pan of water and washed her face and body. She was a large woman and this was no small task. But as I helped, a bond seemed to grow between me and Mrs. Brown. I was not afraid to touch her and wanted her to be pretty. So after we had dressed her in the sprigged dress, I found a comb and face powder, and combed her thin gray hair and powdered her wrinkled face.

About noon, two men from the little town came with the casket loaded on the back of a flat-bed truck. I was still there when they put Mrs. Brown in the casket and just remember that it took some doing because of her size. She was almost too large for the casket. The flat-bed truck then slowly drove away with Mrs. Brown on the back, and her son squeezed in between the two men in the cab, all four on their way to the graveyard. There was no funeral, just a burying, and no one else came.