This is one of those “only in the South” kind of stories. My own little Southern Gothic.
The Murderer in question was my Grandmother’s maid, a woman named Eva. And I came to love her dearly, in a very strange way. To tell the story backwards, myself and a handful of other cousins would spend the Summers at my Grandmother’s big old farmhouse. Eva would be left in charge of the house and us, and we were deathly afraid of her because all we knew was that Eva had been in Milledgeville (where the State Mental Hospital was located) for killing her husband with an ax. :eek: (And as a quick aside: Eva used whatever bathroom in that house she damn well pleased, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it, so please don’t think this is a story that is going to resemble The Help in any way.)
Now Eva was a big woman, and don’t mean fat, I mean just large, tall, broad-shouldered…a very imposing figure. She had a badly repaired hare lip and and she smoked filterless cigarettes. So needless to say, she had no trouble keeping us in line. She was a woman of few words, but she did have a wicked sense of humor, and I came to appreciate much later the influence she had over my life. Despite the fact that I was scared of her, I was always skulking around in Grandmother’s kitchen when everyone else had run off outside, to see what she was doing because she was the local Root Woman and she would make up these little poultices in cheesecloth bags that stunk to Holy Hell, but I was so curious about them! People would come to the back door and buy these from her, and when she thought I had seen too much she would lock me in the big walk-in closet butler pantry thing and I would just spy on her through the key hole until she would let me out. There are many things I could say about her, but I want to keep the story as brief as a tale like this can be, so…
Eva could do no wrong in my Grandmother’s eye, and Eva was fiercely loyal to her. They had a very interesting relationship. When Grandmother, who was a very proper buttoned-up, hat, purse & gloves kind of lady, would leave for the day, she would say, “Now don’t do anything to upset Eva, you know she is nervous.” and when she would come home, I would try to tell on Eva for putting me in the closet, Grandmother’s reply was, “Well, you shouldn’t have made her nervous.” She had no problem leaving her grandkids with an ax murderer all day.
My years of growing up with Eva around date from the late 60s when I was very little all through the 70s until I left home in the early 80s. While I was in college Eva died. We all went to her funeral, and I was really broken up about her passing, more than I expected to be. Afterwards, an uncle of mine finally filled me in about the mysterious backstory.
In the early 60s Eva was married to worthless man who liked to smack her around. Now I already said Eva was a big woman, so I would hate to see the man who could bully her, he must have been a giant. So one night, Eva fixed up a potion and he fell into a stupor. While he was passed out in a chair, she went to the shed and got an ax and then just buried it in his skull. Fairly split his head in two. The first person she went to was my Grandmother. Now, we are talking early 60s, Deep South, pre-civil rights era. There is no such thing as Battered Woman Syndrome, and it could have easily been argued that this was premeditated murder, and she is surely going to be tried by an all-white jury. Grandmother wouldn’t even allow the Sheriff to put in Eva jail until the trial, she stayed at Grandmother’s house.
My Uncle said that Grandmother hired a big-city lawyer out of Atlanta and they got her off on a temporary insanity plea and instead of going to prison, she did 3 years in Milledgeville, and boom, came right back home and went right back to work for my Grandmother again.
I have always found it so intriguing that these two women, so very different from each other and in such different social circumstances, truly cared about each other so much. There was some kind of connection between them, as women. I like to imagine what their private conversations must have been like.
There’s actually a good bit more to it, but I have run on long enough. I have toyed with the idea of writing all my experiences with Eva and Grandmother up into a series of short stories or something, their story is too good to be lost.
But if I had to know a murderer, I am glad it was Eva.