My Valentine Grandmother

Anna Mae Langford Leigh was my maternal grandmother. She was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, on February 15, 1903, in a polygamous Mormon colony. Her father had two wives.

Not such a big deal, considering some Mormons had six or more wives (including my father's grandfather), but polygamy was outlawed in the Utah territory, beginning in the 1880s. Many  men were proud of their polygamous stature and refused to divorce their wives.

Often, they were jailed (and proud of it), and then left Utah for other parts; often, they settled in Mexico, near the Arizona border.

Such was the inauspicious beginnings of my grandmother.

Life was hard during the early part of the 20^th century. When the circus came to town, my grandmother and her brother played with the black bear cubs that accompanied the circus train. Life was anything but dull.

One day, my great-grandmother made Irish soda bread, when she heard a disturbance in the house. Indians, my great-grandmother screamed. Indians in the adobe hut. My great-grandmother gave the Indians fresh-made Soda bread, and they went away. A lesson to all, at that time. 

Not long afterwards, my great-grandfather, Isaac Fielding Langford, died of a heart attack.

My great-grandmother, Laurena Allen Langford, had two small children to feed, and traveled north to Cedar City, Utah, where she built a house so she could provide for her children by taking in boarders.

Mae lived this way for a few years until she graduated from high school and worked in the soda shop. It was there she met Wilford Webster Leigh, a sheep man and livestock broker-distributor, seven years her senior. They married soon afterward.

My grandmother had four children, nine years apart, all born within a 10-day period in October. My mother was the first-born. By the time I was born, my grandmother was 50 years old and living in the same house since she was nine years old.

I always had a dream of buying that house with the little carriage house in the rear, but it was not to be. So I have to content myself with the memories of my summer vacations there as a child.

During summer vacations, I visited my grandmother.  I would travel from Salt Lake the 300 miles down the length of the desert to be with my grandparents in the quiet, Mormon town of Cedar City, then, a population of 2, 000.

Really, I needed something to keep me occupied, considering I was several years older than my sisters.

On my first visit to Grandma Leigh's house,  I was five years old. I boarded the Greyhound bus and took the eight-hour trip with only my five-year-old loquacious charm and a nametag to identify myself.

Halfway through, at Fillmore, Utah, the bus driver offered his hand to take me to lunch at the restaurant. This was during an earlier, safer, period in the history of our country. Clearly, it was my first date.

 When I arrived in Cedar, my grandfather was not there to pick me up. The bus depot attendants called my grandparent's  house, but no one answered. Within an hour, he came. Apparently, he had gotten lost.

I have lovely memories of summer vacations at Grandma Leigh's house, where we played in the irrigation ditches, made clay pots and bowls out of the red earth, tended the Hollyhocks and Sweet William, and played with the cats that lived with my grandmother.

Two black Scotty dogs belonged to neighbors and I pretended they were black bear cubs from the circus, just like my grandmother played with, 50 years earlier.

My grandmother was a modern marvel and an anachronism, a throw back to an earlier day. She canned her own fruit. I watched what seemed like a difficult, laborious process. What a waste when you could buy jam and jelly at the store.

Monday was washday. I helped her take the laundry, including her LDS garments, and put it all in the tub next to the washboard. Together, we would sing and dance the Irish washwoman's jig as we scrubbed the laundry, and then put the clothes through the wringer. This fascinated me no end, as no one else I knew had a wringer in 1956. We pinned the laundry to the line and as it hung like tents, I played cowboys and Indians as the laundry dried in the hot, Dixie sun.

My grandmother's brother's boy, my second cousin, Bobby, was just my age, and together we played during those long mid-summer days. We walked to the corner  store and bought Bits-O-Honey, or those miniature wax bottles you could drink from. Some days, we bought Clove gum, and tried to pass off our chew as ABC gum to some unsuspecting friends. That joke became old, all too soon.

Twice a week my grandmother worked at Wanda's, a nursery school in town. I often accompanied her to Wanda's lest I display any bored behavior and annoy her. Wanda's was a special time for me, as I had finished three years of nursery school, but  I was one year too young for kindergarten.

Other days, Grandma Leigh and I played beauty parlor. I pinned her red, Irish curls with bobby pins, and then applied rouge and lipstick on her. She did  the same for me. She made corn fritters or johnnycakes in the Sunbeam Mixmaster, and we ate them for lunch.

She told me stories from the Mormon 'oral histories.' These were the stories  her great-grandparents passed on to her. My grandmother's grandmother, Mandana Hillman, was of the Mayflower Hillman family, and was part of the Mayhew clan who lived in Chillmark, Martha's Vineyard,  from the 17^th century until the 19^th century. Mandana Hillman was raised in upstate New York and moved to Utah with William Dalley, in the 19^th century.

 One ancestor of my grandmother's was part of a large train coming west, the Martin Handcart company, which has been much written about in history books, due to its ill-fortune in decimating the ranks of those who traveled from Iowa to Salt Lake. My favorite story from this period was the Pioneer ancestor who gave birth during a snowstorm on the North Platte River. By morning, her hair had frozen to the ground and had to be shorn.

Such a difficult time seemed romantic to my childlike mind.

On Sundays, we went to church. The first Sunday of every month was a day of fasting, according to the LDS church. This was  difficult for my young metabolism, but I was not required to fully comply. Church service in the adult church was long, hot and boring. I did not like the communion of white wonder bread squares and miniature Dixie cups of water.

I wanted the real stuff, wafers and wine.

Sunday school with my aunt and cousins was much more tolerable, as we learned about Jesus, a young man at odds with his world, something I could relate to.

Most of all, my grandmother did a lot of work with the Navajo church, officially called the Welfare Indian Branch of the LDS Church. I loved going with her to this church.  Some of the women at the small, mission Navajo church still wore traditional Navajo dress. The church held the promise of something mysterious and exotic.

After a few years of doing LDS work at the Navajo church, the main LDS church in Cedar told her she needed to return to the main church. My grandmother told them in no uncertain terms to 'stuff it' and that she was going to do what she thought best.

Around this time, my grandmother took in a foster child, Les, a Navajo boy from the reservation. Les and I became fast friends. He proved himself to be adept at games I'd never heard of. Besides, he was rough and tumble, and I, being a tomboy of seven, liked to wrestle. So, we wrestled and played cowboys and Indians – the real thing.

But it was not to last. Soon, Les was to return to the Indian school in Bountiful, Utah. It was there he learned to submit to white man's ways and to give up his Navajo heritage. It was there he learned he would have to cooperate on white man's terms in order to survive.

It nearly killed him. Years went by and I'd not heard from him. It was rumored he stop by my grandmother's house, just to take money from her, only  to disappear again. More years went by, and it was rumored he drank and stole from my grandmother, the woman he called 'Mom'. I felt sad for Les. Such a waste of talent.

At that time, I did not fully appreciate how deeply his school experiences or my grandmother had touched him. In my 20s, my grandmother told me he had become a local celebrity in Utah and had appeared on TV, preaching to other Navajos to quit drinking and to return to their native traditions.

I was proud of him. On one trip, I sojourned down to the local Navajo drop-in center, where my white presence was clearly not welcome. I asked if they knew 'Les J----. They did. He lived in Arizona, but stopped by from time to time. I left my telephone number in Boston and asked that he call me collect.

My aunt said he would steal from me. I wagered he wouldn't. Two or three years later, he called me in Boston. I was overjoyed. He told me he was studying for his master's in California. He said he overcame alcoholism by returning to his Navajo rituals. I realized how important his Navajo roots were to him and how deleterious the Indian school in Bountiful had been.

Years before, I had been a reporter in Washington, D.C. for a news service at the graduate school I attended. I was a political beat reporter for "The Ogden Standard-Examiner", in Ogden, Utah. I covered Utah senators and congressmen, and any important goings on near Ogden, Utah.

The Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to close the Native American schools in the country. The school in Bountiful was slated to close. At that time in the 1980s, I was outraged. I viewed the school as a place where the Navajo children could go to school.

I had not yet realized how awful they were and how they molded Native Americans to white ways, while depriving them of their heritage. I wrote a lot of front-page stories for that local Ogden newspaper. Two years after the stories appeared, the school closed and Navajo children were mainstreamed into public schools, for better or worse.

Les told me he did not like the Navajo school, that it deprived him of feeling Navajo and that it was important to be true to his own identity. I wished him well with his studies and he told me how much my grandmother, "Mom", meant to him.  He visited her gravesite and placed flowers there. He would not be returning to Cedar City for a long time, but said that he and all his children were happy.

I visited my grandmother's grave in 1989, a few weeks after she died. She had just missed seeing her first great-grandchild, my son, by only a few weeks. I remembered her most fondly of my four grandparents because she had a special and  kind way about her.

She sold the house at First South and Second West before she died. She lived with her daughter in Salt Lake for the last year of her life. She survived two small strokes and a big stroke, had survived uterine cancer and had had surgery to remove clogs in her arteries.

Eventually, it was old age and blood poisoning that took her from us all. She was 86. At her grave, she lay next to her husband, Wilford Webster Leigh. I looked at her grave and the following words came to me in an epiphany. "She lay there like a poem, so quiet in repose."…

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