"Memoir" by Robert Hicks--Book/Manuscript Review

Robert Hicks, Photo by UMWA Local 5895

For those of you who ever actually read the list of "Books I Have Read Lately" which has been located at the bottom of the page on this blog ever since I have been blogging, you might have noticed lately that I had added "Memoir" by Robert Hicks to that list of books.  I used the term "book" somewhat expansively in reference to that particular work as I sometimes to do documents, manuscripts, and other unpublished sources of information which I believe could be useful to another student of Appalachian Studies or of some particular subject covered by some writing I have read.  I have always hoped that at least a few of my readers might choose from time to time to read some of these listings.  This particular manuscript can only be found in one place on earth so far as I know and that is the Wayland Historical Society in Wayland, Kentucky, where I have been doing some research recently.  If you decide to try to locate and read this manuscript, you will need to travel to Wayland to see it.  But the bright side is that the Historical Society has a relatively broad policy about access to their holdings and the copying of those holdings.  

I had two different reasons for choosing to read this 50 page manuscript: 1) my ongoing research involves the town of Wayland and the Elkhorn Coal Company which built the town and owned it until about 1970; 2) Robert Hicks was a distant cousin of mine and was raised in a holler called Bruce near Mousie, Kentucky, where my father was also raised.  Robert Hicks served as the fifth president of UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland, KY, and his son, Bobby Ray Hicks, still serves as president of Local 1741 which was merged with Local 5895 sometime after coal mining ended in Wayland and the number of active UMWA members dwindled. As his biography in "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" states: "Robert Hicks started work in the mines...in 1919" and served his local union, the town of Wayland, and the greater community in a variety of ways as Financial Secretary and President of Local 5895 and as Police Judge of the City of Wayland.  

When I read this memoir, I was able to learn some previously unknown information about my extended family and the area in Mousie where they lived and many of them are buried.  I also learned more about a man named John "Bud" Wicker who had been a school teacher and elected official in the area around the turn of the twentieth century.  This was particularly important to me since a treasured family member who developed dementia late in life had fixated on John "Bud" Wicker at times during the severe deterioration of their dementia.  As a well known and well loved caretaker would walk through the house this person would often say, "There comes that SOB John "Bud" Wicker".  Their caretakers knew nothing of John "Bud" Wicker but I had at least heard of him during my childhood and knew that he had been well respected in the county.  His photo and a warm remembrance of him is included in the memoir and I immediately copied that page and mailed it to the caretaker of my family member.  It seems that the family member, in their dementia, had fixated on their old grade school teacher after they could no longer recognize their caretaker and we all found it quite humorous as some of these dementia stories can be.  Secondly, I was able to learn the original source of one bit of information about my paternal grandfather, Charlie Hicks, which I had found repeated in another more questionable source.  Robert Hicks had also included in the memoir other somewhat more lengthy information about my grandparents: 

"I remember on several occasions, Joe and I would go up to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betty's to stay all night.  Uncle Charlie was somewhat of a rhyme maker.  He was all the time making a rhyme on someone and we just loved to hear him.  Aunt Betty was always working with her loom weaving cloth to make her children clothes, or she would be spinning wool on her old spinning wheel to make wool thread to knit their stockings.  She was also one of the old midwives who caught babies from under persimmon trees, or got them out from among Uncle Charlie's bee gum stands.  Uncle Charlie was always talking about his "honey money" and his old woman.  He must have had at least seventy five bee gums and an old mule called Jim.  He would start out on Old Jim and say, "Come on Jim, we're going to Lackey or maybe Garrett."  He would start out singing "Tell Mother I'll Be There".  That's an old Baptist song.  At breakfast he would have a big bowl of honey and we boys didn't care too much for honey.  All we wanted was that big bowl of gravy.  I think that gravy was the greatest thing the old people ever learned to fix.  It it hadn't been for gravy, many folks would have starved to death.  We would eat every bit of it and even scrape the skillet clean.  That was a big skillet too."  (Robert Hicks, "Memoir" page 7)

It was wonderful for me to read that somewhat lengthy remembrance of the paternal grandparents I had never known personally or heard hat story in its entirety.  I had known that Grandma Betty was a midwife until she was about seventy-five and I had also known that  Grandpa Charlie kept seventy-five or a hundred stands of bees until he was about eighty and peddled honey among the coal camps by mule back even at that advanced age.  It also reminded me of a story my father Ballard Hicks used to tell about going to Jackson in his childhood with Grandpa Charlie and at least one of his brothers.  It was the first time they had seen cement sidewalks and Daddy always said that his brother kept looking at the poured concrete sections of the sidewalk until he finally said, "I sure wish I knowed where they got these big flat rocks.  Pap could sure use some of them to set his bee gums on."  

Elizabeth "Betty" & Charlie Hicks

Robert Hicks also made one short reference to my maternal great-grandfather Hence Hicks, who was murdered in 1935, by saying that he had been an oxen driver in a local logging or farming operation.  But he only made one short reference to the United Mine Workers of America to which he apparently had devoted several years of his life and had obviously inculcated union thinking into his son to the point that Bobby Ray Hicks also became a UMWA official.  That failure to discuss the UMWA left the readers of his memoir without many key elements of his life's work I am certain.  But this book is well written with only minimal linguistic errors considering it was written by a relatively uneducated man.  That skillful writing is also one more testament to the fact that the Hicks genes seem to carry some propensity for producing people who like to write or "make a rhyme" as my grandfather, father, and myself have done along with Robert Hicks.  If you are a descendant of some of the Hicks family living around Mousie Kentucky, you will benefit from making a trip to the Wayland Historical Society and reading the "Memoir" of Robert Hicks.