Reba: My Story (3 page)

In 1950, as soon as school was out, Grandma went to Poteau, Oklahoma, to have a hysterectomy. Nine days later, while she was in the hospital, Grandma suffered a stroke. Daddy and Mama were at a rodeo in Marietta, Oklahoma, at the time. They decided to stop by home after the rodeo. As they turned off the highway, they met Bess Martin, a neighbor and friend, and learned of Grandma’s condition. They drove over to Poteau to be with her, but she never regained consciousness. She died on July 1, 1950, five years before I was born.

After her funeral, Mama and Daddy went to Grandpap’s house. They found him throwing her personal things, including some beautiful quilts she’d made by hand, into the creek behind their house. Mama retrieved as much as she could. She even found Grandma’s watch—she has it to this day—which had been scorched because Grandpap also tried to burn some of Grandma’s things. Though Grandpap had been a difficult husband, I know he missed Grandma Alice an awful lot.

I sure wish I could have known her!

T
HE SUMMER GRANDMA DIED, GRANDPAP WAS FIFTY-THREE, AND
he still roped quite well. He won the Woodward, Oklahoma, steer roping and won a day money at Pendleton,
Oregon. A day money is like a go-round. If ten cowboys are entered in a calf-roping competition, for example, the first go-round will be completed when all ten have had a chance to rope once. The one with the fastest time of the ten will be paid, and his earnings are called “day money.” There are usually two or three go-rounds in each event in a rodeo competition, and the contestant who has the fastest average or the lowest average wins a greater sum, called the “average money.”

But then, Grandpap had been infected with rodeo fever since an early age. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had made respectable money on a horse in a touring Wild West Show. By about 1923, Grandpap’s rope had taken him from southeastern Oklahoma all the way to Madison Square Garden in New York City.

I’ve thought about that whenever I have played in New York City, and my sister Alice has never missed a chance to remind me that I’m not the first McEntire to perform there.

Today, rodeo cowboys travel in air-conditioned trucks with campers and motor homes, and many have corporate sponsors and backers who keep them on the road no matter if they win, lose, or draw. Former Rodeo Cowboys Association All-Around Cowboy Larry Mahan used to travel in a private jet. But Grandpap went to most rodeos on horseback, and his income depended on his winnings. There were plenty of times when he was just starting out that he paid his entry fee but then missed his steer or saw another cowboy rope his steer faster. Then he made the long ride back home with a packhorse whose supply bags were as empty as Grandpap’s pockets.

That was before the days of the RCA (Rodeo Cowboys Association) and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, the sanctioning organizations for today’s championship rodeos. Back then the only association was the Turtle Association, which Grandpap helped get started.

Even though both families were friends, my family has
told me how Grandma Alice’s folks thought Grandpap was irresponsible because he wouldn’t work the fields and cared little about anything that didn’t involve riding and roping. They themselves were practical and hardworking people who were used to making sacrifices. When Grandma’s Daddy lost his slaves because President Lincoln had freed them after the Civil War, the family took their places in the fields, even though my great-grandfather didn’t know how to farm himself and lost a leg when a sorghum masher fell on him and crushed it. So they didn’t cotton to Grandpap’s ways.

Actually, Grandpap made so little money during the early years of their marriage, they might have starved to death if Grandma Alice hadn’t been a schoolteacher. And if Grandpap did win any money rodeoing, he was liable to let the neighbor kids play with it until they lost it, or he might just give it away.

But Grandma was conservative with her money and scrimped and saved so they got by. And in time, Grandpap became a rodeo hero. In 1934, he took first place in the steer roping at Cheyenne, Wyoming, the indisputable championship rodeo in the world. Anyone who won his event there simply became the world champion in that event. In his later years, Grandpap was a constant presence on our ranch, and us kids got very attached to him.

M
Y OTHER GRANDFATHER, GEORGE ELVIN SMITH, GREW UP AN
orphan and stayed with anyone who would take him in. Maybe that’s why he was very sincere about taking care of his family. Even during the Depression, he made sure there was plenty of food on the table to eat and blankets on the bed. He loved his grandchildren, but he had little patience with them.

I was very close to his wife, my Mama’s mother, Reba Estelle Brassfield (born in Smith ville, Mississippi). I am her namesake, of course, and I truly adored her. She had Indian-like
features, with thick, black hair that time would streak with gray. She braided her hair every night, and it was almost like a ceremony to a little girl. I can still see her with her long hair parted in the middle and woven into braids on each side.

I also remember how, in the evening, we’d sit on the front porch facing the west. Grandma would have her gallon jar filled with fresh milk heavy with cream, which she’d churn until it was butter. The lightning bugs would flash on and off as the light faded and the moon came up. The butter would taste great on our biscuits the next morning or in the following night’s blackberry cobbler—the best I ever had. You can be sure she picked the berries herself!

Grandma seemed to understand children in the way that only grandmothers can. I remember that my sisters, brother, cousins, and I once held a summer version of an Easter egg hunt by hiding and seeking our beachcloppers (which some people call thongs). During the hunt, I spied a beachclopper on top of some old boards at the back of the house, and I climbed up to get it. Accidentally, I stepped on a long nail in one of the boards, which stuck deep into my foot right between my big and second toes.

My cousin Diannia was with me and hollered for Grandma, who pulled the nail out right then and there and carried me inside. I don’t know how she doctored my wound. But I remember that she kept the other kids outside while she had my Aunt Georgia read the comic papers to me.

She knew how to make a little country girl feel so special that I forgot the pain.

Grandma was also the person who introduced me to Jesus Christ. Some of my fondest childhood memories have to do with Grandma telling me Bible stories when she and I fished from the pond dam. That’s where I learned about Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale, Joseph and his coat of many colors, and other thrilling stories from the Old Testament. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior
when I was little bitty, sitting on a pond dam with Grandma.

Grandma practiced the “speaking in tongues,” the descent of the Holy Spirit. “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance,” says Acts 2:4 in the King James Version.

One night during a service at her Baptist church, she started speaking in tongues. My Mama said she didn’t think Grandma even knew where she was because she was so involved in the Spirit.

Such experiences are becoming increasingly commonplace in contemporary churches, even in the old-line denominations of the Protestant faiths. But when I was a girl, some folks in the more established denominations thought folks who spoke in tongues were religious fanatics. So Grandma was warned about her religious practices by an outraged member of the congregation. When she continued them, she was asked to leave the Baptist church she loved.

She then joined a nondenominational Holiness church, where folks recognized that the speaking in tongues was a gift. My Mama remembers services where Grandma would speak in unknown tongues, and someone in the congregation would give an interpretation, translating into English whatever it was that Grandma had said. Interpretations are still common in Pentecostal and other Holiness churches.

Maybe that’s why Grandma understood so well—and taught me—that connection to God is deeper than simple words. I used to watch her get on her knees in her nightgown by the bed. After her prayers I asked her what she was saying and she said she was talking to Jesus, so I’d ask her, “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” she’d say.

“If you don’t know, how are you talking to Him?”

“That’s the way my soul talks to Him. I’m talking to Him through the Holy Spirit.”

I
STILL HAVE THE LITTLE BROWN HYMN BOOK I USED AS A CHILD
. We worshiped at the wood frame country church house at Chockie—a one-room structure with a front and back door. While the church had a piano, no one knew how to play it, though one of our parishioners, Stella McGee, could sight-read music. She would read the sheet music, hum the pitch to the congregation, and then we would sing a cappella. Everyone would then join in. In warm weather, after church we’d all have dinner. The women would bring food and spread it out over picnic tables, while the men would bring benches out of the church for us to sit on. I loved those Sundays.

I was baptized by immersion at the Baptist church in Kiowa, Oklahoma, when I was twelve, just as John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. Some folks don’t think baptism is necessary, but Jesus thought so, and so do I.

Still, I don’t go to church all that much today. I like a preacher to get up and talk about the love of God and how good it makes you feel, not the Hell, fire, and brimstone. I do believe there are physical places called Heaven and Hell, and that they are as the Bible describes them. But I have no doubt that when I die, I’m going to Heaven, to spend eternity with Grandma and other friends and loved ones who have gone before me in death.

When I do attend church, I like to go to the Pentecostal churches with my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Gloria and Narvel Blackstock. I know that having God’s arms around you when you’re speaking in the Spirit is a wonderful experience. I’m familiar with it, and so I’m comfortable with it. It’s only if you don’t know anything about a subject that it scares you. I love to see the joyful way that people worship the Lord in those churches. I love the music, too.

Though I don’t go to church much, I pray every day. God is one hundred percent part of my life.

People can leave Jesus, but he’ll never leave them. He has been with me all these years through trials and tribulations. I’m convinced He has looked after me physically. I went through some reckless days in college as many young people do, and I knew Grandma wasn’t too pleased with me as she looked down from Heaven. There was a time or two when I might have been seriously injured or even killed had it not been for Him. And there have been times when I would have gone insane if I couldn’t have turned to Him.

I rededicated my life to the Lord one year at the Copenhagen-Skoal roping in Fort Worth, Texas. I think it was in 1978. Willard Moody, a great friend and calf roper, and I were talking and I expressed to him some religious confusion in my life. There at the horse barns, we stepped into a stall for privacy and he said, “Reba, if you’re confused, repeat after me.” He said a small prayer that asked God to take control of my life. When I repeated the prayer, it felt like a ton of guilt, stress, and pain had been lifted off my shoulders. The Lord is still in control of my life. I’m proud of it. I wouldn’t want it any other way.