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MAY JORDAN LIVED A HARD LIFE. BEFORE HER DEATH IN OCTOBER 1914 at age twenty-five, she spent most her time helping her father and family survive on a small farm in remote Washington County, Alabama. The sandy soil made agriculture difficult and forced many county's residents, black and white alike, to trap animals in swamps along Tombigbee River and sell their furs. anyone who reads diary she kept between December 1912 and March 1914 recognizes that her poverty did not diminish her sense self-worth, family solidarity, community identity, or religious faith. (1) Indeed her family's poverty enhanced her delight in simple pleasures, her storytelling and singing, and especially her theology. Yes theology, for that is what it was: a distinctive way understanding God, explaining meaning life, making sense her own social reality, and relating her powerless self to omnipotent God, to ultimate vindication and justice. Religion was topic May most frequently mentioned in her diary as a subject conversation with other women. Although a proud and independent woman--who often spent nights alone in wilderness while her father tramped down some dirt path impassable to wheeled vehicles, bound for a remote trapper's cabin--May centered her diary entries on God, community, and her family instead gender. (2) Community for her revolved around Buck Hill Baptist Church, a rural congregation made tip people like herself. The church building also served as her school, which was no inconvenience to worship services since they were held only once a month anyway. Each August church conducted a singing school to educate members in shapenote singing, and in September entire community assembled for a protracted revival. Born believers were baptized in nearby Pine Barren Creek. (3) Her father Eugene was a faith doctor without a formal ministerial portfolio who, according to family legend, had cured his daughter from a high fever triggered by meningitis and had 'raised a dead woman at a church service. He also supplemented his meager income from family's 160-acre federal homestead and his fur trade by selling patent medicines. May contributed income as an agent for herb company. (4) On first page her diary, May explained source her relentlessly upbeat outlook on life: There is church every 3[rd] Sunday.... And I sure enjoy going To preaching. We never can learn to much about Saviour Who suffered so upon cross And humbled hisself when he could but lift his hands and strike [his enemies] down. (5) Running throughout diary is a Calvinistic sense God's providence. During final spring fur-buying trip in 1913, May wrote that it is Saviours will, she and her father would venture out again following winter. Noting beauty Washington County's wildflowers, forests, and sunsets, she contemplated how good Saviour is to us all. On a cold December night, she rejoiced that Saviour has given us plenty fine lighter to burn. Unable to reach home one freezing winter evening, she concluded that our Blessed Saviour seen fit to make night so dark until we could not see to drive. (6) In a theological refrain common to most Christians, May appropriated religion to explain suffering. To those who complained of so much sorrow, she advised: But if they will only love and trust Blessed Saviour.... [t]hey will find more happiness and not so much sorrow. (7) Not that May Jordan was Pollyannaish about life. Living with eight siblings on a poor farm afforded no opportunity for false piety or religious pretension. She filled her diary with lighthearted jokes and folklore at expense hypocritical preachers and ignorant believers. She acknowledged that she often had the blues, and she and her lather compromised their high regard for Sunday as a day rest when they were forced by economic necessity to dress furs. …
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