A Pretty Red Dress

The world came crashing down on many residents of Oklahoma yesterday, and it brought back so many heartbreaking memories for Alabama residents; memories of April 27, 2011. Our prayers are with everyone affected by yesterday’s tragedy.

As these storms tear apart lives, homes, and communities, they also yield another powerful outcome: these tragedies seem to bring out the best side of human nature, inspiring neighbors to help neighbors, and strangers to help strangers. Immediately after the 2011 Alabama tornadoes, I had a heartfelt conversation with my grandmother; as she reflected on how a tornado had forever changed her life eighty years before, one thing became very clear. People may feel helpless during these tragedies, and gestures may seem small and meaningless in the face of catastrophic problems, but sometimes the smallest of acts can change the course of a life. My grandmother is proof of that, and here is her story as I wrote it for her just a few weeks before her 2011 death.

One spring day in 1933, despite the hard economic times, somewhere there was a nice lady who decided to donate a pretty red dress to the Red Cross . I know this because that red dress changed the course of my grandmother’s life.

My grandmother, Ollie Smith, was a vivacious young lady with lots of brothers and sisters, strict parents, a natural talent for playing the piano, a hard scrabble existence, and a proud stance against taking charity. Church was the cornerstone of her community, and the Smith Family was well known around Jefferson County, Alabama, to showcase amazingly good throw-down gospel singers. Life in Adamsville had a pretty typical and normal rhythm; until the tornado hit.

That tornado must have been a doozy. If you ask my 96-year-old grandmother today, she can’t tell you what day it is but she sure can describe in vivid detail what it felt like to be caught between the house and the storm pit when that tornado came. She talks about the wind picking her up and dropping her back down, and about the roaring sounds, and about the terror. Her baby brother Fred was not too young to remember later that the tornado carried him acres away from the house and dumped him into a field. There were bumps, bruises, and breaks, but all survived. The house and all their belongings were destroyed; a complete and total loss.

Being in Alabama during the Spring of 2011 has brought to life for me what the days after the 1933 tornado must have been like for the Smith family. Despite their almost fanatical stance against receiving charity, they gracefully and gratefully accepted help from the Red Cross and from generous neighbors; boxes of necessities and clothes came in and a new house went up.

In one of those boxes was a pretty red dress.

Ollie and her sister Mabel scrapped over ownership of that dress, and for some long forgotten reason, Ollie won. When she ventured out to a singing in Republic, I wonder if that red dress gave her some extra swagger up there in front of the congregation. I wonder, too, if the church family felt close, and prayerful, and thankful like we all feel now. I wonder if the reason my grandfather, Calvin Garner, decided to visit that church with his buddies that day was because of the recent storm and the aftermath.

The rest of the story is not up for debate. When Calvin Garner saw Ollie Smith in that red dress, he knew. He had to meet that girl; he had to brave his friends’ warnings that those Smith gals were shielded from rascals like him by the strictest father in the county. He proved his character, ran the gauntlet, and got the girl. The smiling, singing girl in the pretty red dress.

That tornado was eighty years ago, and yet that simple exchange still lives on. The giving. The receiving. The generosity; the gratitude. A garment handed over; a garment worn.

Proof that a simple act of giving can be much more than it seems. A donated red dress can change the course of a life.
ollie calvin bob

May 2013 Tornado Relief

Comments

One response to “A Pretty Red Dress”

  1. […] My grandmother’s (Ollie Smith Garner) family home in Adamsville, Jefferson County, was completely demolished by a pre-dawn tornado when she was a teenager; several family members were injured, her baby brother Fred was picked up by the tornado and dumped into a field far away, (alive but injured), and she got caught in the wind’s fury with her arms wrapped around a big oak tree, struggling against the roaring winds to make it to the storm shelter. The horrifying event marked her for life. Fear of storms became one of the overriding elements that influenced the way my grandmother lived her life, every day; she could barely have a long conversation without the topic coming up, many decades after the storm, until the day she passed away at almost a hundred years old. The last coherent conversation I had with her before her death in 2011 was about her tornado story, which I had just written a story about (A Pretty Red Dress). […]

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