EIGHT SISTERS con't from p. 28
family. About three years later, he built two
more chicken houses and added hogs to the
farm. Born, in 1963, Teresa remembers, “I
was a daddy’s girl, but I never knew my daddy
when he was physical healthy. When you
looked at him, you wouldn’t know he was sick
until you heard his respiratory struggles.”
The silver lining in the sickness allowed
Teresa to spend the most time with her daddy
than any of the other sisters. While Mama
worked at the chicken plant and at Springs
Mill Furniture, daddy took care of Teresa who
got to hear all the stories from the community.
“I got to sit on a 5-gallon bucket at Mazie’s
store and hear all about everything,” shares
Teresa. “Daddy and I were way more closer
than me and my mama as I worked on the
farm with him. I didn’t know how to cook, but
I knew how to wash dishes. Of course, when
my older sisters started leaving home and
getting married, the sisters who were left just
kept on getting more jobs.”
Of the eight sisters, two of them were moved
out when Teresa grew up. “I only remember
my sister Margie because I got a whoopin’ at
her wedding—my daddy was giving her away,
and I didn’t like him up there. I wanted to
go up there with him, and I found out that I
wasn’t supposed to!” Teresa continues, “The
biggest event I remember about my second
sister is when she went off to college. It was
like we wasn’t ever going to see her again,
like she was going to California. She was only
going to Winston Salem.”
With the eight sisters sharing one bedroom,
their closet consisted of hanging a nail in the
corner and a string to hang good clothes on, of
which they didn’t have many. “You took good
care of the clothes you had because they few
and far between,” explains Teresa. “Most of
them was hand-me-downs.”
Two sets of bunk beds and a double bed
held the sisters after long days of school and
work; Teresa remembers sleeping in the baby
crib until she was about seven. “Even though
our small house was full, I remember my
daddy moving people in like our grandmother
when his step-daddy passed away. He also
moved in his half-brother and his four kids.”
Teresa, exclaims, “I’m thinking now that I’m
older, ‘Where did we put these people?’” To
this day, the hospitality exemplified keeps the
sisters close.
As each sister grew up and left the house,
“You got to move up to the next bed or
whatever,” explains Teresa. “Although Mama
and Daddy was very particular with Phyllis
who had the top bunk. After she left for college,
nobody ever slept in that bed. Mama put her
guitar on top of the bed, and that was just the
way it was. After my sister Lisa left, making me
the only sister at home, I never slept in that
bedroom again. I slept on the couch. That’s
when I realized that bedroom was so big, yet
it was actually very small.”
Teresa laughs, “Whoever wired our
bedroom, back in that day, bless his soul—he
hooked up the electricity to the front porch
light, so the only way we could have a light
in the bedroom was to cut the porch light on.
Well, if you cut the porch light on, and Daddy
and Mama seen the light burning outside, we
were history. We’d have to sneak out there
and unscrew the light. The only time I ever
remember electricity in the bedroom was
when my sister Patty bought a pigtail, and
we screwed it in there. We thought we were
kicking in high cotton, because we got to listen
to a radio. We had zero receptacles.”
EIGHT SISTERS continued EIGHT SISTERS continued
In ’72, when Daddy and Mama stopped
raising poultry and went really big into the
hog business, Teresa continued to grow her
own layers. Selling the eggs at church from the
trunk of her car or from Frank’s Food King on
705, Teresa would pay her feed bill and keep
the rest of the money. She smiles, “Farming is
in my blood, and I would come up with any
excuse to stay out of school. My sisters thought
I was crazy—six of them became nurses and
CNA’s! The other became an office manager
who took every business course offered in
high school. Me? I took FFA and pursued
farming. Basically farming was my life. Even
in the annual, I said that I was going to pursue
farming and have a half-a-dozen kids!”
Graduating in June of ’81, Teresa remembers
her daddy passed away in November of
’81, at 56 years old. Upon attending school
at Robbins Elementary, Elise Middle and
graduating from North Moore, Teresa enjoyed
a few semesters at Montgomery Community
College before meeting the love of her life and
settling down to live her life purpose! They
met in the tobacco fields; the year was 1977
when Teresa met Darrell Sanders.
Meeting the love of her life began at the
Cherry Grove Pier one summer. Teresa says,
“I went up to Gerald, Darrell’s brother, who
planted our fields and said, ‘I hear you grow
tobacco, and I need a job.’ He says, ‘OK.
Tobacco season starts in May, but we’ll call
you when it’s time to do the suckering.’”
Sure enough, Gerald calls Teresa, and she
went to work. She smiles, “I’ll never forget.
I see Darrell, my future husband, who was
twenty-one at the time. I was only thirteen
going on fourteen, when his niece and I were
under the clothesline. I said, ‘O my God. Who
is that handsome man? He’s a pretty little
thing.’ She said, ‘O my God. He’s my uncle.
Leave him alone. This was the same year we
had the tragic, tobacco wreck where one
person got killed, and the rest of us survived
the wreck,” tells Teresa.
After the wreck, Gerald went back to driving
a truck, and Darrell took over the farming.
One day Darrell comes knocking on Teresa’s
door and says, “I heard you want a job.”
Teresa explains, “We sisters had our jobs at
the farm, but we also worked another job to
make money because we had to buy our own
clothes and everything else we needed.”
“I worked for Darrell the whole summer;
we started dating late fall, and then I married
him,” smiles Teresa. “We both had the same
mission in life—farming. He had nothing to
lose, and I had nothing to lose, because we
both came from nothing. We bought a farm in
Seagrove, the one on the way to the feed store
where we’d get the fertilizer.”
After they purchased the farm in 1982,
Darrell brings in all these magazines along
with his belongings. “Does this man work?
How does he work with all these magazines?”
Teresa wondered. She informs, “I grew up
in a house where nobody read. We had a
newspaper, and my mama read the obituaries.
That was it. My sister Phyllis was the only one
who got to read the funnies, because she
was going be something some day. I never
seen a man read.” That Darrell was the first
person she had ever seen take an interest in
reading became one of the many remarkable
memories from their life shared on the farm.
Still enjoying date nights, Teresa
remembers, “We got married on Darrell’s
birthday, thirty-seven years ago. And it wasn’t
because we wanted it that way, we just worked
our ceremony around a flock of chickens. We
still have date nights, and I put ‘Date Night’ in
the cookbook.”
Just as the yearbook predicted, six children
in five girls and a boy came along and grew the
Sander’s farm. Wanting “C” names for the boys
and ‘M’s’ for the girls, the names also consist
of five letters. From Magan to Clint, Makla
Sadie, and Matte, who is named after both
great-grandmothers. Malee Grace and Matre
Dara complete the family. Teresa exclaims,
“Thank God He gave us children later in life.
Since Darrell’s blindness, the kids take him
around the farm and keep him active.”
From the Sanders sisters to the Cox sisters,
the names flow from oldest to youngest—
Margie, Phyllis, Kathy, Carolyn, Janet,
Patty, Lisa, and Teresa. All of the sisters had
nicknames growing up. Teresa’s was Bookie.
Some of the girls actually had guy names; for
instance, Kathy was called Tom. Lisa was Charlie.
The responsibility of cooking in the Cox
household was given to Margie, the firstborn.
When Mama and Daddy left her at the mine
one morning to run errands, they told her
to have breakfast ready when they got back.
Margie was eight years old when she made
her first pan of biscuits and milk gravy. From
that day forward, she was the cook who kept
everybody functioning around the house.
Every sister knew her job, and if it changed,
then they were told, and they didn’t want to
be told twice.
The sisters worked on the farm until the
day they married. Teresa shares, “The day my
sister Patty got married, she hadn’t even told
Mama and Daddy.”
Olivia agrees, “My mama Patty was out
there working in the chicken houses, by golly,
and goes missing because she was going over
to the parsonage to marry my father. She
was eighteen and hadn’t told a soul she was
getting married!”
Teresa continues, “She went to the house
and took a bath, which was a treat. You see, we
didn’t get baths at home. We had a bath tub,
but we just looked at it, because our chickens
and hogs had to have water before we did.
We basically took whore baths where you
get a wash cloth and the sink and some soap
and wash up. When the school would give us
toothbrushes, our parents put them in the
drawer so we could use them to silk the corn.
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p.30 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. No. 141