Anna's eyes

     

I recognize those eyes, deep-set like mine. But the eyes of Margaret Anna Jamison saw much horror in her short life.
       Anna -- she went by her middle name just as I do -- was my grandmother's grandmother. Grandma, by the way, had those deep-set eyes too.
       Ten years before the Civil War, when Anna was 17, she married Coatsworth Pinkney Tharp. He had been the husband of her sister Jane who died in childbirth. Anna married a ready-made family with her sister's three-year-old daughter, Eliza Jane.
        In the 1850s, C.P. acquired 420 acres in the southern Missouri hills of the newly formed Dent County. As the farm grew, so did the family. By the time Lincoln was elected president in 1860, they had five children.
        But as the country fell apart, so did their lives. Missouri was a border state. Most of the people didn't want to secede,  but they didn't support the war either. As a result, Union soldiers marched across the state and treated everyone as the enemy. They attacked farmers, took their livestock, burned their homes.
        Anna's brother, James Jamison, was arrested for defending his home against the soldiers. He escaped from the federal prison and rode with the "bushwhackers" like Bill Wilson and Quantrill's Raiders.
         Family tradition says the soldiers invaded Anna's farm too, and hung C.P. Anna cut down her husband, and he survived. But her babies didn't do as well. Two infant daughters died during the war years. But Edwin, born in 1862, survived. He was Grandma's father.
         Anna's last baby, Evaline, was born in 1866. The war was over, but all the fight had gone out of Anna. She died two months after Evaline was born.
         Anna was only 32.