TRENT WOODS — Flora Ann Scearce always wanted to be a writer, but marriage, being a military wife, raising three children and having a career came first.
But, after her three children were grown and college graduates, she retired early from 16 years in the loan department at a Havelock bank in 1989.
“I really was a military wife,” she said. “Herman (her husband) was in for 20 years. We traveled around so much and then once my children were in college, I needed to work and I worked full-time.”
After his military duty in the Air Force, Herman retired at 37 and became a Sears manager. He had lied about his age to join the military when he was 16. Herman became a Craven County magistrate and during his 24 years he was transferred to New Bern, so the couple moved to Trent Woods.
The writing bug was still there, and Flora knew exactly what she wanted to write about —her mother. Selena Davenport lived from the mountains to the coast and along the way she was published in what later became Our State magazine.
“She had such an interesting life,” Flora said. “I’ve still got hand-written manuscripts that she wrote.”
Armed with background, memories, stories and research, Flora began to write about her mother. The results have been three award-winning books, with a fourth in the works. They combine fiction with the reality of her mother’s life.
The books include “Singer of an Empty Day,” “Cotton Mill Girl” and her latest, “The Village —Searching for Answers in a Cotton Mill Town.”
All three have won the Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award from the N.C. Society of Historians.
Her mother was born and spent her early years in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where her family “made a living off the land” as sharecroppers.
The lure of regular wages brought the family to the Piedmont mill town of Gastonia, where Selena was put to work in the mills when she was just 12. There were no labor laws in the early 1900s and she was not the only child working at Loray Mill, a huge facility that later became Firestone Textiles and was touted as the largest mill under one roof in the world. She worked there until she was 16.
After her mother died, Selena was basically orphaned, boarded with a family and when they relocated to Roanoke Rapids in 1919, she went along. She worked some in mills there and later married and had her family of four, including Flora.
Flora’s first book “Singer” was about her mother’s days in the mountains. She calls it “the book she (mother) would have written.”
It was a success, but left questions with readers, which Flora has encountered with each new book.
“Folks were saying, ‘well, what happened to her then?” she recalled.
So, she returned to writing and produced “Cotton Mill Girl,” which chronicles her mother’s years in Gastonia.
Again, the readers asked “What happened next?”
That brought along the latest, “The Village,” which is about her mother in Roanoke Rapids. This book chronicles Selena’s life through having her fourth child. It also includes another very special woman in their lives — Lucille Smith.
“The message is that someone comes into their life. It is a woman who lives directly across the street,” Flora said of Lucille. “She is an old maid, very educated, very into cultural things. She gets my mother interested in things that she has never been interested in before.”
Selena became an expert with flower arranging, joined a garden club and rose to president and even taught workshops and judged flower shows.
But, Lucille didn’t limit her cultural umbrella.
“She was like a second mother to me,” Flora said. “She encouraged the children on our block to stay in school, not go to work in the mill, which was what they were expected to do. She encouraged them to finish their education.”
Lucille’s efforts paid off.
Many of the children went on to college. Two became ministers and one became a doctor.
“No one in our block — about 33 children when she was there —went to work in the mill,” Flora said. “She called us ‘My Gang’ and we called her Ms. Smith. We did not call her Ms. Lucille.”
Lucille later moved on to New York and then to her home state of Louisiana, but she sent many cards and letters — a collection of which Flora keeps in a fire-proof box.
They are the crux of the fourth book, “Letters from Lucille.”
Flora hasn’t rested on her laurels or taken her talent for granted. She is taking creative writing in a class at the West New Bern Recreation Center for inspiration.
“There are some very, very good writers in that class,” she said. The group meets from noon to 3 p.m. each Friday.
Charlie Hall is a reporter for the New Bern Sun Journal.