Nora Peacock
Role in Story: Mother of Florence, whose attempted suicide wreaks havoc one Florence’s world.
Occupation: Middle School Teacher
Physical Description: Rugged exterior, tough but feminine. 5’1” brunette. Not heavy-set, with a slight pot belly from pregnancy. Wears pants and dresses. Loves to sew and quilt.
Personality: Stubborn. Set in her ways. Has the last word. Her way or the highway. A teacher. A disciplinarian. A do-it-yourself type.
Habits/Mannerisms: Hates to be alone. Comfortable when kept busy. Likes canning peaches and making cobbler. Enjoys her time at the sewing machine, making clothes or quilts. Reads the Bible, the Bible, the Bible. Sings in the Church Choir.
Background: From East Texas farming families.
Internal Conflicts: Her father died when she was young and her mother remarried. Her mother died when she was 42, which seemed to be harder than when her father died. Had to care for her Chorea ridden sister. Lost her money when the First State Bank of Snyder closed. Witnessed some of the worst storms in the Dust Bowl period.
External Conflicts: Pregnancy took it’s toll on Nora. She had to get a hysterectomy, which caused an hormonal imbalance leaving her temporarily blind. Distrusted doctors so much that she removed her own wisdom teeth.
Notes:
It was September of 1929 when Nora Sweeney stepped out of the black Model-T
Ford in front of the thirteen-room boarding house near Texas Technological College
in Lubbock, Texas. The farmer’s daughter had fled the fields of her father’s farm; a
new breed of woman aspiring to validate herself as the first college graduate in her
family, a teacher and a self-made woman. The waxy optimism cushioned the ground
under her feet and destiny fertilized her path.
The bounty of the roaring twenties would soon grow scarce; the result would calcify her
blossoming caliche of eighteen years into a rigid blanket of doubt. The discipline she
developed from her paternal agricultural roots would oxidize when met with her
maternal boiling waters of the Southern Baptist Convention, would be confirmed by the
stock market Crash and the Dirty Thirties that followed. She stomached the foul taste of
the Great Depression when she lost a year of savings after the First State Bank & Trust
Co went bankrupt and subsequently closed. In West Texas, the financial crisis was
followed by an array of sand storms evacuating the land of any useful soil or sunlight.
The incessant sand storms of the Dust Bowl depleted the farmland of any nutrients and
became so prevalent that many residents grew accustomed to the idea that the dust
caused the depression. By 1935, she had graduated and was working as a teacher near
Snyder, Texas. The culmination of the storms occurred in 1935, on Black Sunday in
April, when a tidal wave of topsoil chased her and her family down the highway until it
swallowed their car, forcing them to spend the bone chilling night in that tin can of a car.
Her mother caught pneumonia from the inhalation of dust and severely cold
temperatures. The family returned home in horror to find that her condition was
deteriorating rapidly and she died within days of their return.
The storm was not over yet for Nora; the greedy sooty fog that took the life of her mother was changing patterns again and setting its sights on her sister. A few months after her mother’s death, her sister began to have trouble swallowing. Her father immediately suspected the cause as over inhalation of the dust, but it wasn’t until she began dropping things, slurring her speech and refusing to eat that his suspicions subsided. Several doctors evaluated her and they all reached the same prognosis, she was suffering from Huntington’s disease and would spend her days in disarray and discomfort. Nora was no stranger to suffering or discipline and willingly spent her days and nights caring for her younger sister as she writhed and moaned until her eventual passing a year later.
The tumult of her life prior to completing her college education did not defeat her will to achieve what all devout Southern Baptist women desire: education, marriage and family. She graduated Texas Technological College in 1934, having majored in English and Spanish. Shortly thereafter, she accepted a clerk position at the Lamesa Cotton Gin. The focused and diligent demeanor of the gin’s assistant manager, James Peacock, left a remarkable impression on her. She caught his eye as well and it wasn’t long before the two were dating. They married in 1937 and began a life in Lamesa together. The end of 1939 was both a financial and domestic blessing for the Peacock’s when James was promoted to head manager and Nora gave birth to their her first child, a girl in 1939, whom they named Florence. In 1941, she bore a son and named him William.
The lack of extreme weather for the next decade was a well-earned relief to Nora and she was able to tend to her seedlings, as she endearingly referred to them. She was concerned that they were undersized at birth, but relieved at their active demeanor nonetheless. The farmer’s daughter in her loved the metaphorical garden that she envisioned in her children. William was one of those sun-loving perennials who savored the company of fellow plants, with whom he would dance and sway to the direction of the light, quickly tire and grow wilt once placed indoors. Florence, on the other hand, was a classic specimen of Gossypium hirsutum, that simple downy staple of a fiber whose existence became the lamb of civilizations.