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leased out the plantation and returned to his family in Iowa. His first child, my grandfather, was born in 1867 and given the middle name Holliday in honor of his Mississippi friend.
    T. Holl was raised in Ottumwa and grew prosperous running his father’s hardware store and tinning business. He married a local girl named Nettie, with whom he had four children, but Nettie’s health was precarious. So he moved the family down to his father’s Mississippi plantation to take advantage of the warmer weather. Sadly, Nettie didn’t survive, and he was left a widower with young children to raise.
    Two years later, he saw my grandmother, Elizabeth Holliday, sitting across the aisle from him at a Methodist prayer meeting in Canton. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” he said. She was also the granddaughter of his father’s Confederate friend, Isaac Newton Holliday, T-Holl’s namesake. Elizabeth was fifteen years younger than her new admirer. She had just returned home after being away for a few years teaching school and then attending business college in Jackson. She wore her long, strawberry blond hair rolled up in a bun, just like I do now. (I am her namesake; I inherited her coloring, and was always told I favored her. I treasured this comparison because my grandmother was so loving and kind.) T. Holl fell for Elizabeth instantly. She was taken with him, too, describing him as “the cutest gray-haired man.” She also liked to say he was the second Yankee she had met in her life—“and the first one was crazy.”
    In a way, Elizabeth and T. Holl’s marriage was born out of the deep and unusual friendship of two men—his father and her grandfather—who had fought on different sides in a terrible war. The spirit of civility and grace followed them all their lives. Their first child, born in 1907, was named after Elizabeth’s father, Joseph. They nicknamed him Bud.
    But all was not civil in Mississippi. According to family legend, T. Holl was despised as a Yankee carpetbagger by a lot of the white folks around Canton, and he had to carry a pistol in his belt for protection. He eventually persuaded his young wife to move back to Ottumwa with him. Once again, he prospered in the hardware and tin business, and Elizabeth bore him a daughter named Elizabeth, whom they called Sis, or Spilly. But after four years of cold northern winters, T. Holl’s health began to suffer, and his doctor advised him to move to a warmer climate. He chose the rustic lower valley of the Rio Grande, where, in 1912, he bought his first section of land seven miles outside of the small town of Mission, near McAllen. When the family arrived, Mission was little more than a railroad stop surrounded by mesquite and huisache brush.
    In those days Pancho Villa was roaming the Mexican border, terrorizing Texas settlers. Although Villa never quite reached Mission, he came close enough. Once Papa was showing some property in his Model T, and a bullet went right through his hat, missing his head by a hair. It was a wild time in the valley. Gangs of thieves would break into homes while the owners were off at church. The outlaws would pile the valuables on the bed and make bundles out of the blankets and sheets to carry off the loot.
    It was a hardship for Elizabeth, living on the remote, primitive ranch while she was pregnant with their third child. Papa installed, at great expense, a telephone line from town, so that she could call the doctor when her time came to deliver. But when she went into labor, the doctor couldn’t be found anyway. She gave birth to my uncle Newton right on the ranch, with help from her visiting brother-in-law, who happened to be a physician.
    As soon as the infant was old enough to travel, she took baby Newton and the older children on the train back home to Mississippi. From there she sent her husband a letter, refusing to return until she had a place to live in town. T-Holl found a house in Mission the next day.