| Notes |
- General Notes: Info from Rachel Johnson Rigby.
Note from Rex Everage, her brother.
"She grew up with the name Hilda, and that was the name by which the family called her until after she was married to Charles. Then when she and Charles planned a long vacation in Mexico, she needed a copy of her birth certificate for a visa. There was no record of a Hilda Everage born in Covington County on August 07, 1925, but there was a record of a Lilla Rebekka [sic] born on the same day to Judge C. and Harlie V. Everage. Obviously, that had to be Hilda. She was quite surprised at her "new" identity and thenceforth insisted on being called Lilla or Becky.
She couldn't understand why we didn't take her identity crisis more seriously, though she herself sometimes laughed at it. The name on the birth certificate, it turned out, was the one that Mother had desired, with old Dr. Wood's misspelling. Mother had thought that the first child, being a girl, should perpetuate the names of the grandmothers, Rebecca Hutcheson and Lillie Everage, thus Lillie Rebecca. Daddy liked the name Hilda. Mother and everybody else, not ever checking the birth certificate, assumed that Daddy had had his way with the name. Still, the older members of the family recalled, Daddy sometimes called her Becky.
Perhaps he knew all along. We became fairly accustomed to calling her Becky, though sometimes I slipped back into Hilda--the name I prefer, though my preference is of no account in such a matter. During all the time of her illness and death, I didn't shed a tear. Since then--as now--I've shed plenty. As some poet wrote, "The dead have ways of mingling in the uses/Of life they leave behind . . . ." Becky was the most intelligent of us all--a good match for Charles in that respect--and had they both pursued a college education, there's no limit to what they might have made of themselves. She was very witty, and had a wry, an ironic, sense of humor, which she rather indiscriminately employed on whoever was closest to hand, though seldom offending anyone (except Mother). And she loved a good belly laugh, too.
Becky was a passionate liberal, a yellow-dog Democrat, with a penetrating understanding of politics. She studied all sides of an issue; so she understood the opposition very well indeed. She had the facts at her command. Even during her last illness, before her desperate move back to Alabama, whenever I'd enter her hospital room in Houston, she'd be surrounded by newspapers and news magazines in disarray all over her bed, though Becky was isolated in that tin box of a house trailer in that treeless semidried swamp south of Houston-- the most awful place on earth for human habitation--she was the most family oriented person I ever knew (except for "Aunt" Carlee). I don't know why she didn't visit us more often. Whenever she did return to Andalusia, she made it a point to see all the relatives she could. Some of Daddy's people she saw more often than I, though I live only an hour from them. Why didn't her own child and grandchildren take after her in this regard? After she moved to Florala, she told me that she prayed for only one thing: not that she be cured of her cancer, but that she would be well enough that first Christmas to cook a big traditional dinner, with all the trimmings, and have the whole family around her to celebrate one last time. Well, God denied her wish. It breaks my heart to remember that. Well, let me end this little trip down Memory Lane."
-- Rex Everage, March 15, 2000
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1925 - 1993 (67 years)