Essie on her 90th birthday.
Her father, she said, was a "full-blooded Irishman"--who unaccountably, I thought, had disembarked in Indian Territory, the Choctaw Nation, in the 1880s. He was, I figured out from censuses, a Scot, born in Arkansas from parents from Perry, Tennessee--typical Scotch-Irish. He was illiterate. Before meals he said grace in Choctaw, the language of his mother-in-law.
Essie looks Indian, but when she was young she was red-headed, like her white father.
