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Sisters
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offered before, but not enough for your life’s work.”
“We just had a short time and practically had to give our place to the first person who offered and go ahead and move,” Della said of her own home.
“One lady, Blue Davis, from Gainesville, wouldn’t leave her house and rode out on the front porch in her rocking chair,” said Della laughing. “She said she wouldn't leave and she didn’t. They had to move her.”
“We were all born at home except our youngest brother,” said Della, “fie was the only one that Mama went to the hospital for ... back then you didn’t run to the doctor for every little thing.”
Ruby was the baby girl of the family and “everyone called me baby sister,” she said.
“But I was my daddy’s favorite,” said Della. “He used to take me with him. When I was about eight years old he took me floundering.”
Both women have found memories of their parents Willie and Pearl Hover, and their life in Napoleon, a life that for many would sound like a pretty picture book, full of the closeness of family and friends, and community. Indeed, the kind of life shared by many of the residents in the area.
Candy pulling parties, hay rides, fish fries, and camp outs with pots of gumbo made with fresh caught crabs are all a
part of the picture book memories. Della walked around the corner to attend the old Napoleon school. Why she even remembers riding in a surrey with the fringe on top, and her parents horse and wagon that was the family's transportation.
Their mother Pearl was a relative newcomer, aYriving in the area a month before she was born, by horse and wagon from points north (Minnesota and New York), Della said. She was bom in Nicholson. Willie and Pearl celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Napoleon. Willie died in 1977 and Pearl in 1995.
The women remember their father as a pleasant man who was always making them laugh. Ruby was the cook of the family and remembers that her father always loved her cooking. Della remembers a joke lie made about her small homemade biscuits. “One bite and you have a quarter moon he would say, another bite and you have a total eclipse.”
Their mother, they remember as being loved by everyone.
“Once just before she died a man we know told her that if she lived to be 100 he would give her the biggest party slie had ever had,” said Ruby. “But
I	said that it would have to be some party because for as far back as I can remember, the house would be full of people on Mama’s birthday. You could look out the front door
and see people lined up bringing presents.”
The family laughed a lot, but they worked a lot too. There were cows to milk and let out in the pasture, then they had to be rounded up in the evening. There was wood to chop for the cook stove and for heating.
“I never saw a gas stove till
I	was 16,” said Ruby.
And every Monday was wash day, wliich Della doesn't remember as the good old days.
“I didn't like all that scrubbing on the wash boards,” she said.
And of course there was the cooking for their large family, the extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins that lived all up and down the road, and various friends who were always at dinner.
“It was family all around,” said Ruby. “And on Sunday there were visiting ministers who would come and preach from the seminary ... we had a preacher at our house for dinner every Sunday. I started doing the cooking when I was eleven.”
When Ruby married she moved away to New Orleans. Della stayed behind with her first husband Freeland Reynolds, and later when he passed away her second husband, Rev. J. R. Boutwell, who was a pastor at the Ttulle Skin Baptist Church for many years. Both men are buried in the cemetery at Napoleon. In between them a
place wraits for Della and when it is her time she will be buried there, at home once again, surrounded by family and friends.
For now the two sisters spend many of their days working in the family business in Pearlington, Loveccliio’s Restaurant. The restaurant is open several days a week but the main business is the stuffed artichokes that the women make themselves and send out across the area to other restaurants and stores. And as is traditional with them, other family members work to help.
“We were a close knit family then, and we are still a close knit family,” said Ruby.
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