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By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

Mrs. Eugenia Wilson was my fourth grade teacher at Davis School in Davisville, Fla. during the 1956-57 school year. She was a sweet, kindly teacher and I do not remember anything negative about her. She never got mad or raised her voice and never spanked anybody. Mrs. Wilson told me years later that she did not retire from teaching, but had actually only taught full time for a few years. That made me feel special and lucky to know that I got her in one of those few years of her teaching career. I often saw Ms. Wilson round and about Atmore in later years and she was always a delight to visit with.
Mrs. Wilson’s husband was a Farm Bureau agent. He drove a gray Plymouth with a big rotating Farm Bureau sign on top. His name was Gene, which I deduced was a derivative of “Eugene,” which was almost the same as his wife’s first name of Eugenia. Even as a child, I thought that was a cute coincidence. Mr. Wilson was a handsome man with a thick headful of dark, curly hair. He often stopped by the schoolhouse to visit with his wife. Mrs. Wilson was a thin, attractive, elegantly dressed woman too. I thought they made a handsome couple. Mrs. Wilson was one of those rare people who got even more attractive as she got older.
She had a son named David, who was one year ahead of me in school. David was very smart and he was a Boy Scout. Sometimes he gave presentations to the other classes on things he had learned in the Boy Scouts. He wore his Scout uniform when he did this. It was so cool! I was inspired by David’s presentations and I wanted to be in the Boy Scouts too, but my father said the Boy Scouts was mostly for city boys, not for country boys like me. Daddy said I didn’t need to know how to build a fire with stones and sticks because we had matches at our house. It made sense at the time, but I later thought about it and realized that Daddy probably didn’t have the money to buy the uniforms. There were five boys in my family and if one of us got to wear a Boy Scout uniform, I suppose the rest of us would have wanted one too. That could’ve been pretty costly for poor folks like us. Daddy only made $50 a week in those days and it took a lot of beans and cornbread to feed a family of eight.
When my mother had had her first child on September 12, 1945, at the tender age of 16, she desperately hoped for a baby girl, but it was not to be. In those days, people did not know what sex the baby would be until it actually arrived. Consequently, Mama had pre-named her first baby girl Sandra Louise. When the newborn turned out to be a boy, his name was quickly changed to Ronald Wayne. He was called Ronnie. Ronnie had one blue eye and one green eye.
Though happy with her new baby boy, Mama held fast to her hope for a baby daughter. She pre-named her second child Sandra Louise as well. She liked that name. When that child turned out to be Yours Truly on October 27, 1947, she named him Lloyd Clark. Next came Phillip Larry (January 14, 1950), then Gregory Lamar (March 17, 1952), then Avis Armold (December 5, 1954). Mama had pre-named every single one of us Sandra Louise, her favorite girl’s name. By the time the sixth child arrived on December 21, 1956, Mama had pretty much given up all hope of having a baby girl. She was happy as could be with her five little boys. The new boy, her sixth child, was to be named Leroy, after one of Mama’s favorite cousins, Leroy Tullis. When our baby sister arrived instead, it surprised us all. Mama was so excited that her mind went completely blank on a girl’s name. Sandra Louise did not seem to fit anymore.
Returning to Mrs. Wilson, she had a daughter that year named Susan, who was in the First Grade class at Davis School with my younger brother, Phillip. Phillip had a romantic crush on Susan Wilson that year. He was also sweet on another little girl in his First Grade class named Wynelle Miller. Phillip could not say for sure, however, which of these pretty little girls he liked best. One day it was one; the next day it was the other.
And so, when our little sister was born, Phillip suggested to Mama that we name her Susan, after Susan Wilson. Or maybe Wynelle, after Wynelle Miller. Susan! Wynelle! Wynelle! Susan! Phillip just couldn’t decide.
“Well, why don’t we just name her after both of them?” Mama suggested. And that’s what Phillip and Mama did. They named our new baby sister Susan Wynelle. I don’t know if that meant Phillip liked Susan Wilson better than he did Wynelle Miller, or if the combination just rolled off the tongue better that way. Whatever! Our sister has always been known commonly as simply Susan.
The story of the naming of the Albritton family’s sixth child quickly became common knowledge among the Davis School teacher staff and student body. The student population at the little white wood-frame school was only about a hundred from First to Sixth grade. On practically every occasion that I encountered Mrs. Wilson in the ensuing years, she never failed to share this story with me, i.e., “Do you know how your sister got her name?” Before I culd answer, she would tell me the whole story from beginning to end. It was our personal connection and I felt closer to Mrs. Wilson because of it. It was almost as if we were related.
I would have been saddened to hear of the death of such a special person as Mrs. Eugenia Wilson on the morning of February 27, 2004 under any circumstances. The news that she died a violent death at the hands of some unknown intruder felt truly tragic to me. She had been beaten to death in her home. It was a sad day for Atmore and for Lloyd Albritton. I was living in another state at the time of the event and only heard of it through the grapevine.
I returned to my hometown of Atmore in the winter of 2008. In the fall of 2022, I felt prompted to make some investigative inquiries into the death of Eugenia Wilson some 18 years earlier. I discovered that no one had ever been charged with her brutal murder. Atmore Police Department investigative reports on the case have never been released, not even to family members, who remain vexed and traumatized by her death even these many years later.
A few years ago my brother, Phillip, attended a class reunion held in Atmore. Phillip attended along with former Davis School classmates Susan Wilson (daughter of Eugenia) and Wynelle Miller. As they shared fond memories of their school days the story of how my sister got her name came up and the three remembered that one of their former teachers and close friend of Susan’s mother, Ms. Addie Belle Copeland, was currently a patient in the local nursing home suffering with dementia. They decided to pay Ms. Copeland a visit.
Unfortunately, Ms. Copeland could not remember any of them. As she struggled to remember these three former First Grade students standing at her bedside, suddenly her eyes lit up and she turned her head and looked at them. ‘But, I do remember,” she whispered hoarsely, “a story about a little boy who was in love with two little girls; and when his sister was born he named her after those two little girls.”
That very same little boy and those two very same little girls looked at one another and marveled as tears ran down their cheeks. It was a story worth remembering.