A Gator-Wrestling Woman

GWM: Could you describe your grandmother, Elizabeth Bowens, wrestling alligators?

 

Joann Bowens Huger: “My grandmother lived over in the Red Top community and used to catch alligators around here. She’d skin them and sell the hides and meat. Back then, people loved alligator meat.

 

Grandmother was short and of medium build, and mean and strict. She had a big hook and would dive in the ponds and swamps, go down in the alligators’ dens or holes, and snag them with that hook. She didn’t use bait. Just that big hook. I heard she’d wrestle them underwater and hook them.

 

One time she and my Granddad were out in the boat together. She told him that the first head that broke the water’s surface to hit it with his paddle. Instead of the alligator’s, it was hers that popped up, so he knocked her in the head.

 

Richmond Bowens, her relative, adds: “Elizabeth Bowens wrestled alligators in the ponds and phosphate mining cuts around Drayton Hall. She’d charge admission to people who’d come out and watch from the pond’s edge as she hunted gators by hand.”

 

Joann: “She did a lot of other things. For example, she used to cut wood, and back in those days, they’d tie the wood up in a bundle, put it on their head, and tote it. They used the wood for heat and to cook meals on a wood stove. They had a big iron pot where you’d boil your clothes and sterilize them. In those pots, they made lye soap, and you bathed with lye soap. That iron pot, that’s what they used to use back in those days.”