“There’s the man I’m going to marry,” Ella told her sister Sudie back in 1912, as she gazed across the church and pointed to the tall, dark, and handsome Everett McKelva.
“You can’t!” insisted Sudie. “He’s blind!” To think---an 18-year-old girl wanted to spend the rest of her life with a visually-impaired husband. Love is blind, indeed.
Born in 1884, Everett McKelva was a hard-working and adventuresome man and he found work stringing telegraph line in Louisiana. While there, he joined a posse to hunt down anescaped fugitive near Shreveport. Being caught in the gunfire was not part of his plan.
Surrounded in a corral, the bad guy fired shots and then escaped. Buckshot, along with splinters from the wooden corral, permanently destroyed Everett’s eyesight and his hearing in one ear. Assuming that Everett was dead, the remaining members of the posse left him and chased the jailbird.
But Everett survived . . . and thrived. The Texas School for the Blind provided him with social enrichment and trade skills. There, he learned to make mattresses and brooms, and those mattress masteries continue to serve Fannin County at McKelva-Morris Mattress Factory in Bonham.
Little did Everett know when he and his brother Luther attended church that day in 1912 that Ella McDaniel, an indentured servant of the 19th Century, would catch his heart, rather than his eye. Family approval wasn’t a given---Ella’s family doubted she’d have a future with a blind man, and Everett’s folks questioned the McDaniel family’s meager resources.
Love is like the wind, though---you can’t see it, but you can feel it. Combine a footed glass fruit bowl (see photo), two hearts made into one, and an ingenious determination to kindle a love, and you have a romance in bloom. With Luther’s help in reading and writing, Everett and Ella left secret love notes for each other in a glass bowl thatnestled high in the fork of a tree.
On August 11, 1912, Luther McKelva drove Everett, Ella May, and their glass bowl to Oklahoma, where Ella and Everett were married. The couple returned to Bonham and set up housekeeping, making mattresses in exchange for their rent. In love forever, the McKelva team worked side by side for over four decades.
Etta James sang it best:
Love letters straight from your heart
Keep us so near while apart
I’m not alone in the night
When I can have all the love you write
I memorize every line
And I kiss the name that you sign
And darling, then I read again right from the start
Love letters straight from your heart
Cindy Baker Burnett