From the crest of the hill, as far as the eye can see, are rolling hills with a backdrop of trees. Fields are divided by fence rows, and beyond that, though out of sight, is the Big Black River. A gravel lane crosses a cattle gap and winds down the hill to a white farmhouse, an inviting porch stretching across the front. Here and there are rustic barns and other outbuildings.

It is appropriately called Hillview, the Jones farm in northeast Warren County. Probably not much has changed since the first time Zula Jones saw it about 64 years ago.

“I came out here because I married Henry,” she said. Zula was a Davidson and grew up near Delhi, La. Her mother died when she was 2, her father when she was 6, and she and her sister went to live with relatives out on a gravel road north of Delhi, attended Cypress Bayou School, then went into Delhi.

She came to Vicksburg when she was 18, the day she graduated from high school, packing her belongings in a borrowed suitcase and a cardboard box and buying a bus ticket with the little bit of money she had been given for graduation.

Zula had a sister here, and she moved in with her and got a job as a telephone operator, back “when you said ‘number, please. Thank you, I’ll ring. And the line is busy.’”

There were times when customers were insulting — one once told Zula, “You’re crazy” — so you just plugged them in to the supervisor. Once, one of her friends called and asked her for a date, and she had hardly said “OK” when Miss Loretta, the supervisor, summoned her to the office and told her, “Miss Davidson, we do not make appointments from the switchboard.”

Zula rented a room on Clay Street from Mrs. Tom Birdsong, “Cousin Mary Lou” to the Henry family. She went to a funeral out near Rawhide, in northeast Warren County, and had an idea. Was Zula dating anybody? No? Well, neither was Henry Jones. Would Zula be interested? Yes, and so would Henry.

“You should have heard the buildup she gave me about Henry,” Zula said, and the matchmaker wrote him, “two things I’ve been promising to get you — a girlfriend and a dog,” and then, Zula said, “she devoted a whole page to the dog, barely mentioning me.”

It turned out Henry really wasn’t interested in the dog, but he wanted to meet Zula. Cousin Mary Lou, Zula said, “suggested a movie for us to go and see, then said, ‘You’re on your own from here on.’”

They were married about six months later in a small wedding at the First Baptist Church on Sept. 1, 1947. After a honeymoon in Arkansas, they settled down in the house at Hillview.

But they weren’t alone: “There were four adults already living in this house,” Zula said. There was Mrs. Jones, the former Anna Henry; her two brothers, Uncle Phil and Uncle Hub; and Henry. And Henry was an only child, Mrs. Jones’ son, and Zula had married him.

It wasn’t the best situation, Zula said, stating simply, “We were different, very different,” adding, “it was hard for two women to work together in the same kitchen.”

Mrs. Jones had gone to college, studied art and became a teacher, first at the one-teacher school near the house, then rode sidesaddle to the school on Dillon Ridge.

Zula never had been a city girl. But, Henry reminded her, if she wanted to go back to Vicksburg she’d have to learn to drive. She laughed about the question posed by her sister in Vicksburg when she and Henry married: “Does the bus run past your house?”

Hillview might have been remote in some ways, but it had a connection rare in rural areas — a telephone, in fact, two. It was a unique system established about 1910 — a Farmers Line from the Bolton exchange. The lines fanned out in all directions for two miles, then it was up to the individual farmers to maintain them. There were as many as 10 families on a line, and the service cost about $2 or $3 a month. Every household had a certain ring.

Of course, everyone would pick up when they heard the ring, and Zula recall stories she heard from the family about Uncle Ike Henry, who would spread rumors just for fun, telling someone on the phone “that a band was going to be playing somewhere at midnight or that Bilbo’s plane was going to land nearby at noon.” It left a lot of neighbors either puzzled or disappointed, or both.

The local phone system, which connected the Henry relatives, was a private loop, operated by a battery, and turning the crank would be the generator.

Edwards was only 14 miles away, less than half the distance to Vicksburg, and for 27 years the family did their banking, bought their groceries and went to church in Edwards until the county closed the Askew’s Ferry Bridge. Zula still laughs about the county board of supervisors who had an official ribbon-cutting, complete with photos, closing the bridge.

At Hillview, they raised cattle, goats, sheep, cows, hogs, row crops of cotton and corn, and they gardened. Zula had her hands full, raising lots of vegetables, canning and freezing them — and raising five children.

First, there were just Anna Rebecca, called Annaree, and Phillip. Then came Dewey, Emmett and Glen. For their mother, “there was no spare time.”

She remembers the job of clothing them: “You start out with school opening, then comes along winter, then Christmas. Oh, boy! Henry thought I spent all the money on the children, but those were difficult times.” In later years, she dreamed that she forgot to get a jacket for Dewey and shoes for Glen, “though they never went without.” Once, feeling really depressed, she ran into Mary Lyerly Duval, a Henry relative who said, “I can tell you what’s wrong with you,” named the seasons, and said,“You’re feeling like there isn’t enough money to go around.”

Being a seamstress helped, for she made all her clothes and those for Annaree, even a coat and a hat, and everybody envied her clothes. “But, you know what? When she got to be a senior, she wanted some store-bought clothes!” She also took a white linen suit that Henry never wore, took it apart and made it into a suit for Phillip. The coat wasn’t a lot of problem, she said, “But, oh, the pants! When I got through, I thought it looked beautiful. Phil tried it on, and guess what? ‘Mama, something’s wrong.’ The pockets were in backwards. I never made another pair of pants.”

She recalls another sewing experience, or knitting, when she made a pair of gloves for Henry for Christmas not long after they married. She thought they looked nice, and so did Henry, “but they were for the same hand. That was the end of that.”

Though Zula married into the family, she knows most of the history of her in-laws — the Henry, Jones and Young families, some of whom migrated from North Carolina in the 1830s. Henry’s grandfather was a 16-year-old member of Harvey’s Scouts, a Confederate unit out of Madison County. Not far from the house occurred the Battle of Hill’s Plantation in June 1863, a Southern victory in which 24 Yankees were killed. When someone told Zula they were buried in the family grave yard, she said, “Oh, no! Uncle Hub would turn over in his grave!” They were really just outside the cemetery and were moved to Vicksburg in later years.

Uncle Hub — Herbert Hubbert Henry — played the trumpet, tuned pianos, repaired clocks and watches, and had been blind since he was a youth. Once, when the power went off and the family was in the middle of supper, Zula said Henry commented, “Uncle Hub’s the only one who knows how to finish eating.”

Henry Jones had a dry wit, talked slowly, but made note of all that was going on. He graduated from Oak Ridge High School and worked his way through Mississippi State with a degree in agricultural engineering in 1935. He taught at Clemson University in South Carolina until 1941, when he came home to run the farm. He was turned down for service in World War II because he had a leaky heart valve, though Zula thinks he probably outlived all those doctors (He died at 94).

“He was always a homebody,” Zula said. “Lord, he hated to go off to college. Though he took lessons to play bridge and also ballroom dancing, he loved to farm. He didn’t even want to change clothes to go to town.”

He worked in soil conservation at the Farm Bureau. He said paydays were only once a year — when the crops were in — and he told his children, “You’ll not make a lot of money, but you’ll make a living if you manage right.” Zula becomes a little emotional when she remembers that he tried to teach them, “This land, this soil — it’s not ours. We’re to be good stewards of it.”

He loved the outdoors and hunting, and Zula said when she went to the camp with him the first time, and they were going to go walking in the woods, she asked him not to take his gun “because I didn’t think I could bear to see him shoot a deer. Those hunters thought I had lost my mind.” Later, when Henry got her breakfast and took it to their quarters, the other men told him, “Henry, you’re starting something.”

One of the stories she tells is of how Henry could kill a rattlesnake with just one strategically placed whop.

When he got old, he was walking in the woods one day with one of his hired help. He saw a snake and gave a stick to the other man with orders to kill it. The man looked at the stick, then at the snake, and told Henry, “Mr. Jones, this stick’s not long enough.”

Zula has taught Sunday school for years, both children and adults, and is a member of Ridgeway Baptist Church. One little girl in her class, while visiting her at Hillview, thought the cows were beautiful and asked, “What do you do with them?” Zula explained that she sold them, “and I wondered what she thought the next time she ate a hamburger.” Another child said, “Mrs. Jones, why is your car always so dirty?”

And Zula told him, “Well, it’s either dusty or muddy, whichever the weather is,” for it’s many a mile to the blacktop.

Zula has a philosophy that, “In life, when something isn’t right, I always have this vision that something is going to be better.”

She spends a lot of her time putting together family albums of pictures and family history for the grandchildren (there are seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren) “and none of them are named Zula.”

Sometimes she can’t remember things and wonders, “What’s the matter with me — other than I’m getting old — 83, but closer to 84 than 83. Time is marching on. But a year is just a year.”

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.