Now, more than 60 years later, former conjoined twins Lillian Matthews-Hollins and Linda Matthews-Wilson said they are still finding out things about their miraculous birth and each other that they never knew.
The two, who were the subject of international attention after their birth and subsequent separation in the 1950s, admittedly talk to each other several times every day, and they celebrated their 63rd birthdays in September.
And despite their frequent phone visitations, at least two new discoveries were made during a recent interview.
To her amazement, Linda found out that Lillian can write equally well with either hand.
“I’m actually ambidextrous,” Lillian said.
Seeing the astonishment on her sister’s face, she continued, “Oh my gosh, you didn’t know? That’s (right hand) all I wrote with when I was teaching,” she said.
Astonished, Linda responded, “I didn’t know that, you never told me that.”
It appears that growing up, Lillian was left-handed, whereas, Linda was right-handed. Lillian, who is now a retired educator, explained that writing left-handed on the classroom chalkboards was awkward, so she learned to write with her right hand. “Actually my right hand is better than my left,” she said.
Linda also had a shocker of her own, disclosing that she had received several marriage proposals while in high school and college, something that Lillian was unaware of, “Oh my gosh, I’m learning something new. Who? Was he serious?” Lillian asked.
The sisters have always been extremely close and they are delighted that their husbands have never had an issue with their bond.
“Our husbands are great,” Linda said, noting that there is never any complaining about the amount of time they spend on the phone. “And my husband has never gotten us confused,” she said.
Lillian however, said her husband admitted to getting them confused only one time, and only for “half of a second” while they were dating.
The twins have five children between the two of them and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren even though they were told at an early age that they would not be able to have children.
Linda said she remembers posing that question to her mother who gave her a typical response, “Why y’all want to know that, what y’all tryin’ to do?”
Linda asserted that they were simply curious because other people had raised the question to them and because neither of them have a navel; it had to be removed early on. The two also share a liver. Lillian has one-fourth of it and Linda has the other three-fourths.
When asked what it was like growing up, the twins said their most leading recollection was that of being a conversation piece wherever they went. Linda said people identified them as the “Siamese twins” during those earlier years, however, later the phrase, “conjoined twins,” was deemed more appropriate.
When they were younger, the twins said they more closely resembled each other than they do now.
“Everybody knew we were twins,” Linda said, however when they were introduced to new people their mother, Missouri Matthews, would always remark, “You know they were joined together?”
Linda said that was her favorite phrase.
Elementary school presented some unique challenges for the girls. They remember having to show people their incisions.
“Other people would pull our dresses up so they could look at our scar. Teachers would take us in the back of the classroom and pull our dresses up so that whoever was visiting could see our scars.”
Reflecting on those times, both agree that those kinds of things would not happen today.
“And I look at that now and say, abuse! lawsuit… really! Think about it, it wouldn’t happen today,” Linda said.
Lillian added that it wasn’t just the teachers at school, “Mama use to do the same thing.”
She said that whenever there were visiting doctors or nurses who stopped by, they had a similar occurrence at home.
“We’d have to go in the back, get in the bed, lie down and they would cover us up and show our scars, then talk doctor talk and nurse talk over us while we lay there, looking at each other like…What?” Lillian said.
Looking back, the two called the episodes disturbing,
“We didn’t like it then, we just didn’t understand why we didn’t like it, but we just knew we didn’t like having to be on parade all of the time,” said Linda.
The conjoined twins were featured in many publications from medical journals and reports to local newspapers and national magazines.
The women said although the show and tell at school dwindled by the time they reached second grade, their mom continued to present them to people, they described as “mostly medical people passing through, who were aware that we lived in Indianola, Mississippi,” until they were almost in high school.
Linda and Lillian said that although their brothers and sisters thought them privileged because of the attention and notoriety, they can rest assured that their mother didn’t cut them any slack.
“The only time she did was if we said our stomach was hurting. So, we played that stomachache card whenever we could.”
The sisters said that when they came home from the hospital only their mother and father were allowed to hold them. They were separated at five-and-a-half weeks and then had to go back a few months later. She said their mom said their skin was so thin they could see their intestines.
However, the twins maintain that they still received the same number of “whippings” as their siblings and that it only “appeared” that they were treated differently. They admitted to pretending to be sick on occasion to get out of stuff, but attest that as they got older that no longer worked.
“She was like if your stomach is going to hurt, it’s going to hurt whether you’re at church or at home so you may as well go on to church, you may as well go on to school and then come back home and get in the bed.”
The fact that the two shared a liver, made certain things a little easier to get away with and avoid, at least for a while.
Growing up, there were certain foods they could not eat and there were others that they only pretended they couldn’t eat because they just didn’t like it. So they would say it made them sick, even though it did not.
Now that their systems have matured, they are able to eat foods that they could not when they were younger.
The twins remember spending what seemed like hours sitting at the dinner table waiting for a reprieve so they would not have to eat something they did not like. Recalling those times, the duping duo said they can still hear their mother’s voice echoing, “We don’t throw food away, you’re going to eat this food.” Their tears rolled and pleas resounded, but to no avail.
As daughters of the late Missouri Matthews, a staunch supporter of education and the Rev. John Matthews Sr., pastor and school principal, the twins concede that it was difficult getting out of going to school or church. “She was all about education, she believed in education,” they said of their mother. She wanted all of them to go to college.
Their mother was also the main disciplinarian. “We were good girls as far as daddy was concerned, he hit hard,” said Linda. They fondly remember their dad walking through the house every night, checking every room for every child to make sure they were safely tucked in.
They also remember him sounding off for them to be quiet and go to sleep when they were talking in bed during the early hours of the morning. They said if one of them couldn’t sleep, then that one would wake the other and they would laugh and talk until they both fell off to sleep.
Separate lives and identities were never an issue
Identical in appearance growing up, the twins suggest that the differences in their personalities should have been a tell. The two said only a few of their friends could tell them apart even after 12 years of school. Lillian said she was quieter and more studious and Linda was the social butterfly. Linda said she doesn’t remember it that way.
Both are retired teachers, Lillian taught for 33 years and Linda was in the school system for 35 years, having retired just last year. Both said they are enjoying retirement, dividing their time between grandchildren and church work.
They often run into each others’ former students, who can’t tell them apart and oftentimes get offended thinking that their favorite teacher doesn’t remember them. That’s when the twins have to make it known, “You do know I have a twin sister?”
Linda said similar misidentifications have occurred with some of the members of the church she attends, even to the point of one member thinking she was cheating on her husband Claude, because she saw Lillian and her husband having dinner in a Jackson-area restaurant. According to them, they spend a lot of time saying, “But, it wasn’t me.” Only a few are hard to convince, they said.
As adolescents and teenagers, they experienced the characteristic twin sensations and had some of the same feelings and emotions at the same time, like knowing what each other was thinking and feeling.
However, that doesn’t happen as often anymore.
“The last time it happened, I was actually in the throes of a miscarriage,” said Lillian. “And I was living in Oklahoma,” Linda infused.
Lillian said she was living in Sumner, Mississippi. “I was so sick, didn’t know what was going on and she just got so sick. She had the exact same feeling; she was feeling everything I was going through,” Lillian said. Linda added that she finally turned to her husband and told him that it must be something going on with Lillian.
As for fights and disagreements, a dispute over whether or not the baton pass was executed properly during a 440 relay in Greenville is the most memorable disagreement the two recall. Lillian and Linda were high school track standouts at Gentry. “Half of the team agreed with me that I put it in her hand the other half said no I did not, said Lillian.
Lillian said the coach, Dan Brown, had the perfect solution, “Don’t worry about it, you’ll never run together again.” They said he was visibly angry because they were on the track field “fussing” in front of the crowd of fans.
Another time, during a piano recital at church, the twins decided to change the ending on one of the songs, but during the performance one of them forgot about the change. That brought on another bout of bickering in the church that left their mother livid. She was so angry that she took them off of the track team and made them practice every day (for two weeks).
The twins said their siblings always felt as if they were the outsiders because the two of them seemed to always have their heads together with their own little private conversations and jokes.
Although they both ended up as teachers, Linda started teaching five years after Lillian. Linda said she originally wanted to be a nurse even though her father kept telling her that teaching was her calling. The fact that the twin’s father was a school principal meant that each one of his daughters had to work as substitute teachers whenever possible.
On one of those occasions, Linda said she was paired with a special education class and because of the success she had in such a short time with one particular little girl, who could not talk and with whom no one else had had any success, her father reaffirmed his earlier pronouncement of her true calling.
Linda still acknowledges that Lillian is the greatest teacher she has ever known. “Mrs. Kent trained me well,” Lillian infused. She said her former teacher was the epitome of an excellent role model and credits her for setting the bar for which she has strived to reach.
Linda admits to taking some of the same principles that Lillian used with her high school English students and applying them to her elementary special education children. “I told them if they (her sister’s students) can do it, y’all can do it.” She admits that Lillian was also the more studious of the two.
Both attended Mississippi Valley State University and admit that they tried some of the typical twin things there. They swapped classes because Lillian was more fluent in Spanish and Linda admittedly didn’t learn any Spanish in high school. It worked fine until a classmate remarked to Linda that she was going to fail Spanish if she didn’t start coming to class.
The statement baffled Linda since Lillian was supposed to be going to class for her. “She almost made me fail my class, I’m thinking she’s in my class because I’m going to her class and she’s in the bed asleep,” Linda said laughingly.
To make up for it Linda induced Lillian to take an exam for her and instructed her to just make a passing grade, a 70. “Chick made 99,” Linda said.
So, when Linda returned to class, the instructor celebrated her and called her to the front of the room to demonstrate her skills because no one else in the class made a passing grade. Unable to demonstrate the skills she demonstrated on the exam, Linda deferred to an old faithful… she faked a stomachache.
Conjoined twins are identical twins joined in the womb.
An extremely rare phenomenon, the occurrence is estimated to range from 1 in 49,000 births to 1 in 189,000 births, with a somewhat higher incidence in Southwest Asia and Africa.
