 Louise Brackett Beasley. |
If you ever visited my mother's cottage in West Hollywood, you either sat on, or gazed at, the antique sofa which graced her living room. It was hard to miss, almost perfect in it's symmetry, orange crushed velvet upholstery, it was a lovely piece, and at least twice Edna was offered noticeable money for it.
We referred to it as "The Louise Sofa" because my mother purchased it from her oldest sister, Louise Brackett Beasley, the matriarch of the family.
Louise was the oldest sister, born 12 years before my mother in 1900, she embodied the family struggle to attain middle class respectability.
We forget that less than one hundred years ago, class defined one's life, and those who were not part of "proper society" lived dreadful lives of endless drudgery. Most of the people who died on the Titanic were poor, the White Star line, in keeping with the custom of the day, did not believe passengers in steerage deserved lifeboats.
That world formed my aunt Louise, and looking at that sofa is both painful and triumphant for it embodies almost the entire history of that part of my family's life.
This sofa is one of the last icons of the family's struggle to become "respectable." Like all of the tokens of that life, and that era, in a world which rarely understands or appreciates what these small things mean, I ponder their fate. Moreover, I ponder the future, as the world rapidly returns to the economics of one hundred years ago, including an ever widening chasm between the "haves" and the "have-nots", where privilege and access count for all, and everyone else gets the left overs.
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In my youth I occasionally asked my mother, and later her sisters about their father. My mother would sternly declare that he died in the flu epidemic of 1919, and add "and that's all you need to know." When I asked her sisters, they would either change the subject or quietly tell me "that's not exactly true, but you'll have to ask your mother."
 Ed Garren is a roving reporter, writer and thinker. By Ryan Gierach. |
I quickly realized this subject was taboo, and rarely brought it up again, occasionally asking myself what could be so awful that none of them wanted to talk about this man.
In 1992, when I returned to North Carolina for my father's funeral, I stopped in Toccoa Georgia and spent a couple of hours with a cousin I always loved and respected. We went out to the family plot, behind Providence Methodist Church in Deercourt, along the banks of the Tugalo river, and cousin Charles Odes Yearwood unfolded the story.
As we stood over the grave of Nancy Garner, my mother's mother, he explained, "Aunt Nan was sort of what you'd call a loose woman. It wasn't that she planned it that way, but after her husband left her with her first child (a son), she just did whatever she had to do to keep body and soul together." With a little more digging, I realized that my mother, and her four other sisters had different fathers, none of whom were married to their mother. My mother's father, Edward Ramsay, owned a sawmill across the river in South Carolina. Edna never saw him.
To make things worse, when my mother was three, their humble house caught fire and burned to the ground. Like most of the country people of the era, it probably looked a lot like the unpainted house that Sophia in "The Color Purple" went to visit on Christmas day with Miss Millie. But it was home, and when it was gone, my grandmother's fortunes took a serious nose dive.
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After living around with neighbors for a while, including time at the local stage coach inn (now called Traveler's Rest, then called Jarrett Manor), Nancy moved her brood into an abandoned train station, which they share cropped to pay the rent. Having no well, they also hauled water from neighbors about 200 feet away.
 Louise’s gravestone. |
As anyone who's ever been on the bottom knows, there is only one way, up. Louise left home in her mid teens After a large fight with her mother, she signed herself on as a servant to a wealthy family that was traveling through the region. She got as far as Norfolk Virginia. Along the way, she met her first husband, dashing and handsome, discovering he was a womanizer after their daughter was born. Soon after, he left, leaving her to raise a daughter alone.
In the 1920s, she left her daughter in the care of an elderly couple and took to the road working as a traveling sales associate for Carnation milk. Somehow, she even passed through Los Angeles in the mid 20s, working at Bullock's on Wilshire. Louise decided Los Angeles was worthless desert (which it was in the years before the aqueduct was built), returned to Norfolk and settled into work in sales. Upon her return, she noticed that something was not "right" with her young daughter, but there was not much she could do.
Later she met an older man, who courted her relentlessly. Feeling desperate in her poverty, she married him. She came back to the apartment which she shared with her daughter and a couple of other working women and declared, "I've just married the ugliest man in the world."
The marriage lasted until her husbands death. He was good to her, and the daughter they had, but he completely shunned her first child. Louise went to her grave saying that her first daughter had paid the price for all of the loss in her life, and it surely was true. Like many people who have ambition, family paid the price for upward mobility.
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In the depression, Louise, who had the equivalent of a second grade education, got a job with the WPA at the Norfolk Navy Yard, in the supply depot. By this time, she had educated herself, shed her "country" accent, learned about fashion and graciousness, re-inventing herself into a strong, but gracious southern lady. If you saw the opening scenes of "Driving Miss Daisy" then you saw my Aunt Louise. Neatly coifed, well dressed, lace or kid gloves, that steely determined walk, with just a slight roll of the hips, no one crossed Louise and got away with it.
 Nancy Garner’s headstone. |
At an early age, she decided that she'd never met a man any smarter than she was and that was her awakening as a liberated woman.
In the early 1950s, she got passed over for a job that she had actually been doing for ten months (having set up the department) by a young man just out of college. Her (new) boss declared "I'd rather have a man in the position." In a time of rampant sexual discrimination, Louise took a portfolio of her work, which included setting up the department, writing all of the procedural manuals and the job descriptions, to her congressman. She wore her sable stole, and kid gloves, taking an extra pair for luck.
He was so impressed by her work, and equally puzzled at her not getting the actual job she had designed and done for ten months, that he instituted a full investigation of civil service hiring and promotional practices at the navy yard. She got the job, and a reputation, don't mess with "Mrs. Beasley". Even the Admirals called her "Mrs. Beasley."
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"Mrs. Beasley" worked her way up the civil service ladder to second in charge of naval supply at Norfolk. The facility was the largest building in the world. In 1962, on the way to New York city with my father, we stopped and spent a couple of days visiting "aunt Louise." We spent a day at her job, touring the facility, which was six floors and about a mile long.
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When she retired in the mid 1960s, Louise had sizable savings, retirement income, a stock portfolio, a home full of antiques, a cabinet of Lenox Renaissance china, a full collection of "Horizon" magazines (charter subscriber) and her black Mercury Monterey sedan.
True to her roots, every fall she returned to north Georgia to help slaughter hogs at "killing time". Shedding her urban trappings, she donned work clothes and worked the eighteen hour days to transform the fattened hogs into meat for the coming year. Her reward, bringing back a trunk full of fresh homemade sausage and "souse meat", as well as a few fresh hams, curing in salt on their way back to Norfolk. Legend has it she so loved pork that she would stand by the stove while the lard was being rendered, dipping biscuits in the hot fat to snack.
It was Louise who inspired my mother to complete an education and leave Georgia. She became a society woman in Norfolk, playing bridge with a group of ladies every week, including the mayor of Norfolk's wife. One year, she went with the mayor and his wife to the Mayor's convention. At the gala dinner, she was seated next to Fiorello LaGuardia, whose wife was home sick in New York with the flu. Engaging Louise in conversation, he asked her about where she was from. Ever the embodiment of charm, she replied, "Why Mayor LaGuardia, I'm from so far back in the Georgia woods, at night the owls come down from the trees and roost with the chickens." He then enquired about life in those woods. Her reply, "If a man had enough to eat, he was considered prosperous. If he had a different set of clothes to wear to church on Sunday, he was considered well to do."
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And so it went, this humble bastard farm girl, who never knew her father, but decided she wanted more out of life than chopping cotton, and marrying a man whose teeth would fall out before he was 35. Louise used her intelligence, and ambition to become someone important, because she believed she had earned it, even if society did not agree.
She lived to about 90 years, choosing to return to Georgia to be buried next to the mother she had fought with as a child, who forced her out into the world at too early of an age.
Those hard early lessons, a combination of the Bobbie Gentry and Reba McEntire ballad "Fancy" and Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue", forged a woman who charmed all she met, because she had to "get tough or die."
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There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times - Molly Ivins.
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Edward "Ed" Garren, MFT, Edward "Ed" Garren, MFT is a Family Therapist, justice activist, former West Hollywood City Council candidate, writer and sojourner. He is originally from the Tampa Bay area of central Florida. Ed has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Frontiers news magazine, and other books, including "Out of My Mind", a pictorial memoir by Kris Nelson. He is currently working on a book about Addiction in America. More information about Ed can be found at: www.edgarren.us.
Ed Garren can be reached, even in the Red America’s wilds, at