The Bedford Girls
My great-grandmother, Pearl Katherine White Beard, was a writer. I honestly do not know much about her, except that as a married woman she lived in Bedford County where she married my grandfather Roy Craft Beard, in the shadow of the Peaks of Otter at Kelso Mill and had five children. I know that when my great-grandfather died, leaving her to raise five children she found herself faced with a difficult decision. She sent her two sons to work on another farm with their uncle. She took her three daughters to the Bedford train station and sent them to the Miller Home Orphanage in Lynchburg. My grandmother, Shirley Pearl Beard, was just five years old, so the year would have been 1923. This is pure speculation on my part because I would have to go back and look at dates to verify, but I suspect that as a widow, my great-grandmother took up writing as an additional source of income. I remember seeing article clippings that she had penned for the society pages in the newspaper describing a wedding, and particularly the bride’s beaded gown in lavish detail. As an adult, I cannot help but think about how hard it would have been for her to send her children to be taken care of by someone else because she felt herself uncapable of doing so. When my grandmother, Pearlie, as we lovingly called her, would tell me stories as a child I just thought her mother must have been so cruel to ship her daughters away. But I wonder if it pained her to write those flowery articles as she recalled her own wedding day, and the life she imagined she would have. If she thought, amid her struggles, how irrelevant the number of beads hand stitched in lace were in the grand scheme of things.
When Pearlie became a young woman, she left the orphanage and married my grandfather Grover Carl Holt, Jr. After years in the orphanage, even with visits from her family on occasion, she was eager to move on and begin a family of her own. They lived in Hurt, Virginia on a little farm that reached all the way to the railroad tracks by the river. I feel like she was quite the practical woman. She laundered and canned and sewed all their clothes. When she found the style of shoes she liked, she bought an extra pair. On Sundays she put on her clip-on earrings and powdered her nose with care. She gave birth to five children and only two made it to adulthood. My Uncle Glen, and my mother who was eight years his junior. Two sons died very young, and one son was placed in a home for the disabled when he was in his teens. Instead of describing bridal gowns and wedding guests, Pearlie wrote cards, letters, and grocery lists. She set the Sunday table for the extended family and when her mother became feeble, she gave her a room in her own little home. When I was a child, she taught me the days of the month and the seasons of the year. She took me to church. Now, even still, she teaches me a lot about forgiveness.
My mother, Belvia Sue Holt Tate, is also a writer. She kept this little secret for a long time, amid her other notable hobbies of painting and gardening. I recall her taking literature and writing classes at the local community college when I was a little girl and how vivid the narrative about her daddy came to life. By then my parents and I were living back on the land my grandfather farmed near my Grandma Pearlie. My grandfather, Crebo (they called him since he was a child), passed away when I was a baby. Suddenly, my practical grandmother, ever the caregiver, was rattling around in her little grey house all by herself, surrounded by the memories of all she had lost. I became her purpose. Mornings, evenings, and summer days were for Pearlie’s house; where I baked mudpies, played with dolls, and watched Pearlie dress her long white tresses in rollers.
I was in second or third grade, probably around 1993 when I started writing short stories and poems. I would sit by Pearlie’s chair in the living room, next to the heat vent on the floor and weave words to the sound of the morning news. Weather report by one Mr. Willard Scott, of course. When I got older, I would sit on her porch and journal about how life wasn’t fair, and I hated my parents because we were moving. We moved to Bedford County, under the shadow of the Peaks of Otter, just a few miles from Kelso’s Mill as the crow flies. And Pearlie, she came with us. And my mama took care of her, just like she did for her own mother. As a teenager I could hardly wrap my mind around it, how my mama had watched her mama do the same thing in their home years before. Preparing meals for everyone, doing the cleaning and the laundry, shuttling Pearlie to doctors’ appointments and me to everything under the sun. All the while working and going to school. She didn’t have time to write or paint then, or really anything for herself except working in her garden, which she tells me was therapy. It wasn’t until Pearlie died, and I was grown, and mom had faced incredible life-changing experiences, that she wrote her story. Now, even still, she teaches me about being a caregiver to others, but perhaps even more to myself. To not lose the essence of who I am even as I grow as a wife, a mother, and a daughter.
A question was raised in Sunday School, “Can you think of someone who has made a huge sacrifice for you, who was it and why?” And the point was raised that our parents make countless sacrifices we know nothing about, nor do we understand until we are much older. I come from a long line of strong women who knew the undeniable truth of self-sacrifice. I come from a long line of women who were incredible caregivers and sacrificed so much of themselves for the good of their children and their parents as they aged. I hope I can be as strong as them. I hope I can see the beauty in small details, like Pearl, even when life gets ugly. I hope I can find my way to nurturing forgiveness in the middle of the mundane like Shirley. I hope I can make time for my son in flurry of responsibility like my mama did for me. And I hope, I always have the words to share the stories of courage, sacrifice, forgiveness, and love.