Love Lost and Found in 1913

The girl, Bessie Smith

Since Aunt Bessie was 18 when she married DeWitt Brown, the year would have been 1913. But that first marriage lasted only so far as Dallas, TX where Bessie got off the train bound for California and returned east to Marshall, TX. DeWitt journeyed on, the marriage later annulled.

Here follows the rest of the story, as I know it, that I called "The Ballad of Bessie Brown."

A poem that the second Mrs. Brown, Lillie, sent to Bessie is not dated. The envelope is lost and so too the picture she enclosed to show and tell my mother's Aunt Bessie about the life that Bessie could have had in sunny California.

It astonishes me, however, that Lillie spent the time, the creative trouble and the postage to tell Aunt Bessie, Who's Sorry Now? Only Lillie titled her poem "The Cord That Bound Three Hearts, The Will That Severed Two––To Miss Bessie Smith" [sic]. Or rather sick? Or syrupy sweet?

Page 1 of 6

 

 

Girl Meets Boy

Thou once wert young and fair,
As sweet as girl could be, 
Thine eyes were like the summer skies,
Or like the deep blue sea …

The man was young and brave, 
A noble man was he;
His face was sweet, his heart was true,
As honest as could be.

Page 2 of 6

Thou sat'st his heart aflame

With love's bright glowing blaze;

For hearts like his will melt so soon

Beneath his lover's gaze.

The cord of love soon spun

Her web around each heart;

And verry [sic] soon the tie was made, 

Until death doth us part …

On page 3, the story heats up. How Bessie's heart turned to stone, stone De Witt's love could not penetrate.

He pled with thee, my child, 

to turn and do the right; 

But thou wouldest not, and so soon 

Despised him in thy sight…

… But hardened in thy ways, 

Thy proud heart harder still;

E'ne tears of grief and words of love

Could never break thy will.

 Boy Loses Girl

 On page 4, God enters the picture:

And God in heaven knows

The day the deed was done, 

When in thy wrath the cord was cut

Which bound thee to this one. 

Alas poor man he wept, 

Thy love had proved untrue;

When this one hasty step ye took, 

Which many others do …

Looks like Lillie means to curse Bessie:

God grant you may escape

The awful pain he bore;

But Bessie, I'm afraid, my girl

It's coming to your door. 

Boy Gets Better Girl

 Page 5 recounts the truer love heartbroken Dewitt found in Lillie.

This love will ne'er be quenched

As God is on his throne;

'Tis burned so deep within two hearts, 

It never can be known. 

That's stickin' it to her, Lillie. Turn that knife and make her bleed. The letter is tattered, suggesting that Aunt Bessie read this tome many times.

Page 6, a summary: He's mine now.

… The love thou shouldst have known,  

The joy that should be thine, 

A darling husband's tender care

Has turned and now is mine …

… May God forgive you, Dear

The mistake of your life;

For He was merciful and kind, 

And gave DeWitt a wife.  ––Mrs. Lillie Brown
 

Epilogue

Although Bessie married again, three more times in fact, I wonder if she wondered what her life would have looked like had she gotten on that train to California in 1913.

This picture tells more than a thousand words for it looks as if Lillie continued to rub it in. Lillie sent Bessie several such pictures of the happy couple. 

I wonder if the Browns ever had kids. Aunt Bessie didn't.

Bringing in the sheaves

The Ballad of Bessie Brown

Aunt Bessie’s death stunned the family when she died at age 79, 3 weeks short of her 80th birthday. Not that she wasn’t old—she had always seemed old to me—but she insisted she would live until the Rapture. “Jesus is going to come back while I’m alive,” I must have heard Aunt Bessie say so a hundred times. But He didn’t, and the house where she lived in East Texas, where she had perched herself high on the pillared porch to look down on passersby, that house burned down. Only the slab sits to recollect the years of her life––so exalted, settled and secure.

 A Woman of Influence

My mother's Aunt Bessie in Galveston

Aunt Bessie––the eldest of eight children, the progeny of Ma and Papa, who had until she died lived the longest––weaved a tangling web of influence on all her siblings and demanded strict adherence to standards she herself did not keep. 
My mother's mother, Prudie, died from a ruptured appendix at age 26, when my mom was 7-years-old, her younger sister, Joyce, was 5, and "the baby"––as they called her until she died at age 43––Syble was 16-months-old.
Aunt Bessie's funeral in Marshall marked the last time my mother and her sisters would ever spend together. They all got drunk.

Aunt Bessie, despite multiple marriages had no children, so instead she manipulated and shaped her nieces to fit her own design. 

A Bundle of Inconsistencies

Aunt Bessie smelled of talcum and splashed rosewater on her neck before putting on her pearls. She stuffed her bulging body into a corset with drawstrings in back, her bosom inflated but soft like a roasted marshmallow. I might never have known how she managed such a shape but for seeing her get ready for bed the times I slept on a pallet in her bedroom. 
It surprised me every time I saw her let down her hair—thin, silver-gray tresses that reached to her waist got bound and pinned each day in a bun, her crowning glory. Before bed, Bessie would sit on a bench facing the dresser mirror, count aloud 100 strokes using a tarnished silver brush. A rigorous routine. Religious.

Sitting down at the dining table, Aunt Bessie prayed, her eyes closed but her left hand raised, sputtering unintelligible words sprinkled with "Thank you, Jesus," words that passed her lips before the food got passed to eat. And when the noon meal was over, Aunt Bessie put a cloth over the table, covering the leftovers that would serve as supper. 

After the last meal I ever ate at Aunt Bessie's, I slept in the small room off of her bedroom––suffocating without a fan or windows––and I had nightmares that night, visions that danced on the ceiling, made me afraid to be in that place, afraid that demons had in this house found a host. 

Aunt Bessie's religious beliefs allowed her to impose a self-righteous pietism that “’llowed a little” for her indiscretions but drew sharp distinctions around the sins of others. My mother baulked at the incongruities. My mother's experiences colored my own impressions of Aunt Bessie.

When my mother was a young girl, she got to sew stitches in a quilt stretched over a frame suspended from the ceiling in Aunt Bessie’s parlor. The frame hung ready for the weekly quilting circle where other women encouraged my mother to learn to quilt and imparted a lifelong love for handmade quilts. But Aunt Bessie removed Loretta's stitches right after she got sent to bed. 

This is me with my great-aunt Bessie and Aunt Syble's Yorkie, Cindy

Marriages not made in heaven

Aunt Bessie reigned over three husbands; all died leaving her more property than she had had before they married—a farm, a grocery store and a house in town. Except her second husband, 20-years younger than she, married her for her money and they divorced in 1946. Divorce was a scandal for everyone except Aunt Bessie.

A ledger would fail to account for the difficulty I have imagining Bessie as the object of anyone’s passion, her breasts heaving beneath any man’s head, let alone three or four or more different men. I knew her only when she was old, wearing print dresses she had made for herself where she ‘llowed a little on account of the “little dab of leftovers, not enough to keep,” which Aunt Bessie would rather eat than save.    

 Aunt Bessie sewed dresses and skirts for me, too, ones that she 'llowed a little too much fabric––ill-fitting, so that I felt tacky wearing these creations that she boasted about making without a pattern. As they say in East Texas, I looked like something the cat dragged in. 
But in deference to my mother's Aunt Bessie, who made an annual trek from East Texas by train or bus to visit us in Las Vegas, I wore these dresses to school and to church. Like it or not.

A Marriage Annulled

At age 18, Aunt Bessie married DeWitt Brown who took her by train to live in California. The couple got as far as Dallas and Aunt Bessie turned back, went home to Marshall where that marriage was annulled. A record of this scandal––for it truly was scandalous at the time––might not have survived but for the letter the second Mrs. Brown wrote to Aunt Bessie. 

A gloating letter––thank you very much for breaking his heart but now he has me and we’re rich. The new Mrs. Brown enclosed a picture of Dewitt and herself wearing a mink coat and a wide-brimmed hat like those worn by First Class passengers on the Titanic. She also wrote a poem capturing in curly cursive, rhyming stanzas this romantic saga which she titled “The Cord That Bound Three Hearts––The Will That Severed Two.” I call it “The Ballad of Bessie Brown.” 

I also call it an act of vengeance. But that Aunt Bessie kept the letter that told the tale tells me that she did, after all, have a heart. 

Next time, excerpts from the letter.