The Barber's Daughters

Today, we drove from Independence, Ohio to Spotsylvania, Virginia, and on the way my Mother and my Aunt J. talked about how things were when they were growing up.

"The Barber's Daughters, they called us."

That was my Aunt J. My Mother prefers to remember my grandfather as a schoolteacher--and such, he may have been, but not for the most important years of his life. For those years, he was a barber, trying to make a living as best he could in the southernmost and poorest county of West Virginia, probably the poorest State in the union, then and now.

But regardless of whether they remembered him as a barber or a schoolteacher, my Mother and my Aunt J. were alike in remembering themselves and their family as superior to those around them.

"It was like we were some alien kind of flower," my Mother said. "We weren't anything like them."

I have a different sense of the matter, born from what they have told me about those years, and my understanding of that history.

They were downwardly mobile, as that euphemism of American sociology would have it.

My grandfather, who was educated, and my grandmother, who was also educated, were ambushed by the Great Depression. They were plunged deeper and deeper into poverty until 1933 saw them retreating up a hill near Newhall in McDowell County, which was then, as now, no more than a tiny hamlet. There was no road to where they were going, only the means of a sled drawn by a horse to get them and their belongings there. There was a house--a meager house, four rooms only, a kitchen, a parlor and two bedrooms, wallpapered with newspaper--but there were no neighbors, and there was no bathroom. There wasn't even an outhouse. "He always said he was going to build one, but he never got around to it," my Aunt J. explained. They had to use the woods.

They were there because land that they could till came with the house. The land gave them the means of surviving.

My grandfather put his family on that ridge outside Newhall, left my Uncle B. in charge of his brood, and went off in 1934 or 35 to a WPA project in Ohio. His remittances and my Uncle B's industry with that land kept the family alive. My Uncle B grew beans and potatoes and tomatoes on it, among other things, and my Grandfather's remittances bought them things they needed from the store--flour and sugar and lard.

My Uncle H., the youngest of my grandfather's children, knew my Grandfather mostly in his decline into alcoholism. But he remembers important and good times with him, too. "I remember exactly what we were doing on Dec. 7, 1941," he writes. That was Pearl Harbor day. "My dad and I were putting up a stove pipe from an old coal pot bellied stove when the bulletin come over the radio. My dad said that it meant war."

On what turned out to be the last day of his life, my Grandfather told my Grandmother that he had something he wanted to tell her. My Grandmother told him that she would do some laundry first. He died before he could tell her what was on his mind. My Mother and my Aunt June both recall that missed opportunity as a great regret of my Grandmother's life. "I think he wanted to tell her that he was sorry for all the hardship she had had to deal with," my Mother said.

I think he just wanted to tell her that he loved her and that he was glad that he had shared his life with her. Once, towards the end of her life, she reminsced about working at the post office her father had built in the town they lived in. She wasn't yet married. My Grandfather lived in the town, too, and used to get mail from a young woman who was my Grandmother's rival for my Grandfather's affection. Laughing, she said she would intercept letters from the rival to my Grandfather.

Today, I live in a very nice house, am well regarded in my profession, and make more than most people do. And I am far from the most sucessful of my Grandfather's grandchildren.

I can't help but think that that ridge in Newhall had something to do with where my brother, our cousins, and I are today. Whatever his failings may have been, my Grandfather didn't desert his family in those hard years of the Great Depression.

"There's a new moon over my shoulder and an old love in my heart," he used to sing to needle my Grandmother as borh my Mother and my Aunt J. recall. But he wasn't unfaithful to her. On that, my Aunts and Uncles are agreed. The Barber stood by his daughters, his sons, and his wife.

He was a great man, in my book.

John, Tuesday, July 6, 2010