Here are the things I know about Evelyn, my maternal grandmother.
She was born in 1911, on November 10 in McLemoresville, Tennessee. She gave the best backscratches that I’ve ever gotten, and I loved to go and stay with her especially if I got to stay upstairs at her house. She told fabulous stories and shared any information you wanted to know and a lot that you didn’t. She was particular and fastidious. When I was a young teenager, we took a trip to England. I wish I could have a do-over of that trip and share with her the respect and love she deserved and didn’t really get from me at the time.
Her born name was Mary Evelyn Bramley. My name, Marylyn, is a contraction of Mary Evelyn. She watched her little brother, James Adrian, die when he was four years old of diphtheria. She said she saw a look of peace and happiness come over his face when he left this world and that was why she believed in God and heaven.
She ran off and got married when she was in high school, to the star of the basketball team. Her family disowned her for this. In fact, her father, a county judge, begged her to let him have the marriage annulled. She refused. Her parents sent her out of their house and as she was leaving her mother turned out the porch light and told her that she had turned out the light in her heart. When she graduated valedictorian of her 1929 high school class, her immediate family did not attend. I think her grandmother, Grandma Bramley, did.
She and her husband, Gerald Carter, went off to live in Memphis after graduation. She got a job as an elevator operator. She was fired at some point because during the depression married women were often fired in favor of married men and single men and single women.
She worked her way through college. First she went to Bethel College and then, later, the University of Tennessee. She graduated from Tennessee in 1937 with a degree in home economics. She left her husband with her parents when she went to Knoxville. She boarded with a family by the name of Sharpe. When she graduated, she took a job with the Georgia Power Company as a Home Demonstration Agent and wrote her husband that she wanted a divorce as she had lost one job by being married and didn’t intend to lose another.
For the rest of her life, her mother would frequently accuse her of going off and leaving her with Gerald Carter to feed.
She met my grandfather, Orville James Pace (nee James Orville Pace, but he changed his name when he went into the army because he always went by Orville and the army doesn’t let you use your middle name as your first), when she worked in Georgia. They married and had twins named Penelope and Patricia. One was stillborn and the other only lived a day or so. She went back to McLemoresville to recuperate where Gerald Carter spotted her on her parents porch one day and told her she was looking fat. She told him that she guessed so since she was just getting over being pregnant with twins that she lost.
When she got back to Georgia, she found tissues all over the floor where Orville had cried over the loss of the twins. I have the dresser that they had bought to keep the twins’ clothes in.
In 1943 she had my mother. She never had additional children, although she had my mother vaginally even after a caesarean with the twins so that she could have more children.
I’m pretty sure she was the toughest mother that ever existed. People always tell my mother that she was a well behaved child and she says “I didn’t have any choice.”
Evelyn died in 1994. I went to her house to help my mother clean things out, and I discovered that she had kept almost every letter she had ever received. I’ve held on to those letters since 1994. One of my greatest dreams has been to turn them into a book. I hope to do her justice.
Marylyn Pace Wright
December 30, 2009
