Matriarch Tales, Part 3 - by Saga

Matriarch Tales, Part 3 – by Saga

In this Wednesday blog I’ll be posting the stories I remember about my maternal ancestors: my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother. The stories may or may not be accurate; family stories seldom are. I set them down here to remember and to honor these unsung women.

Bertha was born in 1880, the youngest of seven children, and rather spoiled it is said.  And feisty.  That feistiness would serve her well.  Her father was a prosperous merchant whose business sold “anything with wheels” from sewing machines to buggies. He also owned extensive farmland that is now part of a western Indiana city.  His wife, Nancy Alice, would have shared ownership in any of it, simply because she was a woman.  As an adolescent, Bertha was pursued by several suitors and needed to be married off to tame her. Or so the stories go.  Bertha had three beaus, but was decidedly in love with an artist, possibly because she was an artist at heart herself.  But when she was about 18, her father insisted she marry another man, an older man with better business prospects.

Bertha did as she was told, though not willingly, and married W.W.  After the wedding, they stayed with one of her aunts before traveling on to their new home. Bertha was so frightened on her wedding night that she ran from the bedroom and fell down a stairway, thinking that the door she opened would lead to a hiding place.  The next day the couple moved to Bertha’s new husband’s home in New Albany, Indiana, near the Ohio River, where the children Bartlett, Esther, and Alice were born.

By all accounts, W.W. “had a temper”, which is to say that he was violent and mean.  Alice remembers that her left bled often because he hit her constantly at the dinner table. She was left-handed and he wanted her to eat with her right hand. It strikes me now that Bertha did not move Alice to another seat away from him. Alice also remembers that he frequently took dinner plates from the table during meals and smashed them against the walls. He was particularly mean to his son, Bartlett. If Bartlett arrived home late after a date, W.W. was waiting with a buggy strap and would beat him soundly. As soon as he graduated from high school, Bartlett left home.

Bertha, like other women of her time, was bound by middle-class white conventions, and stayed with W.W.  Divorce was out of the question, even though he was a known womanizer and violent. When Bertha became pregnant at age 40, W.W. said, “Good, how I’ve got you where I want you.” Apparently, he thought she still needed to be tamed, or perhaps he knew she had reason to bolt. Bertha stayed, however, and their third child, Grace, was born in 1919. Bartlett had long since fled and 18-year-old Esther had gone to study music in Cincinnati. Alice was then 16 and thrilled to have a baby sister.

One day, when Grace was about three months old, W.W. came home to find her crying in her crib while Bertha was in the kitchen to be sure his dinner was on time. In a fury, W.W. threw the baby against a wall. Bertha had finally had enough. She knew she had to be careful lest her husband beat her to keep her from leaving, so she packed secretly in the attic. Alice remembered some seventy years later that Bertha filled a trunk and cedar chest with the pretty things she treasured. Among them was the Haviland china her mother, Nancy Alice, had saved from the burning house years earlier. [See the post from September 27, 2019.]  W.W. came home one evening expecting dinner only to find his wife and daughters gone. 

Bertha had taken Alice and baby Grace on the interurban railroad north to Indianapolis and then west to Terre Haute, and gone home to her parents. Bertha’s father was not happy to see her; how her mother reacted was never mentioned. In any case, eventually Bertha’s father sold a parcel of his land, gave her the money as an early inheritance, and told his youngest daughter to leave and never come back.

So, Bertha went to Indianapolis where she could be a “grass widow”, a divorced woman who pretended her husband had died. This worked well in social situations, especially for Bertha who apparently was accustomed to a position of some prestige. To keep the secret, Grace was told that her father had died.

Next week, the further adventures of Bertha Rachel, who would not be tamed.

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