 There is a Berry family photograph that shows Martha Berry as a young girl. The picture must have been taken around 1880, for Martha, who was born in 1866, appears to be about sixteen or seventeen years old. It was a large family, those Berrys. Six sisters and two brothers, not to mention the other aunts, uncles, cousins, servants, and adopted children living on the plantation and who may have been included in the picture. Martha is sitting decidedly apart from everyone else. She is holding a book, and her face wears a serious expression, not just in the way that Victorian faces generally do, but in a way that is peculiar to herself, even defiant. She is attractive, but she seems to be telling the beholder, “I am not going to be a Southern belle.” And in addition to this general message there is the more particular message, that “I would rather be reading my book than posing for this family photograph.” A Berry School brochure described Martha at this age as a gifted storyteller. Apparently, it said, she aspired to be a writer. She had little interest in getting married. She had a suitor at one time, so the story went, but she turned him down. Her career got started when the children of the local poor folk would come to visit her in her little cabin out in the woods. Martha’s father had built this little retreat for her. It became the homestead for her storytelling. They called her the “Sunday Lady of Possum Trot” because she told the local children Bible stories. It is a bit of Victorian piety, only it really happened, and that’s how the Berry School began. The Berry family lived on a plantation on the outskirts of Rome, Georgia. I think I know why Martha did not become a writer. Martha’s path lay in doing things, not telling stories about doing things. There have to be adventures, deeds, even buildings, before the people come along to tell about them in prose and verse. I think families only produce writers when there is no more land. One can no longer be the steward, or rather the urge arises to be the steward of something other than the land. For what is writing but a form of stewardship, not of land, but of history and experience? When there is no more land you can hear the cri de coeur -- or rather the commandment -- of the Recording Angel: “Write these things in a book!” Captain Berry, Martha’s father, owned thousands of acres, and Martha ended up with thirty thousand of them. It became the campus of the Berry School, launched from a modest beginning in 1902. Martha’s father began to acquire land when he got back from the Gold Rush. Not that I ever heard that he found any gold. When he came back -- he was in his forties -- he married Frances Rhea, of Turkeytown, Alabama, who was then eighteen. Their oldest daughter Jennie was born in 1861, when the Civil War was going on. The Civil War left much of that part of Georgia in ruins, and after it was over, Captain Berry traveled up North to visit some of his rich Yankee friends. The idea was to get them to lend him money -- “for the purpose of rebuilding my shattered and impoverished land.” It was an early version of the Marshall plan, and it worked. These friends of his loaned him fifty thousand dollars, which he sewed up in a pouch in his greatcoat. Family legend stressed, “And he paid back every cent.” For this reason the name of Thomas Berry was burnished with respect, forever honorable and trustworthy. There were, in this family, six daughters and two sons, and this tale tells of the two eldest daughters. The first daughter was proud and imperious and the second daughter took on herself the form of a servant -- albeit an aristocratic one. As Karl Koenig says of birth-order in families, the first-born wants to conquer the world, and the second-born wants to live in harmony with it. The third-born, who wants to understand the world, has the power to reconcile the temperaments of the first and the second. Our Cain, Abel, and Seth are true of the female line as well. But the third, fourth, fifth and sixth daughters in this family, though honored by their husbands and their descendants, do not come into this narrative. Thus I depart somewhat from the archetypal form of the fairy tale. Aunt Frances, Aunt Laura, Aunt Lilah and Aunt I-don’t -remember have graciously gone back into the shadows from whence they came and left only a trait, an accomplishment, or, at most, a sharp-turned witticism behind. Growing up, as I did, in Birmingham, a hundred and twenty-five miles away, these two Berry aunts of my mother, Aunt Jennie and Aunt Martha, were like stars on my distant horizon; they glowed in the heavens of indecipherable meaning. They shot forth with power and allure, but it would also be true to say that theirs was a fainter luminosity compared with the more immediate influences of my father’s family. Rather, not fainter exactly, but challenging and enigmatic. Aunt Jennie and Aunt Martha did not challenge so much the usual assumptions and expectations as confound and confront them with something surprising, whimsical, unexpected, and authoritative. Symbolically speaking, their early-modern skirts rustled with faint premonitions, magical passes, and intimations of immortality – as the great poet put it. With my mother, on the other hand, Aunt Jennie and Aunt Martha inundated her conversation like meteoritic showers at regular intervals. They were not “intimations;” they were the Biblical “And there were giants in the earth in those days.” They were the Thing Itself, personality enfleshed. She would say, “My aunt, you know, Martha Berry, was the founder of the Berry Schools.” And she would talk about the Berry School and the thirty thousand acres, how Aunt Martha met President Teddy Roosevelt and wheedled money for the school out of Henry Ford and heads of corporations, and how she, Isabelle, walked down the aisle in the chapel of the Berry School on April 23, 1938, to be married. Or she would begin, “I never went to college, but I received a great cosmopolitan education because I lived in Europe on several occasions with my aunt, the Principessa Ruspoli.” And that would spark reminiscences of trips with Aunt Jennie and lessons in Italian and music, how on one of those trips to Italy she met Mussolini, and what ridiculous and snobbish notions Aunt Jennie had about people but how she never let it worry her. And when she wanted to tease my father, she would talk about Bingo, her Italian admirer, whom she had wanted to marry. This nickname did not reveal very well the state of her feelings. Was it not a little silly, for a man for whom she cherished an undiminished affection? I suppose that Bingo was my first close encounter with contingency. For what if my mother had married him? Then I would not be here to tell the story. There is something faintly dizzying in seeing oneself nonexistent in this way. My mother informed me emphatically that the eldest daughter, and first child, of Thomas and Frances Berry was named James Enfield Berry. This, I have never been able to confirm. My mother, however, remained adamant on this point, and furthermore, refused to explain why the Captain and his wife would give their first-born, a daughter, a male name. It was not common then, nor is it even common now, all our Ashleys, Beverlys and Camerons notwithstanding. My mother’s refusal (or inability) to explain why Jennie was named James I took to be part of the legends that ever attend the great, legends that can be neither corroborated nor denied. Yet I also discovered that modern people always feel slightly ashamed about legends, as if they represented a sort of disreputable indulgence, like drinking or gambling or having a secret mistress. A kind of hemming and winking would noticeably occur whenever people got to talking about Aunt Jennie. The first gesture would be almost a kind of awe, quickly negated by the second, which would disdain or disown it. Such as: “She really was something,” or “She certainly had a high opinion of herself,” followed by something like “She was an incredible snob,” or “You really can’t take her seriously,” or “You can’t let things like that bother you.” Yet what was awesome about Aunt Jennie was, apparently, just how seriously she seemed to take herself and how naturally it came to her to impose upon other people. People in the family, and those outside the family who knew her, liked talking about her because her life made such good copy, but on the other hand the same people who liked telling these stories would scoff at the personality from whence all these colorful stories originated. This seemed to me the way with modern people, always wanting things both ways or wanting things for the wrong reasons. They don’t like pride not because it goes against a virtuous humility, but because it stood as a challenge to comfortable mediocrity. Still, they liked telling stories about the prideful Jennie. It was O.K. to rate the stories as entertainment but not if you had the tendency to go poking about and inquire why, by contrast, modern people failed so miserably to assert their own wills. As long as you never, never, doubted the gospel and the reality of Progress, Aunt Jennie and Aunt Martha were fine in their way! It has been difficult to determine the name of this first-born daughter, who is called Jennie Enfield or Jennie Eugenia. But that she could have been named for a male forebear is not unlike her either. I was also told, by my mother, that this Jennie or James Enfield was born at Turkeytown Plantation in Cherokee, Alabama, in 1861, the same place her mother Frances Rhea had come from. Maybe Captain Berry stowed his pregnant wife in Turkeytown when the shooting started. Anyway, after the War Jennie’s family came back to Rome, and as the years wore on, Jennie began to gain in looks and reputation. We pass over the years from Jennie as a baby to Jennie as a jeune fille. She must have thought the people around her were good fodder for courtiers and ladies-in-waiting; she had nearly half-a-dozen younger siblings to fill the parts. On one occasion, coming upon one of her brothers engaged in currying his horse, Jennie sniffed: “That’s groom’s work.” My cousin Anita once told me that on another occasion Jennie exclaimed that the winding road leading to Oak Hill should really be straightened! It was also said that Jennie would not let her other sisters use her carriage, for fear that they would damage it. I am told, however, on the authority of my mother and certain other relatives, that Jennie’s looks may have been one reason (if reason must be found) for this imperious behavior. She was striking: not tall at all, but petite, with black hair, to which I should probably amend the description to read “raven-black hair,” not only for the sake of romance, but also because a raven sounds so much better than a crow. Not all petite ladies with black hair are stunning, but I am told that Jennie fulfilled this description to the degree requisite for the imagination to fill in the rest. Well-born, stunning in appearance, imperious in manner: this is the description of Jennie Berry. At the age of eighteen she announced to her father, the Captain, that she intended to go to Germany. How she persuaded her father to let her travel to Europe alone, at that age, is not recounted in any narrative of my mother’s telling. Apparently, she possessed the ability to convert others to her purposes, even to bend them to her will. She went first to Germany, where, in the course of time, she converted to Roman Catholicism. Again, there are no clues in my mother’s stories as to the reaction, in a Southern-Protestant family, to this turn of events. With regard to Jennie’s imperious will, there is a kind of disbelief or skepticism -- it is a kind of baiting attitude. “Well, what will she do next?” “That’s Jennie’s way.” “She didn’t care how many people she inconvenienced!” Hoo hee. My mother called it selfishness. That was as close as anyone came to giving an explanation for Jennie’s assertions of will. I finally figured out that the reason is very simple. People don’t like being used or being made fools of and that, according to some, was Jennie’s forte. The amazing thing was that nobody ever said Jennie converted to Catholicism because she believed in it. Eventually returning to the United States, Jennie married a Mr. Henry Bruton of Nashville, Tennessee, scion of the American Tobacco Company. (“Bruton’s Snuff” is still available to this day.) This gentleman passed away after seven years, leaving Jennie in substantial fortune. (to be continued)
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