Mrs. Branton Shepard died in Kennesaw, Georgia. Well actually, she died in a senior mobile home park in Phoenix, Arizona. But her mind went, over a decade earlier, in her home in Kennesaw, Georgia. As is often the case, her sons couldn’t find the resources to take care of her. So she was shipped off to the care of my obliging mother and sister.
In the early 1930s, in the rage of the depression, Mrs. Branton Shepard gave my mother the most memorable Christmas gift. She saved up all of the boxes from her kitchen staples, cooking parchment paper, little wooden packaging, colorful calico rice sacks… And she made my mother a kitchenette. That gift was a priceless memory that my mother returned to time and again.
Mrs. Branton Shepard was a Daughter of the American Revolution. The first of her people came over from Europe in the 1630s. She was proud of her Germantown Pennsylvania heritage. She was proud of her West Virginia roots. She had the Good Fortune of marrying Mr. Branton Shepard in 1929. She missed the home where she raised her children in Andover, Ohio. She was an upstanding woman of the community. And she was a hillbilly.
She was a smart, loving, stern entrepreneur. Mr. Branton Shepard was a man of grand ideas, paired — as they often are — with an inconsistent income. This economic reality led Mrs. Branton Shepard to get a hold of a chrome train dining car, plunk it at the edge of her property near the town square of Andover, Ohio. She served the town’s workers there for years. This allowed her to buy the clothes her children needed to go to the colleges she paid for.
Her children were all expected to contribute to the restaurant. But she was the main driver, up before everyone, the last of the family down, until she could not bend her knees in her mid-50s. She would sort of fall back into her lazy boy chair, and from there instruct me on all things domestic: cooking, cleaning, organizing, money management, gardening, sewing…
After my grandfather passed, my family sent me out to Kennesaw to help dispose of his personal items and help my grandmother in any way she wanted. I never had a close relationship with my grandmother. But she wanted me there because I was my grandfather’s favorite. We sat together as I hemmed some clothes.
“Well you have a nice light hand,” she began with that compliment that always seemed to end in judgmental resolution.
Anticipating her next move, I said, “Yes, Mom taught me how to do the backstitch so that I only picked up the weft inside, making the hem invisible,” Proud of myself and my mother’s skill.
“But you’re heaving the thread away from yourself. That takes more work. If you set it up this way and you pull the needle towards yourself, it takes less effort.”
And sure enough, even with her tired body and arthritic hands, Mrs. Branton Shepard sewed with the poise of a young seamstress at a finishing school.
One day, the evangelicals came knocking at the door. Mrs. Branton Shepard invited them in, and directed me in preparing sweet tea and cookies for them. They came by just to pay their respects in the passing of her husband. And to let her know that they would be doing a prayer in his honor. She graciously thanked them. And just as graciously, let them know that she was fatigued by grief. They were gone before I came around with seconds.
When we were alone again, she said, “They pray for old widows. And they prey on widows. They won’t get any more money from me. Let’s go to McDonald’s.”
We carefully, ceremoniously got into the car and drove to McDonald’s. There, everyone greeted Mrs. Shepard. I was shocked that they called her by her name, at which point she told me to look around. There was a picture of Mr. And Mrs. Branton Shepard enjoying lunch. It’s not like the wall was filled with other seniors. It was the only customer photo on the wall. And I wondered what they had done to receive such honor.
I once asked my grandmother why she always called herself Mrs. Branton Shepherd instead of Mrs. Helen- or Ms. Helen Shepard. She said, “Because Mrs. Branton Shepard is my status, who I am in society.”
Impeccable. That’s the one word I would choose if I had to describe my grandmother. Impeccable dress, conduct, business practices, home economics, and relationship to the community. It is only years later that I understand the roots of her demeanor. When you are starting from scratch, the only currency you have is your comportment.
Helen Sager
Before she was Mrs. Branton Shepard, Mrs. Branton Shepard was Helen Sager. The thing she wanted me to know, from my earliest days, was that she loved her father. He was her joy. “When he returned home, the sun came out.”
Helen’s mother was a proper woman, with the lineage that went all the way back to New Amsterdam. Her father was dark and tall and larger than life. His work required travel. I was led to believe that he was a beaux arts artisan, that he worked on plastering the ceilings in the White House. What I didn’t understand is that he was part of a large contingency of working class men who migrated all up and down the Appalachian trail and Eastern seaboard in search of work. Sometimes they brought their families. Sometimes they left them behind. Sometimes they returned.
Helen’s sisters Nell and Thelma lived on the property of Mrs. Branton Shepard, in Andover, Ohio. Nell had her own little office/junior one bedroom on the property. Thelma took the third story as her pied-à-terre. After hours of preparing large Sunday dinners or Thanksgiving feasts, Helen would go up to Thelma’s flat, joined by Nell and other women. They would roll down their stockings. They would smoke cigarettes. They would swear me to secrecy.
That was the first glimpse I got of another Helen who was hidden from public view.
Thelma was a sardonic elder woman, never married, with furniture, jewels, and furs, well beyond her apparent means. She had a lot of trinkets and tchotchkes with drinking, cards, and gambling themes. She had been a restaurateur in Youngstown. It was whispered that I should never ask about it.
Nell was the sweetest woman with the sweetest dimples. She was married to a Native American man, who I remember was very handsome and kind. But again, this was something that we were told not to comment on. But not for the same reason. It was out of respect.
Years later, after the Indian Rights movement, I was told Helen’s father William was probably part Native American on his mother’s side. Helen and her sisters were slightly darker than the average white girls. And William was darker still. The relationship between the Sagers and the Native Americans was a complicated story, I think as yet untold.
Then there was Ethel. Ethel, or her absence, exposed more than any stories told around the dinner table or secrets whispered upstairs in Thelma’s apartment. I found out about Ethel’s fate when my grandmother told me I reminded her of Ethel. When I pushed to hear more of this grand auntie, Helen only said Ethel died early.
My mother and aunt filled out the story. Ethel was young and beautiful. She was leaving the beauty parlor. A woman mistakenly identified Ethel as the lover of her adulterous husband. And she shot Ethel dead.
When I pushed, “Are you sure it was mistaken?”
I was told that yes probably, that well it was a different time, that Helen and all of her sisters were flappers. They were trying to find out what it was like to be independent women, in the South, in the 1920s.
“They found out. And they didn’t like talking about it.”
Rebecca Plowman
Helen’s father, William, would be away for weeks and months at a time, for jobs and also to visit his mother, Rebecca Plowman. He would travel West, walk across states, to deliver her whatever money he could afford to take away from his family.
In her later life, Helen believed she recalled that Rebecca Plowman lived on a reservation. And that William Bell Sager was half Native American. Out of respect for my grandmother, I would say this fact is far from certain.
What is true is that while the Five Nations rolls were being gathered, Sagers of partial descent, or even of little verifiable descent, applied. Many were turned down.
To Helen, Rebecca Plowman was the noble woman Native American. The lore is that Rebecca was a nurse during the civil war. A young soldier decided to take a seat and have a smoke. He did not realize as he struck the match that he was sitting on top of a gunpowder keg. Rebecca Plowman nursed him to health and then married him.
John Sager became a blacksmith after the war. Again, this was a heroic profession in my young mind, an illusion of the strong free American, a master craftsman whose hands shaped raw metal into the future. Reality was more likely that this was a grueling profession somewhere between mining and metallurgy assembly lines. These men moved from industry to industry, county to county, unskilled except in their ability to continuously hammer away within cauldrons. John Sager lived decades beyond his ability to earn an income in this harsh manner.
In Altoona, Pennsylvania, Rebecca cared for the sick and comforted the grieving until she died, according to her obituary. There was no mention of any Native American lineage or reservation.
Auntie Witchie
My DNA contains no Native American heritage. Helen’s story was, in part, a typical story of appropriation, where the white majority takes on the affectation of the BIPOC they colonize.
Helen’s is also a typical story of migration, where economic forces dispersed families, creating new identities and new yarns that stretch across the United States as spectral lineages.
Often in the Fall, near Halloween, a ghost walked out of the mist of my family’s colonial history. One of my female ancestors, I was told, was a healer and wise elder. She was accused of being a witch. So she walked the Appalachian Trail until she found a town where she could be respected for her natural gifts. I’ve found no evidence of her in my half-hearted genealogical endeavors.
The hillbilly narrative is a bluegrass pastiche of yarns and humor and petty tragedy. These small stories persist in communities where wealth accumulated at the top, men were barred from a living wage and safe working conditions, and women’s contributions were sublimated. But Mrs. Branton Shepard wanted me to know: she chose to comport herself according to her heritage — as she imagined it, and to infuse love and dignity into her life story.
The hillbilly narrative is intertwined with lineages of success and sorrows. It’s inextricably entangled with the tale of America. For me, it is a quiet song my grandmother hummed as she pulled the lard can from the back of the kitchen counter to wash the back boards.
Appropriating the hillbilly narrative
The hillbilly narrative hides in those immaculately clean corners. It is a half-sentence, a sliver of a story, of a backroom abortion, whispered to a granddaughter whose face goes blank and then pale and then —
“Where’s your mind? Pay attention to that drip. Elbow grease, sis!”
These truths are secreted away from grifters who would use hillbilly yarns to further oppress hillbillies.
Hard to believe, but since Mrs. Branton Shepard passed, the fate of the folks has become even more challenging.
- $51 trillion have been sucked away from the working classes to the top 1%.
- Public school education has been drained of liberal arts and civics.
- Big pharma made junkies out of consumers.
- Secret owners of corporations now spend unlimited cash to influence citizens and elected officials.
- The 14th Amendment protections of the common citizen have been shattered.
And the list goes on.
JD Vance — and his rich funders who have vacuumed up the bounty and disposed of it overseas — have one remaining coup de grace: to render a government of the people completely impotent against their every whim. That’s why he’s promoting a “post-liberal” social order. That’s not liberal, as in footloose and fancy free. That’s “liberal,” as in liberal democracy, as in a democracy driven by personal agency, as in “of the people.” Mrs. Branton Shepard, who adored FDR, would consider talk of a post-liberal America to be sacrilege.
I think Mr. Branton Shepard was a feminist. Or at least he was smart enough to know how to support a strong partner when she’s maximizing the family bounty and rearing their children up above the fray. He taught my mother to drive a tractor at 5 years old, gave her free use of a car at 16, even after she came home late one night from a powder-puff derby with the car roof covered in hay. I remember several times when I saw my grandfather tickled pink by the accomplishments, small and large, of the women in his family.
Mrs. Branton Shepard was not a feminist. She was fine living within a patriarchal, nuclear family structure. I’m sure if you asked her what social structure was optimal for a prosperous American, she wouldn’t have an answer. “Empty barrels make the most noise.” But make no mistake, she would not abide anyone trying to take any personal agency away from her. The right to her own body and how to use it in furtherance of the safety and success of her family — no one had the right to tell her what to do with her body. The right to vote — she saw in her lifetime, how it moved from a privileged few to everyone. The right to marry — although not exposed specifically to the gay rights struggle, my grandmother made it clear that the government should stay out of the bedroom. Mrs. Branton Shepard would see the post-liberal “corrective” of limiting her personal agency as nothing more than a power grab.
Mrs. Branton Shepard would say, “That boy’s about as honest as a fox in a chicken coop.”
