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Kokomo Kootsie
5/01/2002
Nibbles- Bits & Pieces
Bessie
As I set there among the squalor, and listened to poor old Aunt Bessie try to carry on a conversation, which consisted of no words whatever, but were a series of grunts and odd sounds, that I’m unable to convey here, my thoughts wondered back to what had to be a happier time for her, as I smiled and nodded my head, and used a few grunts of my own.
I looked up at the huge picture of Bessie’s mother, hung high on the wall of that small room; and I thought, ‘Dear God, if she could really see how this beloved child of hers, lived her life today, would she ever rest in peace?!
At best, her life could not have ever been ideal, though I doubt if Bessie ever thought it not, at anytime. She did marry; surely had known how it feels to be young and in love; and how it feels to be deserted by the one loved! She did become a mother; she had a daughter once, who lived to be about twenty. So, she also knew to lose a child is a hurt past bearing.
Now her mother had finally died at ancient age of approximately one hundred or more; she and her two brothers were sent from the only home they ever knew, to live in their small house built for them in the middle of a big tobacco field!
Their food and necessities, doled out as they went, hat in hand, up the hill to the big house, their old home, to ask the young kin who now were to care for them.
They were incapable of caring for themselves properly. No one was ever sent or came in to clean and it was really in bad shape, everywhere one looked. They lived in direst poverty.
I looked at that picture and recalled the mate to it, the father, that I’d seen hang in my grandmother’s bedroom, all my life, and thought, what a contrast!
Two sisters, children of those two parents, and lives so different. They lived three hundred miles apart, in separate states.
There was no one who cared what became of them; didn’t want them around.
But I cared; and nothing I knew to do except visit and take things to them; and it hurt, it hurt to see my grandmother’s sister and brother treated so badly, neglected so.
When the younger generation inherited the old Sageser home place, like her brother, Lee, before her was sent to the asylum in Lexington, Bessie was put in a nursing home where she was ill treated, and evidently beaten, and there she died.
When relatives from Kokomo came down for the funeral, dark bruises on Bessie were noted, and upon inquiry, were told her body showed evidence of having been beaten more than one time, and were probably what caused her death.
I thank the dear Lord, that in his infinite wisdom and mercy, does not make it possible for anyone to be able to see, or know, what plight may fall to their loved ones who are left after they themselves are gone.
I know if we could look into the future, see what would happen to those we love more than life itself, we could not go on with our own life.
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