When you are in trouble, or about to go over the edge, or feel like jumping in the raging Irish Sea, call on your ancestors! Or make soap! Or drink a bottle of Oozo! Or if you don’t like Oozo, crack open the Baileys before we even hit Saint Nicholas’s Day! (Eh, who’s that say the Irish people)
I’m making soap and candles to survive the madness but the madness is relentlessly heaving at my door, like molasses. I think it’s like this for a lot of people, the war zones are roaring, within in without and between. I can’t comment on what is going on in the world for I am a Scorpio, I would be hanged or burned at the stake if I stepped into the minefield of the current polarisations. That’s how it can be for Scorpios. People like to fling mud at them, scapegoat them. So I’ll stick to telling you more tales that might seem irrelevant in the maelstrum of the death of this old world (when’s the Big Bang?), but might do the task of entertaining you instead.
When you are in trouble, call on your ancestors. Well, not many people do that nowadays that but I do. I conjure them out of the field and ask them to stay with me for the duration of the problem at hand. I have a rather large one right now, so I’ve asked my Great Aunt Addie Belle to help me. I’ve always imagined her dripping with jewels, crowned with funny hats. I never met her but I’ve heard about her all my life.
My mother visited her in 1948 in Andalusia, Alabama. My great grandmother Heart, and her and Addie Belle’s sister Collie (who lived to 105), invited my mother my grand mother to visit them. So they set sail from Cobh to New York on the SS America. It was a mere 5 day crossing, but not without drama, as there was a violent Atlantic storm. It was February. All the passengers were green with sea sickness, except for my grandmother Mary Catherine who stayed upright, fascinated by everything that was happening around her- the plates stacked in the Dining Room flew across the room, one severly injuring the chef and two stewards. When the storm died down, my grandmother told my mother in a low voice that the ships’ crew was mutinying. I’m not sure if this was true as my grandmother was ‘high’ at the time, and already diagnosed as ‘manic despressive’.
“They’re all Communists!” she said to my eleven year old mother, who hadn’t a clue what was happening.
“I just about knew what a mutiny was but I did think that the sailors wore frilly shirts and were armed with swords and cutlasses. As for Communists, I did not know what they were. But it all added to my more or less permanent state of excitement” -Jennifer O’Donovan, The Burnt Child
They survived, and were met at New York on the tender from the crazed SS America, met by my grandmother’s friend Hazel Guggenheim McKinley. My mother said she wore a satin low cut blouse with full sleeves and that ‘to a puritanical 11 year old, she was shocking. They had lunch at Schrafts Schrafft's, 5th Ave. and 46th St., New York City.
It was clear to Hazel that my Grandmother was high as a kite. She said “Mary [Catherine] shocked the diners with stories of all the prostitutes that had been on board the ship.” She bought Hazel masses of baby clothes but she was in her 50s, long beyond child bearing. Something was wrong, and she’d seen the dark side of my grandmother’s bipolar disorder (called manic depression back then), so it didn’t make her easy.
My mother wrote of Hazel: ‘She took us to the Yale Club. I had not been in many lifts before and the skyscraper bulding with Yale club on the top floor went so fast my stomach turned over.’
Mum and my Grandmother stayed with her cousin Olive, a musician who had to grand pianos in her drawing room, according to Mum. ‘Listening to Olive play seemed to wake me from a long slumber.. I resolved silent to get music lessons when I got home.’
While they were waiting on the platform in Grand Central Station for their train to Dallas, my grandmother said to my Mum: “Look, Jenny, there’s Eleanor Roosevelt!” My Mum asked who that was, seeing the tall woman dressed in black. It was 1,500 miles to Dallas, two nights on the train because they could nt afford a sleeper they slept on the seats. In Dallas, they met my grandmother’s brother Norman and Mum’s cousin Anne and Terry, 16 and 11, but my mother felt no kinship with them. Then, there was my mother’s grandother Heart, larger than life, even more so than my grandother. Cousin Terry turned when my mother spoke and said “Doesn’t Jennifer even speak English?” That didn’t go down well.
They took a train to Troy, Alabama and visited Aunt Collie, who had survived the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and who would go on to live to 105 years old. My mother recalled the heat in Alabama, that April. Outside Aunt Collie’s house on Murphee Street was a pecan tree. My mother wanted to play with Patsy Jones, a girl on the street but this was frowned upon by the snobbish southern women, simply because she was the postman’s daughter. Remember the times they were in: they had ‘Help’. Aunt Collie had a cook from Missouri who churned out red beans, butter beans and black eyed beans, all of which my mother loathed and refused to eat.
“Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.” -Tennessee Williams
And then, there was Aunt Addie Belle. She intrigued my mother, and she terrified her, simultaniously. Collie reminisced how in their youth:
‘Addie Belle was very popular with the boys and girls and we had a great deal of company. She didn't care for school, but she was socially minded and dressed very expensively for the times. When Addie Belle was about fourteen, Papa fixed up the parlor for her. He bought a piano because she played the piano so well. On Sunday afternoons, after a little nap, we all gathered in the hall; we played the melodian and we sang Sunday School songs and Papa read to us. He loved to read aloud; Dickens was his favorite. Addie Belle resented staying at home because the young people were taking their Sunday afternoon walks, but it was Papa's only day that Ne wer-e sure to have him to ourselves.” Collie Gardner, Recollections, ca. 1953
The story went that the first man Addie Belle married (she was the daughter of John D. Gardner of Troy, Alabama- my great great grandfather and Julia Belle Starke my great great grandmother) was Henry Opp, an attorney that represented the L &N Railroad in a suit against Central of Georgia. He’d made a fiery speech on behalf of the railroad when the first train rolled into that town, then called Duval. He won, went on to become a tycoon railway magnate.
Addie Belle and Henry moved to Andalusia in 1890, where he was mayor of Andalusia from 1899 til 1906.
“If you took a stroll down Church Street about the turn of the century you’d would find Mr. and Mrs. Henry Opp living in the first house on the left facing Church Street with Opp Avenue running on the east side of their house.”
“Mrs. Henry Opp [our Aunt Adiebelle] was a piano teacher during this period of time. Her pupils gave a musical concert on Friday evening, May 16, 1891, at the Andalusia Academy.”
When Henry Opp died on Jan. 15, 1921, he left a vast fortune to the value of $190,712 ($2.4 million dollars or so), legacy of one of the richest persons in Covington County. His estate included $11,577 deposited in Andalusia and Opp banks, $50,000 in U.S. Gold certificates, $1,000 in war bonds, household and office furniture valued at $1,500, and about $110,000 in outstanding loans to individuals, including G.O. Waits, $32,000; Trammel Henderson, $15,000; Walter and John Riley, $15,000; Covington County Fair, $15,000; A.C. Darling, $10,000; J.D. Henderson, $8,000; Bonnie (Riley) Crenshaw, $7,000; and J.L. and W.M. Knox, $4,200; plus about $7,000 to other individuals. Every last penny went to Addie Belle.
Remember this is right about the time and place that Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama. Scott had broken up with Chicago socialite Ginerva King, and joined the US Army in in 1917 during World War I. Stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda, a southern debutante of the Montgomery set. She rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, but agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). They moved to New York. Interestingly, my grandmother Mary Catherine was at the same Debutante’s Ball as Zelda Fitzgerald in Montgomery, Alabama. I’m not sure what year that was, but it would have been right around that time that Scott dropped in.
“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”- F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
Addie Belle Gardner Opp wasted no time and put her money to good use (arguably, however). She met Jesse Hillary (Hill) Guy, 36 years old, from Conecuh County in 1922, 19 years her junior, a shoe salesman who squeezed Addie Belle’s foot while she was trying on shoes in his store. She married him quickly on 24th Ocotber, 1922. She had plenty of money so she bought him shares in the ‘local shirt factory’ as my mother called the Alabama Textile corp. And my grandmother told me that Addie Belle said to the owners: “If I gave you $30,000 would you give my husband a job?” And they did. They made him vice president.
Addie Belle Guy and her new husband began purchasing property and investing in businesses in Andalusia, Alabama. On March 1, 1923, they invested $5,000 of the $10,975 start up capital for the Andala Corp. J.G. Sherf invested $2,000, and 11 other individuals invested the remaining $3,975. Within one year, J.H. Guy and J.G. Scherf had bought up all the outstanding stock in Andala. Of this, Guy owned 400 shares at $25 per share; Scherf owned 450 shares; and Allen Crenshaw owned two shares. On June 14, 1924, the three shareholders voted to dissolve the Andala Corp. and Andala became a private company owned principally by J.H. Guy and J.G. Scherf, with Guy as president and Scherf as secretary and treasurer. Andala remained a private company with Guy as president until his death in 1959.
Now, while my mother and Grandmother were staying with Addie Belle, Hill was still alive but only just as he had a heart attack while they were there. The doctor gave my grandmother, for some strange reason, and not Addie Belle, the responsbility of administering his medication- the red pills three times a day and the pink capsule at night.
“For some reason my mother was terrified she would give Uncle Hill the wrong pill. She thought he was going to die and Aunt Addie belle was sure of it. During the few weeks of his illness, she would go into the to town in her car. She bought a black dress and black hat in readiness.” - Jennifer O’Donovan, The Burnt Child
My mother remembered that despite the grandeur of the house, it was crawling with cockroaches. My grandmother wrote to her father in law in Washington about the state of the house. Apologies in advance for my grandmother’s lack of sensitivity. It’s how she was brought up. And remember, she was high as a kite. Not that that should excuse anything…
Missouri [the cook] comes two hours a day to clean but spends most of her time picking up Addie Belle’s things off the floor. I made her wash the windows and I forced Addie Belle to buy a vacuum cleaner. No dusters no furniture polish, no windows are raised - poor rich people, how badly do they behave.. as many as I’ve heads of lettuce mouldering away in the refrigerator.
Well, for all this drama and the dirty old house, Hill Guy didn’t die for another six years so Addie Belle got to use her black funeral costume then. Addie Belle would go on until she was 98 years old in 1965.
‘She devoured merchandise just as she had devoured Uncle Hill and the shirt factory.’ - Jennifer O’Donovan- ‘The Burnt Child’
Great Aunt Addie Belle would go down in Andalusian history. Dr. William (Bill) Hansford said of ‘Mrs.Guy’ in his book, Andalusia, that Addie Belle was an “unforgettable” and “fascinating” character. The Covington Historical Society noted that Mrs. Ray Murphy, another “colorful” Andalusia character once impersonated Mrs. Guy at a historical society programme: “She competed for youthfulness her entire life,” said Hansford. “A younger man can do wonders for an older woman,” he quoted Addie Belle.
Maybe it is a bit easier to be cheerful and youthful when you have serious amounts of cash. Mind you, we all know that’s not true. She just seemed to enjoy life, and everything. She didn’t bother finding a third husband. Life was just too good. Addie Belle was voracious, as my mother put it. If a little careless in her mansion…
So, that’s Addie Belle and more. They sure ain’t, or weren’t, activists. I’m not proud that she had the ‘Help’ and that she still seemed to operate in a feudal system. My Granma mentioned the poverty in Alabama in a letter to her father in law, especially of ‘white people living in unpainted shacks’. She said the black people lived in the prettiest part of Alabama: ‘They all look happy and well dressed and are very polite, but I am scared to go for a walk by myself at night, as one of my friends in Troy [Alabama] had a cook who pulled a butcher knigh on her husband, severed the main artery in his thigh and he died before reaching hospital..’ Well, it’s all swelling with judgment and she sure was oblivious to there being even a possibility of ‘equality’, as she took it all for granted that black people worked for white people. Who knows how that situation with the knifing arose but clearly my grandmother wasn’t aware that there might ever be a Civil Rights Movement. It would not be long until Rosa Parkes would refuse to get up off her seat at the demand of a white man in Montgomery, home of Zelda Sayers, in 1955, just seven years after my mother and grandmother visited those old great aunts of mine.
“I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
Jakki Moore did this wondeful sketch of Addie Belle which I just love:
Please read and subscribe to her wonderful new blog here:
Facinating blog Siofra, what a character she was
Really enjoyable article, Siofra. Thank goodness Addie Belle is looking out for you now. Looking forward to hearing more about the wonderful, feisty women in your family! 👏