Pike County Alabama Biographies.....Maude Estelle Kelly Beasley  October 7 1893 -  August 1981
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb by:
Charlene Beasley Moore charbmoore@aol.com April 8, 2003

Author: Charlene Beasley Moore

Born:October 7, 1893 Pike OCunty, Alabama
Married: Ed Beasley 8-12-1912, Pike County, Alabama
Died: August 1981, Edge Memorial Hospitol, Pike County, Alabama


   Maude Estelle Kelly was the only girl of ten children and was born right in 
the middle. She always said that she came along just in time to help her 
mother, Nancy Elizabeth Griffin Kelly, with all of them.  She toted a baby on 
her hip so often when she was growing up that the hip had begun to make a 
fairly loud cracking sound when she walked.  One day her father, Thomas Madison 
Kelly, heard it and was much alarmed.  He would not let her carry the babies on 
her hip anymore.
     A younger brother of hers took to eating clay.  Her father was very upset 
about this and the boy got into a lot of trouble about it.  One day she caught 
him eating the clay and was really curious about why he would take such a risk 
in eating it when he knew his father would be angry, so she tried it.  She said 
she liked it very well and ate a good bit of it.  The next day when she  "went 
out", her way of descibing a trip to the outhouse, she said that clay came out 
looking just the way it did when it went in.  This so surprised her that she 
never ate anymore clay.
     Her father conducted Sunday Services in their front parlor as a layman and 
she was his pianist.    Her hands were very twisted with arthritis by the time 
I knew her, but even then she could play a lively hymn, which she did without 
any music from which to read. 
     When she was a young teen still at home around 1908, her cousin Minnie 
lived with her family.  Minnie was a little older and was having "gentleman 
callers".  One afternnon a young man came to escort Minnie on some outting and 
she wasn't quite ready to go when he arrived.  She sent Granny in to entertain 
him until she could finish her preparations.  Granny went in to the parlor and 
sat down across from him prepared to offer conversation until Minnie appeared.  
You have to know that Maude Estelle Kelly, my granny, had beautiful strawberry 
blonde curls, large, merry, blue eyes and last, but not least, an extremely 
well endowed chest.  She said the young man could only stare at the front of 
her shirt totally unresponsive to any comments she made trying to engage him in 
small talk.  Finally he rolled his eyes heavenward and whistled softly under 
his breathe.  She told me, with her characteristic giggle, " He thought I was 
too young to understand what had astonished him so, but I knew."  
     She said that the summer of 1912 Ed proposed.  Ed was quite a catch. He 
was 23 years old, one of those handsome Beasley boys from over at Needmore and 
a school teacher to boot.   Her father, Thomas Madison Kelley,  had given her a 
cotton patch and told her that if she would not marry that year she could have 
all the profit from that patch.  Ed proposed on the way home from a "cemetery 
workin'" by asking her to "Be his Rainbow", a reference to a popular song of 
the time.  She married in August and the cotton patch and all its riches was 
forgotton.
       Once when I was young I had read a book about  Southern Ladies of the 
past that said that they were taught that nice ladies did not enjoy the 
physical aspect of the marriage relationship.  I ask her if that were true and 
if she been taught that.  She listened carefully to the question then got this 
very owl-eyed expression and said, "Not supposed to enjoy it?  I never did know 
anything about that!"
     She said that when she was first married someone, either her father or Ed, 
gave her a pistol for protection because she was at home alone during the day.  
She went down in the field with it and sat on the fence practising until she 
was a pretty good shot.  She was known to kill many a snake that made the 
mistake of thinkng her yard or garden was a good place to lounge, but not with 
the pistol.  I wondered about this until I was grown and went to live in the 
country myself.  I, myself,have killed many a moccasin and rattler with a flat- 
nosed shovel  and I still do not understand her weapon of choice; a garden 
hoe.  You would need to be very stong indeed and have a deadly aim to behead a 
snake of any size at all with a hoe. 
     The grandchildren called her Granny.  She was very good to us and always 
had a twinkle in her eye and a giggle over something.  She kept a spotlessly 
clean house and was an excellent seamstress.  She cooked on a wood stove until 
the late 1960's and could open the door and tell if the temprature was right 
for whatever she was cooking just by sticking her hand in it.  She made 
excellent cakes.  Her son, my dad, Charles'  favorite was her Lane Cake, it was 
alcohol soaked enough to make for a very merry celebration indeed.  My favorite 
was her Banana Pudding. She made it from scratch and the meringue on the top 
would be perfect and golden brown. She also made wonderful scuppernong wine, 
and many other goodies.   
         When we were little and would visit in the winter, she would put the 
feather tick on the bed and then pile on so many quilts that, when I was small, 
I wouldn't be able to turn over due to the weight.  I still associate safety 
and comfort with a cozy bed piled high with cover.  There is no better memory 
for me than waking on a cold morning in that warm bed to the smell of Granny's 
biscuits cooking in the oven.  Her bicuits spread with butter and honey were a 
meal fit for royalty.  She made them in a wooden bowl using measurements that 
only she knew, as they were  "a right smart of this" or  "a pinch of that".  
She "choked' them off the main dough ball to make each one and they were always 
of the same perfect size.   When I was more than half grown Uncle Bobby Jack, 
husband of her youngest daughter Carolyn, taught her to smear a little oil on 
top of them to make them  turn  golden.  She thought this the finest thing to 
know and would tell me about it every time she made them for a long time 
afterward..  Once when she was old and in the hospitol I came to stay with Papa 
and cooked him biscuits every day.  I used Granny's bowl and ingredients, but 
although edible, they just didn't measure up.  I know they had to be a terrible 
substitute, but he never complained.
     When Granny didn't like something she would never say,"I don't like that" 
or "I hate that" she would always say,  "I don't love that".  For example she 
might say of a political candidate on TV, " I don't love to hear him speak."  
Or if I did something she didn't approve of, she would say, "I don't love to 
see you do that."  I thought that was such a funny thing to say, but I guess it 
wasn't so funny after all because I still remember her saying it.  She had 
another word that always struck me as funny,and that was "sort".  She would 
never say, 'What kind is that?" She would say, "What sort is that?"   When she 
got too feeble to cook the enormous amount of food that she thought she 
couldn't attend a family reunion without, I would go and stay with her and cook 
food to take so she would go.  We would take her in what she called 
the "Rollin' Chair" and she would visit and talk  and have a grand time.  Once 
I had bought a cake mix  to make a cake to take with us. It was pink with all 
sorts of festive looking sprinkles in it.  She had never used a cake mix and 
probably had never even  seen many since she didn't do her own shopping.  Ed, 
my Papa, went to town every Saturday morning to get his hair cut and buy 
whatever was needed.  She sent her list with him and seldom, if ever, went to a 
grocery store.  She had  a very puzzled look on her face when she saw that cake 
with its gay sprinkles.  She looked at me, her eyes very huge behind her 
glasses, and said, I've never seen that sort of cake before."  She was a 
wonderful cook and I have a " get it done" attitude toward cooking so I know 
letting me fix those reunion dinners was a trial, but she never critisized me 
with even one breath.  I guess she thought I was a decent "sort".
     She kept a fabric scrap box and an old composition baby doll under the bed 
in the room where we slept.  We grandchildren could be entertained safely for 
days with those scaps and that doll.  That doll did have one major flaw.  
Composition dolls have this terrible inclination to crack when dropped.  Of 
course, Granny could then keep us occuppied a while longer tying on a scrap 
bandage and distributing the necessary healing kisses.   Sometimes we would use 
the scraps to make clothes for the "babies" that grew in the field across the 
road in front of the house.  These were some kind of wild, inedible melons that 
were relatively small, but were the color and shape of a watermelon.  My dad 
said the people around there called them citrons.   We would carve faces in 
them and dress them in the rags.  This face carving could take quite a lot of 
time and require quite a few melons to get a satisfactory expression on the 
melon baby's face, one wrong scrape or dig and your baby could be wearing a 
most unbaby-like smirk.   They were quite heavy to a 4 or 5 year old and I can 
remember carrying those babies until my arms felt like over cooked spaghetti in 
the evening.  
     Granny dipped snuff and if you got a bug bite or sting of some kind she 
would daub on a little wet snuff to fix it .  I don't know if it was the snuff 
or the attention, but I was always instantly better.
     Sometimes my city upbringing and her county speech created 
misunderstandings between us.  I remember once when I was unhappy and bored she 
suggested that I "sweep" the yard for her.  Country folk at that time kept the 
yard around the house completely clear of any growing thing.  A stray blade of 
grass or a weed were quickly dispatched with the hoe.  In that part of 
southeastern Alabama, known as the wiregrass region, that meant that the yard 
was light sand.  When a country person speaks of sweeping the yard with the 
yard broom, he means for it to be raked with what a city person thinks of as a 
leaf rake.  I still can see the look of surprise on her face when she came out 
the back door to find me sweeping the yard down to hard packed clay with the 
broom that stood on the back porch that was used to sweep the kitchen.  I had 
to work very hard.  There were probably three to six inches of sand on top of 
that clay.  She never said a word.  I was grown and married to a country boy 
before I realized what she had meant for me to do that day.  I can still get a 
laugh out of thinking about what must have been going through her mind watching 
me struggle to get rid of all that sand.  My mother, Lottie Steadham Beasley, 
used to have a saying if the babies got cranky, " if it takes scissors and 
twenty dollar bills to make 'em happy, give it to 'em!".  That broom must have 
been Granny's "scissors and twenties" that day. 
      Another time she wanted a new "rug" for the kitchen.  I couldn't for the 
life of me figure out why she would want a rug for the kitchen since keeping 
the sand from the yard out of the house was nearly a full time occupation and 
she didn't own a vaccuum cleaner, but I loved her and was willing to try to get 
her whatever she wanted so, a rug it would be.  Luckily, I discovered before 
the mistake could be made that what she wanted was what I knew of as a vinyl 
floor covering.   Sometimes I wish I could bring her back just to tell her how 
many times I let her down just because I didn't understand what she said, but I 
expect she forgave me.   
     There was a swing across one end of the front porch that was the sole 
domain of Papa every morning until the heat built up enough to cause him to 
retreat  inside  the house.  Then the swing became our train.  That train could 
take us any place our imaginations could dream up. We would back up so far we 
could barely touch the floor with the tips of our toes and hang there for 
several moments of gleeful anticipation while we shouted , "All aboard!"  Then 
we  would give one mighty push and let the swing fly while we sang out, "Whoo-
Whoo,  chug-a-chug-a," until the swing stopped, at which point we would do it 
all over again, destination, the stars.  I can still remember the 
exihilleration of that swing sailing across the porch and my hair flying back 
and my stomach doing a flip.  Only one thing could make it better.  When we 
would come Granny would send for a six pack of Cokes.  We didn't get many Cokes 
and these were quite a treat. They were the little short ones in the glass 
bottles that you don't see much of anymore.  We of that generation, still think 
that those Cokes taste better than the ones in the big bottles or in those 
dreadful 2 litre plastic jugs.  Granny would keep them ice cold in the 
refrigerator, then when we were to have one,  she would poke a hole in the top 
of the the cap with an ice pick instead of removing it so that we could sip it 
slowly through the little hole and make it last longer.  We would take those 
Cokes on our "Train Trips" in that swing.  I guess now the fear of a child 
getting his teeth knocked out with such a thing would keep them from having a 
Coke bottle on a swing, but we were blissfully ignorant of such possibilities.  
Those were the days when I truely wondered, as my Mother would say, what the 
poor folks were doing.  I felt as rich as Midas in that swing with my Coke. 
     Granny wasn't easily ruffled.  The story is told of her lying on the  
couch in the living room watching television during a thunderstorm.  Lightening 
hit the TV and glass blew all over the room.  She didn't even raise up.  She 
just laid there and calmly called, "Ed,  you better come see."  I guess that is 
the reason she didn't "bustle" as some grandmothers do.  She just calmly and 
efficiently took care of whatever needed doing and we felt as safe and secure 
in her care as we would have with our own mother.  If she was ever frightened 
or worried she had the good sense to hide it from us.  My father tells one tale 
when she lost her calm for a few moments.  Granny and her oldest daughter, 
Sybil, were shelling corn over a large tub in the back yard.  My father, being 
a little young for the chore, but a little too old not to be into mischief, had 
climbed a tree and perched himself on a limb directly over thier heads.  
Suddenly the limb gave way with a crack, and he fell straight down onto Sybil's 
hunched shoulders.  Granny, sure that Sybil was dead, leaped up and chased my 
father around the yard,until catching him and giving him a sound spanking (Dad 
declares to this day he didn't know she could move that fast) .  Then, because 
she could see by now that Sybil was perfectly fine, sat down and started to 
laugh.  She may have lost her composure for a few minutes, but she could see 
how funny that was and laugh at herself over it.      
     She kept a sharp mind until the end of her life and even when she had had 
a stroke and was lying in her hospitol bed unable to speak, she knew what was 
going on around her.  She had wanted one of her grandchildren to be named for 
her mother, Nancy Elizabeth Griffin Kelly.  My first child was  a boy and I 
couldn't oblige her then , but my second was a daughter and I was able to 
fulfill her wish just three months before she died.  I brought my baby girl to 
see Granny at the end and put her on the bed by Granny's side and 
said, "Granny, this is Nancy."  She looked up at me and gave me her twinkling 
grin now a little twisted from the effects of the stroke.   Before I left that 
day her roommate said, "I'm glad you came, she hasn't acted like she knew 
anything or anybody until you put that baby on the bed."  She knew plenty!