Aunt Pearl

My mother's mom's sister was my Aunt Pearl. This is her story and even though my mom and her eleven brother's and sister's were not of her womb...we are her legacy. She was born Pearl Elizabeth Littlejohn on March 30, 1916. When she was small, she and my great-grandmother were abandoned by her dad. They lived way out in the woods in what is called a "holler". The only income available to them was the small sum brought in by selling eggs. Eventually her mom was forced to prostitute herself in order to feed them. Aunt Pearl told me the story once about recieving a chicken from a man for her mothers' favors. My great-grandmother was not a very nice woman. No, not because she did what she had to do in order to support her and her child but because she forced her child into the same lifestyle.
Aunt Pearl spoke to me about what happend when I was old enough to understand. She held no anger or contempt towards her mother for what she did, only forgiveness. There were eventually 3 more children born to my great-grandmother. My grandmother, Uncle Earl, and Aunt Erma Lee. Aunt Pearl told me one time that when my grandma was little, she would hide her so that the men that came to the house "wouldn't get a hold of her".
I'm not sure of the timeline but I'll recount the events as closely as I can remember her telling. She went to California when she was young to work. She picked fruit. I believe it was oranges. She met and married a man who her family remembered as being "rich". Aunt Erma Lee remembers that when Aunt Pearl came home to visit she was driving a new car and brought her a new pair of gold sandles. This is important because my great-grandmother didn't have a car and the kids rarely had shoes. The marriage to the "rich" man ended badly because of Aunt Pearl's need to sabbatoge relationships. (Now, we all know what that kind of childhood abuse causes in the psyche but then they just thought she was bad.) Aunt Pearl's next relationship was extremely abusive and led to her being beaten half to death and thrown out of a car and left for dead on the side of the road. She had a baby during that relationship that died as an infant and the pregnancy left her infertile.
She eventually met my Uncle Lloyd. This is them in the picture below. I'm not sure of the date but they appear to be in their mid-thirty's or so.
Eventually they were both saved by God's grace. They were both extremely hard workers. When times again got hard in Oklahoma, they went out to California to work. They both worked together in the Red Woods. Uncle Lloyd cut big lumber while Aunt Pearl used an axe to cut grape stakes. To this day, Uncle Lloyd brags on how quickly she could cut them with that big axe. His eyes still shine when he talks about her. Like I said, my mom had 11 brothers and sisters, four of which are gone now but Aunt Pearl helped to raise them as her own. My grandpa died when my mom was eleven, on Christmas day but that's a story for another post. All of the kids and their kids had rough times and acted like morons a large part of the time, myself included. Aunt Pearl never gave up on any of us. She prayed for us daily. If we were hungry, she fed us. If we were homeless, she gave us shelter. She literally gave to all of us, everything and anything she had. This is a picture us on my wedding day. Today I am missing her badly. Maybe that's what brought this post on.
Aunt Pearl died on April 14, 2004 after being in the hospital for two weeks after suffering from a stroke. I spent several nights at the hospital with her during that two weeks. She couldn't talk the first few days but she could understand. I was able to tell her what she ment to me during that time. When I was little, she would take her long, silvery hair out of the bun she always wore and let me comb it. She would say, "Shelly, you wanna comb my head?" Why she would ask, I don't know because she knew how much I loved doing it. Late into the night, 3 days after her stroke, I gently took her hair down. Hair that was no longer long and shiny but broken off to half its former length and brittle. I gently combed through every strand and braided it, all the while telling her everything that I'd never told her before. I know, without a doubt, that before she died, she knew just how much she ment to me. She is part of the reason that I am the person that I am today. I am her legacy.