A Secret Gift (28 page)

Then, on May 11, 1927, Mary and Maude’s father, Thomas Dennison, died of “apoplexy.” Lewis Brigham’s wife, Mary, was pregnant. She was huge and feeling sick. Still coping with Lewis’s injuries and struggling financially, the Brigham family retreated from Canton and moved to London, Kentucky, where Mary’s widowed mother lived and where they could try to piece their lives together. In June of that year, twins Doris Jean and Kathleen were born to Mary. Then came the Depression.

Maude would come to the aid of her sister, Mary, and her husband, Lewis, the scion of Southern privilege. In the letter to B. Virdot, Maude spoke of the boxes she would routinely send to the Brigham family. Maude’s daughter, Virginia, still remembers those boxes. “My mother would say ‘Aunt Mary needs help’ whenever she was getting a box ready. ‘The girls need clothes,’ ” she would say, referring to the Brighams’ twins, who were a year older than Maude’s daughter, Virginia. Maude Burnbrier would then go through Virginia’s clothes. “I was kind of chubby,” says Virginia, “and if anything was the least bit tight it went into the box. One year she put in a dress I liked and I saw it and cried and she said, ‘Shame on you, I can make you another.’ ”

Maude’s caring went beyond family. When homeless and hungry strangers showed up at her back door, she shared with them food from her table, recalls Virginia. “I remember she had cornbread and it was hot out of the oven and this gentleman couldn’t believe he was having hot buttered cornbread.”

Joe Burnbrier too cared about others. Each day he would look in on an old man, an invalid unable to raise himself out of bed.

The Burnbriers were people of faith, and at least once it seemed that Providence repaid them for their kindness. In 1933, the year the B. Virdot letter was written, their decrepit icebox (a box that literally held ice) sprung one leak after another. “Joe,” Maude Burnbrier implored her husband, “you’ve got to do something with this icebox. It’s leaking again.” Time and again, he would tack a sheet of tin to the box, but not long after, a rivulet of water would snake its way across the floor.

“I can remember my dad sighing,” recalls Virginia. But there was no money for a new icebox. Then one day a delivery truck pulled up to the Burnbrier house and workmen unloaded a dazzling new GE refrigerator with a circular motor on the top. “I can remember my mother screaming and starting to cry that they had a real refrigerator,” says Virginia. Her father, Joe, had won the appliance in a drawing at the local Kroger grocery store.

But for Lewis and Mary Brigham, the Hard Times continued. “My mother named me ‘Bill’ because I arrived on the first of the month,” their son would laugh. It was years before the Brighams got on their feet. But if Mary was disappointed in her man or the road chosen for them, she never let on. “Mama was never one to put Daddy down for anything,” says daughter Doris, the surviving twin. “He worked so hard. My mother always held Daddy up to the children. She could serve grits and a fried egg for an evening meal with as much grace and glory as if it had been a banquet, whatever it was. And it was never discussed as being enough. I wondered how she did it.”

Throughout the Depression, Lewis Brigham was on the road, selling insurance, venturing into mountain hollows seen by few salesmen. Three years running, he was named the state’s outstanding insurance salesman. But there were times when Brigham had to accept vegetables in lieu of cash for insurance, and when the family would dine on green beans and potatoes for the week. “Whatever we had, we ate, and nobody felt sorry for anybody,” said Doris. “They did not sit and pick at what had happened in their lives—the bad part. We never knew the bad part. I just thought everything was perfect as a little girl. I didn’t realize we were in hard times.”

There was one Christmas that stood out. Doris remembers it because it was when she got long stockings and a dollar doll—a fat little baby—and her older sister Caroline made the clothes for it. That, she now believes, was 1933, the Christmas the family received B. Virdot’s gift.

By all accounts, Lewis Brigham was a man of good heart, a keen sense of humor, and a willingness to follow the work wherever it took him. In the years after the first bout of Hard Times, he was known by his three-piece suit, his felt hat, and his Dutch Masters cigars—but not for his luck.

On October 31, 1936, three years after his sister-in-law Maude wrote her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, William Lewis Brigham was driving through south Georgia between sales calls. A man beside the road flagged him down asking for a ride. Brigham could not bring himself to pass a fellow traveler.

“Where you goin’?” Brigham asked.

“Anywhere I want,” said the man, brandishing a pistol in Brigham’s face. From out of nowhere, two other men jumped into the car—escapees from a prison road gang in Treutlen, Georgia. Brigham had been kidnapped. For the next eighty-six miles they held a gun to his head and ordered him to make for the Florida line. He knew they had no intention of letting him go, at least not alive. When he entered Waycross, Georgia, he opened the door and jumped, rolling to freedom behind a pyramid of oil cans stacked in front of a filling station. The convicts got off two shots, but Brigham was unharmed—except for the bruises that came from tumbling onto the pavement.

Some months later, after the prisoners had been caught, Brigham visited them in jail. He wanted to know what had happened to his summer and winter clothes, his keepsakes, and, most of all, the family Bible he had had since he was a boy. All that had been in the car. The convicts just laughed at him.

After that, Brigham seldom went anywhere without a Smith & Wesson .38. He kept it in the glove compartment and dropped it into his valise before entering the hotel each night.

By 1950, the family was living in Girard, Georgia, in a frame house with a front yard and a picket fence—no plantation, to be sure, but a long way from the depths of the Depression. The plantation was still in the hands of his stepmother, Miss Minnie, but he was determined to prove to her that he was worthy of his birthright, that the farm should be his. For three years he tirelessly worked that land, oversaw its operations, and tended to whatever needed tending. And for three years, she paid him nothing. Miss Minnie died in 1953, but Brigham had already resolved to move on with his life. The plantation would pass to her blood kin. Brigham retained an attorney, but, as he confided in his grandson, he knew the farm was lost to him forever.

Lewis Brigham and wife, Mary; daughter, Caroline, recently widowed; and two sons moved to Roswell, New Mexico. Lewis Brigham was now a paint salesman in charge of an expansive western sales territory. Among the brands of paint he sold was one labeled “Plantation.”

Brigham had developed a bad heart, and the frequent changes in altitude aggravated his condition. He had his fifteen-year-old grandson, Brigham “Brig” Knight, drive for him. Brig did not yet have a license, so Brigham propped him up on a pillow and set a man’s hat on his head to make him look more mature behind the wheel of his huge black 1958 Buick Roadmaster. Wherever Lewis Brigham went, so too did the oxygen tank and the Smith & Wesson.

Over time Brigham and a partner built up a formidable business—the Southland Paint Company. Its products were sold in twenty states and afforded the Brighams a measure of comfort. But by then the demands of life on the road were taking their toll.

“He wanted to keep working,” grandson Brig recalls. But all hint of smugness was long gone. “He was a little cocky, but I think he had it all rather cruelly taken out of him,” says Brig. “I don’t think he had it coming.” His wife at one time had every reason to expect a more gentrified life, but both Mary and Lewis Brigham adapted over time. “Nobody was going around licking their wounds or feeling sorry for themselves,” says grandson Brig. “But there was always a sense our economic situation was temporary. It was as though we were the same as the people that had money but we temporarily didn’t have it—but we would have it again. Lewis always carried himself and looked like a man of means—he might not have had two pennies to rub together in his pocket.”

Mary Brigham died in 1960. Then, late Sunday afternoon of March 2, 1964, Lewis Brigham sat in a rocking chair in the living room of his daughter’s Roswell, New Mexico, house, let out a groan, and died.

The Brigham children referred to in the letter to B. Virdot would go on to live lives of public service and faith, guided by lessons learned during the Depression. Son William Lewis Brigham—“Bill,” as he was known, and thirteen when the letter was written—became a decorated paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in World War II. During the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, he helped liberate the town of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, one of the war’s most celebrated battles. He earned a Purple Heart in France when a bomb went off near him, damaging his aorta. Ten years later he dropped dead of a heart attack at age thirty-four.

But even after three-quarters of a century, the Depression is neither remote nor abstract for the descendants of the Brigham and Burnbrier families, linked by blood and love and hardship. Sixty-eight-year-old Thomas Burnbrier, grandson of Maude, still remembers the Depression-era lessons passed down to him by example. He remembers his grandmother saving rubber bands on the doorknobs, and his grandfather removing the screws before discarding scraps of wood. That too is a legacy of the Great Depression.

“I am still one of those guys,” he says, “who goes room to room and turns the lights out. I learned to make do with what I have. I have never forgotten. That’s how I was raised.” But Thomas Burnbrier can afford to leave the lights on if he so chooses. A former financial planner and broker, he employed some forty workers in his insurance business before selling it to Wells Fargo and retiring in 1997 at fifty-seven. “I did very well,” he says. Thomas Burnbrier says there was no secret to how his grandparents survived the Great Depression. “They just outlasted it.”

Carl Joseph Burnbrier died on January 31, 1958. A year later, on May 4, 1959, Maude Burnbrier died.

William Lewis and Mary Brigham are buried side by side in the Georgia soil he so loved, at the Bethany United Methodist Church Cemetery, a couple of miles down the road from his ancestral farm, Stanley—as close he would ever get to returning to it. The plantation has long since been divided up and sold off. Lewis Brigham’s lone surviving child, the twin Doris Jean, finds it difficult to speak of what has become of that cherished tract of Georgia soil. A part of it is now a row of apartments, low-income government housing. Once called “the plantation,” it is now known locally as “the projects.”

T
he bond between sisters Maude and Mary had moved the Burnbriers to help the Brigham family that Christmas of 1933. Others were moved by parental instinct to write to B. Virdot. And in at least one case, it appears that only that single-minded determination to provide for the children rescued the parent, pulling him back from the abyss of depression and self-pity.

John Gissiner wrote his letter on December 18, 1933, from his home at 816 Marion Avenue Southeast. Gissiner enjoyed a reputation as an honest and generous man. He had put on the roofs of many of Canton’s public schools and until the Depression had prospered. Coming from humble roots in rural Tennessee, he had made something of himself. But as his letter makes clear, he was now a triple casualty of the Depression, losing his money, his wife, and, for a time, his mind.

John S. Gissiner and his wife, Evelyn, were the parents of one daughter and four sons, the youngest then but three years old. John was a small man, starting to lose his hair. He wore glasses and spoke softly, never raising his voice and never swearing. They were both homebodies—“gentle and meek” is how their ninety-seven-year-old former daughter-in-law Betty remembers them.