A more personal piece, this post consists of an edited transcription of a conversation I had with my grandmother, Hannah Boynton-Bernardo, at her homestead Swallow's Rest. It covers her findings in the diary of my great-great-grandmother, Olivia Tutwiler Hill, now preserved in the archives of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. What follows is a discussion of young love, the position of women in society, and comedic anecdotes…
Hannah (reading entry): Hello, dear boy. I saw you earlier and spoke to you too. Oh boy, if you only knew how much I love you... I couldn't help thinking of you. I like your black hair, it's so nice and crisp with just a little bit of curl, and your blue eyes. What makes you have dimples, and be so altogether good-looking and adorable?
Hannah: This is a school teacher (laughter). Your great-great-grandmother became a schoolteacher at sixteen — in a one-room schoolhouse.
Anna: We have a long line of writers and school teachers.
Hannah (reading entry): You're really the most extraordinary boy I've ever seen. Nobody seems to be able to get anything out of you, one way or the other. I used to think you cared a lot for me, but I've evidently been mistaken; for all I hear and see. It's a funny thing how boys will be in love with one girl, and still try to make all the others think he's wildly in love with them by acting if not speaking. They all seem to do it, and I suppose you're no exception.
Hannah (reading entry): I didn't know Pat would ever try to kiss me, but he did twice, and I had to tell him a few things.
Hannah: So, when I was a teenager... she got Parkinson's disease. Actually, she lived with us for several years. I used to take care of her... when I was your age in high school, within walking distance of the high school. I had gotten all the credits I needed to graduate, except for this one class. So, my mother taught school at [redacted] — Latin, in the afternoons — so during the day I would take care of Grandma Hill [Olivia Tutwiler Hill], walk over to the school for my class in the afternoon, and then come back and take care of her until mom got home from work. Anyways, what I remember is that she always wore her hair... in a long black pigtail, down the small of her back. It was my job to brush out her hair every night while she drank her mineral oil.
Hannah: She hated cats, and we had several cats in the house, and I remember one time I was brushing out her hair — she had Parkinson's, so she was like dead weight when she fell — she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a cat walk through the door. She didn't even think, and she leaped, and I caught her.
Hannah: I really respected her as a person. She was very well-read. My mother used to worry — she was raised with perfect Southern manners and all that — so we would get all electric before Grandma Hill came to visit.
Anna: I remember you saying that you weren't allowed to sop your bread around her.
Hannah: No, nor have our elbows on the table.
Hannah: Talking about the birds and the bees — Grandma Hill knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. She didn't even know how you got a baby in your belly. She was about to be married; her mother was too delicate to ever discuss it with her. Her sister, Argyle, was married and living in Florida. She was going to come to the wedding and was very concerned that she could talk to Grandma Hill before she got married. But she got sick, and she wasn't able to make the wedding trip. So, she was never told a thing before she got married. Oh, what a different age we live in now.
A note: we went on to talk about a short story by French author Guy de Maupassant with a similar plot, but could not find the exact one.
For context, her family owned the Blacksburg Inn, a boarding house outside of Virginia Tech. She obtained a teaching certificate from Longwood College, and from then on periodically taught all grade levels.
Hannah (reading entry): Gee, but I've had enough of a time today. I just got so mad at dinner when two of my kids set the field on fire. The seventh grade just doesn't seem to know a thing. I kept Frank and Fred in until 4:30 and made them learn poetry... they certainly are bad, I had to slap both of them today.
An Otter Rex kit asks for more greens by placing his foot in the bowl.
The conversation comes to a close as we enter the portion of her diary in which she begins her entries about her eventual husband, Henry Harris “Bunker” Hill, a revered Chemistry professor at Virginia Tech.
Hannah: There was a flood on the James River when he was born. He was a newborn, and someone had to come find the boat to get his mother and him in [it] from the upper window of the other house. They had to climb out of [the window] to rescue them — Scottsville on the James.
Hannah: By the time she was pouring out her deepest feelings for [Hill], she would not have even been twenty. He had been teaching at Virginia Tech for over a dozen years at this time. She sounds like a thirteen-year-old, but at this age, you're talking about girls your age sitting down and playing with dolls. Things were just different.
Hannah: When your great-great-grandmother, Pearl Boynton (paternal side; Hill was maternal), got married, the superintendent (of her school) talked to her and said the two greatest jobs on Earth are being a wife and mother, and being a teacher — you can't do both. To marry Abe, she had to quit teaching. You take a sixteen year old girl teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, a lot of the time not even at school for the whole year, because they had to work on the farms during harvest — imagine how difficult.
If you are interested in reading more creative work by yours truly, I run an independent blog by the name of Byway Vignettes, accessible here.
Anna Martin
Contributor to Project Invisible String; writer at Byway Vignettes.
July 27, 2024
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