Voices of the Faithful: Martha Bryant

The western end of Locust Street is quiet and still, with blinds drawn and night having fallen like a shroud softly upon the street. And from the darkened backyards and inky specters of boxwood plants, emerges the pitch of crickets and the occasional iridescent glow of a lighting bug. Tangled shadows of sugar maples leave their imprints on the street and lead to a limestone gravelled driveway and a house framed by private hedge and wrought iron fence.

The white wooden gate to the backyard stands slightly opened and off its hinge, having been in some state of disrepair for the better part of the last twenty-five years. This fact has never discouraged the regular flow of visitors, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who have come of age in the span of that twenty-five years, marking moments in life, engagement announcements, pregnancies, baseball games won and lost, returns from college, trips recounted, all seemingly called into existence only after a visit to the family matriarch.

Two notes ring out in swift cadence as the doorbell is rung with the push of a glowing button and through a windowed back door weighted with the clanging of metal blinds a kitchen materializes. From the ceiling, long fluorescent bulbs throw light upon a kitchen remodeled in the early 1950s with cast iron porcelain sinks and white metal cabinets yet representatives of kitchen fashion and technology from every succeeding decade are to be found as well.

A Coca-Cola clock on the wall is always ten minutes ahead and various woven beach hats and baskets adorn the ceiling from hooks. This windowed room’s very existence, a room that now houses the kitchen table and has heard the dialogue of 10,000 hours of phone calls and visits and meals of “poarched” eggs, vegetable soup, salmon croquets, spaghetti and cornbread, was once the subject of debate between a husband and wife with the fate of an old pecan tree or the added space of a kitchen dining room for their growing family in the balance. To the husband’s dismay, the kitchen table won out.

It was around this same time in the 1950s that a swing set, jungle gym, and slide were added, all built of galvanized pipe and placed in the far corner of the yard by the ancient iron ringed stone horse mount, for what had been two in 1937 had grown to eight by 1954.

Those two who had joined hands in marriage on the 23^rd of July in 1937 on East Holmes Street in Huntsville, Alabama would fain imagine the tree they were planting then. Their wedding ceremony with the bride holding a bouquet of gladioli had been delayed by several weeks, following the death of both the groom’s uncle, as well as the bride’s grandfather.

The passing of these two figures would cast a shadow of grief upon their respective families. The bride’s grandfather was a respected teacher in the community having received a classical education of Greek and Latin just prior to the Civil War at the University of Virginia and spending a lifetime studying the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant. For decades he acted as the educational, moral, and spiritual compass for countless students, first in Madison County and Huntsville, then onto rural Holmes County, Mississippi to a town called Ebenezer, where much of his wife’s family had moved.

It was there on the edge of the hill country and the Mississippi Delta that he suffered the loss his eldest daughter, Nona Belle at the age of twelve due to fever. This event would serve as a fulcrum in his family’s journey, and they would soon return to Alabama leaving their daughter and sister buried in a cemetery called “Mizpah” in Holmes County. Her memory would forever remain close and often be recalled and the only portrait of her would hang over his bed for the remainder of his life. This event too would fan into flame a fervent and lifelong religiosity and galvanize his attendance at the First Baptist Church near the Big Spring in Huntsville.

This zealous faith of the man many knew as “professor” would always color his personality and a quote from the Psalms or the Epistles of St. Paul would be often recalled from memory and sit readily in his mind for application like a taut sling. Semesters and years came and went at the school where the professor taught on Clinton Street, in a building constructed on the remains of the Greene Academy. Built in the early years of Huntsville’s existence the Greene Academy was burned by Union Troops in their destructive occupation of Huntsville in 1862. A year after the professor’s death in 1937 this location would be chosen for the future site of East Clinton Elementary.

In 1905 his youngest daughter Ollie would meet a young man selling insurance on a bicycle and invite him for lemonade and within a year they were married and living under the roof of the professor and his ailing wife in a two-story, yellowed home. This young man, fervently industrious in all his endeavors, clean and tedious in his dress and habits, strongly desiring to emerge from his childhood on a dairy farm and into an urban and modern existence was named Jack.

The house buzzed with his movement, every hair in place and every suit pressed, his steps rattled and creaked the old darkened hallways, hurrying past the professor in his study who glanced up from his reading, his cane hanging from a nearby chair. A streetcar would take him down to the train station across the Appalachians and to journey up the Eastern Seaboard where he would sell new flavors for soda fountains to supplement his insurance income. Soon too his interest would grow for the new business of automobiles for they satisfied an urge in his mind for efficiency, economy, and speed that a mule and wagon could never afford.

In the winter of 1915, home from his salesman journeys, his ear full of the words of other train passengers concerning the troubles in Europe, he welcomed with a grin and a sweet glance into his wife’s smiling eyes the news of a coming baby. Immediately the preparations were set in order for the baby’s arrival and the passing of an old confederate veteran’s wife across the street couldn’t have been more timely, as it opened the chance to purchase that much larger home.

The home was a federal style structure built just prior to the Civil War and Jack set about to modernizing it, replacing the old coal stoves with radiators, adding a porch and brick columns, detailed blue and white tile mosaics on the bathroom floor, and installing an electric stove in the kitchen. The many needs of the aged house rendered the process to slow speed and by summer of 1916 they still remained in the professor’s home across the street, though now Ollie was due any day and so they waited with bated breath.

On the day of June 14^th there had been a summer Chautauqua festival on the grounds of the old school of which the professor had attended seeing many former pupils, and upon his return home, he learned that the hour had come for the baby’s arrival. The midwives were called in and Ollie’s sister, visiting from Texas, was busy orchestrating their actions throughout the room. In the parlor stood Jack and his sister in-law’s husband, a tall ice salesman from Texas, who filled up the room with his laughter and sales pitch, although ice was the last thing on the tense mind of the expectant father.

Soon other men, neighbors and acquaintances arrived, their speech hushed and in whispered tones; they spoke of the disappearance of a local judge that day. This particular judge was known for his hard-line against the bootleggers of Huntsville who lined the pockets of nearly every public official. Having lived only a street away, the professor and other teetotaling Baptists had highly praised the efforts of the doomed judge to rid the city of the element of bootlegging, though it now seemed he would be martyr to that very cause. That night, amid the climate of hushed whispers, arrived a baby girl they named Martha Olivia Moore.

As the months passed, the baby girl took on a strong personality and surveyed the world around here with wondering, blue eyes, passed from arm to arm of various doting neighborly women who came to call. She was a healthy baby, even surviving a bout with the Spanish Gripe in the fall of 1917 and soon would be crawling about the floors and rolling along the garden paths in her “kiddy car”. With the larger home complete in its modernization, they moved in with the professor in his upstairs bedroom and their first Christmas downstairs in the parlor room.

In the spring of her childhood, Martha climbed about the lofts of the backyard barn and into the old gray barked holly tree where she spied a particularly frightful and elderly bearded man who was a former teacher friend of her grandfather walking the block and passing by the house. At night she sat on her grandfather’s trunk at the foot of his bed and he read to her and instructed her to commit to memory the words of the Bible. Perhaps in her he could recall the lost memories of Nona who looked down from above his bed like an angelic statue frozen in innocence.

With Jack raised a Presbyterian, Ollie as a Baptist, and the professor growing too frail to attend church, the choice of denomination fell upon Martha and for many Sunday’s they traded churches, with one Sunday spent a the First Baptist Church and the next at Central Presbyterian only two blocks away. While Martha loved the happy melodies and accented notes of the Baptist hymns, she swayed towards the more youthful congregation of the Presbyterians and they settled into a pew there towards the back of the church, where Jack claimed the sound was clearest and most audible.

With the coming of the 1930s and the hard economic times ahead, the house was split first into two apartments, then into four and a succession of families, young couples, and widowers came went and by 1934, Martha had her portrait taken for her final year of high school at the photographer, S.W. Judd’s studio wearing a flowing white dress and sitting in a throne-like chair.

Unlike many of her generation, she had grown up mostly as the only child around and given that her father owned a car dealership, she had been driving a Model A Ford since the age of twelve, snaking up and down the old wagon trails going up the mountain in the summers. That fall she bid farewell to her family, the professor, and the Huntsville High School class of 1934 as she boarded a train for Texas to attend classes at Texas Women’s University in Denton in her training to become a teacher.

Over the course of the winter the distance grew far for her and she missed sorely her family in Alabama and soon had thoughts of transferring to a closer school. This notion was further animated upon her return that following summer, when she agreed to go on a blind date with the nephew of a city councilman named Buddy. Buddy had grown up between St. Louis and Huntsville having been raised mostly by his widowed Uncle H.C. Blake. who was now grooming him to someday take over their family plumbing business.

Like Martha’s father Jack, H.C. Blake was a shrewd and perceptive businessman, careful with his bookkeeping and frugal with his expenditures. The son of an Irish immigrant, he oversaw every aspect of his business and instilled these traits in his nephew. By 1937, Martha had transferred to the Florence State Teacher’s College in northwest Alabama and after letters exchanged, chocolate and flowers, and ice cream in wicker swing on the family porch, Buddy proposed to her and she accepted his offer of marriage. Her family had approved so much of the councilman’s nephew courting their daughter that each of her returns to Huntsville would be published in the Huntsville Times giving him notice to come calling for her.

The date of their marriage came as well as the passing of the professor and H.C Blake and with these events came waves of new responsibility for the couple. Buddy had inherited the family plumbing business, his uncle’s home on West Holmes as well as having been asked to fill the empty seat of his uncle as a city alderman. Using every bit of tact and wisdom bestowed upon him in his twenty-eight years, he carried out these duties.

In comparison with his frugal uncle ,who had a habit of keeping every tub and sink, radiator and pipe fitting, the uncluttered existence of Martha’s parents seemed nearly exotic. This exoticness did not fail to permeate their eating habits as well, and Buddy was surprised to see a dinner table with strange things such as bananas, pineapples, and oysters, which he politely accepted ,yet unable to stomach the idea of digesting these creatures, he promptly filled his pockets to keep up the polite illusion, only to have his plate refilled.

They made a home of his uncle’s bungalow on West Holmes, and in 1939 welcomed their first daughter, Olivia and a year later their second, Sara. A Second World War was raging in Europe, Japan, and Africa and Buddy contracted his business to take on plumbing and electrical work at the fledgling military installation situated in the swamps and cotton fields of rural southwest Madison County. His work was steady and constant and their family continued to grow with a son named Hall born in 1943 and a daughter Nancy in 1945.

A community formed around Buddy and Martha with children always coming and going, a riding horse in the field behind their house and even a concrete swimming pool with Buddy’s mother, sister, and brother next door always over for nights of cooking and talk of the town’s gossip and Jack and Ollie now known by the children as “Jack-A-Boy” and “Mama Ollie,’ frequently making visits from down the street on East Holmes. With the end of the Second World War and the onset of the 1950s, two more final children arrived with Ann in October of 1950 and Jackie in 1954. And now a family of eight filled every room of the West Holmes bungalow and a move to a larger house was in order.

That home was found on Locust Street at a house built in 1893 and had been owned by a German man named Mr. Mortimer, who had filled the yard with fruit trees of peach, pear, and apple as well as arbors of grapevines for his winemaking in the basement. The home would need much work and Jack-A-Boy and Buddy were there to oversee its progress just as before. The kitchen was modernized with a Youngstown kitchen sink and cabinets, a breakfast room added, a wood-paneled den, and eventually a pool dug. And on Halloween of 1954, with Jackie being only six months old the family moved in.

This home too became a community with spend the night parties, birthdays, church youth groups with card tables set up in the den, and Sunday lunches of broiled Steak with lemon and butter. A large paper shell pecan tree stretched its arms across the backyard and each fall Buddy could be found cracking the shells for pies and cookies for his children. The years rolling by swiftly and without warning and soon Sara and Olivia were off to school dances in pastel dresses with their two youngest sisters at the top of the stairs watching. With a family of six children, Martha had frequently found herself returning to the words of her grandfather and to the Psalms and the Epistles of the New Testament, ever providing aid and comfort to her in times of stress and needed guidance.

Church attendance grew ever important to her and she joined many groups such as the church circle, making lifelong friends with many of the other women there such as Mrs. Frey, Mrs. Turner, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Giles, Mrs. Panell, and Mrs. Rogers, and they shared their homes with each other gave support to one another. She became involved in programs such as “Week of Power,’ and often, the speakers featured would be invited for family dinner. She joined the order of St. Luke which focuses on the power of prayer and the laying on of hands and also worked with the Child Evangelism program.

Her faith began to fill up every aspect of her life and a point came, in which she could not even read the Bible without tears, as each verse would touch her so deeply. She spent five years as an elder of Central Presbyterian Church, and uncommon role for a women in the South of the 1960s. Her children themselves married and began to have children of their own and to them she became a spiritual mentor, always only a phone call away for a prayer, a Bible verse, or an encouraging word. She impressed the importance of prayer before every decision no matter how large or small and of the providential plan that formed their lives, always prompting them to “give their problems to God” through the act of prayer.

She continued her church activity, attending almost every Sunday and going to groups, such as prayer and praise while her grandchildren, grew up and married to have children of their own. In the summer of 1990 her husband Buddy passed away and the home on Locust Street seemed to quiet down some save for the frequent visits of her 17 grandchildren and other family and friends. Continued still, was the tradition of every Christmas with each grandchild reading a verse from the familiar Christmas story with lights down low and lit by candlelight and “Silent Night” sung on the piano slightly out of tune and Grandmother leading us all in prayer, our numbers now filling the whole of the room.

Her kitchen and den became like sacred rooms, where every morning she would fill up notebooks with prayers for her family along with her oatmeal and halved grapefruit. Her den is lined with her grandfather’s books and beside her chair is a magnifying glass and well-worn Bible, heavily marked in cursive pen ink and bookmarked with toilet paper and filled prayers and memories of ninety-nine years of a life and of a seed of faith planted so long ago.

Tags: God In Our City, Huntsville, Martha Bryant, Our City On A Hill, Voices of the faithful