Bessie Mae Hayes Chesney

This is my paternal grandmother, Bessie Mae Hayes Chesney.

Bessie grew up in a poor family in Lea Springs in Grainger County, TN. Her father was a farmer and she had five brothers and three sisters. When she was 12-years old, her oldest brother, Alfred, who was eighteen at the time, tragically died when the car he was driving plunged off the side of McBee Ferry into the Holston River. I wrote about him the other day. Then when she was 16-years old, Bessies's father, Britt, died from Cirrhosis of the liver, he was only 47. With Bessie being the oldest daughter of the house, it was up to her to help her mother with the other children.

At 22-years old, Bessie met Lorn James Chesney and in June of 1939 married him. Ten months later on May 4, 1940, my dad, James Carroll Chesney whom they called "Carroll" was born. They had two other children, both girls; Barbara Jewell and Brenda Lucille.

Bessie and Lorn moved around to several different places. They started out living on Old Andersonville Pike. Afterwards they lived on Grayson Rd. which used to be in East Knoxville off Millertown Pike where Lowes now sits. Eventually they moved to Rt. 12 Maloneyville Rd. in Knoxville which was redistricted to Corryton in the 70's. They bought a farm with a large house with several acres of land from Lorn's brother, Jesse Lee Chesney.

Although they were my grandparents, they insisted my sisters and I call them by their first names of Bessie and Lorn. I always felt a little robbed because of it. My family lived just through the cow pasture from their house. When Bessie was still living, we visited them very frequently but after she died and Lorn remarried, we only went at Christmas time.

I always felt that Bessie loved me. She was always so kind and gentle. I would spend the night upstairs in their big scary house, and she would tuck me into bed and rub my head and talk to me in a low sweet voice until I fell asleep. I remember that she wore wigs and there was a room just off the living room where there were three or four Styrofoam heads with wigs on them. I was forbidden to go into that room. I guess she didn't want me messing with her wigs.

Bessie cooked and canned a lot and her kitchen always smelled like pickled beets. I never could stand the taste of them but loved to smell them when I walked into the house. Lorn always had to have beans and cornbread with every meal so there was always a pot of beans going as well.

One time I had gotten in trouble and my dad was beating me with a belt outside our house. I was screaming to the top of my lungs and Bessie came running through the cow pasture, crossed the barbed wire fence and into our yard and said, "Now Carroll, you stop whipping him, you're going to beat him to death!"

Sadly, in May of 1979, at the young age of sixty-one, Bessie passed away from pancreatic cancer. I was only 11-years old at the time. I remember when my parents went to her funeral service, and they left me and Pam at Bessie and Lorn's house. On their way out the door they said they would be back "dreckly." I asked Pam what that meant, and she said "dreckly means never." I cried myself to sleep and didn't wake up until dad was getting me in the car to go back home.

I always wondered how different life would have turned out if Bessie had lived longer. I've always felt the family made a monumental shift in the wrong direction after she died.

Below are pictures that I have of Bessie.