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By Root 301 0

—even on those days when the world utterly terrified her—for without courage she could not have endured what she endured until the end of her life. She was not, however, always a hopeful woman. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing unadulterated hope in her expression the entire time I knew her. So what shocked me about these pictures was that there was hope in her face on the day that they were taken. Not a bounty of it (not as much as there was pride), just enough to make plain what the lack of it for nearly fifty years can do to a person’s look. Seeing these pictures, I realized that my mother could have died with a different face. That not only made me fed a new sadness for her, it also made me worry about my own face in its closing days.

My mother had a way of looking at a camera that could tell you everything about how she was looking at life. In my favorite of these pictures, Bessie Brown is seated in a chair. She is looking toward her left, in a three-quarter profile, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, her hands meeting calmly in her lap. She is wearing a simple, floor-length white dress—it fits perfectly and looks stunning—and around her neck rests a string of pearls. She has tied her long black hair up in back, and wears the rest of it in a flourish of curl that emphasizes her intelligence as much as her beauty.

The picture was taken outdoors. Bessie is seated in a chair on the farm, in front of her favorite mountain. Next to her stands a woman (a sister or a friend) holding a purse. She looks fine, but the picture belongs to Bessie, who knows the wonderful incongruity of her own pose: the exquisite beauty in a rustic setting. There’s a faint smile on her face. It says she knows too much about herself, and about life, to stay in this setting. It is a small smile, bemused and a bit impatient, and in her eyes there is the steady, dark stare of hope.

In 1933, despite everything that had already happened, my mother had not yet learned to hate what a camera could reveal about her mind and soul.

THE PHOTOGRAPH TURNED OUT TO BE BESSIE’S FAREWELL to the Brown farm. As my cousin Brenda once told me, “Your mother had a longing for the finer life.” In this case, the finer life meant Salt Lake City, fifty miles to Provo’s north. In the mid 1930s, Bessie left home and moved to Salt Lake with three friends. They all rented an apartment not far from the city center, and all four took housekeeping jobs. They hadn’t been there a month when one of the women returned to her family’s home in Provo and told her folks she didn’t like the way Bessie and the others were living in Salt Lake. They had all quit their jobs, she said, but nobody had trouble paying the rent.

The Browns didn’t hear much from Bessie for a while, and they never made the trip up north to see her. Occasionally, Bessie would go back home, mainly to see her youngest sister, Ida. When she did, she made a point of wearing her fine new clothes and her new jewelry. She now wore a ring on each finger. Her parents asked her how she could afford such things, and she told them she had taken a job modeling jewelry. They had trouble believing her, and then the fights would start again. Finally, Bessie would stomp out in a rage, and her father would go down the hill to a tavern in the valley. Will Brown, the good Mormon patriarch, was learning how to drink.

RUMORS FOLLOWED BESSIE LIKE AN UNWANTED DOG. In 1936, she disappeared for a while. Later, there was talk that she had hitchhiked to California with a friend, and while she was there, she had fallen deeply in love with a serviceman. But the romance went bad, and Bessie came home, brokenhearted and compromised. After that, she lived by herself and began to keep a distance from her old friends.

All the gossip had its effect on her. Insofar as the rumors were a kind of judgment, a dismissal of her worth and goodness, Bessie felt deeply hurt and enraged by all the talk. But on the surface, she managed to wear her image with the pride of the outcast. She had too much dignity to surrender to the displays of repentance