The Family Light

by Wendi E. Berry 

Foolishly, I did not realize the importance of my late grandmother’s walnut swan-armed rocker (to me) until it was almost too late. And I almost lost it from the family. I was moving out of an apartment near Manteo in the Outer Banks, and the landlord threatened to hold it as collateral until I paid him a surprise $365 cleaning fee. After receiving his “I am disappointed in you” phone call and his threat to give away the family heirloom if I didn’t pay up, I used my voice and the facts I had collected to write a letter outlining why I refused to pay him. (I had cleaned the apartment the best I could given the furniture that remained to be picked up by people he had recommended and they were late and delayed.) At my father’s urging, I capitulated. My dad paid the fee and my uncle, a retired sergeant major, retrieved the rocker and delivered it to my cousin Shannan who had a stable home for it.

To antiquarians, it’s known as a “Lady swan-armed rocker,” but to me it was the portal to my late grandmother Elizabeth White Berry and to a hidden history she revealed to me one day, sitting in that chair, in 1999. My grandmother was never much of a talker, but that day she divulged that my great, great grandparents were lighthouse keepers of Currituck on the Outer Banks. That’s when I first learned of the existence of my great, great grandmother Lela Upton—one of only about seven documented women lighthouse keepers in the Outer Banks. Why hadn’t she told me before? If she did, why hadn’t I heard? Twenty-four years after Elizabeth’s death in 2001, it continues to intrigue me how much she downplayed the family’s commitment to serve.

 

In photos of Elizabeth in her 20s, she was dressed like a flapper and she loved to dance and attend parties. Something quieted her youthful exuberance through the years. In the 30s, it could have been a backlash against flappers for perceived morality issues, fear over the economy and the anti-suffragette movement. Or did her modesty set in during the Great Depression and her marriage to my grandfather from Tennessee, a decorated police officer, who became a devout Baptist? Whatever the case, backlashes can have a ripple effect on generations of family and those targeted for oppression. Women can lose their voice and even their stories, until someone makes them known again to the world.

 

The Lady swan-armed rocker was small and Elizabeth was petite in height, though her waist revealed she liked to bake and eat cookies. Her hands rested lightly on the swan-neck hand rails, her feet in Millies, 1920s-inspired dance shoes, on the footstool. She liked to cross her legs at her ankles, look down and ruminate. I can still see the top of her head and her wavy silver hair, the floral dress with the floating sleeves.

True to her humble nature, it was unusual for her to talk much less brag about family unless it was her two adult sons, my father David Berry and my uncle Douglas Berry, and her five grandchildren. The times I visited her in assisted living, she sat in her special swan-armed rocker and asked about me. Where I was living and what I was doing.

On this day, though, Elizabeth coyly revealed she had just been interviewed for a book. The nonprofit Outer Banks Conservationists sponsored the writing of “To Illuminate the Dark Space” to commemorate an upcoming descendants reunion and the restoration of the Currituck lighthouse they had begun in 1980. They were holding the reunion in November and Grandmother Berry wanted to know if I would attend on her behalf.

“Wait—our ancestors were lighthouse keepers?”
“Yes, my grandparents, W.J. Simmons and Lela Upton.”
My heart stepped up its beat, as I sat on the end of Elizabeth’s four poster bed and asked what they were like.
“Grandpa W.J. was stern and Grandma Lela worked hard to put cooked meals on the table.” And that was it, all that I recall she told me about them. Why didn’t I ask her more questions? Why didn’t she say more?
“Won’t you come with me?”
“I don’t feel up to it,” she said.

Now that it’s been 24 years since her death, I continue to regret that I didn’t try to be more resourceful about finding a way to get her there. I wanted to help make it happen, but I felt uneasy about her health and taking a risk. I don’t recall her using a cane, but I think she was afraid of falling. The chest pain that landed her in the hospital at my sister’s college graduation six years before worried me. Why didn’t I find a walker and perhaps a friend to help get her out of the car and to the reunion tent? Why didn’t I call the organizers and ask if someone could help?

A part of me was afraid she was going to die on my watch. Another part thought she might live forever. She was 94 years old.

Whether we know it or not, we’re all searching for role models from the day we are born for how to live and how to conduct ourselves in this world. In 1999, it had been three years since I lived in Nags Head for a year, and through my grandmother’s contacts helped secure a small beach house rental. I’d wondered for some time why I felt continually called to be there. That my ancestors were lighthouse keepers meant something, though I didn’t really understand what.

I was glad to learn of Lela. But it would take me years to really find her. And when I think of why my grandmother didn’t tell me about her sooner, I wonder how our current climate of stern men angry about women’s academic and career growth will affect generations of women to come.

 

During that time in our family, I lived the closest to Elizabeth, four hours away in Durham where I worked as an editorial assistant and features writer for The Herald Sun. My parents were in Northern Virginia and my sister in New York. My cousins were in the Midwest. Elizabeth’s retirement place, the Ballentine, was in Norfolk, so I was the most likely candidate to get to the Northern Outer Banks and report back. I agreed to go to the reunion on her behalf, but my motives were dutiful and somewhat shallow. I was there to pick up copies of the book, do the obligatory climb to the top and talk with some people from The Insiders’ Guides I had worked for in 1995-1996 in Manteo right before they sold their business.

As I picture myself at 39, I was a bud just beginning to open. A late bloomer. I’d recently learned to windsurf. Except for a temporary back injury, I was in the best shape of my life. At 5 foot 6, I weighed 140 pounds. My hair was long, thick and bleached from the sun. I was no longer living in the Outer Banks, but I had only been away for two and a half years, and in spirit, it felt like I was still hovering and carried the fierceness and lightness of the island with me. I dressed as if I still lived there in a white T, pale lavender fisherman’s sweater, worn fitted jeans, and Teva sports sandals, always sandals. I had just started working in a newsroom in Durham and had a reporter’s curiosity, but it was not very well developed. I was in such a hurry to get and go places in my Corolla sport wagon. I was still earnestly searching for a mate I thought would be a surfer, a fisherman, a marine biologist, a birder or environmentalist, or if I listened to my mother, it would be someone who owned a boat and belonged to a yacht club. My favorite song at that time was a throw back to the 70s: Paul McCartney and Wings, “Band on the Run.” I thought if I ran fast enough I might catch the right one—or me. I might find out who I was. My mother’s interest in art and appearance interested me, but not enough. My father’s work ethic and climbing the corporate ladder stressed me out. I might have been most like Grandmother Berry in her 20s—a flapper looking for fun, wanting to dance and celebrate, and happy for youthful freedom. Something inside of me was looking for a strong voice, a strong physical presence and a commitment to serve.

At the reunion, I did meet up with my former employers and was happy to hear about their latest ventures in publishing and hospitality. I did introduce myself to other families and other descendants. It was easy peasy running up the 220 steps of the spiral staircase. I didn’t stop to rest. At the top, on the perch, I went right to the railing, enjoying the view of the Atlantic Ocean. I did not stop to consider the weight of what I was experiencing. My ancestors had worked here. They had run up and down those same steps many times a day on their seven-hour watches, lugging heavy oil, and tasked with polishing the lens to keep the light as bright as possible and keeping a lookout.

I don’t remember being curious about the renovated keepers’ quarters. I fulfilled my mission and bought copies of the book. I was in and out, like “a laser beam,” a friend who was a scuba instructor used to call me.

I wasn’t ready to know Lela yet.

Working in the newsroom helped finetune my curiosity toward investigative research. Still, it wasn’t until I was accepted into Virginia Commonwealth University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and received a North Carolina Writers’ Network scholarship to their Squire Summer Writing Workshop that I began to go deeper and reconsider my family’s heritage. The summer (2023) before I graduated, a local OBX journalist connected me with the current Currituck lighthouse keeper.

Meghan Agresto. She could tell me more about my ancestors.

We met at her office. She greeted me warmly and began to fill me in on the work my relatives did for the state of North Carolina.

The conversation started by admitting I didn’t feel all that brave. Now that I was in my sixties, I had reservations about climbing the winding 220 stairs to the top. Meghan shared what she tells students arriving on field trips to climb the Currituck spiral staircase.

“You can’t be brave unless you’re afraid first.”

From Meghan, I learned my great-great grandfather W.J. Simmons had retired as a lighthouse keeper by the time Grandmother was born, so when she visited him and Lela it was in Elizabeth City, where Lela worked hard to keep food on the table.

Though records were scarce because W.J did not keep many, one might surmise he was good at his job. His wife Lela was one of his five assistants at the Brant Island Shoal lighthouse in the Pamlico Sound. This was his second commission and probably the most difficult. (His first was at Wade Point on the Pasquotank River for a year.)

That’s when I learned of Lela’s physical strength working alongside men and her bravery. I was so proud and pleased to learn that my ancestors risked their lives to help light up dark channels, save lives and ensure provisions made it to the people who needed them. I didn’t have the physical strength or the strength of character that Lela did, but the thing I could bring to my MFA was to document the life of lighthouse keepers and how important it was for women to tell their stories.

W.J. worked at the Brant Shoal screwpile lighthouse in Pamlico Sound from 1887 to 1895 and Lela was his assistant for the last six months of the commission. He needed an assistant and she must have had what it took in what seemed like an impossibly challenging situation. The only thing holding the small rectangular house in place in seven feet of water were iron pilings drilled into the South Pamlico sound floor. The light sat on a white skeleton tower 35 feet above high water.

“Basically, they were out in the middle of nowhere,” Meghan said.

She pointed out, there was still no electricity—anywhere. That wouldn’t arrive at Currituck Lighthouse until 38 years later in 1933. The light that came from Brant Shoals protected large European trading ships from crashing into land.

Lela was one of the people who helped guarantee that passage. A role model for me to consider through the ages.

Keeping the lamp lit beneath the 1810 Lewis Lens, a less powerful precursor to the 1822 Fresnel, required daily trips up the spiral staircase lugging heavy oil. Old oil had to be disposed of. Daily, they polished the lens with linen. Add to that, the bell striker had to be cranked in case of fog and low visibility. The bell warned those crossing the Atlantic not to get stuck in shallow water or run ashore. If all went according to plan, the traders sent their flat-bottomed barges called lighters through the channel to Portsmouth, Virginia, a major trading hub.

W.J. and Lela lived in the small house and kept livestock on a platform below. They only went to shore for supplies once every three weeks. The lighthouse came with its own 200-gallon water tank. Their ability to tolerate isolation amazes me.

My ancestors were tethered to the land, the sound, and the sea. Meagan told me just how tied they were to their jobs of protecting ships. Before the Currituck lighthouse was built in 1875, there was a 40-mile stretch of east coastline completely veiled in darkness between Cape Henry in Virginia Beach and the Bodie Island lighthouse in Hatteras. The new lighthouse built with a million red bricks from the ground up was 162 feet tall.

The coastline was so treacherous, even with the Currituck lighthouse in place, in 1877, 98 people died only 200 yards from the Nags Head shore. Rough November weather forced the gunboat USS Huron to run hard onto a sandbar. It capsized and was stuck in the icy water, with people trapped inside. The nearest lifestation was closed until December due to an inadequate operating budget. It’s a miracle 34 of the crew survived.

In the time of no electricity, lifesaving stations were spaced every six miles apart. The wreck of the USS Huron and the wreck of the Metropolis off Currituck beach in 1878 led to more funding and improvements in the stations. Rescue workers known as surfmen walked the shore and exchanged medallions to keep track and keep watch. In addition to the ships, there were the residents to consider. They depended on safe passage for ships to deliver food and building materials just as the Lost Colonists had waited for supplies until they couldn’t anymore.

Another one of W.J. ‘s assistants went on to become principal keeper at Currituck from 1888 to 1895. In 1895, WJ switched places with Lazarus G. Hinnant to become the principal keeper. He and Lela moved into the keepers’ quarters just as Corolla became an official town with a school, chapel and post office. Making their home there, they began their family of five children. From sundown to sunrise someone always had to be in the lighthouse.

 

Starting up those lighthouse steps again two summers ago after my first time 26 years ago, my pace was slower. It took more courage. I had to watch where I focused my attention and my gaze. To look up too much, made me dizzy. I had to stop and catch my breath at several landings. Reaching the perch, I was careful not to get too close to the railing. I wondered how my life might be different if I were younger and as committed to serving as my ancestors were. Looking out from that high up, those windswept barrier islands seemed to wait for me with all those channels and sounds and my question of how do we get from one island to another. I was about to complete my master’s degree and I wasn’t sure what to do after graduation.

Family and friends encouraged me to finish two manuscripts and find new work and reminded me, I had served, I had helped as a tutor, an adjunct, a journalist and an editor. As an essayist, I tasked myself with documenting a physically strong woman in my family who saved lives and who was a role model to push on through for whatever awaited me on the other side of completing my MFA.

Even coming down the spiral staircase I had to go slowly, so I wouldn’t make a misstep and take a tumble. What must it have felt like to be under pressure to crank the bell or polish the light knowing that a huge boat could get lost in fog or a storm. Or to be a woman and an assistant of a lighthouse? According to Meghan, they were paid relatively well for what they did.

Since Grandma’s passing in 2001, it has felt as if our family lost its center and our one dependable gathering place. For me, it has seemed impossible to find a place that is home for long. Twelve years after Elizabeth’s death, I received a notice to vacate from my Richmond apartment. I had to be out by Jan. 1, 2013—so, in the middle of grading final papers for my students at two Richmond universities and not finding any nearby rentals I liked, I allowed myself to daydream and search for winter rentals in the Outer Banks. Then I found one.

From January to April that year, I lived the dream. I got to stay with lifelong friends in Richmond to teach part time at two Richmond universities and I got to live part-time on those islands that I had always felt drawn to. I went to several events in the waterside fishing town of Wanchese and I drooled over the multi-tiered cakes at a community fundraiser. I ate fried sea trout sandwiches whenever and wherever I could, and attended literary readings at the Glenn Eure’s Ghost Fleet gallery sponsored by the Dare Arts Council once a month.

When a job opportunity too good to pass up arrived, I was not prepared for the expense of moving. I could not afford a moving truck, and I could not get everything into my car. I asked the landlord if I could pick up Elizabeth’s rocker in two weeks, assuming a missing first check from my new employer would surface by then.

His first reaction to my leaving was to offer assistance. However, things didn’t go according to plan, and by the time I had to leave to start the new job, there was still furniture people said they would pick up and then did not, or were delayed. A few weeks after my job started, he called to say I owed a $365 cleaning fee. When I balked at paying the fee, he said he would hold my grandmother’s rocker until I paid it.

I spoke to my father and we learned my cousin Shannan, married and living in Minneapolis, wanted the rocker. My uncle Doug, a retired Sergeant Major, offered to go to the Outer Banks and retrieve it for her. My Uncle Doug added the final word on the story about Elizabeth’s rocker being held hostage. When I visited him and his wife Wendy last Thanksgiving, he recounted that the landlord tried to explain what happened from his viewpoint. With my uncle’s formidable height, broad shoulders, and commanding voice, he said:

“I am here for three things only—to deliver the money, retrieve my mother’s rocker, and leave.”

I was relieved knowing Elizabeth’s rocker would have a good home.

 

With the help of Meghan Agretso, I’ve continued to put pieces together of how my ancestors conducted themselves and helped the community. In our meeting two summers ago Meghan revealed lighthouse keepers’ descendants were dying out, and historians wanted to capture as much oral history as possible about the families whose relatives were dedicated to minding the light and preventing shipwrecks. Now I was part of that legacy. I believe Elizabeth would be proud to know all my cousins have made a pilgrimage to the lighthouse. We are family-strong.

It’s gotten harder and takes more courage to climb a spiral staircase and follow in the footsteps of those brave Simmons and Uptons. Still, I want to claim the courage Meghan said I would have as long as I keep trying to overcome my fears. As I write this essay, I want people to know I’m still climbing, working on my writer’s voice, and aspire to serve North Carolina as a teacher, writer, editor or whatever comes next.

 

Wendi E. Berry was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, where she recently earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University (2024). She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, and volunteers for Step Up Durham as a mock interviewer to help people return to the job market. She drafted this essay during a residency at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. You can find her prose in storySouth, Prime Number Magazine, Duke Bishop’s House Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review blog.