How a decision to leave home exemplified one woman’s courage
January 30, 2024 | Story by Bryce Brown | Photo courtesy of Bryce Brown
Editor’s note: Kathleen is the author’s grandmother.
Kathleen Pelkey is known to make kids cry. Grown men, too.
Some would consider it unbecoming. Others, endearing. It all depends on how you look at it — or rather, her.
Kathleen is as puzzling as her history. A series of instances touched by chance, a lick of courage and luck — only, she’d credit her luck to God.
She found Him in a little Methodist church as a young girl. As she recalls it, the minister’s sermon, which reverberated among packed pews, was interrupted by a strange light, a providential beam shining down on her. It was just she and the light in that church for all she was concerned, and she laid down her heart at the foot of the pulpit.
“He’s here,” she’d often say, pressing her finger to her chest. “Always.”
This light guided her as she migrated from place to place; it was a lifestyle she was used to. Passed from hand to hand like the offertory baskets at church, she and her sister Janet sought a stable home as children.
After resigning themselves to an orphanage for a period of time, they found lodging at their Aunt Treva’s, where they toiled on the family’s farm for long hours and ate olives until they were sick.
Having not lived with her own mother for years, Kathleen was startled to see her on Aunt Treva’s front stoop one afternoon. She dropped off a few obligatory words and some coins from the bottom of her purse, then turned her back and left again.
Kathleen got to work. Quickly, she wrote a letter dedicated to her mother, expunging her anger by vomiting it onto paper. After signing and sealing it, she placed it in the mailbox and entrusted her sister with this coveted information, already feeling victorious.
Hours later, she’d be painted purple by the callous hands of Aunt Treva, who found the derisive message.
Shattered on the floor, Kathleen gathered her pieces and brought herself to her feet.
“I’m leaving,” she told Janet that night.
“Well, I’m going with you,” Janet responded. “I have to.”
Janet wouldn’t confess she had shown Aunt Treva the letter until years later.
The two of them trudged along dark gravel roads with only paper sacks to carry their belongings. Kathleen heaved herself over a fallen log, and with the weight of her body came the heavy weight of panic as the reality of her actions began to register. Then the light came.
You can leave now. Go.
She paused.
Then, without looking over her shoulder, she continued moving forward.
The two girls eventually reached Uncle George and Aunt Mable’s home several miles down the road, where they would stay for a few days before moving to Miami.
Years later, Kathleen would see her mother again to hold her hands while she lay dying in bed.
Today, Kathleen is a woman who doesn’t bow under pressure. She is steadfast — a trait that suited her when she began working for the FBI in 1952, and one which still vindicates her claim that she doesn’t wear a wig and, instead, gets her hair styled at a salon (one she won’t name).
She is a woman who knows when she is lost but never loses direction. A woman disarmed by family but who protects her family against all odds. A woman of strict law but ever-flowing forgiveness. And, perhaps, a woman of oxymorons.
History etches itself into her square glasses and stiff blouses; the future forever bound in her Bible and family photographs. Kathleen is a woman constructed of hard lines, which fold softly into their center.
