Higher Calling-Part Four

Pilgrims

Hettie’s three children were like pilgrims, settling in a new land and dependent on each other. They walked to school, did their chores and grew up with each other. The road wasn’t easy, but they had a whole brood of Monks to help them on their walk.

The world was changing, too, with The World War II heating up. No matter the nightmare of war, service life was one way out of the bottom trough life of tenant farming.

Hettie took a job at the Glenn L. Martin Company, a military aircraft production facility located just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. This was factory work, physically demanding and low paying, though it was steady work. She had her family to support her, but still, she was the sole breadwinner. Hard work was the way to make it through. Hettie carried on with the fierce determination that would have crippled lesser folks. She had heard a higher calling and was intent on seeing it through.

Along the way, she met a man who would help ease some of the burden. Clinton Edwards worked on the railroads up north and married Hettie Monk with her three children. They lived in a small place on Singer Road along Winter’s Run. Later, they moved to Clayton Road, Darlington, and back to Singer. Eventually, they built a house on Plumtree Road, just outside of Bel Air, Maryland.

Clinton was a hard man. He took on this new task of being a husband and a father none too joyously. My mother, eight years old at the time, recalls a meanness to the man that went beyond having a hard day. He liked the younger girl Mary, but gave Margarette an awful time. 

Didn’t matter. Seems Margarette Evelyn was cut from the same cloth as her mother. She took no guff from her new father. She was respectful of course, but the two tangled all the time. Clinton wasn’t a very likable person, just the way it was.

With the marriage came more children. Four more to be exact. Richard, Kenneth, Wanda and Virginia were Edwards children with Monk blood and the line carried on. Hettie loved all her children and instilled them with the lessons she had learned. This old world changes, but bloodlines take a little longer, evolving with the love of family to carry it on. It is a way of life that eludes any explanation other than the higher calling from where it comes.