Love Takes Root

Mr. and Mrs. Morris Robert Jones

Announce the marriage of their daughter

Elizabeth Deane

To

George Bibb Edmondson

On Sunday, July the twenty-first

Nineteen hundred and forty

          Beaumont, Texas

From Southern Bypass---
Elizabeth Deane Jones, my mother, married George Bibb Edmondson, my father, in a small ceremony in Beaumont, 1940, with her mother, father, sisters, and brother present. Mamma wore a navy suit, size 4. A steamy July afternoon, a platinum wedding ring, and a new name satisfied the new bride at first, but her gaze looked beyond to another open window and an opportunity to see the world. She and George Bibb left shortly en route to Montgomery, Alabama, to meet her new husband’s family, predominantly his matriarchal, reticent mother, better known in her ancestral town as Mattie Bibb.

The newlyweds landed with a resounding thud. Deane’s move as a bashful bride to the old Bibb mansion on Moulton Street provided quite the challenge. Mattie Bibb, proudly wore her heritage like the proverbial badge of honor. She was an aristocrat, both by nature and design. Her husband, a newspaper editor, had died at an early age with an infection from appendicitis and her widowed state held her captive in attire and state of mind. Mattie Bibb had coddled her son to the point of curdling as she consistently over-compensated for the early loss of his father.

Mamma's innocent beauty did little to fend her mother-in-law’s preconceived notion that her son should have married “much better” than this little uneducated girl from Kentucky. The new bride entered into this cohabitation with little choice or support, having no friends other than those who supposedly were her husband’s or mother-in-law's. The town offered the expected southern hospitality by throwing the round of parties for a new socially acceptable arrival, but after the glitter, only the afterglow remained and it soon dissipated. Deane and G.B. spent most of their time in the stuffy, hot, upstairs bedroom where writing poetry was blessed by Mattie Bibb’s adulation, and drooling over Deane was kept quiet. The isolation became stifling for the newlyweds and probably at Deane’s encouragement, George Bibb returned to work.

Work is the topic of the next post.