More Than the Eye Can See: A Memoir

By Helen Lavinia Underwood

More Than The Eye Can See is about two young women, one sighted and one blind,
living together as roommates in a small Southern college during the peaches and
cream fifties. The sighted student reluctantly becomes reader to her blind roommate.
A letter dated June 23, 1957 -- the authors wedding day -- turns up in a box of keepsakes
in 2012. Written by the blind roommate as a paean to their college life together, the author
realizes she has never read the letter and certainly never responded to it. The memoir
becomes the long-overdue response. Poignant memories and hilarious escapades characterize
the narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483671918

Helen Lavinia Underwood

Helen Lavinia Underwood, a native of Huntsville, Alabama, has taught writing at both the secondary and college levels. For eighteen years, she served as Head of the English Department at Friends School, Baltimore, Maryland, and later taught English at Wesley College in Dover, Delaware. Earlier in her career, she taught at the American International School in Calcutta, India. Mrs. Underwood holds degrees from Martin Methodist College, Middle Tennessee State University, and Rutgers University. I’ll Never Tell is her fourth publishing venture. Mrs. Underwood’s first three novels, Under Cedar Shades, The House of Lakshmi Chattergee, and More Than the Eye Can See, continue to receive accolades. A published poet, she has also written numerous short stories. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband Joel. They delight in their three children and seven grandchildren.

Book preview

A Scary Thought

Was it merely by chance that we became roommates? Lisel Mueller, in her poem Alive Together, speaks of what an important part pure circumstance plays in our lives.

Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun…

Yes, you and I could have ended up with anyone else as roommates. But for whatever reason, that fall of 1955 at Martin College, we moved in together.

I doubt I ever shared with you how upset I was the first time I met with Dean Whitley about becoming your reader. Can’t you just hear him now? He was holding forth in that matter-of-fact voice of his: Helen, I have the perfect work-study for you. I’m assigning you to become reader to a blind student.

Then he looked up from his desk and announced, It might be easier if the two of you shared a room. Right now Thelma’s living on the first floor with another student, but I suggest she move in with you.

By that time, I wasn’t listening. Hadn’t I just escaped having every aspect of my life decided by my family? And hadn’t I hoped it would be different at Martin?

Wasn’t that just typical of Dean Whitley? Always deciding someone else’s life!

But I trusted him completely. After all, he had been the one who’d encouraged me to attend Martin College in the first place. He was so persuasive with his father knows best attitude as he peered over his round, silver-rimmed glasses. Who was I to question anything an administrator said, especially if that administrator was Dean Whitley?

You’ll love Martin, he insisted. You’ll love the small classes; the excellent, caring faculty and staff; and—since your father’s a Methodist minister—you’ll be given a scholarship. Of course, you’ll still need a work-study to help with your day-to-day expenses. And I know you’ll excel at Martin. It’s a small college, and you won’t feel lost as you might at a larger institution.

It all sounded positive—except for the part about the work-study. Some students had been given the opportunity to work in the kitchen and dining room or to help in the college business office or to become secretaries to professors or to work in the athletic department. I had already snooped around and decided I would like to work in the library. But the dean gave me no choice.

Thelma, I’m sure you will understand how I felt since you’ve had so much of your own life determined by other people and circumstances beyond your control. I know it wasn’t a great attitude to have, but you must know I was hesitant and afraid and a little angry! All I could think about was: Why me?

Honestly, I was not looking forward to having any roommate at all. But I knew that having a room of my own was not an option. A blind roommate? Reader to a blind person! It was a scary thought. First of all, I had rarely encountered sightless people in my young lifetime, and like most people, I simply felt pity for them. It made me uncomfortable just to be near a blind person. I remember once when I was very young, I went with my mother to shop in Huntsville, Alabama. On the square, we walked past a blind beggar holding a cup for money. When my mother stopped to drop change in it, I tried to pull away.

I don’t think I ever told you how much I wanted to run from Dean Whitley’s office that first day. I simply didn’t have the courage to say to him, Please, can I work in the library? I’ll never be any good as a reader to a blind person.

The Old Parsonage

Thelma, when was it you first met Dean Whitley? I met the dean in the fall of my junior year in high school. He simply appeared one Sunday morning at my father’s church, Moss Chapel in McMinnville. He showed up at just the right time: nothing had been decided about where I would go to college.

Like the early Methodist circuit riders, he traveled to churches all over the hills and valleys of Middle Tennessee, recruiting young people for Martin College. And like many of the early preachers, he was good at persuasion. He would speak at services on Sunday mornings and then arrange to be invited to Sunday dinners, where he would talk with prospective students and their parents.

It took little persuasion for Dean Whitley to convince me—or my parents—that I should attend Martin. My mother expressed concern that it was an hour or so away from home and that I had never been that far away except to attend Girls State in Nashville. But they were both happy it wouldn’t cost a lot for me to attend Martin.

Talking about the role circumstance plays in shaping one’s life, in June just after I graduated from high school, the bishop appointed my father to a circuit of three churches in Giles County near Pulaski: Olivet, Pleasant Valley, and Berea. The Olivet parsonage was just fifteen minutes from Martin College!

We all hated moving, especially my mother. She often complained that the higher-ups—the bishops and district superintendents—seem to have little concern about making appointments that meant families would have to adjust to new places to live. While my four siblings groused and complained about having to attend a new school, I don’t remember worrying much about the move. I knew that in just two months, I would be leaving for college.

My mother always cried when we moved. It was hard adjusting to new places. She was always disappointed in the parsonages. In fact, we were all disappointed with the Olivet parsonage. The house was old, built well before the turn of the last century, with high ceilings and French doors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything was old. A worn-out carpet covered the wide hall that separated the living room, kitchen, and dining room from the three bedrooms. Two unattractive opaque glass doors at the end of the hallway opened onto a front porch with ten steep steps that led down to a long open yard. A road wide enough for only one car wound its way up the hill to the back of the house, where, to my mother’s consternation, everyone entered through the rear screen porch.

The walls were covered with water-stained, ornate Victorian flower patterns that had been there since the house was built. A large fireplace in the living room smoked up the house every time a fire was started, and there were smaller fireplaces in each of the bedrooms, but they never seemed to give off much heat. A potbellied stove to help heat the entire house had been added at the back of the hallway. The place had only one small bathroom between two of the bedrooms, and it was in constant demand until Mother devised a schedule for early-morning baths.

There was little evidence that any renovation had taken place over the years except for the added-on back-screened porch with an electrical outlet for a wringer washing machine. We soon discovered during the first big rain that the roof leaked. Buckets and other containers had to be placed strategically in every room.

They treat us like gypsies, Mother said. And they think when they give you some old throwaway, they’re doing you such a big Christian favor! Someday I’m going to have a house of my own and my own furniture!

And she did! I guess enough preachers’ families complained over the years until the Tennessee Conference of the Methodist Church began encouraging ministers to buy their own homes if they chose. Looking back, it seems to me a terrible thing that ministers’ families had to spend their lives living in places that some of their parishioners would never be caught dead in!

Back then, that parsonage was just an old house set out in the middle of nowhere. But, oh, what the passing years can do! Nowadays, I still sometimes fantasize about that old Victorian house, with its gingerbread trim and its front porch swing. With all my complaints about that parsonage, part of me would love to live there again. I would repair it and fix it up, but I wouldn’t change the paper on the walls!

Thelma, do you remember the times you and I would sit in the swing when you came home with me from Martin on the weekends? We figured that after I had helped with the chores, we could sit in the swing and catch up on our reading.

Maybe while you do your chores, you said, I can find some way to entertain your brother and sisters.

Barbara, Larry, and Sandy were intrigued with having you around. Sandy, who was four at the time, couldn’t refrain from asking personal questions.

Are your eyes real? Can you take them out now? Please! she begged.

I can’t, you said. I only do that early in the morning and late at night. But tell you what, when I take them out tonight, you can watch me!

That last summer before I went to Martin, my father kept himself busy with visiting the parishioners and preparing sermons. My mother—in order to supplement the family’s income (and probably in order to get away from it all)—took a job in an upscale clothing store in Pulaski, leaving me and my sister Joyce in charge of our three siblings: Barbara, age eight; Larry, six; and Sandy, four.

The mornings were mostly taken up with cleaning the house. Joyce and I would assign the tasks: washing breakfast dishes, making the beds, sweeping the floors, dusting furniture, and washing and ironing clothes. When arguments arose about who was doing more than the other, the schedule of jobs would be changed. Still a good portion of my time was spent trying to prevent a war from breaking out.

You stepped on my clean, shiny floor with your muddy shoes!

I did not!

Yes, you did. Now I have to clean it all over again.

And before I knew it, Barbara was chasing Larry around the house with a broom.

After midmorning when the tasks were all completed, we would gather on the front porch and argue about who would sit in the swing and bemoan the fact that we lived out in the boonies with nothing to do for entertainment. Sometimes we would tune in to music on the radio and sing and dance. The porch became the stage, and those of us not performing would sit out on the grass as the audience. Larry had begun to play the guitar, so he strummed while we sang All I Have to Do Is Dream. I can still hear us harmonizing on it now.

Life On The Milky Way

It was not until years later—the summer of 2006, when Joyce and I revisited the Olivet church and parsonage—that I realized what an incredible view we had while sitting there on that front porch. Hundreds of acres of luscious, undulating hills spread far and wide across the road from the parsonage. Not much about the parsonage had changed. It was empty and in the process of being repaired, so we were each able to take a small piece of that lovely old wallpaper as a memento.

Joyce reminded me about the times we picked blackberries in the woods at the back of the house. Remember how we were all scared of rattlesnakes? she said. "We covered ourselves from head to toe, and just when we found the juiciest berries and were well into the brambles, someone would holler, ‘Snake!’

"Then there was the day we got tired of scouting the woods for blackberries and decided instead to explore the property across the road. We’d been warned never to go there, but like the kids in the old Our Gang comedies, we paid no attention—not even to the ominous No Trespassing! sign. Remember how we all ran down the hill from the house, crossed the highway, and crawled under the barbed wire fence? We then followed a narrow path through the woods until, to our amazement, we stood facing an enormous structure—an English Tudor house surrounded by smaller houses and barns. We couldn’t believe the well-kept gardens of roses, canna lilies, purple irises, and garden sculptures. Big magnolia trees lined the lane that led to the house. It was like something out of a