White Trash: Childhood Memories on Happy Top

By Rosa Pannell

Georgia White Trash is the story of Be Be Beasley and her 11 brothers and sisters. They grew up in a place called Happy Top. It was an area filled with run down shacks, sitting on top of a gloomy hill. The Beasley children had many adventures most of which they liked to settle with their fists. The following is a collection of memories from Be Be, as she shares some of the highlights from her family’s past.
These stories include one sister stealing from the mob, another shooting her husband (although he claimed self-defense), as well as what it was like growing up poor in Happy Top just to name a few.
Only two of the Beasley siblings still survive but they all managed to leave behind the one place that would never define them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664164949

Rosa Pannell

The following stories are memories of my childhood on Happy Top. Some of them reveal the abuse we experienced from my father. Others relate adventures of my siblings, while others demonstrated our resilience and faith. We seemed rough around the edges and often used violence to solve our problems but at the end of the day, we loved each other. Our lives might not always reflect happiness as the name of our home implies. We struggled with poverty, be we managed for the most part to overcome our difficulties. I did not write this thinking it would be a best seller novel. I feel this would be a wonderful movie if it could fall into the hands of someone with the knowledge or ability and a good sense of humor. This book of memories fall in parts comedy, violence, poverty, and profanity.

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Copyright © 2021 by Rosa Pannell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/23/2021

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Contents

Chapter 1   Life on Happy Top

Chapter 2   The Tooter

Chapter 3   Daddy Choking

Chapter 4   The Kite

Chapter 5   The Fight

Chapter 6   Bill Kisor

Chapter 7   The Midget

Chapter 8   Dorothy Shooting Junior

Chapter 9   Beer Bottle Nose

Chapter 10   Jesse and Clyde

Chapter 11   Jesse and Bill

Chapter 12   Jesse’s Husbands

Chapter 13   Willie and Hardee’s

Chapter 14   William and Faith

Chapter 15   The Neighbor

Chapter 16   Killing Luther

Chapter 17   Stepmother Beaten Up

Chapter 18   Barbara and the FBI

Chapter 19   Barbara Ann Cuts Dorothy

Chapter 20   Daddy and the House Fire

Chapter 21   Barbara and the Mob

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Life on Happy Top

I was born in 1943 and was the first of ten children that were born in the hospital, two more would follow me. My birth certificate identifies me as Rosa Alice, but everyone calls me Betty. When I was born, one of my older brothers, SH, was in the navy. He told my mom that she should name me Betty after Betty Grable, a pin-up girl famous at the time. The name Betty stuck after that.

I grew up in a place called Happy Top in a home with eleven brothers and sisters. To say we were poor was an understatement. My parents married when my mom was thirteen years old and my dad was nineteen. Her first child was stillborn, and she was thirty-seven years old when I was born. It seemed she spent much of her life having babies or taking care of babies. My dad wasn’t much of a father figure, and he seemed to resent being tied down.

My mother had grown up in Pickens County, just over the mountain. She worked in a thread mill from an incredibly young age. Her father, Harvey Duvall, would take her paychecks at the end of every week.

My father walked with a wooden leg that was hollow. He lost his leg when he was twelve years old in a railroad accident. He and some friends had been hoboing to Chattanooga, Tennessee. They would hop on a cargo car and hitch a ride to Chattanooga and then hitch another car for the return trip to avoid buying a ticket. One day, as he was jumping from a car, he slipped and fell. The train ran over his leg, and his leg was cut off from just above the knee down. He spent a year in bed recovering from this accident.

My parents met when my mom happened to be walking by one day as my father was sitting on the edge of a pickup truck strumming a guitar. Who was to know if it was love at first sight, but in my mom’s eyes, it was definitely a ticket out of the life she was living.

The area we grew up in was called Happy Top, but it was anything but that. The homes were basically wooden shacks. Our home had three rooms in it. There were two beds in the front room. Willie, who was the youngest, slept in the bed with my parents. I shared a bed with my two sisters Barbara Ann and Dorothy. The kitchen had a woodstove for cooking. We only had cold water in the house. If you wanted hot water, you had to heat it on the stove. The kitchen table had benches, and you could look out the window from there. The third room had a cot that was always piled high with clothes. We had no closets or drawers to store our clothes in.

Our father had a building close to the house where he made chenille bedspreads. He was a jack-of-all-trades. More often than not, he was away from the house, even spending the nights at the building. Dad supplemented his income by peddling different items. He would often