Mary Jean Berry Eason, a retired educator, died Wednesday, July 17 at her home in Jackson, Miss. She was 99. Growing up with a single mother in the Great Depression and teaching fourth, fifth and sixth grades at Jackson Public Schools through integration, in the months before her death she said life was chiefly about: “doing the right things and helping other people.”
Married for nearly 50 years, to Gene Bowen Eason, Sr. until his death on March 15, 2000, the couple had two children, Gwendolyn Eason (Palmer) and Gene Bowen Eason, Jr., who survived them.
A prolific letter writer known for her punctuality, grammatical zeal and penchant for giving directions, she was forever correcting family members on the difference between “laying” and “lying,” a lesson that perhaps needed another 100 years of her instruction in order to stick.
Jean was “a steady friend,” recalls Neal Brashier, 100, of their seven decades of friendship. “For years she always called me on Monday morning, and we got ready for the week together.”
With a never-ending love of life and profound interest in other people, even at the end, Jean’s reach extended well beyond the confines of her den, where in her latter years she reigned over her family – which had grown to eight great-grandchildren – from her recliner. A lifelong resident of Mississippi, within days of her death, condolences showered from across the country, including, perhaps most notably, a jail cell in California. Life was good and bad and difficult – and rarely easy – but “that’s just what you’ve got to face with life,” she said recently, adding: “It takes a lot of praying to get through life.”
Mary Jean Berry was born in Picayune, Miss. on Sunday, August 10, 1924, to James Leo Berry, a banker, and Mary Margaret Lewis Berry, who, after giving birth to stillborn twin boys, named both their proceeding daughters after herself. Mary Jean’s younger sister, Margaret “Peggy” Berry (Offenhiser), was born in 1928. Mary Jean’s early childhood years were spent in Gulfport, Miss., largely on the water, searching the foamy sands with flashlights, gigging for flounder with Peggy, and sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch with her father watching the lightning flash over the ocean while mother and sister hid inside. With the start of the Great Depression, her father – then the Vice President of Hancock Bank – emptied his savings to help other families survive.
When Mary Jean was 11, her father died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mary Margaret – an accomplished pianist and singer – reared the girls near his family in Prentiss, Miss., working as a secretary and, later, in local politics as a city clerk. Around the age of 13, Mary Jean was kneeling to say her prayers – or perhaps more honestly, contemplating with her eyes wide open – when she noticed a fire outside her bedroom window. She pounded on relatives' doors (the family did not have their own telephone), and the town bell rang out the alarm. When the local fire truck ran out of gas coming up the hill, neighbors rushed into the home – consumed by flames – hauling to safety, among other things, a cabinet filled with her mother’s wedding china and crystal. Not one piece broke.
Dropping the “Mary,” Jean enrolled at Mississippi College, in the first class of women accepted there, graduating in 1945 with degrees in English, Spanish and Bible. On Friday nights, the roommates would make toast over the gas heater and hot chocolate in a warming pot. Her black-and-white photo albums document a road trip to Rolling Fork, Miss., her senior banquet– and a curious number of photographs of the boxing team. Jean spent most of the 100 Christmases of her life in Mississippi. In her early 20s, much to her mother’s horror, she tore off to New York City, staying with friends in Brooklyn and walking the steps of Columbia’s library.
Shortly after college, Jean rented a house in Jackson with three close friends and took a job as a secretary at Bailey Junior High School, where in 1947, she met a talented wood-worker applying for a job as a shop teacher. Having changed a flat tire en route, Gene Bowen Eason arrived wrinkled and late to the interview. He made such an impression on the comparatively starched and prompt secretary that they got married three years later on June 6, 1950. (He had another two flats en route to their fried chicken rehearsal dinner, missing it completely.)
As a sixth grade teacher at Emma Green School (and as a teacher of fourth through sixth grades at Duling, Powell and Watkins elementary schools), an estimated 700 some children passed through her doors. Jean taught at Jackson Public Schools for 27 years, working hard through integration to teach every kid in her classroom despite state politics. Decades after retirement, Jean would often run into her – now long grown – former students in the local grocery store, still recalling them and their siblings by their full names.
Her seasoned briskets and heaping bowls of gumbo accompanied countless family dinners and celebrations, and her home was always stocked with repurposed coffee canisters filled with cookies pompously (aptly) named “World’s Best” and “Melting Moments,” as well as another family favorite simply dubbed “Fruitcake Cookies” (which really, we promise, were quite good).
Jean and Gene traversed much of their lives with their friends Jack and Lila Bickerstaff (now 97), and James and Neal Brashier. Together the couples shared early married years, becoming parents, building careers, retiring and having grandchildren. Then, one by one, the women attended their husbands’ funerals. Jean “taught me how to handle” being a widow, says Neal, whose husband died in 2003. “She was a widow before I was, and I had said to her I miss James so much when I sit down to eat,” Neal recalled. “She said, ‘Get yourself a book or a magazine and keep it right there to read,’ and that’s what I’ve done for the last 20 years.”
Growing up Baptist, Jean found a treasured church community at St. Matthews Methodist Church, where she and her husband were charter members and she was a longtime member of the card committee, sending notes of encouragement to sick, grieving, and shut-in members. In more recent years, she received cards from that very same committee.
In later years, Jean enjoyed weekly lunches with first granddaughter, Abbie Lauren Eason (Koonce), and her son – who also squired her to her standing Wednesday afternoon appointment at Switzer’s Beauty Parlor – as well as nightly long-distance telephone calls with her daughter and younger granddaughter, Emily Eason Palmer. Visits usually ended with “Love ya! Love ya! Love ya!” Fun Snoopy-themed cards sent from her niece Peggy Jo Offenheiser (Crochet) in Baton Rouge, La., and Mary Berry Dent always adorned her shelves. Until her death, Jean tuned into the local news, which she dubbed “The Murder Report.” In March, she greeted worried family from her hospital bed, requesting a live update on the sentencing of a set of corrupt law enforcement officers, who called themselves the “Goon Squad,” and had been convicted in a case of police brutality.
She died of natural causes one month shy of her 100th birthday. She was holding her daughter’s hand.
Funeral arrangements are being made by Parkway Funeral Home in Ridgeland, MS. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church, 7427 Old Canton Road, Madison, MS 39110.
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