Written in One Another’s Hearts

Feeling the Love of My Quaker Great-Great-Grandmother

But all Friends, mind that which is eternal, which gathers your hearts together up to the Lord, and lets you see that ye are written in one another’s hearts. —George Fox, Epistle 24

I have two things that belonged to my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Lane White (whom we all called “Grandma Lizzie”): a letter and her oak secretary. As long as I can remember, the secretary stood in the cool, shadowed hallway of my grandparents’ house in Belvidere, North Carolina. I liked to sit on the floor in front of it and take my time choosing a book from the selection lined up on the lower shelves; a few ancient Westerns and A Girl of the Limberlost were my favorites.

Today the secretary serves as my computer desk, with upper shelves and cubbyholes that hold a strange collection of my North Carolina treasures, including an arrowhead and a piece of garnet from the mountains. Underneath, on one of the lower shelves, is another treasure: a stiff manila envelope with a copy of the letter Grandma Lizzie wrote 70 years ago, which is addressed to her family. The letter begins:

The First day of May 1954

To my dear Children and Grandchildren,

I was born in a large family of Children 10 of us, I being the 8th of Mary Winslow Lane and J.E.C. Lane on the 24th of Nov 1866. Father died when I was about 7 yrs. of age which made a great impression on my mind leaving 7 Children 3 of them dying while young. The others have passed away one by one and I am the only one left in my 88th year. So my earthly pilgrimage is about run.

Early in life I felt the need of a Saviour and learned to love and trust him and felt I must confess him as my Saviour. Later in life I dedicated my life to him, felt called to the ministry, was recorded a minister in 1904 but had been preaching quite a while prior to that time. Was married when 19 to Robert J. White who was so faithful in making the way for me to get to different meetings and attend funerals, but he too left us in 1938.

Grandma Lizzie served the Up River Friends Meeting near Belvidere, North Carolina, in the Albemarle Sound region, an early Quaker stronghold in the colonies. George Fox visited the area in 1672. Piney Woods Meeting, located close to the town of Hertford on the Perquimans River, was founded in 1723. Members of Piney Woods who traveled to the meetinghouse from Belvidere—a township some seven miles up the river from Piney Woods—sought permission to establish a meeting nearer home. In 1866, the year Grandma Lizzie was born, Up River Friends held its first monthly meeting.

I attended worship at Up River when visiting my grandparents in the 1960s and ’70s. One summer I made a longer visit and went to the meeting’s vacation Bible school. But my father had married a Methodist, and he and my mom had built our family on neutral ground: we were Baptists. I didn’t see a great deal of difference in the two churches. The hymns were the same, and the order of service was similar. But just as Grandma Lizzie grew up a Quaker, I spent my life through college and young adulthood as a Baptist.

Not until many years later did I slowly begin to discern the imprint that Quakerism had left on my heart. I loved Up River, and the soft, alluvial black soil of Belvidere. The stories I’d heard about Grandma Lizzie, the mysterious attraction of the desk that had been hers, and the fact that she—a woman!—had been a minister and nobody had blinked an eye made a deep impression on me.

Over the years, I moved around a bit and was active in both Baptist and Disciples of Christ congregations. But it was while I was searching for a new church in Florida that I finally realized where I needed to be. I was visiting a church near my new home that met in a beautiful historic building on the St. John’s River. I fell in love with the location, until the minister announced a joint project the church planned to undertake with the local Quaker meeting.

The word “Quaker” hit me like a bolt of lightning. I’m Quaker, I thought, in a sort of dazed wonder. It was hard to remain seated and not leave immediately to go find my fellow Friends, but I stayed through the service and tracked down the tiny meeting later. The group gathered in the library of a private academy. I found the school easily enough, but once on the grounds, I became confused. The school was still growing; construction machinery and mounds of red dirt kept blocking my way, forcing me to turn back and try a new route.

I’d nearly given up when I met a caretaker in a golf cart and explained my problem. “Follow me,” he said, and we navigated a series of looping drives to a sleekly new, free-standing library. He gave me a wave, and once inside among the circle of Friends, I felt I had come home. A few years later, when I moved away, those dear Friends sent me off with a copy of Faith and Practice from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—a treasure I keep on the bottom shelf of Grandma Lizzie’s secretary.

When my husband and I moved back to North Carolina, it was not to return to Belvidere but to a spot almost four hours west, near my parents and only five minutes from Liberty Friends Meeting. Pleased as I was to return to a Quaker meeting, I felt shy at first and uncertain about committing myself to it. This meeting was considerably more staid than the Florida meeting, the worship more structured. I wasn’t sure it was the right fit for me. I chose not to join officially and struggled mightily to stay aloof. But how could I? The relentlessly kind hearts of the Liberty Friends drew me in, and I was soon, a little reluctantly, connected in spite of myself. They wrote me on their hearts, and I finally surrendered to their love and wrote their names on mine.

From that point forward connections seemed to branch out like fresh waterways leading back to Up River and my earliest Quaker experiences. The pastor of a nearby meeting once served at Up River Friends; another was the preacher’s kid there for a time and grew up with my younger cousins. Even without blood kinship or perfect harmony in shared beliefs, there was no denying these were my people, my family, my Friends.

Grandma Lizzie’s letter concludes:

I had hoped we might all get together again but it hardly seems possible. I am writing this to ask you if you are not a Christian to give your heart to God, and if you are, to press on to the end, for the longest life is soon over, that we may be a united family in heaven. I love you every one and God bless you.

Mother, Grand, and Great Grandmother

Elizabeth White

My great-great-grandmother never knew me. But she is a part of my life as I sit at her oak secretary and type up the minutes of Liberty Friends’ monthly meeting for business or prepare a newsletter to send out to members and two dozen others who have moved up- and downriver from the wellspring of our meetinghouse. How I would love to tell her that her presence in my history, her name written on my heart, helped guide me to a warm community of Friends. We are evolving, slowly, into a united family on earth, much to the delight of us all.