In 1943, 22-year old Leroy Beavers left a farm in Barnwell, South Carolina, and arrived by train in Savannah, Georgia, settling in the city, on the Black side of town, some 90 miles northwest of his hometown and a world away from his family’s lives as sharecroppers.
Months after arriving he began what would be a lifetime cutting hair of both Black and white men, and later women. Beavers began as an apprentice, later renting spaces around the west side where he ran his own barbershop before opening Beavers and Sons barbershop.
Opened in 1988, Beavers and Sons, located on the corner of 42nd Street and what was then known as West Broad Street, and now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the barbershop was a bastion of neighborhood life and culture. And now 32 years later Beavers and Sons still is where a large portion of the mostly Black, mostly lower to middle class neighborhood gets their haircut and share the day’s business.
Upon Beaver’s passing his son Leroy Beavers, Jr., took over the family business. Simply known as “Jr.’, Beavers was a veteran of the United States Army, and had lived around the country before taking over the barbershop.
On a grey Thursday morning in February, third-generation Beavers and Sons owner Melody Edenfield, 43, the granddaughter of Leroy Beavers, Sr. rushed down 42nd Street towards the shop.
She was a few minutes early for her 8 a.m. appointment that morning but wanted to be ready for the client. These days more than any other in the recent past, she can ill afford to lose a client. Making it through the COVID-19 pandemic is not just a personal act of survival, it’s a financial one too. “We are here to provide a service,” she said.
Both her grandfather and her father ran the shop less like a business and more like a community center, a place for a man to get a haircut and discuss the day’s business. That is not as easily accomplished these days with the social distancing protocols imposed to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
“The new normal at the shop now is clients calling to see if there are appointments available,” said Edenfield by phone Sunday, her one day off from the shop. “It has been a very complicated dance. The economics have become difficult, so you have to get around the obstacles in front of you because there will be another one coming.”
The west side has changed economically and that includes the barber business. Besides the auto mechanic on 41st Street and a few local restaurants, there isn’t much commerce taking place in the neighborhood surrounding Beavers and Sons. That’s not how this neighborhood was decades earlier when Savannah’s Black wealthier community was forced to live together before racial integration and thus spent their money together. “I still have customers come in here and tell me how the old neighborhood had everything they needed,” said Edenfield about a time long before she was born.
Today Edenfield takes calls and texts from clients every day, as the shop can’t be filled with people waiting in the multi-colored chairs lined up against the wall, so she has to schedule them to be seen in increments that will better keep them and her socially-distanced.
“The COVID-19 protocol has changed the business because it’s on everyone minds when they come in here,” said Edenfield. “So we have to go the extra mile to do extensive sanitizing and cleaning because we are trying to keep our clients safe.” And coming back.
According to the Georgia Department of Health’s Coastal Health District there have been 17,173 positive cases of coronavirus and 311 deaths to date in Chatham County, the county that encompasses the city of Savannah.
A number of businesses were temporarily closed during the past year, but the barbershop managed to stay open as it’s designated “essential” and has a steady, if dwindling, flow of customers. That doesn’t mean the business hasn’t suffered despite remaining continuously in operation.
Edenfield says, financially, the shop isn’t doing as well as during past years as a result of the pandemic. “Some people are not coming to the shop as much as they normally do,” she said.
Savannah’s restaurant and hospitality industries have been the lifeblood of the city’s minority communities for generations. From college students and student-athletes at nearby Savannah State University, to local high school students, area mechanics and fast food workers, the clientele of Beavers and Sons speaks to the fiscal diversity of the middle-class neighborhood it inhabits.
Edenfield, a licensed beautician understands that if you lose your job or have your hours cut at work a haircut is the last thing on your mind. “As a small business owner I have to deal with a lot of things but not nearly as much as my clients,” she said. “I have customers who have lost their jobs.”
She points out that the more expensive procedures like hair braiding and coloring, procedures that normally take precedence, have become more difficult to schedule. The barbershop has always been a place where men and women could be groomed, said Edenfield.
The time it takes to do those, less lucrative but equally important haircuts means they can be left to linger. It is a balance that Edenfield, who is currently the shop’s sole barber at the moment, says she is getting better at, if no other reason than because she has no choice but to adapt to the way things are these days.
Despite the difficulties Edenfield decided to not take out a small business loan, unlike thousands of other smaller businesses in town and around the state, deciding to weather the storm and deal with what comes.
“The language of the government loans is very, well you have to be very careful,” said Edenfield. “If I took out a government loan I would have to follow very strict guidelines. If I didn’t follow those guidelines that could put debt on my balance sheet. In a time like this I would not want to risk putting debt on a balance sheet.”
Asked what she would tell someone thinking about taking over a family business during a pandemic and recession that feels like it is closer to the middle than to the end, she says, “I would advise them to cultivate the things that work. Don’t try to turn it upside down, cultivate the things that make the business what it already is and then you can gradually make changes, hopefully in a more stable environment for business.”
Though Edenfield has worked in a number of industries, including on Broadway, the family barber shop was always in her future. “My dad and my grandfather were synonymous with local culture and my family is continuing their legacy,” said Edenfield. “It is really important to keep that story alive.”
Asked if she ever thought about changing the shop at all, maybe into a nail salon, beauty shop or day spa, she answered, “It would not serve me or my family well to change it into a nail salon or a place where we take care of other cosmetic needs. I inherited a barber shop and that is what I continue to do here.” Earlier this month she said she cut the hair of a man from Qatar and another man visiting Savannah from Idaho.
Beavers and Sons remains an essential service and Monday through Saturday it will be open to provide that service if Edenfield, a mother of two teenagers, has anything to do with it. “I learn things from people every day I am in the shop,” she says. “It’s part of the human condition to share our stories.
“We’re not fully back until our people are back,” she said of her clients, the people that help keep the doors open. “Some of them haven’t come back because they are afraid. It’s a struggle, a formidable struggle and if our customers are in limbo, we’re in limbo. This is a huge challenge for all of us.”
Done with her morning appointment, Edenfield checked her watch and realized her 9 a.m. appointment was running late. No worries, she was going to be ready when he arrived. “My grandfather always had a saying about the business, ‘Just keep the doors open,’”, said Edenfield.
And that’s exactly what she’s doing.
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