Our Berenice - Queen of Estate Sales, Ruler of The Cottage & True Southern Belle
Berenice Denton, age 50 and holding for a score of years plus some change now, leads a local cosmetic surgeon with a passion for antique train sets, into an estate sale full of antique trains. The owner has passed and the heirs have asked Berenice -- middle Tennessee’s undisputed “Estate Sale Queen” -- to make the house her realm and do her thing. She guides the man to the basement where antique trains of every description line the shelves. She reaches up at random to pull one down, and opens her hand. Instead of a train, she is holding a live grenade. Whoops!
“We could have met our demise,” Berenice exclaims. And it wasn’t even the first live hand grenade she had come across during the course of her official duties either. Ruling as middle Tennessee’s Estate Sale Queen entails moments of risk and surprise. One can just never tell what some folks have left in the building after they have left the building, so to speak.
“Oh, there was the time I found the dead boa constrictor in the freezer,” Berenice recalls. (Only the Nashville native pronounces the words ‘con-STRIC-tuh’ and ‘FREE-zuh’ in her charmingly euphonious, deeply authentic and increasingly rare South Midland drawl.) “It was coiled up and frozen solid, the beloved pet of the man who had passed.”
However, even with her formidable sales skills, Berenice did not find a buyer for the deceased man’s snake-sicle. There are limits. But she has appraised and sold just about everything else, including Chi Chi Rodriguez’s helicopter and Barbara Mandrell’s Rolls-Royce.
"I always try to sell items as if they were my own,” Berenice shares. “I always try to get families the best." And she is not exaggerating either.
Once, in 2001 as country star Waylon Jennings was receiving treatment in Arizona for an illness, Berenice oversaw the sale of some of his belongings. Some fifty to sixty would-be buyers of Outlaw memorabilia packed his Nashville home when a belt buckle on display suddenly went missing. Berenice wasn’t having it. She barred the doors and would allow no one to leave until the belt buckle was returned. It was one woman’s will against the plans and dinner reservations of some four to five dozen strangers. They didn’t stand a chance. In the end, the standoff was resolved by Waylon Jennings himself. “Berenice,” the gritty baritone said to her over the phone. “Let my people go.”