Letting her unbridled optimism lead, Cokie dropped her precious Rose off in Georgia certain that her stay would be brief. But hope for a quick recovery slowly faded over the weeks that became years. The only consistent contact mother and daughter would have was their long distance Sunday phone calls. Cokie had to limit those to three minutes each if she was going to put food on the table for the rest of her family. So she and her Rose grew expert at packing every bit of gossip, tears, and encouragement into those three precious minutes. But if Cokie’s hope was fading, she never once let a soul hear about it, because she refused to let her daughter’s hope fade.
As much as Rose Anna looked forward to those calls, she was despondent for days afterward. Privately, so was Cokie. Because when you have little material wealth, and even less hope of ever finding any, family becomes absolutely primary. It’s partly what built the great Southern traditions that “family comes first” and “blood is thicker than water.” Of course, folks from all over will say their families come first too, but until you’ve lived in the kind of town my grandma called home, where any kind of personal ambition, career, or education comes a very distant second to being there for your children, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, and even second and third cousins, you haven’t yet experienced the passion and power of absolute familial primacy.
Not to say Southern folks don’t hurt our own; we most certainly do. That’s why the repercussions of such lapses in familial allegiance cut so incredibly deep. And there’s a dark side to this “family comes first” coin: if mine comes first, then what about other families? Might they be seen as a threat? Indeed. Such fidelity gave rise to the most famous family feuds in American history: the Hatfields versus the McCoys of Kentucky and West Virginia, or the Lees versus the Peacocks of Texas. And this dark side of “family first,” born out of love and protection, can be seen in modern attacks on new outsider families that some fear are just too foreign or different—new families labeled as threats, even when they aren’t at all.
But Cokie wasn’t thinking about politics or family feuds. She was focused on a family divided by disease, and her search for solutions. A terrible outside force had started things moving in dire ways in Lake Providence, and now Rose Anna was stuck in a heartrending situation. A true daughter of the South, what she wanted back more than her motility was that most precious thing there is where I come from: her family. That great need, and her mother’s imperishable optimism and confidence, are what would fuel little Rose Anna’s impossible dream to one day come unstuck from stillness.
CHAPTER 2
Safety’s Sound
I
Still strapped down to her hospital bed at night for her own safety, six-year-old Rose Anna woke before sunrise to listen for the faraway sound of angels singing. With all of the other sick children still fast asleep, she often thought she could hear them.
The voices were actually those of missionary ladies singing morning hymns in a chapel well beyond Rose Anna’s Warm Springs ward, but unable to get up and go find them, Rose Anna preferred to imagine they were guardian angels. Their voices helped her feel safe and gave her hope that joy, love, and beauty might still exist someplace. If not inside her ward, then perhaps just beyond it.
* * *
—
When Rose Anna had first arrived at Warm Springs, all of the nurses, doctors, teachers, and aides had quickly fallen for their new golden-haired girl. Rose Anna couldn’t move most of her body at all back then, but she understood the power of a well-batted eyelash. And she was bright. She was expert at math by six years old, and by seven, though she still couldn’t move her torso much, she understood most of the science behind her care. Thanks to her circumstances, she was the first in her family in generations with access to a proper elementary school education, and it became clear that a Whitehead’s mind was capable of far more than scratching dirt and drinking. When tempted with knowledge and good teachers, it was as thirsty as a fish in a fryer and sharp as a tack.
But Rose Anna offered the staff challenges as well. By the age of eight, she’d regained control of her arms and hands, a blessing that suggested increased autonomy in her future but also marked the beginning of her reign as ward heartbreaker. She could now fix her golden hair, what she called her “crown and glory,” as well as her makeup, her clothes, and whatever else she could reach with her outstretched arms. So she made herself and her surroundings “perfectly pretty, and with plenty of flowers around the edges.” It looked as if a Rose Parade float had crashed down wherever she dropped anchor. If a new staff member dared object to the garden growing on her bedside table, Rose Anna would shoot back, “Flowers ought to live anywhere and everywhere they like, sir, and I like them right where they are, thank you very much.” And that was the end of the conversation.
The boys on her ward, with their own frozen limbs, would linger, stare, stammer, and flirt with the princess in bed number nine. Soon, so did the able-bodied young “push-boys” who manned the wheelchairs or fetched crutches when the patients fell during walking lessons. Whenever Rose Anna fell, there were always boys racing to help her. So when a cute one came around, well…Rose Anna might let herself fall, and fall often.
But despite her floral surroundings, somewhere around this time, Rose Anna decided that she no longer wanted to be called Rose. The sound of it reminded her too much of the mom and home she missed so terribly. Besides, here in Warm Springs, she thought perhaps she could make something special of herself. Here everyone was perfectly imperfect—their battle scars, casts, crutches, or wheelchairs worn like merit badges. Here, afflictions, stitches, and braces didn’t earn the label of “freak” or garner stares and disgust; they were symbols of one’s will to survive. In this extraordinary place, young polio survivors got a glimpse of what a “normal” childhood might have been: crushes, squabbles, laughter, tears, and heartbreak. So these lonesome survivors formed a tight, absolutely unique family of outsiders, and at the center of it all, like some Hollywood ingénue, eight-year-old Rose Anna shortened her name to simply Anna. Because here she felt sure that Anna could be a star.
* * *
—
With so many patients arriving and disappearing, Anna began keeping an autograph book to stop her friends from vanishing altogether. I’d long heard stories of the brave children, nurses, and doctors who filled Warm Springs and Anna’s treasured book. I finally found that book at the bottom of an old dresser, buried under pressed flowers. It hadn’t been opened in nearly half a century.
I’ve built most of my career out of the stories of those who came before, so to me, any such object is sacred. It might hold wisdom, shortcuts, and battle-tested solutions to today’s challenges. When I carefully opened this one, I found each page filled with children’s ghosts. A few had simply signed their names, but most had left long inscriptions—evidence of the depth of Anna’s relationships, the power she held, and the young woman she was becoming.
A boy named John filled a page with: “Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.”
On a page marked “Reserved for Abray (your push-boy),” Abray had eventually written: “Good luck to a very sweet and very cute girl. Abray Bell.”
In Spanish, another boy wrote out an entire poem that ended with: “Your ‘roses’ on my path have brought me joy. A forest of a thousand flowers. I love you.” Another broken heart.
A roommate wrote: “Rose Anna now, Rose Anna forever. Whitehead now, but not forever! Susan.”
An aide on the ward wrote: “Always remember the good and bad times we had in Warm Springs.” She signed it “Grandmama Moody.” She was as close to a grandma as most of these children would ever know.
Anna’s recovery wasn’t quick or easy. No matter how hard she worked, her legs and spine refused to grow strong again. And nearly ten years after she first fell ill, new roommates were still coming and going, still writing their names
in her book, while there she remained.
“My little ‘Rosebud,’ I’ve known you since I came here. Three summers ago! Now you have grown up into a young lady…I like you very much. Meryl.”
“To a sweet girl. I have enjoyed being in the room with you during surgery. Get well soon. Your roommate, Lynn. 1960.”
“Roses are red, violets are blue, I have polio, and so do you. Connie, 1961.”
And from another long-term survivor: “Rose Anna, I hope that our friendship will continue to grow as it has since we first met in Vicksburg in 1951. It will be ten years that we have known each other this November. Love, Nat.”
In the book’s final pages, there are fewer and fewer mentions of when Anna might ever go home, or ever regain the use of her legs.
And in the very back of her autograph book lives a heartbreak: dozens upon dozens of hand-drawn calendars marking every day, week, month, and year Anna was hospitalized, with infinite little x’s as she counted down the never-ending days until she might get better and finally be home again.
II
In one of the few photos of seven-year-old Anna from her Warm Springs days, she’s leaned up against a brick wall outside a hotel room next to her mother, who’s holding a doll. It was Christmas morning. Despite the bleak backdrop, they look happy enough. Cokie and Victor had gotten a divorce by then, the farm was now bankrupt, and Cokie’s bad financial situation had become impossible. Cokie had spent nearly every penny she had to get that cheap hotel room in Warm Springs. She’d spent her last cents on dolls for Anna and Martha, who’d made the long journey with her to see her baby sister. One cheap hotel room, only one of her five siblings, and two inexpensive dolls. It was the best Christmas Anna would know for quite a long time; as seldom as she received visitors, a visit home herself was far more rare because her tiny body demanded constant medical care.
On the Christmases when Cokie couldn’t swing a Georgia hotel, she did her best to make the most of what little she had for the rest of her kids. She spared no expense come time for dessert, building them the most extravagant treat she knew: a real fruit salad. To her children, the big, burgundy glass bowl her annual fruit salad was served in—the bowl that came out of its secret hiding place only once a year—was their family’s great treasure.
Cokie would carefully pick out the best fruit on her way home from work the day before Christmas, and then just as carefully peel and chop it up on Christmas morning, making sure not an ounce was wasted. She’d add a can of fruit cocktail and a quarter cup of granulated sugar, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and pop it in the refrigerator to chill.
But the Christmas of 1961 promised to be the most special yet. Despite all of Anna’s doctors’ passionate appeals, Anna had refused to use a wheelchair. “I don’t want to be down there. I want to be up with everyone else. And my arms are stronger than any working legs, thank you very much.” And so by her thirteenth birthday, with her strong arms and the help of metal braces on her legs, torso, and neck, Anna had become fairly proficient on crutches, using them in much the same way she had her old potty chair. Her arms became her legs, her braced legs swinging like a pendulum beneath her torso. Most days she could make it clear across the ward without falling, and she didn’t mind all the bruises and stitches on her chin from her many epic crashes. They were her battle scars from a war she was determined to win.
Come 1961, thanks to Anna’s hard-won proficiency with crutches, and the mountain of assurances Cokie gave Anna’s doctors, Anna was cleared to go home for Christmas. She wasn’t going home for good—not yet—but this was a step in that direction. The announcement of her yuletide return was received with elation and brought all her grown siblings back home to Lake Providence.
By that year, searching for some stability of her own, Cokie had gotten remarried, this time to a man she valued more than she loved. He owned a little house and took home a modest paycheck. In turn, she’d given him two new daughters, Mary and Nannette, but the family still needed a second income, so Cokie had kept her dime store job. Once Anna arrived home for Christmas that year, Cokie walked the mile home from work in record time.
Each afternoon, Cokie would burst through the front door, push her dining room table to the center of the room, put quilts on top of it, and get Anna up there to go through the series of exercises the doctors had prescribed. Some required two people, so Martha held her sister down by the hips while Cokie moved and stretched Anna’s limbs.
In the bathroom hallway, there was a harness with a series of pulleys that Cokie’s new husband had bolted above a door. The harness would go around the back of Anna’s neck and under her chin, and then weights were added. Anna had to hang there for a long time in hopes of straightening her spine, which had begun to bend and twist from her atrophied muscles—a severe form of polio-induced scoliosis. Cokie was determined to get this right so the doctors would let her Rose come home more often. But no one realized how painful these exercises and hangings were, because Anna never complained. She bore them because she was tough, because she didn’t want to scare her mom, and because she welcomed their pain—she’d suffer anything not to appear more twisted or “freakish” to the world outside of Warm Springs.
Anna hadn’t come home empty-handed. She’d returned with a special Christmas surprise for her mom. And on her second day home, during one of her stretching sessions, she pointed to the toes on her right foot.
“Look, Mama.”
“What am I looking at, honey?”
“My toes.”
Cokie looked at them, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to be seeing.
“Look closer.”
Her mom leaned in, and Anna wiggled a few of her little toes. After a decade of dedicated, painful work, Anna had regained the use of a few of her toes. She wiggled them like mad, grinning from ear to ear, as proud as she could possibly be.
The room fell silent, and Cokie began to cry. Anna received her mother’s tears and kisses as joy and praise, but when the tears kept coming, Anna saw them for what they were.
After a decade of sacrifice and hope, Anna’s wiggling toes finally forced Cokie to accept what she had always feared most: her precious Rose would never get better. No amount of work at Warm Springs could force that miracle. And just as her liquor-stinking ex-husband had predicted, Rose Anna Whitehead would never walk without crutches again.
Anna’s smile fell with her mom’s tears. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
When she heard that, Cokie’s tears suddenly ceased, and she snapped back, “Don’t you ever apologize for who you are ever again. Not to me, and not to anybody. You’re my Rose, and I am so proud of you right now I just can’t keep my tears inside me.”
To cement her lie as truth, Cokie invited neighbors from a mile around to witness Rose Anna’s “miraculous progress.” Anna wiggled her toes one by one for neighbors, postmen, and preachers. And if any failed to celebrate the accomplishment to Cokie’s satisfaction, or dared to belittle it behind Anna’s back, that poor soul got a sweaty dose of hell from Cokie. Because when you grow up poor in the South, you have two options: you either sink into your misery and die, or you celebrate every little thing you can and live. With the latter option, there’s little time for self-pity; you have to “get up and get on with it.” That’s what Cokie had to teach her Rose to do now.
This was most certainly what Anna’s second-oldest sister, Josie, had done, and they’d all seen how it had paid off. Josie was a family inspiration. She had grown up in the dirt, rarely complained about it, and worked her tail off to become a registered nurse. She’d married her childhood sweetheart, James Ray Mosely, and they had three wild and wonderful kids together: Sandy, Debbie, and James Lynn. And with all of their success, Josie and James had actually bought a car of their own—the very car they’d let Cokie use on her eight-hour road trips to see her baby girl in Warm Springs twice a year.
Anna fell in love with Josie’s husband the moment she laid eyes on him. James was likely only five foot five, but to Anna, he was tall, dark, and handsome. Anna had never met a man who could talk to anyone and everyone, and who everyone actually seemed to like talking to. He had genuine Southern charm. So on the very few occasions Anna got out of the hospital, she insisted on a trip to Texarkana to see James and Josie.
When Anna stepped foot in James’s home, things worked a whole lot differently than anywhere else in the world. James wouldn’t let Anna get away with a thing his own daughters couldn’t, and if his girls could do something without his help, then darn it, so could Anna. To outsiders it may have seemed cruel or insensitive, but it was the main reason Anna loved him so dearly.
Each summer, Josie, James, and their kids drove their homemade pop-up trailer to Bard Springs in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas for a week of camping. Once the campsite was set, it was an hour’s hike to the clear springs the kids loved to swim in. So how does a good old Southern gentleman like James carry a paralyzed girl up a mountain for one hour?
Mama's Boy Page 3