Robert Newsom and Hattie Carter were married the same year that R. J. Reynolds died. He was nineteen, she eighteen. Both had been born in adjoining Surry County, but their families had migrated to the city for the available jobs. Hattie’s family settled in Salem, where her father worked in a furniture factory; Robert’s family moved first to Reidsville, then to Winston, where his father became a tobacco auctioneer. Hattie, a slim, dark-eyed beauty, barely five-foot-two, who wore her long hair pinned atop her head, completed only seven grades of school. She was working in the office of a textile company when she met Robert. He was ruggedly handsome, standing only a couple of inches taller than she, but he had broad, muscular shoulders and enjoyed hard work. He’d quit school in the sixth grade and gone to work delivering groceries when he was barely in his teens. He soon found a factory job at R. J. Reynolds. A proud man, he was adamant in his view that a man did not allow his wife to perform “public work,” and Hattie quit her job after their marriage.
The young couple bought a four-room frame house on 25th Street, northeast of downtown, and there, on February 4, 1920, their first child, Robert, Jr., was born. A daughter, Frances, arrived on July 21, 1921. Hattie fell ill with Bright’s disease after Frances’s birth, was sick for months, and doctors advised her against having more children. When Frances was two, R. J. Reynolds built a new plant in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Robert, a mechanical whiz, was sent to set up and run the cigarette machines. His young family lived in Jersey City for two years, homesick and miserable much of the time.
An ambitious man, Robert realized that he was limited by lack of education and had gone as far as he could with Reynolds. He left the company and returned to Winston-Salem to become a tobacco auctioneer like his father, Colonel John Abe.
Robert had spent his early years hanging around tobacco warehouses, watching his father and other auctioneers, men revered in the tobacco business, learning their techniques. With his quick mind and deep, resonant voice, he was a natural. He began at Brown’s Warehouse, where his father worked, and soon was competing with the best, traveling to markets in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and eastern North Carolina.
He had settled his family happily into a six-room, story-and-a-half house with dormer windows and a big front porch at 2422 Glenn Avenue, just around the corner from their previous home and only a few blocks from his parents’ house. But in 1933, he announced that they would be moving. He’d spent his early years on a tobacco farm and he loved rural life. He wanted a place convenient to town where he could have a big garden and see wild creatures. And he’d found it: a plain, two-story, tin-roofed farmhouse two miles beyond the Reynolds estate near Old Town, halfway between the Moravian settlements of Bethabara and Bethania. The house was on Valley Road at a place once called Valley View. It sat on nearly seven acres, which had been part of the first tract of three thousand acres that the Moravians sold to an outsider. The land had been bought by Jacob Kapp, a millwright, who in about 1770 built a log cabin on the site where the house now stood. The history of the house itself was lost, but it had belonged to Colonel E. S. Reed, a Civil War veteran, and was thought to have been constructed before the war.
Corn grew in front of the house, and behind it a steep slope slipped into heavy woods. Nearby was the Strangers’ Graveyard, where the early Moravians buried outsiders, a spot of mystery and intrigue to children. Everybody in the family but Frances, called Frankie, who was then twelve, liked the country house. She was devastated. She missed her friends, her neighborhood, the easy comings and goings of town life. She felt isolated, and moped around, heartsick, until her father could stand it no longer. He had rented the house on Glenn Avenue, but he asked the tenants to vacate so his family could reclaim their home and happiness. Not until both of his children were safely in college during the early 1940s did Robert finally sell the Glenn Avenue house and move to the country house to stay.
Hardworking, honest and frugal, Robert saved or invested every extra dollar. He bought shares in Brown’s Warehouse, where both he and his father worked as auctioneers. By 1942, he was helping operate the warehouse with his friend Bill Simpson, whose father, John, ran it when Colonel John Abe was auctioneering. Four years later, Robert and Bill built another warehouse on Trade Street and named it Star.
By 1950, Robert was doing well enough to quit auctioneering. Only occasionally in the future would he grin and launch into his familiar chant when some of the fellows at the warehouse would say, “Come on, Mr. Bob, sell this pile.” Indeed, he was doing so well that he started a major renovation of his house on Valley Road. He bricked the outside, affixed shutters to the broad windows, put on a new roof, added a wing on the back, and tore away the front porch, leaving an uncovered stone veranda in its place. He built a garage with a connecting breezeway on one end, and installed a new kitchen, new bathrooms, and large cedar-lined closets. On the back of the house, he put a big covered porch where he could sit and watch squirrels, rabbits, birds, and chipmunks as they frolicked in his yard. When he was finished, the house was a showplace, dominating the area. And when Robert wasn’t at his warehouses, or out visiting farmers and seeking business, he usually could be found puttering around the house. He constructed a barbecue pit out back with a picnic shelter for family gatherings. He built himself a shop where he made sturdy furniture from maple, cherry, and walnut, which he frequently offered as gifts to family members. He loved working in the yard and garden, and he created a small nursery where he grew boxwoods, other shrubbery, and fruit trees. Whenever he worked outside, Hattie usually was beside him. She loved to garden, believed in organic methods, and always produced a bounty of vegetables and flowers.
Robert and Hattie were different in almost every respect, perfect counterbalance to each other. He was gruff with a terrible temper (he once took a shotgun to a bumblebee that got after him). She was gentle and calming. (“Now, Rob,” she’d say when he erupted with profanities.) He was quiet, she talkative. He was serious, she lighthearted and funny. She enjoyed socializing. He preferred staying home. She was a joiner. He belonged to nothing but the Presbyterian Church and the Republican Party. They disagreed on religion and politics, as well. Every Sunday he went to Lee Memorial Presbyterian Church in their old neighborhood, where he was a deacon. She went to nearby Bethabara Moravian, one of the oldest churches in the state, where she was one of the staunchest and most dependable members. She was a moderate Democrat. He was a strongly conservative Republican. They always went together to vote, each canceling the other’s ballot and joking about it.
The arrival of grandchildren, two by Bob, three by Frances, brought changes in identity. In the family, Robert ever after was called Paw-Paw; Hattie was Nanna. Bob lived close by while his children, Susie and Rob, were growing up, and they were regularly at the big house with their grandparents. Frances’s brood—Nancy, David, and Debbie—lived in Raleigh, but they came often, were there on all holidays and for extended visits in the summer. Paw-Paw and Nanna doted on their grandchildren. Paw-Paw was mischievous with them, regularly gave them money and taught them to play penny poker. Nanna, a gifted storyteller, not only loved to read to her grandchildren, she also made up stories to tell them, using a character called Little Abraham that she created to teach the lessons of life.
As they entered their sixties, Nanna convinced Paw-Paw, a tight man with a dollar, that they should use some of the money they’d accumulated to enjoy themselves a little, and each year, after the tobacco season, they traveled, touring Europe, North Africa, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and many other exotic spots. Every summer, Paw-Paw rented a big cottage at the beach, and the whole family spent a week together.
Age seemed to slow neither Paw-Paw nor Nanna. Both stayed strong, fit, and working right into their seventies. In November 1971, however, Robert’s partner of thirty years, Bill Simpson, suffered a heart attack. Paw-Paw went to the hospital to see him.
“Doctor told me to get the hell out,” Bill said when his partner inquired when he might return to work
.
Robert pondered that a few moments. “Well,” he said. “We’ll just quit.”
Paw-Paw hadn’t wanted to retire, and he was lost without his work. During the tobacco season, he went to one of the warehouses every day and sat with his old cronies. At other times, he joined them at W. G. White’s old-time grocery nearby. He spent many hours puttering in his yard or his backyard shop.
In the summer of 1979, Paw-Paw suffered a series of small strokes that took the spirit out of him. No longer could he do the hard work that he loved; he couldn’t even drive himself to see his cronies at the warehouse. Nanna regularly took him downtown and left him at White’s store, where he often sat alone on a rickety metal stool by the seed bins under the country hams hanging by wires from the ceiling. But he continued to deteriorate, and on March 21, 1980, seven weeks past his eighty-second birthday, he died of congestive heart failure.
Everybody worried about how Nanna would get along after Paw-Paw’s death, but she assured them they shouldn’t. She didn’t want to leave her big house. Taking care of it wouldn’t be too much. She would do just fine. She had no financial worries. Paw-Paw had left half of his nearly $2 million fortune of stocks, property, and savings in trust to his son and daughter, the other half to his wife. Nanna had her church, her friends, plenty to keep her busy. She never was one to complain or feel sorry for herself anyway, always positive, always looking on the bright side. She went right on teaching Sunday school, as she had for thirty-five years, right on baking chicken pies for the church’s monthly sales, right on trimming and finishing the beeswax candles for the Moravian Service League to sell at Old Salem, the restored tourist village downtown. She still attended her Bible study group, still taught the younger women in the church to bake the thin, traditional Moravian Christmas cookies. She continued her gardening and canning, kept on with her quilting, basket-making, embroidery, and decoupage, making gifts for family and friends.
She had many friends, some far younger than she, and she always sought to make new ones. She visited often with friends and neighbors, belonged to a neighborhood book club, helped organize an annual neighborhood Christmas party.
“She made you feel good,” said her neighbor and close friend, Mary Brownlee who was less than half her age. “Just to drive down the street and see her out there with her lawn tractor or little wheelbarrow and her ridiculous outfits was reassuring. She was a wise person, always willing to share. No matter what happened to me, I knew I could go up there and tell her and she would understand. She was a woman at ease with the world. She didn’t have any false pride. I always said I wanted to be just like her.”
Nanna was generous with her neighbors and friends and particularly so with her church and family. All who found themselves troubled, financially or otherwise, knew they could turn to Nanna for help. She was beloved by family, church, and community, so much so that in 1984, her church, where she was commonly called Miz Hattie, staged Hattie Newsom Day to pay tribute to her.
When Nanna began having heart problems, her family became concerned, but not Nanna. She didn’t let it interfere with her life. She made it known that she would not indulge self-pity or embrace fear. She trusted the Lord and humanity to the point that she rarely locked her doors when she went to bed, which almost always was after midnight.
As her family’s concern for her health grew, her son, Bob, began spending more and more weekends with her. He asked Mary and Fam Brownlee down the street to keep a watch on her during the week, asked other friends to call regularly and keep check on her when he couldn’t be there. After Nanna slipped on an acorn and broke her foot in the autumn of 1984, Bob and Florence decided that she shouldn’t be alone any longer and made plans to move in. Nanna laughed about the accident and went on with her yardwork wearing a cast, but she welcomed the decision by her son and daughter-in-law and even suggested remodeling the house to suit them.
Although the house had changed little since Paw-Paw first remodeled it, things around it had changed greatly. The city had surrounded it. New houses lined Valley Road, and new subdivisions jutted from it. Two acres had been chopped off the back of the Newsom land to make Reynolda Road into an expressway, where traffic zipped by day and night. Still, the house remained a serene oasis, guarded by huge oaks.
Bob wanted to make many changes. For one thing, he thought the house should have a circular drive in front, and Nanna encouraged him to rip out the huge boxwoods that she and Paw-Paw had planted and install one. When a friend asked how she could stand to see the boxwoods go, Nanna smiled and said, “I’ve had my forty years here. Now he can have his time.”
The renovation, which began at Thanksgiving, took far longer than anticipated. The whole back wing was being redone, with a new kitchen and dining room and a new bath upstairs for the refurbished guest room. Paw-Paw’s back porch was being enclosed with floor-to-ceiling sliding windows, creating a spacious new sun room. Nanna had grown a little impatient as the work dragged on. Her house was a mess. Furniture was piled in different rooms. Dust covered everything. Workers tramped in and out—when they showed up.
Nanna had moved her refrigerator into the breezeway connecting the living room to the garage, where she also put a hot plate on which she prepared her meals. It was a troublesome arrangement, and her family worried that she was foregoing cooking because of it and not getting proper nutrition. She suffered from diabetes, and proper diet was essential. As Nanna began to appear more drawn and stooped, her family became convinced that she wasn’t taking care of herself.
That made completing the house imperative, and by May of 1985, much to everybody’s relief, Nanna had been assured that the end was in sight. Painters and flooring people were at work. Soon order would be restored and Bob and Florence would be living with her.
Mother’s Day fell on one of those rare weekends when Bob and Florence weren’t at Nanna’s. Bob had arranged to take Florence to visit friends in Maryland while he attended to business in Washington. He knew that his sister, Frances, and her husband, Bing, would be with his mother that weekend.
Frances and her mother always had been close. From the time she was a child, Frances knew what she wanted to be in life: a newspaper reporter. Her mother encouraged her, even drove her to the Winston-Salem Journal when Frances was twelve so that she could submit a story for publication. Frances had gone on to become the first female news reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, covering the legislature and writing the popular “Under the Dome” column on the front page until she gave it up to marry Bing Miller, a former professional baseball player who became a professor at North Carolina State University. She later returned to work in public relations and was now, as she had been for many years, director of the North Carolina Nurses Association. Frances and her mother were much alike in temperament. They always found something to laugh about, if nothing more than going shopping and trying on outrageous hats just to giggle about them.
Nanna didn’t feel well that Sunday. She’d stayed home from church because she knew Frances and Bing were coming. She was fretting about her messy house. Over the years, she and Paw-Paw had filled the house to overflowing with antiques and bric-a-brac, and with the renovation it was even more cluttered than usual.
Frances was helping her mother look for something in one of her big closets when she spotted an awful-looking old dress and pulled it out.
“Why in the world are you keeping this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Nanna said, shaking her head. “You know, I sure hope, honey, that you don’t have to come in here and take care of all this stuff if something happens to me.”
“I hope I don’t either,” Frances said. “I’ve never seen so much stuff that you don’t need.” And they both began to giggle.
16
Fam Brownlee was playing with his new computer in the book-lined study of his antebellum home, a two-story, white farmhouse with teetering chimneys that looked out of place amid the modern city subdivision that had enveloped it. A writ
er who had published a history of Winston-Salem, Fam was now in public relations, and the computer was to be a boon to his work. This was the second night he had sat up late in the downstairs front room exploring its many facets.
He was interrupted by his wife, Mary, who had come from upstairs, already dressed for bed. Their two sons were upstairs watching “Christopher Columbus” on TV.
“There’s a car in the driveway,” Mary said.
It was late for visitors, nearly 10:30, and Fam couldn’t imagine who might be calling. The driveway was at the back of the house, and while his wife went to pull on some clothes, Fam walked through the kitchen, put on the outside lights, and stepped onto the porch to see who was there. His back steps were collapsing and he didn’t want anybody to get hurt on them. He saw a man and a woman with fear and panic in their faces.
Both started talking at once, and they were so excited that Fam couldn’t discern what they were saying. He had to calm them before learning that they were the Suttons, friends of the Newsoms. They’d just been to the Newsom house. Something was terribly wrong.
“We looked in through the windows and the TV was on and they were in there,” Homer Sutton said, the words tumbling out. “We tapped on the window and we couldn’t wake them up. We’ve got to call the police and an ambulance.”
He said nothing of murder, and Fam thought maybe there’d been a gas leak or some other accident. He helped the Suttons onto the porch and invited them into the kitchen, where there was a telephone. Mary had returned downstairs and was waiting with a look of anxiety.
“Something has happened at the Newsoms’,” Fam told her. “Call 911 and get somebody out here.”
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