Buddy drove Early home. When Buddy returned to his mother’s room, the nurses reported that she was finally at peace. They predicted that she would die by sunrise, and that’s just what she did.
Part IV
The Lie
7
Original Shame
A 1941 portrait of my mom around the time she became engaged to Daddy. Near the end of her life she thought she looked sad.
Years later, when my parents, too, were gone, it came time for me to weave together the fragments of Mom’s life story that I’d been collecting for years. Some of it she told me. Some of it I never asked about and still don’t know. Some pieces came from her oldest friends and from my research. Here, then, is what I know.
On January 5, 1916, in Moneta, Virginia, a community of humble farms and rusty gates set along dirt roads, three counties southwest of Keswick, Adria Lavonia Overstreet was born.
When baby Adria arrived, tall, pigeon-toed Milton Emmett Overstreet and his wife Sarah Carter McLain Overstreet already had a ten-year-old son and weren’t expecting more children. Carter, as they called her, was forty, so they were surprised when she became pregnant after so long a pause.
A farmhand in a long line of farmhands, Granddaddy possessed a forlorn, elongated face and a tender heart. He whistled so shrilly through his front teeth as he talked that I kept forgetting what he was saying, what with all the hisses and trills. He was twelve when his mother died. By fourteen he was living and working on a neighbor’s farm in Moneta. The next year, his father died, and orphan Emmett—with his possessions tied in a red bandanna—showed up looking for work at the Hicks place, run by matriarch Fannie Manning Peters Hicks. People called her Manning.
Manning took skinny young Emmett under her wing, and soon he was singing in the choir at Bethlehem Methodist, the church she’d helped found. Manning possessed such righteous faith in the Lord that on a scorching, cloudless Sunday during an extended drought, she brought an umbrella to church, explaining, “Well, we’re praying for rain, aren’t we?” At twenty-nine, Emmett married slender, gracious Carter McLain, so well respected that just their engagement brought him up in the world. Along with Emmett’s maternal granddad, the couple moved into a rented farmhouse near the Hicks spread.
In those early years of the twentieth century, few people in Moneta were truly rich. Moneta was an agrarian hamlet in highly agrarian Bedford County, with not a lot of fanciness about it. Today Moneta is part of a resort community built around the five-hundred-mile shoreline of man-made Smith Mountain Lake.
In Granddaddy’s day, it was plain, unassuming countryside, and farmhands like him worked for people just a social notch or two above them. The Hickses owned land and had far deeper resources than the Overstreets. Some of the Hickses became bankers, accountants, teachers, and engineers. But Emmett went to the same church as his bosses and ate corn bread and beans just like they did. They got along like family. They’d make a party of shelling together the black-eyed peas they’d dry for the coming winter.
Just as Daddy was everything on Bridlespur, Emmett was the man on the Hicks farm. He raised their main crop, chewing tobacco, or as Mom always said it, “tuh-BYE-kuh.” He plowed the thousand-acre Hicks farm with horses Prince and Lucy, hollering “Gee!” to go right and “Haw!” to go left. Among hundreds of chores, he grew the fruits and vegetables, raised the chickens, milked the cows, maintained the Hicks house, and hooked the horses to the buggies for Manning and the lady schoolteachers who boarded with her. Before dawn on school days, he rode alone on a horse through the quiet fields to light the fire in the schoolhouse stove.
Like an all-hours towing service, Emmett and the horses pulled wagons, then cars, out of ditches. When Hicks family members left Grandma Manning’s house in foul weather, he’d hitch a mare named Old Nora to a buggy and follow them on the muddy road until they reached a more solid one. Granddaddy loved the Hickses.
People at Bethlehem Church embraced long-necked layman Emmett with his oversized ears and oversized suit, but they groaned whenever he launched into one of his long-winded, lunch-delaying prayers. Years later, when they remodeled the sanctuary—using timbers from Manning’s farm—they told him they found some of his benedictions still flapping around in the rafters.
He was a sweet-natured hick, usually in bibbed overalls, with a toothpick parked behind his ear. He brought his live chickens by train to sell at the Roanoke farmers’ market, where I still buy homegrown spinach and kale. Emmett was so polite, he’d tip his straw farmer’s hat to every person he passed on Roanoke’s busy streets. To be sure he didn’t miss the last train to Moneta, he kept an eye on the Elgin pocket watch tucked in a special pocket of his bibs.
* * *
I WAS IN my thirties before Mom filled me in on the first really bad thing that happened to her. On a Tuesday evening in September 1920, she was four years old and riding along with her parents to revival services at Bethlehem Church.
The headline of a yellowed newspaper clipping taped to a sheet of paper stuck in Granddaddy’s Bible announced it: Woman’s Neck Broken. The Bedford Bulletin reported two versions they had been unable to reconcile: One was that the horse pulling Carter and Adria’s buggy ran out of control. Emmett, in another buggy in front of Carter’s, managed to stop Carter’s horse as it passed. The sudden halt slammed Carter against the wooden dashboard, snapping her neck.
The other account had it that Emmett, Carter, and Adria were in the same wagon when their horse and another behind them started to run. In that version, Emmett, an expert buggy driver, stopped his horse suddenly and got out to quiet the second one. When he reboarded his rig, he found Carter slumped over, nearly dead. “It is said that she breathed only a few times after her husband found she was hurt,” the newspaper reported.
I cried for my poor traumatized mother when I learned this. No wonder her startle response was set so high. No wonder she kept warning me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d break my neck. She watched her mother die that way. Mom would never fully trust the world again.
When the whole countryside gathered at Carter and Emmett’s house that evening to comfort Emmett, they found the green beans Carter had snapped that morning for canning. Her house was so orderly it was easy for them to tend temporarily to Emmett and the children.
My mother lived with a memory of her father lifting her mother from the buggy and laying her on the ground. Adria always wondered if in moving her, her father inadvertently brought about the fatal injury to her spine.
Manning Hicks, sensing the need for long-term motherly oversight, invited Emmett, Adria, and Adria’s brother, Clarence, to move from their rented farmhouse into a log cabin across the yard from her spacious white farmhouse.
Fourteen months after Carter died, Emmett married curly-haired forty-year-old Annie Belle Preston. It was her first marriage, and people continued to call her Miss Belle for the rest of her life. She and her father, Jesse Preston, moved into the cabin. With stone chimneys on each end, a tiny living room and kitchen downstairs, and two little bedrooms upstairs, it was tight quarters for five people. After Mom died, I stood at those chimneys, all that remained of the house after a long-ago fire, and picked up a stone to keep. I could imagine everything Mom told me that happened there.
She and Miss Belle clashed immediately. Miss Belle had little patience with children. She forced Adria, only five years old, to haul heavy buckets of water from the creek and to collect and squeeze to death the grotesque green worms on the tobacco plants. The slimy yellow innards were smeared across Adria’s clothes.
My mother grew into a long-legged mischief. Miss Belle insisted that she wear scratchy brown wool stockings to school until June every year. So Adria pulled them off in the woods and put them back on before she got home.
When Miss Belle farted, she’d confess, giggling, “I pooted.” My mother was ashamed to be associated with her. She sassed Miss Belle. She snuck up behind her and threw a slimy eel around her neck.
One summer aft
ernoon, Miss Belle stretched out on the cabin’s cool kitchen floor and fell asleep. She had one knee propped up, and her wide-legged underdrawers gaped open to reveal her genitals. Adria felt pure disgust course through her. She grabbed a pepper shaker and doused Miss Belle’s labia like a pan of raw chops headed for the skillet. Miss Belle awoke on fire and chased Adria around the farm for an hour before coming home to tend her red-hot crotch. When Adria grew hungry that evening and crept into the house for something to eat, Miss Belle beat the crap out of her. The war was on.
Adria grew into a tall, curvaceous dark-haired beauty with big, sorrowful gray-blue eyes. Emmett had adopted Manning’s moral code: No card playing. No dancing. No makeup, except the purple juice of pokeberries for women’s lips. No liquor, except for Mr. Preston’s hidden-away medicinal hooch. No taking of the Lord’s name in vain. No hanky-panky of any sort. And practically nothing besides breathing on the Sabbath. Adria was about to burst out of her restless skin.
At Christmastime in 1934, she was only eighteen, but being sullen and shapely and tall, she looked older and far more worldly than she was. Adria was giving Miss Belle some lip one day when Belle’s cousin Dessa was visiting from a distant town. Belle had had enough of Adria’s mouth. She sent her home with Dessa until after the holidays.
* * *
RODESKA “DESSA” KRANTZ Miller, widow of a railroad conductor, lived in Covington, Virginia, a sulfur-reeking pulp-mill town in the mountains of western Virginia. Covington and nearby Clifton Forge swarmed with railroad men and with loggers who trucked timber day and night to the pulp mill. Dessa’s life was much more lively than Adria’s back in Moneta. At Dessa’s, people drank liquor, danced, and played cards.
They did all the things Emmett Overstreet didn’t allow. But Emmett and Miss Belle didn’t know that.
At Dessa’s, Adria was negotiating life as an adult for the first time, and she was extremely naïve. One night at Dessa’s, a man considerably older than Mom gave her a beer and led her to a dark outbuilding. She said it was the first beer she’d ever tasted and her first intercourse. The man was married and already a father. I don’t know if she’d ever seen him before.
Over the years, when I’d talk with Mom about that encounter, I tried to define it as a rape, but she never felt comfortable with me using that word for it. “It was my fault,” she told me many times. As far as she knew, the man never found out he’d gotten her pregnant, and she was glad for that. “I never wanted to make trouble for his family.”
In Mom’s oldest albums, I found a picture of Dessa’s daughter sitting beside a man on a leafy bank, but the picture was torn in half with just the man’s pant legs, white socks, and dark shoes showing. Could Adria have ripped away the image of the man who changed her life?
I’ve tried hard to identify him. Mom would never tell me his name. She knew I’d snoop around, and she didn’t want to take the chance of dishonoring him—even though, of course, he had dishonored her. Ronnie never asked her who his father was; he thought she might not know, and he didn’t want to humiliate her.
But after Ronnie and Mom died, I found the man’s name on documents from two institutions where Ronnie lived as a young boy and as a teenager. Mom, always compliant with authority figures, dutifully provided the man’s name when Ronnie was admitted to each place. I wish like hell I’d learned that name while Ronnie was alive. We could have worked together to learn about the man. In deference to Mom, I’m not naming him.
His name is neither the most common nor the most unusual, along the lines of a James Goodman or a William Lawson. No one by his name appears in documents at the county courthouse in Covington. Census records coughed up more than thirty men with that name scattered around Virginia. After eliminating those who were nonwhite, had no children, or were children themselves when Mom got pregnant, I zeroed in on a railroad brakeman who died more than thirty years ago. His railroad line was along the Virginia coast, on the other side of the state from Covington. Still, I thought maybe he’d been passing through. I’d confirmed that a brakeman by another name was friendly with Dessa. Maybe that man was railroad union buddies with Ronnie’s father.
At long last, a couple of years ago, I located the niece of the brakeman’s second wife. I’d already learned a lot about him. I knew that he was born in North Carolina and that he lived in the Virginia state capital of Richmond nearly all his life. His son had cerebral palsy and died in his thirties. His second wife was an ex-nun. Maybe the reason Mom made no demands on this woman’s uncle was because she knew about the disabled child back home. I wanted so much for this man to be Ronnie’s father. I knew so much about him. I could solve the mystery once and for all.
I waited expectantly for his niece, Kathy, to email me pictures of the man. My heart fell when I saw them. He was handsome, in ways entirely different from Ronnie. His face was round; Ronnie’s was long. His mustache and eyebrows were dark and curly; Ronnie’s stubble and barely visible eyebrows were blond and straight. Chin, nose, eyes, ears, mouth—no resemblance whatsoever. Sometimes children do look nothing like their parents, but in this case, the match simply didn’t seem possible.
Covington is only about fifteen miles from the West Virginia state line. So next, I focused on West Virginia men and eliminated thirty-one more with that name. But who knows where the man was from. And was that his real name anyway? I’m still looking for him.
* * *
WITH FEW CLUES about the early signs of pregnancy, Adria came home to Moneta after Christmas without a care in the world. She celebrated her nineteenth birthday four days after New Year’s. But by spring, she knew she was in trouble. Her condition was obvious to her father, her stepmother, the Hickses, and all Moneta. Her best friends’ mothers no longer allowed their daughters to be seen with her. She’d dropped out of high school before graduating. Where could she go? Times were hard enough already. Her father had just cut three fingers off his right hand while cutting logs on a saw rigged to a Model T.
Never one to meddle in female affairs, Emmett longed for the wisdom of his first wife, Carter. He didn’t know what to do with Adria, and pressure was mounting to drive her out of Moneta. Emmett had a brother nearby, but he had nine children, and they were so poor that when blizzards approached, the kids frantically plugged mud between their cabin’s logs so they could sleep without the snow falling on their heads. Finally, the lady organist at church suggested Adria go to the Florence Crittenton Home, a shelter for unwed mothers and their babies, in nearby Lynchburg.
For more than a year, Adria stayed at the Crittenton Home, a large brick house in an old neighborhood. She knew no one in Lynchburg. The woman from her church was one of the few people, maybe the only one, who ever came to see her. Stern female wardens lorded over the girls, who were poorer, coarser, and wilder than Adria. She kept mostly to herself. When the time came for her delivery, two policemen drove her to the hospital, as if she were a criminal.
Her labor was difficult. Doctors used forceps to draw out the baby’s head, which left it temporarily misshapen, but there was no mention of brain damage. Eight-pound Ronald Lee Overstreet was born on August 27, 1935.
In those early thirties, women smitten with debonair English movie actor Ronald Colman named their sons after him. The “Lee” in Ronnie’s name, of course, was for Confederate general Robert E. Lee—a hero to millions of white Southerners. Thousands of people born below the Mason-Dixon Line still carry the middle name of “Lee.”
On the back of a picture of baby Ronnie, Mom wrote his birth date and “Ronald Lee Smith.” His birth certificate already said “Overstreet,” but she still was deliberating what last name to give him, and even for her private purposes, she chose a generic. Eventually, she gave him hers.
A mother and her baby could stay at the Crittenton Home for a year after birth. Mom took courses in nursing and mothering. She learned how to care for her little boy. She fed him a lactic acid baby formula, considered then to be more modern and dignified than breastfeeding. By all
accounts, including Mom’s, Ronnie was a darling baby with eyes like hers, the color of blue-gray slate. On his first birthday, Mom took a picture of him on the grass in the home’s yard, his hair tenderly wetted and parted by her.
People at the home must have talked with her about giving Ronnie up. Later on, when a couple wanted to adopt him, Mom wouldn’t agree to it. For a while, at least, she was determined to be Ronnie Overstreet’s mother.
8
On Her Own
On Ronnie’s birthday, Mom dressed him up and parted his hair before shooting his picture, probably in the yard at the home for unwed mothers.
Worry, along with a young woman’s heady optimism, thrashed within my mother late in the summer of 1936. Her and Ronnie’s year at the Crittenton Home was up. It was time for them to leave and make room for the next wave of mothers and babies. She was twenty and Ronnie was one.
With a list of hiring services for domestic workers in her pocket, Mom brought Ronnie to Roanoke, the only city of any size in the rockier, poorer, more mountainous western half of Virginia. It was a good place to start over.
Set in a green valley where the Alleghenies sidle up to the Blue Ridge, Roanoke was close enough to country to feel like home but teeming with people hard at work at the Norfolk and Western Railway and the world’s largest rayon plant, American Viscose, known to locals as the “silk mill.” Families streamed to fairs and movie houses and variety shows Mom had never heard about in little Moneta. Among all those strangers, Mom could get a fresh start.
She was free from the prying eyes of the strict matrons back at Crittenton, free from Moneta’s judgments of her as that fallen Overstreet girl, and thank God almighty, free at last from Miss Belle. But times were tough, the Great Depression was at rock bottom, and my mother knew no one in Roanoke.
I never learned where they stayed at first, maybe in a boardinghouse, maybe at the Salvation Army. In her initial jobs, she cooked and cleaned in homes. Then she hooked up with a Roanoke agency that, for a fee, connected her with people needing practical nurses to care for new mothers and their babies and for people dying at home. In those years, women stayed in the hospital for a week after giving birth, then were on bed rest for days at home. Any family who could afford it hired a girl like Adria Overstreet to come take care of the mother and baby. But for Mom, there was no child care and very little temporary housing or other help.
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