I don’t remember when it was that I took a good look at the yellow, black, and blue document—maybe as soon as I got in my car, maybe during a gas station stop on the way home to Keswick. I recognized Mom’s careful longhand on the certificate. In 1945, when I was born, Virginia’s birth certificate was essentially a questionnaire filled out by the mother: the father’s name, race, birthplace, occupation, age at the time of the baby’s birth, and all the same information for the mother. Daddy was twenty-seven; Mom was twenty-nine. She wrote my name—Mary Carter Bishop—centered on a line and stretched out in a proud, confident script, like, ta-da, she was introducing me to the world.
Then I reached section 21, headed “Children Born to This Mother.” The question was “How many other children of this mother are now living?” After this, my mother wrote a clear, unequivocal numeral “1.”
That was odd. She’d had that miscarriage a year or two before I was born. But how could my extremely cautious mother confuse a long-buried fetus with a living child? She handled bureaucracy with dead seriousness. She wouldn’t have slipped up on her only child’s birth certificate.
* * *
I GOT HOME around five thirty. Mom was frying chicken at the electric stove. “How’d it go?” she asked.
“Good.” I watched as she flipped the legs and the thighs. Through the window beside her, tall field grasses moved in the wind.
I needed to know about that birth certificate. I fished it out of my purse in another room and brought it to her. I expected this question to be resolved in a few seconds.
“How come you put a one here?” I pointed to the section on other children. She wiped her hand on her apron and looked at the certificate before handing it back. She didn’t raise her voice or look startled when, while turning over a sizzling thigh, she nonchalantly said, “You know who that is.”
I stared at her, my face searching hers. “No, I don’t know who that is.” She laughed stiffly and looked back at the frying pan. How could she think I knew?
Then, with a hint of “you must know” impatience, she uttered two words that sent my worldview reeling:
It’s Ronnie.
She dispensed this information as lightly as the flour she was now sprinkling into the pan to make the gravy.
Ronnie Overstreet? That skinny, unhappy kid who lived on the farm when I was little? The boy she said was my cousin?
She told me at the stove that she’d gotten pregnant at eighteen, years before she met Daddy. “I made a mistake,” she said, lowering her voice.
Over the next day or so, she revealed that before they married, she told Daddy about Ronnie. Daddy promised never to mention her first pregnancy again, she said, with tears in her eyes, and that he never did. To Mom, his silence on the subject was a badge of love.
Daddy came into the kitchen from late-day chores. She whispered something to him. Head-to-head, they shared a private, muted, uncomfortable laugh. The secret they’d kept for decades was out of the cupboard and flitting among us like a moth.
We didn’t talk about it at supper. I’d stepped in something sticky. I wanted to scrape it off.
* * *
IN THE WAY we often underreact to the biggest news in our lives, I absorbed all this in silence. I wandered away from my folks. I went to my room and fiddled with clothes for my trip.
My God. Ronnie Overstreet was my brother. My half brother. But still, my brother.
He was the gloomiest person I’d ever seen. When I was just venturing from my playpen, he was a hunch-shouldered, greasy-haired, asthmatic boy of twelve. He wore rough dark-plaid jackets and hunting caps with the earflaps down, a melancholy boy hidden in sad clothes.
On the rare occasion he was in our house, he quietly glared at us, fuming at our cozy life. In my contentment, I never bothered to wonder where he slept, who fed him, or who took care of him. It was clear my parents were uncomfortable with him around.
This woman, this mother of mine, I didn’t know her after all.
Of all the mothers in the world, how could this all-giving one of mine, this overprotective, selfless parent who on so little money dressed me like a little empress, scraped together dollars to rent my high school band clarinet, and packed me off to summer camp, also be the mother of that miserable boy?
* * *
THAT NIGHT, I lay in the bed where I’d slept as a child. Of the two upstairs rooms, I had the better one. Daddy needed to be able to look out over the dairy barn, the stables, the cows, the sheep, and to listen for the burglar alarm at the big house. He and Mom took the room on that side.
From my bed I could lie on my stomach and gaze through the window at the head of my bed, across the fields to Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance. In winter, I’d fall asleep in the most delicious of circumstances—snug under quilts and watching snow silently creep over the ridge, knowing I would awake to hear the Motorola radio atop the fridge downstairs announcing there’d be no school.
But that June night when my brother was born in my mind, I lay sleepless in the cool darkness, wondering about Ronnie, who his father was, and how it could be that I had a brother out there somewhere. Even then, I knew Ronnie had it hard; even then, I knew the contrasts between us. The very day I’d felt so cheeky, I’d been pulled back into the family shame.
Part V
Finding and Losing Ronnie
12
I Walk into His Barbershop
Ronnie in January 1961 when he was twenty-five.
I’d been at the Philadelphia Inquirer less than three months when a reactor at central Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant partly melted, threatening to irradiate an entire region. Residents fleeing the area in cars packed with kids and dogs looked quizzical as I and an army of other reporters rushed by them toward the scene. I played only a small part in the 1979 coverage but felt the flush of glory when our news staff won a Pulitzer the following year. I could hardly believe I was on such a crack news team.
I’d think about Ronnie occasionally, but events would wash him out of my mind. I’d been assigned the job of investigating Philadelphia’s distressed public schools, and I spent more than a year analyzing a system of 273 schools, 224,000 students, and 26,000 employees. One of the city’s oldest high schools was so dilapidated, students defecated in the hallways. Teacher absenteeism was the worst in the nation. The school superintendent faked data in his doctoral dissertation. The system was rotten.
The teachers’ union was furious. On strike for fifty days that fall of 1981, they booed and spat at me as I ran alongside their protest marches, notepad in hand. A mob chanted my name outside the Inquirer’s towering white wedding cake of a building: “Send down Mary Bishop!” I’d been standing among them all day; they needed drama for the cameras.
I needed a long break, so I took a leave of absence from the newspaper and rented a creekside cabin in rural Rockbridge County, Virginia. It was beauty at the level of Keswick’s, without the pretension. I never went back to big-city journalism. Instead, I took a job running the one-woman Lexington bureau of the Roanoke Times & World-News, an hour from Roanoke. My job was to cover Rockbridge and two adjacent counties. What could possibly happen there? Murder, arson, rape, drug busts, political scandals, natural disasters, all kinds of social history. I never worked so hard in my life. Astonishing things happen everywhere. Daddy taught me that, but I’d forgotten.
* * *
I BEGAN TO think more deeply about Mom and Ronnie when in 1985, Sallie Johnson Wilcher, an elderly mountain woman, introduced me to one of the cruelest chapters of American history, the eugenics movement, a twentieth-century social program that filtered individuals judged to be genetically inferior out of the breeding pool.
Beginning in the 1920s, doctors, sheriffs, and social workers in Rockbridge County and elsewhere targeted individuals they decided shouldn’t reproduce. They rounded up unwed mothers like Sallie, as well as orphans, alcoholics, juvenile delinquents, and people with epilepsy, mental retardation, deformities
, mental illness, and even contagious diseases such as syphilis. Authorities committed them to state hospitals, where many were sterilized and used as forced labor, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
Nazi Germany considered Virginia’s eugenics law so efficient that it borrowed the law’s wording to set up a system that neutered thousands before the Holocaust. My high school and college classes never mentioned this cozy relationship between Virginia and the Third Reich.
In 1929, when Sallie was nineteen and the mother of an illegitimate toddler, doctors declared her “feebleminded,” a catchall label applied to a wide assortment of social undesirables. Sallie’s older brother-in-law had lured her to a barn and gotten her pregnant, just like what happened to Mom. Two years later, at the instigation of Sallie’s grandmother, who thought her wildness needed reining in, a welfare worker whisked away Sallie and her two-year-old son, Billy. Sallie was sterilized and put to work in the laundry of a large state mental hospital. She never saw Billy again.
Her son had died years before I met Sallie, but shortly before her death, in 1987, I learned she had three grandsons in a distant city. Billy’s widow sent her the boys’ pictures, along with snapshots of Billy at different ages. “Looks like his daddy,” Sallie said with a wink. She nearly wore out the photos, she squinted into their faces so often.
My Sallie stories led me to other eugenics survivors. I spent years writing about them. It could have been my mama who got locked up. She fit the formula: poor, unmarried country girl with an illegitimate baby. If she’d been targeted, I wouldn’t be writing this.
* * *
WHILE IN LEXINGTON, I had a feeling Ronnie was reading my work. Occasionally I’d win an award and my picture would be in the paper. He knew I was around—I was sure of it—but he never contacted me.
As the favored child, the onus was on me to reach out to him. He must have seen that I was writing about people and events an hour or more away from him. Maybe he forgave my not coming to find him. Maybe he saw I was busy elsewhere. Then again, maybe he didn’t want to see me. He might turn me away.
* * *
HE’D REAPPEARED BRIEFLY in my teens, flying up the dusty farm road in a big old car one Sunday afternoon. Ronnie was six foot four, well dressed in a shirt and tie, not bad looking in his midtwenties. His girlfriend, a six-foot-tall telephone operator, rode along. There was something of the greaser bad boy about Ronnie. His limbs sprawled casually across our couch, his long leg bones stacked against each other like firewood, he drawled with a sleazy nonchalance about cars and hunting and rambling alone through the woods. He laughed nervously. I felt a curious tension in the room. I wouldn’t see Ronnie again for almost three decades.
* * *
AFTER YEARS ALONE in the Lexington bureau, I wanted company. In 1987, when I moved to the main newsroom in Roanoke, I began to think more about Ronnie. I knew he would notice from my stories that I was in town. It was time for me to find him.
Mom said his barbershop was in Vinton, a little town on Roanoke’s eastern flank. I called a barber in the Yellow Pages, but he didn’t know Ronnie. Another sort of recognized his name. “Ronnie Overstreet? Oh, you’re talking about Slim. Yeah, he’s right there on Pollard Street in Vinton. Easy to find. It’s the Sportsman Barber Shop.” Ronnie’s place was across from the bank and the post office on Vinton’s main drag.
I drove there on a September afternoon. Outside the shop door, I peered through its plate glass window. Counters of the high-ceilinged shop were piled with magazines, books, and newspapers. One person was inside—a tall man, slumped, maybe asleep, in one of two barber chairs. He didn’t look familiar.
“Ronnie?” I walked tentatively through the door. He sat up, and when I saw his face, I knew it was Ronnie. He had changed, but I had trouble figuring out exactly how. He just looked odd and homely. He was staring at me, startled. I finally said, “It’s Mary Carter.”
“Goddamn,” he said, scrambling to stand and look me over. A small smile gradually appeared around his eyes and moved to his cheeks and mouth. “Pie, what’re you doing over this way?” Touchingly, affectionately, he used my childhood nickname. Judging from all the old copies of my newspaper scattered around, I knew for sure he’d been reading my stories all these years. Why had I waited so long?
In a minute, a customer slipped through the door. I settled into the line of black vinyl chairs where men waited their turns. Ronnie’s hands were masterful and quick. He could do a haircut in five minutes. In between, we got acquainted. I needed him to know how long I’d been in the dark.
“I didn’t know ’til a few years ago you were my brother. I found out by accident. They said you were my cousin.”
“Yeah, that’s the way it was,” he said, smiling awkwardly down at the floor.
“I didn’t find out ’til I got my birth certificate, and it said she had another kid. I should have figured it out.” My voice and face dripped with apology. We fell quiet for a minute.
A state trooper rushed in for a close trim. The two talked for a half hour. I was about to burst. But Ronnie let him drone on and on about some backwoods criminals. “Those mountain people don’t know any better,” Ronnie told him with a knowing snicker.
After the trooper, we talked for two hours. The facts of his life began to drop into place. We didn’t ask many questions of each other. We just said whatever came to mind, with him doing most of the talking. He mentioned foster parents and an orphanage.
“You had it all, kid, and I was cast off,” he said, throwing his giant right hand up like he was tossing something away. He threw me a fierce look. I knew he was right, and I felt exposed. I left my raincoat on the whole time I was in the barbershop that day.
But at the same time, I could tell that Ronnie had long wished to talk with me, just as I had him. I was the one person in the world who knew all the principal players in his story.
At first, as he told me what books he read or where he went turkey hunting, he tucked his head, chin to chest, rolled his eyes way back in his head, and peered at me in the narrow space between his glasses and his bulging brow. His eyes looked tiny behind thick black glasses much too small for his face. He looked frightening. The longer we talked, the more he lifted his head and looked me straight in the eye.
Oddly, because I could see he was a good barber, his own haircut was of the old mixing-bowl variety—straight, parted on the side, salt-and-pepper, and sticking out in sheets around his head. He obviously cut his own hair.
His voice veered from furious to tender. Trying to build some commonality, I criticized Mom’s treatment of him, but he called me on it. “She had it hard, Pie.” She was chased from home; she was forced to give birth among strangers in an unknown town. Our strict Methodist granddaddy did the best he could but was blinded by religion. The old man was humiliated by the sin inherent in Ronnie’s birth.
Long ago, Ronnie claimed, he resigned himself to Mom’s rejection. “She can’t handle” was his shorthand for her shame in his birth, a sentence even he couldn’t bear to complete, the unspoken “me” always hanging in the air.
Then, in a reverent tone, he posed this question: “You ever watch your mother write a letter?” Well, of course I had. Ronnie praised her “perfect” handwriting. She looked up spellings if she wasn’t sure. I didn’t mention how she, who dropped out of high school before becoming pregnant with him, routinely wrote “mabe” for “maybe” and “ect.” instead of “etc.” He took comfort in her talents and in mine and thought they were inherited.
I was always a careful speaker, taught never to cuss. I spoke like a good girl. But Ronnie inserted “damn” in nearly every sentence. A tough-guy habit, I speculated as I sat there listening. He said “nigger” a lot, hard to hear even if he was expressing solidarity with black people as his fellow underdogs. “Just me and the niggers,” he said of his callous treatment by Keswick people and those in authority elsewhere. Maybe Ronnie was why my folks freaked out so dramatically when in first grade I asked them w
hat a “nigger” was. If Mom carried within her some evil seed, maybe it was popping up in me too.
To Ronnie, all female librarians, teachers—really, all grown women—were Old Lady So-and-So. Mom cautioned me as a child never to refer to women that way, or to men as Old Man So-and-So. Again, it must have been because Ronnie did.
He seemed to have read all my stories in the Roanoke paper. He proved it by remembering Sallie Wilcher’s sterilization and the seizure of her little boy. He remembered the young punks who strangled a Roanoke hooker, lashed her nude body to the hood of their car like a deer, and drove her miles in the middle of the night before dumping her in a country stream. He’d kept up with my work, so why hadn’t he called the newspaper and asked for me? “I’m your bastard brother, Pie. I didn’t want to drag you down.” Every advantage I’d ever had instantly felt like a minus in his column.
* * *
AS HIS TRIMMER buzzed away on a guy’s crew cut, I stood up slowly and mentally compared us in the horizontal mirror that covered the wall behind the barber chairs. I was forty-two; he was fifty-two. I couldn’t help but wonder if as I aged I might develop features like his. There were definite similarities—the straight hair, still some honey blond like mine in his gray; the deep-set eyes; the long, thin limbs; our family’s height. But something had transformed him since his visit to the farm all those years ago.
His voice was an octave lower, raspy, with crackling mucus. His face was overgrown with flesh and bone. His fingers were strangely long and his middle fingers ended in bulbs at the tips, like spring onions. Could a car wreck have messed him up? It looked more internal, more medical. I didn’t have the heart, or the nerve, to ask.
“Mary COD-ah, Mary COD-ah,” he kept singsonging to himself as we talked. He said my name just the way our mother did. He was savoring the fact that I’d come.
Don't You Ever Page 10