The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  Bertha, every bit a Mainer, totally practical, with a keen eye for the inherent usefulness of otherwise overlooked things and individuals, had that quintessentially feminine ability to look at something or someone and not see what it was, but, rather, what it could be.

  Collins stood on the property in the overgrown grass on the last of what had once been railroad tracks and saw in front of him a turn-of-the-century two-story redbrick railroad station, closed long ago, like so many whistlestop station houses now slated for extinction.

  Bertha saw their future home. With a total of ten rooms, the building could be remodeled without too much trouble to accommodate as many as five foster children, with bedrooms left over for the three Taylor children, Collen, Kathy, and Roy, already growing up in their household.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if Collins did have misgivings about the work involved in transforming the stationhouse into her vision, or whether he was ready to foster what would amount in the coming decades to as many as sixty foster children, ranging in age from newborn to four years old. As any man who marries a woman like Bertha—that is, someone for whom foster parenting is a true calling, a destiny—he would have known better than to object. People were going to talk, because that’s what they did. They’d think her eccentric. Well, maybe she was. Just a little.

  This was, after all, the same gal who had previously left Montville and gotten a job in a shoe factory in Belfast, when most of the jobs went to men. With the Depression on, it had been better to be eccentric and have food on the table than to go hungry. When the two married and struck on the possibility of moving to Gray, more than a hundred miles southwest, practically a world away, instead of being worried about how locals would take to her, she cared more about how she’d take to them. Bertha’s two best friends, Laura Sawyer and Retha Dunn, were not only independent-minded like her but would share in her undertakings.

  Collins Taylor went along with whatever his wife set her sights on doing, the same reaction he must have had when she arrived home with me, sixteen years later. In a town where everybody knew everybody and no person of color had ever lived—at least to anyone’s knowledge—there had to have been an initial wave of gossip, some of it probably titillating, but less about me than about quirky Bertha Taylor’s hardheadedness. At the same time, the city of Gray would never have come to be had it not been for its quirky, hardheaded founders. One of them, a man by the name of Samuel Mayall, who in 1791 had built the first water-powered wool mill in North America, right there in Gray, had defied the British woolen guilds by smuggling out designs for the machinery—a crime punishable by death. Seeking revenge, one of the English guild lords sent him a hat in which poison pins were hidden, while another lord sent him a package containing pistols set to fire when he opened the box. Being a man of his wits, Mayall saw through these ruses and lived long enough to see his mills became a foundation of America’s industrial revolution, thriving in and around Gray until the 1900s.

  Had Bertha Taylor been forced to fend off poison and exploding packages on my behalf, she would have done so. She was that wholly focused on securing me in her home and in Gray.

  True to New England tradition, Bertha was neither prideful nor overly modest (both considered forms of self-centeredness) and was never prone to showing off, but she apparently couldn’t help herself when it came to me and—I am told—dressed me up in an array of baby girl clothes, then took me everywhere she went, bristling when anyone dared suggest I was not her own. Obviously, she was nearing the age of a grandmother, with graying board-straight hair that was originally blond, and I was a baby of mixed race, with brown skin and a head full of dark loose tiny curls that formed early on. Nonetheless, Bertha made me hers from the word go, allowing herself the most unabashed maternal pride, holding me up and presenting me as her little Vicki to neighbors and strangers alike.

  Between Bertha, Laura, and Retha, and additional members of the three families, I could not have wanted for more attention, to be more cherished or doted upon. Laura Sawyer’s two teenagers, Pam and Dennis, actually competed for babysitting time. Dennis even missed baseball practice to rock me to sleep. How this special extended family came to be and came to take me into their hearts and lives—so much so that when we reunited in my adulthood, they were able to rattle off stories from my earliest years right from the tips of their tongues—remains the mystery of love.

  Bertha was absolute in her conviction that she would prevail in her quest to prove the law wrong. She was determined to show the powers that be that I was not merely being fed and housed—as required by the weekly $7.00 check that the state paid per child—but that I had been embraced as a member of a family and of a community. Social workers assigned to my case had to have been amazed to see that instead of emotional or physical delays that can occur with displaced babies and toddlers, this abundance of love, nurturing, and early education seemed to be responsible for advanced development in every area.

  The effervescent, outgoing Laura Sawyer—younger by some years than Bertha and Retha, and the most talkative of the three—loved to invent games to engage and cultivate my abilities. The “duck” game was developed by accident one morning when she asked me to help her find a missing keepsake. Laura was the first of a long line of collectors who would inspire my own passion for holding on to pieces of the past. Her jewelry collection contained a vast assortment of pins and brooches, and her other big thing was frogs—in whatever keepsake version she could obtain.

  Laura asked me to help find her missing frog, under Bertha’s couch. With the Taylors, Laura’s husband, Lawrence, her two children, Dennis and Pam, and the Dunns collectively egging me on, I bent over to search, and the white ruffles on the back of my underwear fluffed up, like the tail of a duck.

  When I located the frog that had been strategically hidden for me to find, I received a hearty round of applause. If performing was in my blood, as the threesome believed, they did everything imaginable to reinforce that natural inclination.

  No concrete images have stayed with me from those gatherings, but in my senses I remember this trio of women, can-do Mainers, like female elders of a tribe, hovering around me, pleased with my every gesture and every utterance. They combined the roles of grandmother, mother, and aunt, and each went on to prove over time—no matter how many children they ultimately raised, fostered, adopted, or mentored—that their capacity to give love was limitless, a well that never ran dry.

  Together with their genuine love for children, these three were also natural-born teachers, recognizing well ahead of their time what sociologists of later years liked to point out—that the object of early education is to build the infrastructure for lifelong learning. That was certainly their legacy to me in creating an improvised school setting in their midst. Bertha was unquestionably the no-nonsense headmistress, embodying Maine’s motto—“I lead”—as she took me purposefully under her wing. It was Laura’s role, with her hand-holding and cheerleading, to make every learning opportunity fun, and Retha, perhaps most of all, left her mark by teaching me how to overcome my fear when facing unfamiliar situations. These were lessons that had come from her own turbulent childhood.

  Retha—or Grammy Dunn, as she was later known by everyone in the county—had a disarmingly dry wit and infectiously warm smile that she must have used to great effect in helping Bertha navigate the state bureaucracy on my behalf. Though there wasn’t anything remarkable in her looks, something about Retha’s inner beauty was so striking that people of all ages were drawn to her. Devoted to what would become four generations of offspring that she and her husband, Archie, would personally raise—including four children, thirteen grandchildren, twenty-six great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren, together with thirty-one foster grandchildren—Retha honestly came by her frequent comparison to the Little Ole Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. She was really Gray’s own version of Mother Teresa, spending her extracurricular hours volunteering at the local schools, well into her nineties, and mak
ing the most of her time by driving fast in a series of small, sporty cars she had a weakness for, and, as a terrific fan of sports, somehow managing never to miss any of her grandchildren’s or students’ games.

  Though she was known widely in many public and private quarters for her good works, only her closest friends and family knew that Retha had once been in an orphanage and had been raised as a foster child in her native Kingfield, Maine, eighty miles north of Gray. Knowing from firsthand experience what kinds of fundamental fears can afflict a foster child, she worked doubly hard not just to help Bertha overcome the obstacles to my adoption, but also to instill that sense of courage and self-protection in me—in the event that their efforts failed.

  From the end of May 1959 until the end of 1961, families Taylor, Sawyer, and Dunn were relentless, filing petitions in court, driving back and forth to Augusta to meet with legislators and child welfare workers, pressing for answers and asking for a change in a law that served no one. Bertha, Laura, and Retha were of a generation and a culture in which women were not encouraged to embrace their womanly powers, but rather to employ them subtly, through men, or behind the scenes. At some point, it may have been discreetly communicated to them that they had rocked the boat, kicked up too much dust, caused much more of a commotion than was flattering for women of their station. They might have been warned. There may have been a social worker willing to risk her or his job to help them, but the more they pressed for the State to permit the adoption, the more scrutiny they drew. Finally an answer came back, but it wasn’t the one they wanted. A plan was in the works to move me.

  Apparently, the official reason for the decision was that Bertha was too old to adopt me, and so, too, was Retha. Laura Sawyer then stepped in, suggesting that she could be the adoptive parent of record, and that all three families would continue to raise me. “Dear Mrs. Hurley,” she began an earnest letter to my social worker on February 25, 1961, “I am writing concerning our neighborhood angel, Vicki…” and went on to attest that there was not a community in the world that could love me more, or adoptive parents who could care for me as much, regardless of faith, color, or age.

  Since the issue of race had been raised, Child Welfare was now in the position of explaining that though the decision had been difficult, it was made carefully:

  It would be easy for us to leave Vicki in a home where we know she is loved and well cared for and to close our eyes and minds to what life would hold for her in ten and fifteen years hence. But in thinking of the future we must remember that being brought up in a foster home is difficult enough without aiding the problems of racial difference and separation from what little “own family” is left…. We must face the fact that the same people who love her at age two might feel differently when she is in her teens. We also know that Vicki herself is going to be aware of the “differences” as the years pass, and she will have problems to work out living in a totally white community.

  (Decades later, I received a letter from Retha Dunn that would reunite me with her, Laura Sawyer, and Bertha Taylor’s family. Laura Sawyer would be the first former mother I would encounter. When we met in Dresden, Maine, she burst into tears recalling the heartache they had all suffered. “I wanted you,” she said very loudly, fingering her whimsical frog pin on her lapel. “I wanted you, I loved you like my own! But they wouldn’t let me have you!” Laura fell into my arms and we both wept together.)

  For the pending move, the Maine Division of Child Welfare had its eye on a young Negro couple in Portland, a town that had a larger community of Negroes than other locations. This couple seemed perfect but was ultimately denied due to an important puzzle piece in the decision-making process by the State. Dorothy, who relentlessly visited the Welfare workers’ office, had tried in vain to give them one dollar a week for a fund to reunite me with my sisters, who were in the same Negro foster home. Three things mattered to her—that I be raised with Sheree and Lori, that I be in a home where the adults were Negro, but, most of all, that it was a foster home and not with adoptive parents. Her point was that this way she would be able to visit all three of us on occasion and one day reclaim her girls. Dorothy’s appeal as my birth mother prevailed.

  Not knowing any of this, Laura Sawyer and her husband, Lawrence, arranged for a meeting with the Child Welfare district supervisor who merely repeated their reasoning as stated in an earlier letter. The supervisor went on to report to the director of the division in Augusta:

  The Sawyers became very angry, could see no reason why we should disturb the placement of a child who was getting along beautifully, quoted the Bible, indicated that love could overcome all obstacles, and finally, as always, stated that we could not know anything about parental love anyway since were not parents.

  The supervisor described how illogical and hysterical the Sawyers were, especially in blaming the state for having allowed me to come to Gray in the first place, if only to remove me later. She went on:

  The Sawyers are also talking of starting a petition. They had much to say about Gray being a “Christian” town and therefore, there isn’t all this horrid prejudice there…. In their opinion the decision is a totally wicked one and we are not at all concerned with anyone’s “welfare” as a welfare agency should be. As a nation, we are supposedly workings towards integration, yet when we have it we destroy it.

  The supervisor did ask the Sawyers why Bertha and Collins Taylor hadn’t raised these same objections, and Laura’s answer was a choked-out response, “They would have, but didn’t have the courage.” By the end, Laura had collapsed into a fit of hysterical sobs, and Lawrence could only try to comfort her. Such drama was extremely out of the ordinary, but it had dawned on the Sawyers that my removal was now imminent. The traumatic separation not only affected me but also my foster parents. Bertha and Collins Taylor could never bring themselves to foster another child.

  Retha Dunn followed my life and career, further dedicating herself to children in every walk of life and to quietly having a hand in changing the system that had taken me from their community. Emphasizing education, Grammy Dunn had quite an influence on her son, Burchard E. Dunn, when he pursued a path in public service and was elected to the Maine state senate. Among the many pieces of legislation Burchard helped author and the projects he undertook to help kids was on the advice of Retha—the purchase of a defunct hospital that was remade into a school, later named for him. Upon Retha’s death in 2004 at the age of ninety-five, in addition to volunteer awards that were established in her name, the U.S. representative from the district recognized her on the floor of the House—for the ripple effect that her years of fostering and mentoring had contributed to Maine.

  Bertha and Collins Taylor, along with their daughters, maintained some contact with me, including a few visits, letters, and gifts at Forest Edge, but I was told that their grief was such that it was better to allow for a distance, so that they had time to heal and allow me time to bond with my new family. Parting was always traumatic, so much so that I, too, couldn’t allow it to register in my conscious memory, and associated it abstractly through Agatha telling me of an unforeseen winter storm that occurred in April 1961, which shattered my foundation of family and safety, when I was one month shy of my second birthday.

  In my early thirties, I made the trip to visit Bertha in a nursing home in Gray, to thank her in person for what she had given me early in life and for taking me into her heart, home, and community. Eighty-seven, very frail, and suffering from Alzheimer’s, my second mother still had a dim light in her eyes, and she looked at me in a way as though she might have remembered me, then she dozed off. I lay down on the bed next to her and put my arm across her chest. There were no words, only hearts. It was here that our embrace brought back that which the senses best document; as I held her while she slept, I thought of the lullaby she must have sung to me, the way she had tenderly rocked me in her arms, and a permanent ache caused by our final separation. As I prepared to sit up, Bertha let out an uncensored wail
, probably one of the rare times in her life she had allowed herself to howl like that, as an attendant tried to explain to a disoriented Bertha why I was leaving. Her wail resounded in the deep recesses of my memory. A feeling was triggered, reclaiming me in that moment. Now I was all grown up and Bertha was more like the child, lying there helpless, me not wanting to leave her there alone with strange people.

  Bertha C. Taylor, predeceased by her husband, Collins, by several years, passed away four days after my visit.

  Aside from a few photographs, she had held on to one keepsake from my time with her, protected in the smallest of plastic ring boxes. At some point, for reasons never revealed, she gave it to Laura Sawyer, who eventually presented it to me in my adulthood, after I gave birth to the first of my two children, as though to make sure I knew what my stay had meant to Bertha, and to the community of Gray—or as proof that Vicki had really been there and really mattered.

  Upon receiving it, I closed my eyes, feeling the soft warmth of Laura’s hands over mine, and paused before lifting the lid, wondering what it could be. It weighed no more than a feather and had traveled so far and so purposefully to arrive in my hands. Finally, I clicked open the box. Inside, as though it was the entire ocean preserved in the most miniature of seashells, was my earliest childhood, wholly captured in a saved lock of my hair—a single tiny perfect curl.

  TWO

  AGATHA WOOTEN ARMSTEAD

  Now I began to remember things. Like awakening from a slow dream, the first involved my being led into a familiar room that contained toys, my toys and my dolls. A woman and two little girls entered. Questions: why were the girls playing with my dolls? Why did the woman, a stranger, seem familiar? At my table, she set up a tea party, and I couldn’t take my eyes off how she delicately grasped my play teacups and poured the imaginary tea, then held the cup between her fingers so carefully, with her pinky pointed toward heaven, explaining that we had to let it cool before drinking it, then blew into the empty cup. Her voice was warm, sparkling, kind. I tried hard not to trust her, yet I did.