by Lee Server
James Bailey Gardner was a disagreeable man, prone to black moods, drunkenness, and violence, increasingly so as the years went on. He was a chronic imbiber of moonshine, and when his black moods and his corn liquor converged he was a menace to all. At those times it was the designated job of the youngest child, Ava Virginia, to run into the house and find the old man’s gun and hide it. Gardner and his second family lived on the farm his wife had inherited from her father, and the main cash crop there, as on any farm in the Piedmont that could sustain it, was tobacco, the bright-leaf tobacco that grew best—and for a time almost exclusively—on the rolling red-clay hills of north-central North Carolina. Tobacco had been grown in the region for hundreds of years, but it was only in the 1830s that the secrets of bright leaf had come to be known, a male slave of Catawba County credited as the first to create the flue-cure process that began a revolution in the tobacco industry. Carefully cured, the golden leaves of the Piedmont were so mild that their smoke could be inhaled and held deep within the lungs, thus delivering to the bloodstream a quicker and more addictive nicotine kick. The worldwide cigarette industry—and habit—was born, and quality “yellacured” bright leaf became about the most desired vegetable on earth. Its cultivation remained specialized and painstaking, however, and while the heirs of Washington Duke and others made incalculable fortunes from processing and selling Piedmont tobacco, they would leave the growing to the small farmers who did the difficult and dirty work for far more moderate profit.
Tobacco farmers passed their skill from father to son, and James Bailey’s son Jonas had begun to learn the intricate cultivation of the bright- leaf plant by the time he could walk—the long process from January to late summer, seeding, plowing, cropping off, killing out, grading, sometimes literally making your bed in the barn with the tobacco so you could watch the temperature in the furnace all night long, and finally in August or September preparing the big juicy golden leaves for market. Given his father’s penchant for disappearing off the farm after every drunken dispute, usually holing up for days at the house of one of his older children, Jonas had run a good portion of the farm from the age of ten or eleven. He had little formal schooling, but he was a very learned farmer and he could tell you the story of twelve kinds of dirt just by running them through his fingers.
He was long and lean, hawkish and handsome with green eyes and a cleft chin, brown-skinned on his face, neck, and forearms from the years spent working outdoors. He was a good man, temperate, loyal, hardworking In his early twenties he found a girl, Mary Elizabeth “Molly” Baker, from Saratoga in Wilson County, the daughter of David and Elizabeth Forbes Baker, a red-haired, red-faced Scottish father and a mother who had died when her girl was very young. Molly was pretty, with dark eyes, skin as white and smooth as cream, and a soft rounded figure. She had a strongly maternal nature, ached to produce children, and was a diligent homemaker and a glorious cook. In January 1903, Jonas and Molly were married in the parlor of the Baker house in Saratoga.
They were opposites in many ways. Molly warm, outgoing, and emotional, Jonas introspective and shy of strangers. But they loved each other, and that love would last with few interruptions till the day that each one died. Nine months and some days from the hour of their nuptials a daughter was born, Beatrice Elizabeth, followed, at nine- and twenty-four- month intervals, by two more girls, Elsie Mae and Edith Inez.
Soon after his wedding Jonas began to search for land, a place to farm that would be his own, that he could cultivate and make flourish and that would become his legacy to his family and to those who came after them. He found such a place in the area of Boon Hill to the west of Johnston County, making a down payment for the purchase of two large parcels of rural land southeast of the town of Smithfield.
For three years he traveled to and from the homesite, building the wooden frame house where his family would live. He hauled the wood and he dug the well and he dug the outhouse. In 1907 they moved in, Jonas, Molly, and the three little girls. The house was on the old back road that ran through the area known as Grabtown. The derivation of the nickname is now only speculation: Some say it was after the way the local kids always hungrily “grabbed” at a traveling peddler’s gewgaws from the outside world. Their excitement was understandable: The residents, the children especially, lived in a near-complete isolation. Smithfield, the county seat, was just eight miles away, but it could seem like a hundred when bad weather turned the dirt road into mud. It was a region of modest family farms, the poorer ones no better than small clearings in the woods. Many in the 1900s still existed outside the cash economy, growing what they lived on. Some farmers owned their land, passed down over generations, but many were tenant farmers, kicking back a portion of their crops in royalties and fees to the landowner; mortgaged landowners like the Gardners worked to pay the bank and hoped for profits or at least enough to make ends meet. Like all of the greater Brogden area, Grabtown had no running water or electricity (and none to come until the 1940s). Children attended a little one-room schoolhouse along the road until it closed with the opening of the Brogden School a mile away. Like much of the American South, Johnston County was racially segregated. The black sharecroppers and fieldworkers had their own neighborhoods, their own churches and schools. Racialist views were common enough in the county, but among many of the struggling rural farmers there was said to have been a live-and-let-live attitude toward the black minority, with less of the overt antagonism and sense of entitlement of whites in the eastern counties where blacks in fact outnumbered the whites by a considerable margin.
On December 5, 1908, Molly Gardner gave birth to her fourth child, the first to be born in their new home, and the first boy: They named him Raymond. A family photo shows a delighted, sandy-haired kid in a straw hat. One early winter morning, two-year-old Raymond was standing near the warming fireplace amid the hustle and confusion of a new workday. A stray dynamite cap from the supply Jonas kept for use in clearing boulders had fallen in transit through the front room and been brushed into the roaring fireplace. The cap ignited in the flames. The explosion hit Raymond in the face and chest. He died on the way to the hospital in Smithfield.
The brutal random death of their baby boy would leave a permanently unhealed wound in the hearts of Jonas and Molly Gardner. Jonas was a practical man whose only propensity for the occult was an unswayable belief in the Farmer’s Almanac, yet he would sometimes in the years ahead come to think that a darkness had entered their lives with Raymond’s dying and remained, a black cloud of hovering bad luck. The farm would fall prey to natural disasters and to man-made ones as well. His land would not remain his own.
Pregnant at the time of Raymond’s death, Molly would give birth to a second boy, Jonas “Jack” Gardner, and four years later in 1914 another daughter, Myra, their sixth child—and, they assumed, with growing conviction as the years went by, their last.
At first they all called her “Liz,” in deference to Aunt Ava, her father’s unmarried sister who had come to live with them in Grabtown. She was made much of and spoiled by everybody. She was a beautiful baby, everyone said so, though for a time she was curiously deficient in hair; at last, in her second year, she began to sprout a layer of soft blond curls. She was a restless child, no sooner placed in her crib than she was standing at the bars and demanding to be let out. She was walking at eight months, ready to see the world. She once climbed through an open second-floor window and was on her way into midair when her brother, Jack, caught her by the drawers at the last instant.
Though her later success in Hollywood would bring the stretch of land called Grabtown a degree of lasting fame, Ava’s time there was brief. When she was not yet three, the family was forced to move on. Jonas could not make the farm thrive, expenses always increasing, profits always slim, and now the whole region plagued by an economic downturn. Jack’s liability for property destroyed in a fire (sneaking a cigarette, he’d dropped a match and burned the seed barn to the ground) didn’t help much. What optio
ns there might have been ran out suddenly and the house and the land were lost.
Someone at the county school board came to the Gardner family’s aid with a well-timed offer that combined employment with a place to live. Down the road in Brogden next to the new redbrick schoolhouse, the old school—the clapboard building a few steps away—was being used as a dormitory for the young lady teachers. In recent years Johnston County had begun an ambitious program to consolidate and raise the standards of primary education in the rural districts. Modern, multistory buildings were being constructed in a number of communities across the county, in many cases replacing primitive one-room schoolhouses where country children learned the “three Rs” and often not much else. For each new school the county supplied certified schoolteachers and provided “school trucks” to transport the children. The upgraded facilities had proved controversial: Some farmers and backwoodsmen suspected any intervention at all by government outsiders, even if they were only as far outside as the county seat, and the construction of one of the new brick schools, at Corinth-Holder, was delayed by local saboteurs who blew it apart with dynamite. The school at Brogden, happily, opened without incident. The faculty was by edict made up of unmarried (white) women, and the county provided them room and board at a Teacherage, a secular novitiate where they could live safely and away from temptation. The Gardners would manage the Brogden Teacherage and be given a portion of the house for themselves, with Molly serving as cook and housekeeper.
Molly took to the job at once. With her domestic skills and maternal warmth, she made the boardinghouse into a home, not just for her family—her husband and son and the girls—but for the young ladies who lived there with them, some very young and away from their own mothers for the first time in their lives. For a while Jonas Gardner sharecropped, working a landlord’s farm. He hoped to turn things around for himself and regain some portion of his own property, a dream that would not come true. The makeshift job and lodgings they shared at the county’s expense drifted into an unplanned permanence. They would stay for nearly ten years, and the Teacherage would be the setting of Ava Gardner’s young life, the big clapboard house, the school, and the fields and orchards and dirt roads of Brogden.
Of her earliest years at the Teacherage she would remember mostly her mother and the whirl of excitement around Molly’s long day of work, cooking and cleaning from early to late, moving through the halls and from room to room, never at rest, Ava toddling behind, trying to keep up, a hand on her mother’s apron. She would remember the wonderful smells and tastes in her mother’s kitchen, something steaming, baking, or frying, it seemed, every hour of the day. She would remember the lady teachers who shared her home, another whirl of activity in the morning, the floorboards creaking as all of them went from bedrooms to bath to dining room, getting themselves ready for school in the morning; and then all of them together again from the late afternoon, generating quieter sounds, relaxing on the porch or in the parlor in the evening, working on their school papers, reading books and newspapers, chatting together. The young lady teachers doted on Ava, talked with her and played with her and held her on their laps, many of them looking at her longingly, daydreaming of being finished with their single, working lives and having husbands and children of their own.
When she was old enough she went to school in the redbrick building across the lawn, joining a hundred or so kids who arrived each morning from all over and poured out of the school bus in screaming droves. Knowing all the teachers for so long and living right next door reduced the trauma of leaving her mother and going among the strange children. It was odd fun to be at school with the ladies and see them made up for classes and behaving with such formality—she’d seen them at home for so long, chattering and running around in their bathrobes, their faces smeared with cold cream. Her favorite teacher was Mrs. Williams, who taught her to read and write. Ava would remember a sweet, tolerant woman, who ran her classes with a “wonderful serenity.” Maggie Williams had the distinction of being the only married teacher at Brogden, an exception made because her husband was to be away for a very long time, in prison for murder. (Many years later, in 1952, his curious life story became the subject of a movie, Carbine Williams, filmed at M GM, Ava’s place of employment by then, with James Stewart in the title role and Jean Hagen playing Maggie.)
At school there was a brief portent, a glimpse of future events in miniature, her acting debut, and a lead role no less, as the narcoleptic fantast in the school production of something called A Rose Dream. It had less to do with any instinct for performing on the girl’s part than it did with her glowing prettiness and how everyone knew that she would look wonderful under the lights on the little Brogden school stage. At five and six she was already attracting attention for her appearance. Her hair was long, blond, and curled in those early years, oddly almost unique among her classmates—a photo of the children in her class posing together at the school shows row upon row of girls with dark hair and the popular but severe Colleen Moore cut (after the silent movie gamine, a short, straight bob with bangs) surrounding little Ava and her untamed golden locks.*
School captivated her in the beginning. She was filled with curiosity for the knowledge contained in her schoolbooks and in her teachers’ words, exploring the new worlds of history, geography, literature. She was a smart little girl, her teachers said. She studied, asked questions. But the time would come by the fifth or sixth grade when her excitement for learning would fade, replaced by new interests and urges. The gaps in her knowledge and her lack of education were things about which she would feel great regret and embarrassment in her adult life.
In the summers she helped her father with the tobacco crop. She would remember standing barefoot in the fields of tobacco, picking off worms, hauling the heavy leaves, helping to hang them out to dry and tie them together in great bundles. She would remember how the sticky black sap oozed from the tobacco and coated your hands and everything stuck to them like to flypaper, and you couldn’t get them clean till you washed them with a lye soap that was so strong it could take your skin right off. Rough work for a little girl and sometimes dangerous (nearly losing an eye once when her sister swiped at her with a hoe), but she enjoyed being outdoors—in the field you didn’t have to keep your hair combed and your shoes on your feet—and she loved being near her father, collecting an occasional word of praise. Jonas spoke so tersely that just to hear him say, “Good morning, Daughter,” thrilled her no end.
“She thought of her childhood as a very happy time,” said Spoli Mills, Ava’s close friend for the last thirty years of her life. “It was a time when she had her mother and father together, and she adored them both. And they gave her, I think, a great deal of freedom. Not in the way of being unconcerned but in letting her think for herself, make up her own mind about things. She never had any racial prejudice, for example, not at all.”
Her memories of those times would be mostly fond, of a Tom Sawyerish childhood: barefoot days, hot summers, the swimming hole in the woods, her friendship and adventures with a black migrant worker named Shine, the nights camped out with her father as they nursed the curing tobacco. She grew up under opposing influences—within the Teacherage the warm femininity and domesticity of her mother and the dignified, disciplined lady boarders; and outside, the allure of mischief, dirt, and adventure. It seemed clear early on which influence had the stronger pull. “She was a real tomboy back then,” Clarence Woodell would remember. He was a neighbor and a classmate in Brogden. “She liked to act just like the boys did,” he remembered, thinking back to a time nearly eighty years before. “You know, shoot marbles and climb trees, get down in the dirt. I remember one time she climbed the water tower out back of the school, maybe sixty feet up and hanging off a little ladder. You just didn’t see many girls doing things like that in those days. She was the prettiest thing and sweet when you got to know her, but she was a little tomboy, oh my.
Feisty. If you were playing and said something she didn’
t like she came right at you; didn’t matter if it was somebody bigger, she wasn’t afraid.”
Her immediate hero was her scrappy brother, Jack, and some thought she was trying to emulate him, the boy who’d burned down the seed barn, who was always finding trouble, and who once as a youngster had a business peddling a near-lethal version of moonshine whiskey until his father caught him (in later life Jack became a politician). At school she made friends with sweet, smart girls like Clara Whitley, but on the weekends she would tag along with Jack and with some of the toughest of the local farm kids. They mucked around, smoked cigarettes (fresh tobacco rolled up in a piece of newspaper), broke a few windows, stole watermelons in harvest season (not an easy crime for a little girl to commit, with Piedmont watermelons sometimes weighing twice what she did). Boys taught her a rich vocabulary of four-letter words and obscene phrases, and she enjoyed using them as often and as inappropriately as possible (but never around Mama). She loved the way they gave a “satisfying jolt” to a conversation, making her daintier classmates at school drop their jaws when out of her little-girl mouth would come the words “goddamn,” “shit,” or “fuck.”