Jerry’s daddy, Simon, was what they used to call a garage drinker, secretive and solitary, not fun-loving like Roy. Her daddy sipped gin from a hidden jar while walking in the woods with his rifle, hunting at dawn while he drank. Simon Robbins brought his kills home and skinned them on the porch, bent over the body of a rabbit or a squirrel with his big knife. Her mama cooked the little animals for his dinner, and he ate alone after his children went to sleep. He thought his kids didn’t see his drinking, until they became teenagers. Then he noticed how they avoided his eyes when he said he was going out. He pulled away from all of them then, even his eldest son, fearing their judgment. He had his share of disappointments. Simon was forced to close his garage and filling station and go back to working leased land after the market crashed. At harvest time, his three children had to work in the neighbors’ cotton fields, weighed down by canvas bags as long as they were tall, picking bolls for hours in the sun. Jerry hated it. She hated the work and she hated how her father gave up. He flat refused to help them, and her older brother Robbie took his place, doing the work of a man even as a young boy. And then their mother, Lizzie, had a fourth child, a baby boy named Erskine, after all her other children were almost grown. They loved and doted on the baby, but it wasn’t easy to add another need to their own.
Jerry’s mama never spoke of hard things. Lizzie was a saint, the way she understood each of her children and showed them her love. She was sixteen years old when she met the handsome suitor who became this surly sinner, her husband. Simon gave her a gold bracelet as a promise of his intent to marry. She was the daughter of a Primitive Baptist preacher, and her family believed she was too young to wear an engagement ring. Even though she was proper, Lizzie wasn’t above a good joke, saying, “When I first met that man, I loved him so much I could have eaten him alive. After we were married, I wished I had.”
Jerry understood that. The real trouble in her first marriage to Roy started when she realized she wasn’t the only one who appreciated her husband’s looks and charm. Women loved Roy and he let them. He took Jerry to parties, and before long a girl would come sit on his lap and say, “Why is she here?” gesturing to Jerry. She would answer the tramp herself: “You better get off of his lap or I’ll show you why I’m here.”
Roy would laugh and reassure her, but she could see through him. He couldn’t help himself when it came to drink or women. It took Jerry three more years to leave him, after the first two good years were over. She had to be sure he would never change. She cried her tears before she got in front of a judge and asked for a divorce. She wasn’t going to wail in a public courtroom and make a fool of herself.
By the time she met Bill in 1943, Jerry had learned how to hold on to herself and her liquor. She wasn’t looking to marry again, but Bill was tenacious. He was handsome and tall with sandy hair—a country boy from a town fifty miles west of Nashville, Tennessee, called Vanleer. You almost couldn’t call Vanleer a town, just a place with a post office, a church, and a dry goods store. A few hundred people lived in small homes nested in the dense green hills, eating what they could grow. His parents’ place had a dirt floor, tamped down and swept clean. Their kitchen was outside under a little roof and their water came from a well. Bill’s father was another hard drinker, and his mother wanted more out of life but couldn’t figure out how to get it.
Bill knew from a young age the army was his best way out. He got his younger brother, Sam, to come with him, and they both worked as recruiters, convincing other seventeen-year-old boys to join up. Eventually, they were able to move their mama into a comfortable home in Nashville. Their daddy stayed behind, and lived out the rest of his life alone in the country. Bill and Jerry shared common ground: They both watched their parents work hard and end up with very few comforts. They were determined to live better lives for themselves.
While Bill was courting Jerry, he brought little gifts of scarce and rationed treasures: a pair of silk stockings, red roses, and an enormous box of Whitman’s chocolates. Jerry and her sister Janie, who was pregnant with her daughter, sat knee to knee balancing the big candy box between them and ate every perfect piece.
Bill said, “Geraldine, to know you is to love you, but you won’t let anyone in close enough to know you!” That was true. She was cautious with herself now, but the idea of getting away from North Carolina, away from her family’s opinions and advice, that was a notion strong enough to pull her toward Bill. She was close with her brothers and sister, but she was cut from a different cloth. They seemed as rooted to home as the oak tree planted in their mother’s front yard. Jerry wanted to live out in the world. She wasn’t satisfied to nest in North Carolina forever. Bill was career military. He was strong, and confident, moving from town to town with ease. He didn’t know where his next assignment would take him and she liked that idea. She thought he could be a good father to the children she dreamed of having, and she wasn’t getting any younger. She had planned to have a family long before she turned thirty, but here she was, twenty-five and divorced. She was ready to begin again. She better be, she told herself. It was clear Bill wasn’t going to stop asking until she said yes. After a short ceremony at the justice of the peace on the army base, Jerry told Bill, “This marriage is the result of a smooth snow job!”
They were married only a short time before the war called Bill away. Jerry waited for letters from him, rode her motorcycle, and worked for her brother-in-law, Joe, managing his restaurant out by the airport. She stayed with Joe and Janie, and spent time with her friends. As much as she missed her new husband, she was also comfortable in her independence. It was her nature.
When Bill came home from Europe, he was a changed man. He had landed in Normandy on D-Day and survived. He was volatile and moody, what they used to call shell-shocked. Jerry knew he had horrible stories to tell, but he only talked about the war at the Officers’ Club, with other men who had been there.
Bill was continuously reassigned once he was home. If something didn’t have wheels or fit in a box, they didn’t own it. They moved around North Carolina, on to South Carolina, then to Tennessee, sometimes living on army bases, sometimes in houses near small storefront recruitment centers. They settled for the longest stretch of time in Nashville, where they bought a beautiful clapboard house on Westbrook Avenue in 1947. That is where they lived when their first son, Howard Duane Allman, was born.
Bill’s brother Sam lived with them, and it was a happy time. Jerry cooked big dinners to share with their friends. They played cards in the kitchen, and Bill seemed better than he had in a long time. Bill carried Duane proudly around the house and took him to Vanleer to show him off to his father. He took him to the Officers’ Club and set his little bottom up on the bar beside his glass of beer. But the happy time did not last for long.
Bill soon got word he was once again going to be reassigned, and they packed up and sold their house.
Jerry hated to give up their first real home, and then, when it was too late to get it back, they found out Bill’s reassignment was only across town, in another part of Nashville.
Instead of settling in again, Bill found a couple of rooms to rent in a large house, shared with an officer and his wife and a traveling candy salesman. Their second son, Gregory LeNoir, was born just a year and eighteen days after Duane, into a far different home.
Duane had a little tuft of ginger hair and skin as pale as cream. He never seemed to tire, and if you held him, he wiggled and grabbed your hair. If you set him down, he reached for the nearest thing to pull himself up with, or cried in frustration if he couldn’t reach anything. Gregg looked like an angel or a baby in a magazine: white-blond and round-eyed, calm and watchful. He was easy to handle, and the officer’s wife who shared their house doted on him. She carried Gregg in her arms and sang him little snatches of songs from the radio. She couldn’t handle Duane. He screamed if she tried to touch him.
Duane didn’t adjust well to his new baby brother, and Gregg soon had tiny scars on this ha
nds and feet from Duane’s teeth. Any little part of Gregg that dangled out of his crib was liable to get chomped, and how he screamed!
Jerry had never loved anything like she loved her babies, freshly powdered and dressed in white. Bill wasn’t a great help when it came to parenting. When one of the boys would cry, Bill would say, “Your son needs something.” And Jerry would answer, “You mean our son?” The pressure between them grew by the day. Bill was distracted by work, that’s what he said. He had been promoted to first lieutenant and had to adjust to new responsibilities. He wore a haunted look and struggled to sleep. He angered easily and would rage for hours about little things, and Jerry wasn’t the type to back down. When their battles were over, she cleaned up the broken glasses and plates they had smashed on the floor in the dawn light, before her toddlers woke up and risked cutting their little feet. Then Bill would wake and go to work again, and her day would begin. You can adjust to almost anything, she found.
Granny told me she had a babysitter in Nashville who left the boys sitting in wet diapers, but she did not have the time or money to replace her. Instead, Jerry taught Duane and Gregg to change their own training pants. She had a low shelf built in the bathroom, and stacked the pants within the boys’ reach. She put a little wastebasket beneath it and explained to her sons that whenever they felt wet, they should go into the bathroom and change themselves. She told them not to bother the woman watching them, just go and take care of themselves. They learned, and she never found them in wet clothes again.
“Really, Granny?” I asked. “How old were they?”
“They were babies. They were just toddling, still in those tinkle pants.”
Gregg was napping on a couch beside us while we talked. He woke up in time to hear her say “tinkle pants” and bellowed, “What are you telling her? Good God, Ma, tinkle pants? Come on, now!”
Bill was assigned to Fort Story, Virginia, and Jerry struggled with leaving Nashville. She would miss the green trees shading the Craftsman houses on the hill overlooking the neon lights of the clubs downtown. Nashville was home. Moving felt different now with her boys to think about, but Virginia was beautiful, and best of all—they would be living by the sea.
Their duplex on the base at Fort Story wasn’t anything fancy—it was built of cinder blocks—but it was steps away from white sand dunes, and salty breezes blew into their windows in the evening. Jerry worked as a shopgirl downtown to keep her mind sharp and help with money. Working allowed her to buy little luxuries like new shoes when she wanted to. On warm days off, she took Duane and Gregg down to the beach with tin pails and shovels and watched them dig and splash in tide pools. A lighthouse stood proudly on the shore, the ocean a vast blue backdrop, and the marshland behind her, encased in low clouds, caught the ever-changing light like a painting come to life. Jerry could feel her life expanding out across the open horizon as she watched Duane tossing handfuls of sand into Gregg’s lap. She was a mother, and they were so beautiful.
I have a stack of baby pictures of Duane and Gregg now, something I never had as a child, when I really ached for them. A few of the best photos came from Janie’s daughter, Jo Jane. I finally went to visit her in North Carolina after more than thirty years of silence. She enveloped me in a flood of warmth as soon as I arrived. She had covered her mother’s bed with photo albums in preparation for my visit. The baby pictures overwhelmed me. Looking at his dimpled knees and fluffy baby hair, I could imagine the powdery smell of Duane and the feel of his skin. As he grows into a toddler, Duane stands taller and bigger than Gregg and he often has his arm around him in a proprietary grip. Duane stares into the camera, his expression a little unnerving. His powerful presence is the first thing people who knew him try to describe; he was really seeing you when his eyes met yours. He was born with that intensity. Gregg smiles and sometimes looks a little worried, his pale brows knitted and watchful. Their essential natures are so close to the surface, captured in every frame.
My favorite picture of the boys as babies was taken on the beach in Virginia: soft limbs, tender heads turned away, and sun in their downy hair. Even with their faces hidden from the camera, the image holds all the intimacy and constancy that was always between them. I could cry for the perfection of that moment.
The Allman brothers, I think. Here they are.
They lived on the base in Fort Story through the winter of 1949, when Duane turned three years old and Gregg turned two. Both boys were active and Duane was already a precocious talker, repeating words he heard his parents say. His birthday was November 20 and Gregg’s was December 8, so Jerry picked a day to celebrate both at once. She bought two little cakes and the boys chose the color of their icing. Gregg asked for blue and Duane green. “Green icing?” she said. “Who ever thought of anything so ugly?” But that’s what he wanted and that’s what he got. The boys were given matching cowboy outfits with felt hats and real leather holsters to hang from their belts. The fancy black shirts had pearly snaps and the pants were trimmed in silver. Best of all, they each received a shiny silver cap gun and real smoke rose from the barrels when they were fired. An extra length of string had to be tied around Gregg’s waist to keep the weight of the gun from pulling down his pants. Duane and Gregg chased each other from room to room, galloping on invisible horses.
Bill drew an unpopular rotation and had to stay on base for Christmas Day that year, so Jerry drove the boys to Rocky Mount to visit her family for a couple of days. Duane begged to be suited up in his cowboy clothes, and loudly refused to wear anything else for the long drive to North Carolina. Gregg put on his cowboy hat and wouldn’t take it off. She said, “Suit yourselves,” and hustled her two little Hopalong Cassidys down the driveway.
On the way out of town, Jerry stopped at a roadside stand and bought fireworks. Duane and Gregg could barely sit still just knowing there was a bag of sparklers, bottle rockets, and Buck-a-Roo flashlight crackers in the car.
At dusk, Jerry took the boys and their cousins, Jo Jane and Ervin, into the backyard of their grandparents’ house to light the fireworks. She wore a little fur jacket over a red party dress, her curls piled high with combs, and when she lit the fuses and sent those paper rockets screaming into the sky, Jo Jane told her she had never seen anything so wonderful. The kids ran in the grass painting hot white circles in the air with their sparklers, until they bent and fizzled, and Jerry took the molten wires away.
The grown-ups settled around the kitchen table, Jerry and Joe sipping shooters of whisky, poured from a bottle kept in a paper bag under the kitchen sink, while Janie watched them gravely. Duane, Jo Jane, and Ervin lay on the living room rug listening to the radio while Gregg wandered alone into his granny’s bedroom and crawled under the bed to hide. Lying on his belly, he kicked his legs out like a frog and hit something with his ankle. It was too heavy to scoot with his foot, so he wiggled back out and grabbed the little package with both hands. In the light, he could see that it was a hard leather holster, a bigger version of the one he wore, and inside, a familiar shape resting beneath a snapped flap.
Gregg rushed into the living room with the long black pistol unsteady in his hands, the weight of it pulling him forward, the barrel weaving wildly, and exclaimed, “Gee! A real gun!” Duane jumped to his feet and Jo Jane followed. Ervin stayed frozen on the floor and watched openmouthed while Gregg pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck the brick mouth of the fireplace with a force that sucked the air out of Gregg’s lungs and knocked him into a sit. The sound was so loud, it left a hum that rang through his ears for a long time. That shocking crack became his earliest memory, the blast and the weight of the gun against his lap. Jerry descended on him, a fluttering flock of bodies behind her, yelling and whooping. The gun was taken away and Gregg was in her arms, squeezed and held and rocked, his soft little body folded into her, her warm breath on his forehead.
The next night, the boys slept slumped against each other in the backseat on the long drive home, Jerry navigating caref
ully through the darkness, her mind still clutching the moment she heard the gunshot and didn’t know where the bullet had gone. It made her dizzy and she turned the radio up and rolled her window open a crack to feel the cold air on her face. She was so tired, only wanting to lay the boys down in their beds, change into her nightgown, and settle in to wait for Bill. It was just after ten o’clock. She imagined he had gone out for drinks with his friend Bucky, as he often did. She wanted to tell him about the gun. She needed to get the sound of that shot out of her head, and stop thinking of what could have happened so easily if it had pointed any other way. Her heart was in her throat as she drove as fast as she safely could.
She was startled to see the post commander and his wife sitting grimly in her living room when she opened her door. She could see they were shaken. The feeling in her stomach tightened. Bill was hurt. She turned from them and rushed to change out of her traveling clothes. Whatever had happened, she would go to Bill now. The commander called out to her, stopped her, and stammered, “He’s been shot, Jerry. Bill is dead.”
Jerry ran into their bedroom, shook off her slacks, and changed into stockings, dress, and coat, pushing every thought away. The commander’s wife stayed behind to watch Duane and Gregg. The commander guided Jerry to his car, then into the hospital, and down the corridor to the waiting room. She felt half blind; her eyes and her mind seemed disconnected. She was asked to wait.
The hospital was horribly cheerful, with a little evergreen tree covered in tinsel and greeting cards arranged on the nurse’s desk. She didn’t want to look at any of it. Behind closed eyes, her mind began spooling out her life with Bill. The horrible sound of the gun was still pounding in her ears. Bill must have heard an explosion just like it, the last sound he would ever hear. The thought made her ache. She felt the memory of the shot’s sound cut through her chair and into her back. She bent forward and pressed her folded arms against her lap. Then someone rested a hand on her shoulder and asked her to come identify her husband’s body.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 3