Despite Helen’s global reach, the home place is where her story, and Cleo’s, begins and ends. During an interview for this book, a New York friend of Helen’s, herself once a desperately poor child trying to survive war-ravaged Paris, offered a bit of advice. Simone Levitt grew into a stunning French beauty and went on to unthinkable riches as the wife of Bill Levitt, the man who famously built the postwar American suburb of Levittown; the Levitts took Helen and David Brown cruising off Monaco on their enormous yacht, La Belle Simone. Helen danced with film stars and princes under the Mediterranean moon, but in the quiet hours, when the two women talked, they recognized the immutable effects of their origins, and how their unlovely beginnings still informed so very many aspects of the women they had become.
La Belle Simone, who sometimes lectures about her astonishing life to passengers on the ocean liner Queen Mary 2, pointed a bejeweled finger and said softly, “You can’t understand a single thing about Helen unless you go there, to where and what she came from. Look hard. Listen. She never changed from that girl and she never forgot. And that is what made her, I promise you.”
PART ONE
Arkansas
I’m sure this is very clichéd, but nothing is more beautiful than Eureka Springs and the Ozark Mountains in the fall. It’s so satisfying, very different from what one usually sees in the world.
—HGB in Somewhere Apart: “My Favorite Place in Arkansas”
1
Cleo’s Lament
It was a terrible life.
—HGB on the misfortunes of her mother, Cleo Sisco Bryan
THIN, TINY CLEO SISCO was hardly the only little girl in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas to have a baby on her hip at age four; it’s just that she would have so many of them, in succession, to care for. Born in 1893, Cleo Fred Sisco was the first of ten children welcomed by Alfred Burr Sisco and Jennie Denton Seitz Sisco. Jennie, born in 1876, was a robust twenty years younger than her husband. For a time, Alfred ran the general store his father, Granville Sisco, had built in Alpena, a hamlet of a few dozen souls; he is also listed as a farm laborer in the Osage Township records. Alfred and Jennie lived in Alpena Pass (now Alpena), then moved to nearby Osage. Over the next twenty-five years, the babies kept coming. The last, and Cleo’s favorite baby brother, Jack Harvey Sisco, was born in 1918.
It was understood that the eldest child would take care of the youngest baby, so Cleo was kept busy with child care until the blessed day that she was old enough to go to school herself. Even then, she was expected to get straight to her chores when she got home. Cleo’s best chance to act like a child was during visits to her maternal grandparents, Isabella and Lawson Seitz, who pampered her with attention and oatmeal cookies. At home, Cleo was afforded none of the playtime that her siblings enjoyed. Instead, Helen wrote, “she was nursemaid.” Gladys, the Siscos’ second child, was as blond and beautiful as Cleo was plain; Gladys was smothered with attention by family members and later by adoring classmates and beaux. The injustice would gnaw at Cleo for decades. Once she had her own daughters, Cleo would deliver ominous warnings on the unfair advantages of pretty girls.
Not long after Gladys clambered down off her older sister and started walking, she was also given nursery duties—until she dropped the infant she had been carrying. (“Smart kid,” Helen cracked.) From then on, the weight of child care rested primarily on Cleo’s slight frame. The strain on still-growing bones had a lasting effect: Cleo’s right hip was permanently higher, from hitching it up to support the succession of wiggly babies. Cleo concocted an escape plan. Most of her contemporaries had only an eighth-grade education; there were few high schools. At fifteen, Cleo wangled a miraculous reprieve when her uncle, a well-to-do dry goods merchant, and aunt agreed to let her live with them in Green Forest, twenty-two miles northwest of Osage, so that she could attend the high school there.
Green Forest was a teeming metropolis compared with Osage. For the two years she was with her aunt and uncle, Cleo shone in high school. As graduation approached, in the spring of 1913, one of her teachers, Jim Birney, hectored her skeptical parents into letting her enroll in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He told them that she was a brilliant student who deserved the chance, and pleaded Cleo’s case again and again, until they finally let her go.
In later life, Cleo would tell her daughters every detail of her spring of 1914 semester at the university, over and over. She would remember it as her happiest, most hopeful time. She had only herself to look after, and she quickly made a close friend there, Miss Ola Stephenson. Though Cleo was a shade under five feet tall, she was an aggressive stealth player on the basketball court, darting below the taller girls’ elbows to steal the ball. It was all so exciting and audacious for a daughter of Osage.
Then, after just a semester, it was over. While Cleo was home for the summer, Alfred and Jennie thought of a new way for their eldest child to help out. Given the less rigorous teaching certifications acceptable in isolated rural schools and Cleo’s claim to some college education, she would be eligible to teach, earn a salary of about thirty dollars a month, and help feed all those Sisco mouths. There would be no more college.
* * *
Summoning what became a lifelong habit of resignation, Cleo accepted her lot. She loved teaching; it was what she had wanted to study in college. Every weekday morning at seven, regardless of what sort of weather the Ozark Mountains might fling at her, twenty-year-old Cleo got up with the sun and saddled the family mare. Daisy was a small chestnut horse suited to Cleo’s tiny frame; the animal was patient and docile and much beloved by Cleo for the sense of freedom and escape she represented. For the rest of her life, Cleo would have a fondness for horses.
The two settled into the clop-clop cadence of their long, all-weather commute up the winding road to the schoolhouse in Rule, on the northern side of Osage Creek. Rule wasn’t much of a town. There was just the school, a church, a post office, and a graveyard; students came from nearby farms. Given the wild mood swings of the area’s rivers and creeks, the poor mountain roads, and the distances, many teachers would board in homes near their one-room schools. But more often than not, Cleo and Daisy made the weekday trek, about two hours’ ride.
They headed northwest, away from the rising sun. Disappearing behind them in the morning mist was the small, unlovely, and very crowded Sisco house, where the wail of the newest infant regularly sounded reveille through the quiet Ozark dawn. Cleo was relieved to become a career girl, although they didn’t call it that. “Schoolmarm,” “teacher”—the title didn’t matter. This job was sweet deliverance. At least, during those long days in a one-room schoolhouse with a privy out back, she was free of the domestic drudgery she had endured for as long as she could remember.
She was content to have her own classroom domain, where she juggled six grades. Her students numbered ten to fifteen on any given day, depending on who was needed at home. Their teacher understood the absences all too well. No note was necessary, just the terse explanation that they had been kept home to “hep out” with planting, mowing, milking, feeding chicken and cattle, and child care. Most students preferred to be in school, with the gentle Miss Sisco teaching them history, reading, geography, math, and the few extras she could manage. She colored Easter eggs for them, an unheard-of frivolity, and carefully carried these to school aboard Daisy.
The bigger boys listened for Daisy’s tread in the morning and took her reins as Cleo dismounted. They fed and watered the little horse. In cold weather, the older children chopped wood and tended a small woodstove. School lunches, toted from home, were basic and portable: a roasted yam, a chunk of bread or pone. Discipline was rarely a problem in Miss Sisco’s class. Though some of the bigger boys towered over her, they were respectful. Helen had a couple of photographs of her mother in those days, prim and unsmiling in a starched white blouse and an ankle-length cotton skirt—“a solemn girl-woman,” she observed.
* * *
Hard times and revers
als of fortune had long plagued Cleo’s maternal ancestors, who had been on this land bordering both sides of Osage Creek for nearly a century. Jennie Seitz’s family had seen some boon times for a couple of decades before the Civil War. Her grandfather Charles Sneed—Helen’s great-great-grandfather—was awarded land in Arkansas for his service in the War of 1812. Born in Kentucky in 1797, he had been a private in the Twentieth Regiment of the United States Infantry. The land grant, Bounty Land Warrant #21796, was issued in July 1819. Between 1840 and 1847, Charles extended his property to more than two hundred acres. He was one of the first settlers along Osage Creek.
Much of the area had long been a favored hunting ground of the Osage Indians. The Osage, originally from the Ohio Valley, were characterized as a “reckless and warlike tribe,” so much so that, following the Louisiana Purchase of more than 500 million acres of land from France, the United States government moved quickly to push the Osage westward into it. With an 1808 treaty, the tribe ceded much of the land to white settlers like Charles Sneed. In the spirit of either tribute or triumph, the town originally named Fairview became Osage.
As the newer settlers staked their claims and cleared the forests for planting, they bore witness to one of America’s deepest shames. Throughout the 1830s, a tragic procession of an estimated thirty thousand Native Americans passed from their ancestral homes along the Atlantic Seaboard and the Mississippi Valley through parts of Arkansas to assigned reservations designated by the federal Indian Removal Act. Their routes were known as the Trail of Tears; some ran through the northwestern corner of the state and across the Sneed homesteads.
The ghastly procession had largely ceased by the time Charles Sneed’s final ownership entries for additional tracts were completed in the Carroll County records. He was also listed as sheriff of Carroll County from 1835 to 1842, and was the area’s first postmaster. Charles’s last will and testament, filed and witnessed in 1860, contained a prosperous man’s detailed bequests of land and goods to his wife, Jane Sneed, three sons, and seven daughters. To Jane: “I bequeath her all my household and kitchen furniture … and also my negro man slave named Jack and my woman slave Phillis, and her infant child to have and to hold for her own use during her natural life hereby giving and granting to her full and absolute power to sell either or both of said slaves, if both or either of them, in her opinion shall become refractory or disagreeable to govern.” The Sneed sons and daughters received household goods, livestock, and slaves chosen specifically for each heir from the household roster. Listed as rightful inheritances of chattel were Louisa, Dallas, Hannah, Luce, McDugan, Ellen, Steph, Zac, Dick, and Ann. Isabella Sneed, Jennie’s grandmother and Helen’s great-grandmother, received “a negro girl slave named Ann about 8 or 9 years old, and two good horses or mares, two good cows and calves and one good bed and bedding.”
Charles Sneed had finalized his bequests just in time. The ensuing war years brought dreadful privations and violence to that corner of northwestern Arkansas. Jayhawkers—rogue antislavery groups that rose up in Kansas just before the Civil War—made occasional incursions and raids on slaveholding households in northwestern Arkansas. So did bushwhackers who were simply outlaws and renegade opportunists. These horseback pirates of shifting loyalties pillaged and murdered at will.
Within the state, loyalties were either sharply divided or dangerously blurred. The war did hit the area hard, and the violence that surrounded Helen’s ancestors was anything but a clear-cut standoff between North and South. Marauders posed as partisans from both sides as they raided and robbed local families, depending on their victims’ loyalties. By 1865, most of Berryville lay in ruins. Farms and private homes had been plundered by both armies and gangs of freelance outlaws prowling for food, livestock, fodder, and supplies. Charles Sneed’s pretty homestead was ill-used during the hostilities, and so was he. In February 1865, the patriarch, then sixty-eight, was kidnapped by a Union soldier; some accounts claim his abductor was a bushwhacker. He was forced to ride over a mountain in frigid weather. The assailant made off with Sneed’s horse and left him there to die. Tattered, starved, and weakened by his desperate scramble off the mountain, Charles Sneed made it back to his depleted homestead, where he died soon afterward. The cause given was exposure.
Just a quarter mile from Cleo Sisco’s old home, on what is now Route 412, the keen eye will make out a weathered wooden sign that reads SNEED. The grass is waist-high in some places, obscuring the smaller, mossy gravestones that tilt around Charles Sneed’s rather imposing monument, an orb-topped obelisk. The only sign of recent visitors: a few plastic Confederate flags driven into the ground snapped in a sudden breeze.
* * *
Much of what Helen understood about her people was colored by her mother’s melancholy worldview. Even the story of Cleo’s own courtship was more about regret than romance. Though she wasn’t batting away the suitors like her younger sister Gladys, Cleo did catch the eye of another local schoolteacher, named Ira Marvin Gurley, who taught in both Carroll and Boone Counties and was briefly principal of Green Forest High School. In a replica of a one-room school in the Carroll County Historical Museum, above the rows of authentic desks and well-used primers, the walls are hung with framed class pictures from area schools, pre-Depression. In one photo, Ira Gurley, a short, hale-looking young man with a robust shock of curly hair, smiles beside his pupils.
Ira was born in 1891 to John Gurley and his wife, Cedella Lipps Gurley, in Alpena. John had come from Georgia; his wife’s people were from North Carolina and Tennessee. Ira had three sisters and three brothers. Four of his siblings moved far from home, two to Texas and two to California. Ira had an urge to go as well, but he was slower and more moderate about his exit plan. Ira was a charmer who put on the full courtship press with Jennie, Alfred, and the rest of their brood. He hunted and fished with the boys and teased Cleo’s sisters, who adored him as well. Ira had plans. In addition to teaching, he was attending law school. Someday he might have a thriving legal practice, or even run for political office. Ira Gurley could be good for the whole Sisco family. He presented himself as a sturdy, willing proposition for jacking up the clan’s dismal prospects, and he seemed crazy about their petite, intelligent daughter.
No one paid much mind when Cleo began mooning over another boy she had met during her time at high school in Green Forest. William Leigh Bryan, known as Leigh, was no squirrel-gun-toting man’s man. He loved books and was not athletic. His family was even poorer than the Siscos. Cleo was smitten, but he just did not stack up as a suitable prospect for her family, especially once Ira had duly acquired his law degree from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in January 1916.
This Ira accomplished with prodigious effort and considerable investment of his schoolteacher’s wages. The university’s bulletin from 1916 lists law degree requirements of two five-month junior and senior terms, costing about $150 each for room, board, textbook rental, and sundry fees. Needy students might compete for a cash prize by writing and delivering the finest, fieriest temperance lecture. Miss Sisco was indifferent to Ira’s enterprise, so deep was her other attraction. It is unknown whether Leigh Bryan returned Cleo’s affections. Cleo had begun to exhibit what would be a lifelong penchant for one-sided attachments, poor social acuity, and unrealistic expectations; it would lead to some bizarre family odysseys and awkward misunderstandings.
Cleo didn’t love Ira, but he was steadfastly enamored of her and pressed his suit. The Siscos made their preference plain, and soon Cleo and Ira were engaged; they married in January 1917 and settled down in Green Forest. Their first home was a shabby little house as Cleo described it, with a yard full of weeds that Ira seemed content to ignore. He had bigger things on his mind, ambitions that would someday take them to finer places—maybe even to the state capital of Little Rock, 150 miles to the southeast.
Eloine Mary Gurley’s birth, on November 18, 1917, came exactly ten months after the marriage, and it nearly killed her mother. Cleo was so small
that it was an extremely difficult delivery, far beyond the limited skills of the country doctor called in to attend her. Her injuries were horrific and poorly treated; her recovery was long and incomplete. She nursed Mary, as they came to call her, in great pain and anxiety throughout the bleak Ozark winter. It must have been desperately lonely; often the route between Green Forest and Osage was impassable in winter, though Cleo would have found small comfort, if any, in her childhood home. Her mother, Jennie, was still having babies of her own. Worse, Cleo would tell her daughters later, she still did not love Mary’s father—never did, never would—and would always pine for Leigh Bryan.
Married life had also delivered a jolt to Cleo’s assumption that she would resume teaching when she was able. Helen was horrified to find out later in life that her beloved daddy had been “a devout male chauvinist, the kind they had in those days.” Cleo had another name for him: “caveman Gurley.” Ira was vehemently against women’s suffrage and would loudly deplore the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Moreover, he would not allow any wife of his to work outside his home. After Mary’s birth, he insisted that Cleo give up teaching, though they were very poor and her salary would have helped. No more could she take pride in the independence and satisfactions of her profession. Cleo’s lot as a homemaker was settled.
In the fall of 1918, Ira began to fulfill his promise: he stood for a seat in the Arkansas House of Representatives, in the general election. He was a dark-horse Democrat, very young for the job at twenty-seven, and inexperienced in politics. He was hardly an imposing figure at five foot six and stocky. But with his ready grin and easy manner, he was the sort of man other men warmed to. Ira could tell a yarn or a joke, hunt and play cards with constituents while chewing over local issues. He had backers in Carroll County, some willing to buy paid endorsements in the Berryville paper, the North Arkansas Star: “Ira M. Gurley, Democratic nominee for the legislature, has made a clean, gentlemanly race of this office. He is a graduate of the law department of Cumberland University, one of the finest and most successful educational institutions in the south. He is worthy of support in every way and will make the county a credible representative.”
Not Pretty Enough Page 3