by Helen Doss
I agreed. “We’d have to be honest about it. After all, this little Gretchen owes just as much of her beauty, as much of her bright mind and budding talent, to her Negro father as to her white mother.”
“It’s difficult, in our society, to be half white and half Negro,” Carl said. “Someday, if our democracy is to be strong, Negro ancestry will be just as acceptable to the majority as any other. In the meantime, as she grows up, we’ll just have to help Gretchen understand the reasons why people nurse their prejudices, the same way we’ll try to help all our children understand.”
We never had the chance to help Gretchen understand, because we didn’t get to adopt her.
Months passed and months passed. The red tape sprouted two new dragon heads for every one we slashed off.
“If we had the money to fly over there and pick her up directly,” Carl said, “I’ll bet we’d have her here in no time. Nobody explains the delay, but I suspect that much of this red tape is a cover-up. Some of the intermediaries probably object to placing a Negro child in a so-called ‘white’ home, and just haven’t the courage to come out and say so.”
The doctor began to worry about Gretchen’s chances of coming to the United States. She wrote, “If to America she is going, as soon as possible it should be, so she can learn the language before the time of starting to school.”
Through mutual friends we learned of a warm-hearted young Negro couple who had a boy in second grade at school; this couple had talked of wanting to adopt a younger girl.
“Let’s turn our information over to them, and see what they can do for Gretchen,” Carl suggested. “You and I might never get her here to America. If it’s really the racial angle that’s holding things up, they might have better luck.”
The Negro couple found red tape, too, but it gradually and miraculously unwound. After a short time they wrote, in a letter shining with quiet joy, that Gretchen had received her quota number; she would be on her way to America on the next plane which carried an extra stewardess.
Gretchen’s stocking wasn’t hanging beside our tree that Christmas, as we once hoped it would be. Still, we knew that she was hanging her stocking under another American Christmas tree, and that she wouldn’t have to ask Santa Claus for white stockings any more. Now she had a father and a mother and a brother, all the same warm toast shade that she was, and she would know that her own color was just right for her.
CHAPTER 14
So This Is Life!
LIFE magazine heard about our family through someone on the staff of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the newspaper for which I was Boonville correspondent. For the “Redwood Empire” section, I covered such Boonville happenings as auto accidents, school-board meetings, lodge initiations, and the annual Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show.
When Dick Pollard came up from the San Francisco office of Life, asking permission to do a picture story for his magazine, Carl and I said, “No.”
The article I had written for Reader’s Digest, back in 1949, had not affected the six children we had then; a picture story in Life, we both felt, would be different. The attention of a writer and a photographer focused upon the children would be sure to make them self-conscious. It was enough of a goldfish bowl that they would have to grow up in a parsonage, under the critical eyes of the community.
While Mr. Pollard agreed that our motives were right in wanting to protect our family, he showed the instinctive psychology of a top newsman. He appealed to our sense of social responsibility.
“You believe in what you are doing,” he argued, “and so do I. The idea of the brotherhood of man needs to be preached to the widest possible audience, and as often as possible. Here is your chance to bring the philosophy behind your kind of life to the millions of Life’s readers.”
His enthusiasm was not faked. Recently he had finished some articles in which he had tried to explain the Orient to Americans, and vice versa.
“I wish you could realize how a general knowledge of your ‘United Nations’ family could help our country! Anti-American propaganda abroad emphasizes our intolerant side. If people in other countries could open a copy of Life and learn about your interracial family, they would see our better side, a glimpse of democracy in action.”
Carl said, “But a Life article would reveal where we lived, wouldn’t it? Helen was able to avoid that, in her article for the Digest.”
Dick Pollard nodded. “We’d have to say that you lived in Boonville. We can’t take pictures, and then be vague as to where we took them. Believe me, we have no desire to exploit your family. There would be no sensationalism, just a warm and sympathetic story that would take your ideas to the millions your pulpit can’t reach.”
Although we finally consented to the story, we still dreaded the ordeal of having our pictures taken. We expected the photographer to be a pompous, high-powered dynamo who would line us up brusquely for pose after pose, while the pot roast burned on the stove and Alex wailed from want of a nap. We thought he would thoroughly disrupt our household and depart in a flurry, leaving behind a litter of flash bulbs and bewildered children.
This didn’t happen. On an appointed evening the next week, Dick Pollard again appeared at our front door; he introduced Wayne Miller, his photographer, a young father with several small children of his own. Our children piled into the living room to welcome our company. In five minutes Dick and Wayne were accepted as old friends, and the children were swarming over them like aphids on a rosebush. They were full of questions.
“Where’s your mama?” Timmy asked.
This query comes early in any interview with a man, and refers to his wife, not mother. Both men explained that their wives were at home.
“My daddy preaches in a church,” Teddy told Dick, “and calls on sick ladies. What do you do?”
“I write stories in an office, and I call on people, too.”
“What you got in that bag?” Rita asked Wayne.
“Show us,” Diane begged.
Wayne took out a Rolleiflex and two Contax miniatures for inspection all around.
“Cameras,” Teddy said. “Why so many?”
“I like to take pictures.”
“Take some of us!” they all shouted, as they do when I have our camera out.
“Tomorrow, maybe.” Wayne showed them how he loaded his Rolleiflex with film, then said, “Tonight, how would you like to take pictures of each other?”
Everyone shouted, “Me first!”
“Calm down,” Wayne said. “You’ll each get a turn. We’ll do it according to age. Alex first, then Timmy. Who’s after that—Rita?”
“No, me,” Diane said. “I’m bigger but I’m really littler.”
“Younger,” I said. “By four months, only.”
“You all watch, now, how I do it.” Wayne held the camera down so Alex could squint into the ground-glass view-finder. “When you get the picture you want in here, Alex, then push here. The flash bulb will make a big bright light, and then you’ll have a picture.”
Alex, just beginning to talk and usually shy as a woods creature around strangers, held the camera with a grin across his round, flat Oriental face, his black eyes happy and crinkled to slits. Wayne wasn’t like most strangers who, with their patronizing attention, usually sent Alex scooting bashfully behind my skirts. Neither did he stoop to such meaningless questions as, “My, aren’t you a nice little boy?” or try the third-degree with, “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” When the visitor’s attention was focused upon an activity, the shy one could join the group with all his natural eagerness.
All had several turns with the camera. Everyone jumped about so much, I was sure the pictures would look like blurred snaps of whirling dervishes.
When the children finally were tucked into bed, I said to Wayne, with regret born of years of penny-pinching, “I’m afraid the children wasted a lot of film and flash bulbs.”
“No waste,” Wayne explained. “I did it on purpose. This should sat
isfy their curiosity about my cameras. Now I can be around them for several days, snapping candid pictures, without their being particularly aware of me.”
The next morning, Saturday, was a warm slice out of Indian summer. It was the kind of day when you want to pack up a lunch and go on an outing, so we did. The children voted to invite their new friends, Wayne and Dick, who were staying at the local motel.
The valley narrowed as we headed west in our station wagon. We wound between towering redwood groves, and the children shouted in delight when they saw a deer standing shadowy and indistinct between the muted shafts of sunlight. The Navarro River was on our left, a quiet remnant of its roaring winter self.
“Let’s go fishing, catch a fish,” Timmy cried, pointing to the river.
“Can’t you read?” Donny asked. “Those signs say NO FISHING.”
“How can I read?” Timmy said. “My teeth aren’t falling out yet. You can’t go to school until you’re big enough to have your teeth falling out, your teeth.”
“We can fish when we get to the ocean,” Diane said. “Maybe we can catch a whale.”
“Simple Simon caught a whale in a bucket,” Susie said. “Our teacher said so.”
“There’s no whales in the ocean, are there, Donny?” Elaine asked.
“Sure there are,” Donny said. “But you might have to swim out a ways, to get one.”
After we left the forests behind, the road climbed toward barren, brown hills. Seeing the scattered sheep grazing there, the children all began singing, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” We reached the top of the cliff, and the blue Pacific spread like infinity before us.
“The ocean, the ocean!” the children cried, springing from their seats in delight.
There was no place for a picnic here; the river’s alluvial fan was muddy, and breakers crashed against high, rocky cliffs on either side. We turned north along the cliff-top road. Here the only live things were wheeling gulls, lonely sheep, and cypress trees which stretched wind-blown arms away from the sea. At Van Damme State Park, where the road dipped down to a sizable beach, we pulled in and parked.
The children spilled out like marbles from a bag. Fall comes early to the wild, rockbound coast of northern California, so our youngsters had the beach to themselves. They raced up and down the sand, shouted into the sea spray, dug for treasures, collected shells, waded in the chilly surf, and played jump rope with a long, rubbery, tubelike seaweed.
“Wonder what kind of seaweek that is?” Timmy murmured, squatting down on his chubby legs as he tried to peer inside a ten-foot length. “This seaweek looks like our gar-den hose.”
Donny said pompously, trying to look very learned, “No wonder. I expect this is where garden hoses come from.”
Soon ravenous, the children gathered in a circle and cleaned up the sandwiches in their individual paper-sack lunches, then polished off the assortment of fruit and boxes of animal crackers which Dick and Wayne brought.
By midafternoon, Alex’s eyes had grown so heavy without his usual nap, he dropped peacefully in his tracks. I covered him with my sweater, shooed the older children farther down the beach, and let him sleep until he awoke, refreshed. The rest kept going with unabated energy, and only the lure of a hot supper at home could induce them to leave at dusk. That night, all were tucked to bed with sand and seaweed still in their hair, and smiles on their faces.
Sunday morning we were up early. Carl carried in wood and lighted the fires at the church, dusted the pulpit and the pews. After changing into his dark Sunday suit, he retreated to his study with his sermon notes. The children, too sleepy the night before for a thorough clean-up, were run through my assembly line in our one bathtub, each scrubbing topped by a vigorous shampoo.
Wayne Miller stopped by the house to ask if he might go early to both churches and replace the regular lights with photoflood bulbs. “The lighting would appear more natural,” he explained, “and my picture-taking can be inconspicuous, so it won’t interfere with the worship.”
When the congregation filed in for Sunday school, and, an hour later, for church, people blinked and commented that the lights seemed somewhat brighter than usual, then forgot them. Wayne used his small cameras unobtrusively. The only reason he was noticed at all was because Boonville is a small town, and in a small town a stranger is as conspicuous as dirt on a small boy’s face.
That night Wayne drove with us to Carl’s second church at Philo, five miles up the valley. He snapped pictures of Carl’s face, earnest and sometimes lighted with humor in the sermon, serene and compassionate in prayer; of the children, singing when they knew the hymns, wiggling when they didn’t. Irrepressible Alex, who kept eluding my grasp, toddled full speed up and down the aisles during most of the service.
The next morning Wayne was at our house early enough to catch the children swinging their lunch boxes and sacks as they waited in front of the church. When the school bus came, he hopped aboard with the school children, visiting Don’s fourth-grade class, then the first grade where Elaine, Laura, Susan, and “Teddy Bear” were working on their primers and word charts.
The following morning, Carl and I headed a ludicrous procession as we hiked downtown to do some local shopping. Alex bounced along between us, hanging to our hands; Rita, Diane, and Timmy danced around us and behind us; our two cockers trailed behind them, snuffling the ground ahead, occasionally looking back over their shoulders; next Wayne sauntered along, discreetly using his cameras; last came a newsman from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, dodging about in the rear as he sought good camera angles to illustrate a story about Life magazine doing a story.
The formal, posed shot of the whole family was the only headache. Wayne decided to arrange us on the wide ship’s ladder hanging from the shady madroña in our back yard. Carl and I sat with Timmy and Alex on the huge beam that anchored it across the bottom, while the rest of the family stood beside us or perched above, on the crisscrossed horizontal ropes. Carl had picked up the ship’s ladder for three dollars in an Army-Navy surplus store, and our youngsters were always swarming over it; they used it for a jungle gym, a ladder to the tree-house, and a giant swing.
“This is just the thing,” Wayne said happily, as he composed his picture. “An unusual background.”
Much later, perspiring in a sudden burst of October sunshine, he wasn’t so happy. When everyone was in place, Alex would have to scoot off to the bathroom; by the time he came back, someone else would beg to be excused. Some of the restless ones on the higher ropes moved around, and others below them were weeping huge tears and wailing, “She stepped on my fingers,” or “Make him get off my hair!”
Donny, hanging upside down, finally rebelled. “I’m not staying up here any longer,” he shouted.
Wayne wiped his forehead and ran fingers through his hair. He was beginning to look as if he had been up all night. “Just once more, Donny,” he pleaded. “Everyone else is ready.” But the rest were wiggling and fussing, too. “Look, if everybody would just give Wayne one nice smile, it would be all over.”
“I’m tired,” Laura said.
“I can’t snap it now, you’re all pouting,” Wayne pointed out. “If everybody would just say ‘peaches’ all at once—”
In the middle of everyone else saying “peaches,” Laura jumped down from the swing.
“I don’t want my picture taken,” she said with finality.
Wayne clapped his head. “Laura, honey, you can’t do this to me!”
Laura turned her back and sat on the ground. Carl started to exert his parental authority, but Wayne shook his head.
“That’s perfectly all right, Laura,” he told her with dignity. “Only please move out of the way, so I can snap the picture without you.”
Laura, who hates to be outsmarted, hopped back to her place and the camera clicked on a chorus of “peaches.” When that picture was chosen to be blown up as the full-page lead picture in the article, Wayne’s patience was rewarded. Ours
, too, because at last we had a complete family portrait for our album.
It wasn’t the only picture we added to our album, as a result of Life’s visit to our house. After the article appeared in the November 12th issue for 1951, the editors sent us a folio of nearly eight hundred delightful candid snapshots of our family doings, along with numerous enlargements of the best shots.
We nursed a frail hope, when the magazine hit the stands, that if we didn’t tell the children their pictures were in Life magazine, they would never know it. This bubble was pricked when Donny and I visited my sister Jane. No sooner had we come in the door, than Don’s cousins pulled him across their living room.
“Look, Donny!” they both shouted. “We’ll show you your picture in a magazine.”
Don sighed. “Everywhere I go, people drag that out and show me those pictures. I’m getting tired of seeing those same old pictures. Can’t we go out and play ball?”
Later, at home, I cautiously showed the younger children their photographs in Life. They weren’t particularly impressed.
“These are just like pitchers in our album,” Rita said.
Teddy cocked his head, studying them critically. “Yeah, but these aren’t so good. They’re littler, and they’re more blacker and sort of fuzzy. The big ones Wayne gave us are lots better.”
“Here’s me crying,” Timmy chuckled. “That was when me and Diane was fighting, and we had to sit on the step together till we loved.”
“There’s us playing ring-around-the-rosie on the beach with Daddy,” Elaine said. “Let’s go out behind the church and play ring-around-the-rosie.”
So they ran outside to play ring-around-the-rosie, and I decided I wouldn’t be disturbed any more about the effect the magazine article might have upon the children.
There was something about Life’s article that disturbed Carl, though.