“That’s probably not going to happen,” she said. “But if it does, you’ll make it with somebody. Cleveland’s not the only football team. The Jets offered you a contract, too. If you get cut at Cleveland, give the Jets a call. You’ll be all right.”
For the first time since she had known him, Pernell seemed to be a frightened little boy filled with uncertainty.
“I’m coming home,” he told her.
“No, you’re not, Pernell. You can do this.” Susan tried to sound strong, insistent, almost parental.
“I’ll try,” he said without enthusiasm. That night, Pernell tossed sleeplessly in bed, wondering how he would react when the knock came at his door and the runner said, “Coach wants to see you, and bring your playbook,” the cursed words of certain failure in NFL training camps.
Well before dawn, he decided that he would not allow that to happen to him. He climbed from bed, pushed his belongings into a bag and walked out of the dormitory without awakening any of the other players. In the dead of night, Pernell drove away from his dream.
“I had to cut myself before some coach cut me,” he said years later. “I’m not sure I could have taken it if somebody had told me I wasn’t good enough to make the team.”
Years later, Willie Jefferson reflected about his brother’s decision that night.
“Pernell carried not only his hopes, but the hopes of all of us when he went to training camp,” Willie said. “The deal was that he got some money to sign—not a lot like a draft choice gets, but a little money. And if he made the team, he’d get $55,000 his rookie season.
“In Benson, $55,000’s a lot of money. I’d hate to think how many years Mama would have had to work to earn $55,000. But that’s what Pernell walked away from.”
For a moment, Willie fell silent.
“He needed his daddy,” Willie said softly. “He needed a male figure in his life right then more than he ever needed it before, and I was too young to fulfill that role. He needed a man to talk sense to him, somebody to say to him, ‘Pernell, you can’t quit now because this is what your mother walked through rain and sleet and snow to run two jobs for, just so you could go to school and play sports and get a chance at something a lot better.’ But there was no one to say that.”
It would be years before Pernell learned that the Browns were close to a decision to keep him. Indeed, hoping that he might change his mind, the team had carried him on its protected list through the 1986 season so that no other team could sign him.
But by the time the coaches realized he was gone, he was well on his way to Greensboro, where later that day, he pulled into a parking space in front of a familiar fitness center where he used to train and where he had been a part-time instructor. Through the plate glass windows he could see perhaps a dozen people straining against weight machines, the very machines upon which he had grown strong.
Thirty minutes later, he emerged from the building carrying a small box containing a fresh supply of anabolic steroids.
Then he drove to Chapel Hill, waited for Susan’s work day to end and knocked on the door. In spite of their intense telephone conversations of recent days, she had not expected to find him there, and in anger and disappointment, she slammed the door in Pernell’s face.
12.
“Daddy, Don’t Hurt Susan”
SOON AFTER PERNELL RETURNED to North Carolina, his agent, Tom Martinelli, tracked him down by phone in Greensboro.
“Pernell, what happened?” Martinelli asked.
“I just walked, man.”
“Well, it’s not too late. I’ve been talking to the Browns and they want you back. You’ve got twenty-four hours to get back to camp.”
“I just don’t have it, man,” Pernell said. “Whatta they want to do, get me back into camp just so they can cut me?”
“I think you’re wrong, Pernell,” Martinelli said. “The Browns said I should remind you that they have the rights to your contract this year and next.”
Although he had already started a new steroid cycle, Pernell still felt slow and weak.
“Tell them that I won’t be coming back,” he said.
As the Browns were finishing their camp, Pernell had gotten work in Greensboro with a business card company. He also took a part-time job at a trucking company. For the first time since P.J. had been born, Pernell now had time to get to know his son better.
Despite Susan’s reaction to his quitting camp, she had taken Pernell back, as she always did, and one weekend, he took her to Benson to visit his family. Pernell’s mother insisted that Susan sleep in her bed. Pernell slept in the bedroom in which he and Willie had grown up.
While they were there, Joann reminded her son of the incident in high school when Sarah’s father had come looking for him for hitting his daughter.
“Now, Pernell, I don’t ever want to hear that you laid a hand on Susan,” she said. “You understand?”
If only she knew, Susan thought, but she wasn’t about to tell her the truth about Pernell, who made light of the admonition.
“See,” he told Susan with a laugh, “She likes you better than she likes me.”
But he didn’t make any promises.
In mid-August, less than two weeks before Susan was to leave for Miami, Pernell took P.J. to Chapel Hill for an evening with Susan, and, as usual, an argument soon erupted.
“I could feel the tension building,” Susan remembered. “Then he started criticizing anything about me he could find to criticize. Then he became extremely polite. It was like he was just waiting, just looking for a reason, because in his eyes whatever we argued about had to be my fault.”
The pain came in a flash. Pernell’s right hand landed squarely against the left side of her face, staggering her. As she began to sob, P.J., frightened, also broke into tears.
Suddenly, Pernell was aware that his young son had witnessed the scene and his mood changed.
“P.J., come to Daddy,” he said softly.
P.J. didn’t move.
“P.J., come to Daddy.”
Only reluctantly did the child move into the open arms of his father. Pernell held him close, saying nothing, until in a whimper, P.J. asked, “Daddy, do you love Susan?”
“Yes, P.J., Daddy loves Susan.”
P.J. turned to Susan.
“Are you mad at Daddy?”
Still crying, Susan did not answer.
“Daddy,” P.J. finally said.
“What is it, P.J.?”
“Don’t hurt Susan anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But the apology failed to stop his abuse. The threats and violence began to come with even more frequency, and with each new episode her will to resist grew weaker. She no longer felt that she would ever be free of Pernell, not even more than 800 miles away in Miami, and she screamed, “Either kill me or let me go.”
“At that point,” she recalled years later, “I would have gladly accepted either alternative.”
Strangely, on that occasion, Pernell seemed to take the ultimatum with the seriousness with which it was intended. He drove her back to her apartment.
Still, Susan felt trapped by her fear of Pernell.
“He told me, ‘If you leave, I’ll kill you and everyone you know. If you do anything, I’ve got a gun.”
Susan never knew when Pernell might show up in one of his violent moods.
She had the memory of an incident earlier that summer as confirmation. It began to develop when her company dispatched her unexpectedly to Elizabeth City, more than 150 miles from Chapel Hill on the North Carolina coast, for an emergency meeting with a group of grocery retailers.
It had been an important, spur-of-the-moment trip and Susan had not had time to let anyone know she would be away for the day. She arrived in Elizabeth City just in time to hurry into a meeting room where the grocers already had gathered. An hour into the session, the door burst open and Pernell barged into the room, his eyes darting about for Susan. In front of more than a d
ozen startled businessmen, he began angrily accusing her of disloyalty, chastising her for leaving Chapel Hill without telling him.
Then, as suddenly as he had come, he was gone. After a brief adjournment called to permit Susan time to gather her emotions, the meeting continued, though awkwardly.
On the long drive back to Chapel Hill, Susan kept a wary eye on her rearview mirror, expecting to see Pernell’s gold Fiero appear in the darkness, but it never did.
Her despair over the hopelessness of her situation caused her to think about taking her own life. Indeed, she made what she later called “minor” attempts at it, first by cutting her wrists and later by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Just before taking the overdose, Susan told Pernell that she was considering ending her life. “Sure,” he responded without emotion. “Go ahead. That would end my misery, too.”
That was not what Susan wanted to hear. More than once in recent months, Pernell had told her he, too, was thinking of suicide. Each time, she had pleaded with him not to talk foolishly. Despite the abuse, she felt that she could not live without Pernell. And now she remembered those phone calls from Ohio when Pernell thought about leaving camp and her attempts to talk him through his crisis.
As if things weren’t bad enough, Susan began to suspect that she was pregnant, and an obstetrician confirmed her fear. Fearing reprisal from Pernell, she kept the news to herself. Pernell would not know for months.
Pernell had worries of his own now.
Word came that summer that Willie Thomas Jefferson, Pernell’s and Willie’s father, had been admitted to the University of North Carolina Hospital at Chapel Hill suffering from an incurable cancer.
For the only time in their adult lives, both Pernell and Willie visited their father together. Susan accompanied Pernell and Willie’s girlfriend, Michelle, the woman he would later marry, made the trip from Benson with him.
For a time, the four maintained an uneasy vigil in the room with the dying man. Then Pernell and Willie were alone with their father.
“I want to say something to the two of you,” the father said. “I want to apologize for not being around for you when you were growing up. Your mother did a good job with you, your mother and Aunt Katie.
“I sent money when I could, but I should have been there for you. I hope you will forgive me and I hope you will do good. Just don’t smoke and don’t drink wine.”
Though Willie would speak with his father briefly on the phone before he died in November 1986, this would be Pernell’s last conversation with him.
After the visit, Pernell and Susan spoke briefly with Willie and Michelle, then walked toward their car.
“Didn’t you think my dad’s a handsome man?” Pernell asked Susan.
It had been a comment Susan had not expected. Pernell, that’s the man who abandoned you and Willie and your mother a long time ago,” she said. “How can you say nice things about him?”
“I know, but didn’t you think he was handsome?” Pernell pressed.
“I thought he was handsome,” Susan answered.
Within the month, Susan checked into a clinic and underwent an abortion. It became an important turning point in her relationship with Pernell.
“Pernell always thought that I couldn’t leave him if I was pregnant,” she recalled. “I’d be stuck forever.”
Now, in late summer with her classes at St. Thomas drawing ever closer, she thought about the abortion from which she had quickly recovered and about what she saw as its implications for her relationship with Pernell. Severing herself from Pernell’s child, she felt, perhaps meant that she could eventually end her relationship with Pernell as well. The thought gave her new hope.
Early in the third week of August, Susan backed her loaded car from its parking place in front of her Chapel Hill apartment for the last time. This time Pernell was saying good-bye to her, and as he stood watching her go, a feeling of release rushed through her.
Later, as she drove southward on 1-95, she began to feel that at long last, she was leaving her tormented life behind one wonderful mile at a time. She knew now that she never wanted to see Pernell again, and the thought of leaving him forever in her past filled her with hope.
Although graduate students at St. Thomas normally lived off-campus, a room had become available in a dorm, Sullivan Hall, and Susan took it. She shared the room—109—with a member of the St. Thomas women’s softball team, Ellen Barber.*
The change in scenery was all that Susan had hoped it would be. She felt alive again, no longer the self-imposed social outcast she had been at Guilford College. She was quickly gathering a new set of friends, something that had not happened since Pernell had come into her life. Among her new friends, in addition to Ellen, were Terri Gilmore,* Erin Collins* and Barbara Pegues,* who shared the room across the hall, Traci Vandermire,* from room 103, and Andrea Hastings* from room 105.
She learned the neighborhood surrounding the campus, the nearby shopping centers, the best Chinese restaurants. And because of her old fears, she got to know one of the St. Thomas security guards, although she thought she was being overly cautious in that Pernell called occasionally, but there was comfort in the realization that he was far away in North Carolina. For the first time in years, days passed when she didn’t think about Pernell at all, and as the months went on, she began to believe that Pernell was out of her life for good. Then on a spring day in 1986, she returned from a brief shopping trip to find a note taped to her door.
Just stopped by to see how you’re doing. P.J
Her heart dropped. “It was as though he was just in the neighborhood and thought he’d drop in,” she said years later. “You know, the old neighborhood, eight-hundred miles from the neighborhood.”
A day later, Pernell called to say that he was coming to see her. It wasn’t a good time, she told him, trying to discourage him, fighting the feelings of dread she had not felt in months. Exams were coming up, she said, and she needed to study. Another time, maybe.
But Pernell would not be dissuaded, and she tried to make the best of it when he arrived on campus. None of her new friends, she reminded herself, knew anything about the years of terror and degradation she had known at his hands. Susan pretended that she was happy to see him, and Pernell was on his best behavior, as friendly and charismatic as he had been when she first met him. It annoyed her that her new friends liked him immediately. “They thought he was wonderful,” she recalled. “I didn’t tell them any different because this was my new life.”
She reasoned that Pernell was only visiting and would soon be returning to North Carolina. But when she learned that he had come to Florida in hopes of finding a job, the old panic hit her. She knew that in a sense she had only herself to blame. Months earlier, during those summer days after Pernell had dropped out at the Browns camp, she had helped him blanket the southeast with resumes in a search for a high school or small college coaching job. So it should have been no surprise that he had come to Florida to follow up. After all, he had been born in Stuart and still had relatives in the state. And with Susan now in Miami, he thought that this just might be the perfect place for him.
He had several leads for high school coaching jobs, he said, and he would he around for a while. Lamar had come with him, taking a vacation, and the day before they had called at the offices of the Miami Dolphins. Pernell had introduced himself as a former player for the Browns, and said that he was looking for a tryout. The Dolphins’ personnel director had thumbed through a loose-leaf binder and found Pernell’s name.
“You’re still under contract to the Browns,” he had told him. “You’re not supposed to be here, and I’m not supposed to even be talking to you. We have nothing to discuss. I suggest that if you want to try again, report to the Browns.”
Susan didn’t know what to do about Pernell’s renewed presence, and her worry turned to desperation when he called a few days after his visit to say that he was returning for a two-day stay on Thursday, April 10, and expected to
sleep in her dorm room.
“Not Thursday,” she said. “Pernell, it’s really not a good time.”
But once again Pernell would not be put off. He would arrive sometime Thursday afternoon, he said firmly.
Suddenly, Susan had no choice but to reveal her past to two people who had become important to her. First, she called Ian James,* a fellow student and a pitcher on the university’s baseball team. They had become friends and recently had begun dating. Now she told him that she would have to cancel their Thursday night date, telling him why and offering a brief description of her long and turbulent relationship with Pernell.
“I’m coming anyway,” Ian said.
“Ian, please don’t,” she pleaded. “He’s crazy. He’s not normal. He’ll create a scene here in the dorm if you do.”
Reluctantly, Ian promised to stay away.
Now Susan closed the door to her dorm room had a long conversation with Ellen, her roommate.
“You’ve got to do something for me,” Susan said. “Something really important. You’ve got to stay right here in this room with me all the time he’s here. You can’t leave me. Pernell’s crazy. You’ve got to be my rock. He won’t do anything if both of us are here together.”
The request presented a problem to Ellen, a member of the school’s softball team. The team was in the heart of its season and was scheduled to leave Saturday morning on a two-day trip for games at other schools in South Florida.
Ellen would stay as close as she could, she promised, but had no choice but to travel with the softball team.
A day earlier, Susan had started a letter to her mother back in Winston-Salem, but interrupted by Pernell’s call, she had slipped it unfinished into the top drawer of a chest in her room. That was where Pernell found it late Friday afternoon when he was alone in the room. In the letter, Susan had mentioned that a new man had come into her life.
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