When Daddy and his brothers, Gerald and Jack, were young boys, my grandfather would push the living room furniture up against the walls, roll up the rugs, and force the three boys to fight. The Clio telephone company was on the second floor of the building across the street and the operator could see right into Daddy’s living room. On fight nights, the operator agreed to time the rounds and ring the Wallace phone when each was over. Sometimes she would ring the phone early when the fighting got out of hand. Most times that act of mercy didn’t matter—a round was over when my grandfather said it was and not a moment sooner. On many nights the fight ended with my grandfather passed out drunk on the floor. When that happened, his wife, Mozelle, covered him with a blanket while her sons went off to lick their wounds.
As I’ve grown older and raised two sons of my own, I have come to believe that the one person who had the greatest influence on what became the very complex and morose side of my father’s psyche was his mother, Mozelle. Amid the stories of the Wallace clan, I sometimes wondered why there was nothing about Mozelle’s family. It was as if she just appeared one day out of thin air. It was not until after her death that I found out the real story.
Mozelle was born in Ocala, Florida, in 1898. At the age of seven, she was living in Montgomery when her father suddenly died and the family fell into abject poverty. In 1906, when Mozelle was eight, her mother sent her to an Episcopal orphanage in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mozelle’s classmates at the school she attended were the Southern belles of Mobile. She was a gifted musician, and the Ladies’ Episcopal Association of Mobile gave her a music scholarship to attend Judson College.
Mozelle’s mother, Kate Leon Frink Smith, lived in Montgomery, then Birmingham until her death in 1968. She watched her grandson become governor and raised four of her great-grandchildren. But we never knew she existed. No one mentioned her name. One of my cousins found her on Ancestry.com long after Mozelle had died. Was Mozelle’s background kept secret from me or just deemed irrelevant? I don’t know.
Mozelle Smith Wallace and George Corley Wallace.
After less than a year, Mozelle decided to leave Judson College. She had met my grandfather at a train station when she was on her way to school. Mozelle somehow discovered that George Wallace had left college and returned to Clio, and she followed him there and settled into a boardinghouse and gave piano lessons to the few children whose parents could afford to pay. Moving to Clio with the thought of snaring my grandfather was a long shot—an audacious plan. Mozelle pulled it off. It showed the force of her will, the kind of drive that she passed on to Daddy.
My mother’s upbringing was very different from my father’s. Her household was warm and loving. She was born on September 19, 1926, and lived in Northport, Alabama, just across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa. The doctor who delivered her suggested the name Lurleen. Her father, Henry Burns, worked as a hand on coal barges. It took him away from home but provided more income than farming; for an uneducated man, it was about the best he could do. The Burns family often lived on the brink of poverty, but there was nothing to suggest that Lurleen and her older brother, Cecil, ever suffered the indignities of destitution.
My grandmother, Estelle Burns, whom I called Mamaw, ran the show. “Mr. Henry” was tenderhearted and gentle. My mother inherited my grandmother’s backbone. After Mama was elected governor, she hung a framed quotation on the family dining room wall:
A woman may be small of frame,
With tiny feet that patter,
But when she puts one small foot down,
Her shoe size does not matter.
Those words were tailor-made for Mamaw and, my husband says, ruefully, me. Although Mama was of average height, I’m only four feet eleven, and Mamaw was also small. But don’t let our size fool you.
Mr. Henry’s sentimentality often brought him to tears. His love for his children exuded from every pore and his devotion to his daughter, Lurleen, was palpable. He nicknamed Lurleen “Mutt” in recognition of her determination to follow his every footstep, and he wept for her on the night she died.
As I’ve already mentioned, my parents’ accounts of their childhoods were spotty at best. Perhaps if I had been told more, it could have made a difference in who I became. Perhaps it would have made me love more. I felt an isolation within the family. It would have been wonderful to have bonds of affection with aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews.
When our sons, Leigh and Burns, were young, Mark would drive them past the house he grew up in. There were no such places for me. The Clio house was destroyed by fire. Mr. Henry and Mamaw’s place was abandoned, consumed by neglect. The house in Clayton that I grew up in burned to the ground. Sometimes I wonder if history is warning me never to look back, to let it rest and leave it alone. There was too much to know and nothing to cheer me up. There were no swings on front porches, only dark days and darker nights. No places to take my sons to show them how it was. Only graveyards with headstones: names and dates. That’s all.
3
Romance in the Air
A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no; it’s curved like a road through the mountains.
—Tennessee Williams
But for the want of a bottle of hair tonic and a dare from a friend, my parents might never have met. There must have been something different about the young girl who sold Daddy a bottle of brilliantine at Kresge’s five-and-dime in downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Daddy asked his friend Glen Curlee if he knew the cashier’s name. “Nope, but she’s mighty cute,” he replied. “She seems to be mighty young for the two of us.”
“Well, I’m going to get a date with her,” Daddy said.
Glen laughed. “Wallace, you don’t even know her name.”
“Tell you what. I’ll bet you a quarter I can walk back inside right now and talk her into going out with me.”
With money on the line, Daddy reentered the store and returned to the street within minutes. He put out his hand. “Time to pay up. Taking her to lunch tomorrow.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lurleen Burns.”
It was the summer of 1942.
Daddy graduated from law school in the spring of 1942 and shortly thereafter was passing out cards to Tuscaloosa locals announcing that George C. Wallace, Esq., and Ralph Adams, Esq., had established a partnership for the purpose of practicing law in the City and County of Tuscaloosa. Freshly minted lawyers were abundant in Tuscaloosa, and when no clients came knocking, Daddy’s financial situation became bleaker by the day. He persuaded a highway superintendent that he had great proficiency in driving dump trucks, although he had never driven one in his life.
Mama when she was three years old.
The summer of 1942 must have seemed magical to my father as he rode a city bus almost daily from downtown Tuscaloosa across the Black Warrior River to Northport and on to Mama’s house. With little money, the young couple spent most days in the Burnses’ living room or on their front porch, always under the watchful eye of my grandparents. On occasion, my parents went to the movies in downtown Tuscaloosa or ate at one of the cheaper restaurants on the town’s side streets. On Saturday, September 19, 1942, Mama and Daddy rode the bus from Northport into downtown Tuscaloosa to celebrate my mama’s sixteenth birthday.
Mamaw was far from enthusiastic about Mama’s new beau. He talked too much about being a lawyer and claimed that one day he was going to be governor of Alabama. His “nonsense” was just pie in the sky as far as Mamaw was concerned. “He talks like he’s got a bucket of sugar in his mouth,” she would say. Her disdain for Daddy was obvious. It didn’t matter: Mama was smitten with the young swaggart, despite his gaudy taste in shirts, his threadbare pants, and his slicked-back hair.
In February 1943, Daddy received his induction notice and left Northport for basic training in South Florida. From there, he reported to the Air Force Cadet Training Program in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.
My mamaw used to say, “Well,
when George shipped out to Arkansas to learn how to fly a plane, I thought that was going to be that and Lurleen would get back on track. And then just my luck, the boy got spinal meningitis, almost died but didn’t, then here he comes, not to his mama, but back on our front porch.”
Mama never thought that story was funny, but I did. I loved to hear Mamaw tell it. Mama would chime in: “George only weighed a hundred and twenty-two pounds when he came back. Before he left Arkansas, he was in a coma for almost a week. When he finally got well enough to be put on leave, he had to ride a train all by himself to Tuscaloosa.” She would sometimes say to Mamaw, “Mama, you are making all of this up.”
Mamaw would usually reply, “Well, he talked you into marrying him, didn’t he?”
Mamaw’s somewhat comical disdain for Daddy was a great source of amusement to my family—she really had his number. My father’s fidgeting, his endless verbiage, and his born-for-politics personality chafed against her clear-eyed common sense and down-to-the-bones morality. “For sure, that boy can’t sit still,” was about all Mr. Henry would say.
On Saturday, May 22, 1943, less than a week after Daddy returned, he and Mama were wed. With Mamaw in tow, Mama and Daddy went to the office of a Jewish justice of the peace, but not before Mamaw signed a form giving her underage sixteen-year-old daughter consent to be married.
Following the ceremony, Mama, Daddy, Mamaw, and the justice of the peace enjoyed a meal of chicken salad sandwiches and Cokes at Ward’s. Mamaw gave Mama and Daddy a hug before they boarded a train to Montgomery so that Mama could meet her mother-in-law, Mozelle.
In 1937, when Daddy was a freshman at the University of Alabama, his father died. Daddy left college and returned to Clio to help Mozelle survive. She was selling the family farms to satisfy their outstanding mortgages. Not long after Daddy arrived, she told him to pack his things up and go back to Tuscaloosa and stay in school. She would manage. After Gerald and Jack graduated from high school, Mozelle sold the Clio house, and she and my aunt Marianne moved to Montgomery. She got a job with the State Health Department and settled into a two-bedroom apartment.
That was where my newlywed parents were going. It was after nightfall when the train pulled into Union Station in Montgomery. Daddy hailed a cab and gave the driver Mozelle’s address. Mozelle was not aware that Daddy was back in Alabama on medical leave, recovering from spinal meningitis. She was obviously surprised when she opened her front door to find Daddy, haggard and worn from his recent illness, holding hands with a teenage girl.
What happened that night never ceases to amaze me: it indicates just what kind of person my grandmother was. Daddy introduced Mama as his bride. After what seemed to be an eternity and without acknowledging Mama’s presence, Mozelle raised her head and looked up at Daddy, and said, in the same dispassionate voice that Daddy knew growing up, “I thought you would have done better than this.”
When I think about that story, I’m conflicted. As a mother of two sons myself, I wonder what my reaction would have been had I opened that door and found one of my sons, who I thought was in a military hospital in another state, standing at my door next to a teenage girl I had never seen, and then hearing that she was his wife. It was a lot to absorb. But as my mother’s daughter, I wonder why Daddy didn’t stand up for Mama.
Mozelle’s opinion of Mama never wavered from that point—even when my mother became governor. Her belief that Daddy could have done better never changed.
After a brief visit, Daddy took Mama to the boardinghouse in downtown Montgomery. The rooms were small and dingy with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, casting shadows on a cracked linoleum floor. One bathroom at the end of the hall on the second floor served all.
Maybe Mama didn’t even notice that the surroundings were shabby. After all, she was sixteen years old and in the arms of the man she loved.
Between 1943 and the spring of 1945, Mama shuttled back and forth between Daddy’s duty stations and Alabama. Their first daughter, Bobbie Jo, was born. During my father’s last stateside posting, Mama arrived at the train station in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Army air field where Daddy was stationed was approximately fifteen miles away.
When she got there, she realized that Daddy had not bothered finding them a place to live. They walked up and down streets, looking for somewhere to rent or at least bed down. Night fell and the temperature dropped. Daddy persuaded a stranger to allow them to sleep on his screened-in front porch. For three nights they lay on a bare wooden floor with their newborn daughter between them, then spent three more weeks in a small rented room until Daddy proudly announced to Mama that he had found the perfect place, a small two-room chicken coop that had been converted into a barely livable shanty with concrete floors, electricity, and a kerosene stove. With no insulation and holes in the lean-to roof, Mama constantly battled blowing sand and shivered at night in the high-altitude air that was constantly on the move.
After the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the world’s eye focused on the war with Japan. In preparation for delivering a death blow, thousands of Army Air Force personnel, pilots, and flight crews deployed to the Pacific. On July 19, 1945, Daddy, who had been trained as a flight engineer, flew on a mission to bomb the Japanese city of Fukui. His plane was caught in a thermal updraft caused by rising heat from the thousands of firebombs that had already been dropped. The plane shot up from 12,800 feet to 18,000 feet in a matter of seconds and stalled. The aircraft plummeted toward the water, but Daddy was able to restart one of the crippled engines. They regained altitude and turned home.
The exhausted crew fell asleep. By the time they awakened they had wandered one hundred and fifty miles off course. There was not enough fuel to make it back to their base, and the consensus was that they were going to have to land the aircraft in the sea. My father refused to consider that possibility, nursing the shrinking fuel reserve. When the plane landed at Tinian, the crew cheered. Daddy was a hero but terribly shaken.
Later in life, Daddy refused to talk about the incendiary bombs they dropped on Japan. Nor would he talk about August 5. In the late afternoon, his aircraft departed Tinian on its ninth and final mission. Just as the sun was rising on the east horizon, Daddy’s aircraft crossed the flight path of the Enola Gay as it flew toward Hiroshima.
In December 1945, Daddy was hired as an assistant attorney general in Montgomery, making $175 a month. A day job and a modest wage was a real first step to settling down, perhaps in a modest home, my mother thought. However, in March 1946, Daddy took a leave from the attorney general’s office to run for the Alabama legislature from Barbour County. My parents moved to Clayton. Upon his election at the age of twenty-seven, he became the youngest legislator in the history of Alabama. And Mama and Daddy’s finances once again fell into ruin.
The legislature was a part-time job, poorly paid, and they met only every other year for five months. When it was out of session, Daddy was home and unemployed. Perhaps he tried to practice law. More likely, he spent his time going here and there, politicking and ingratiating himself. Mama was once again forced to be the breadwinner and parent. She did secretarial work and had no choice but to move back to the run-down boardinghouse where she spent the first night of her marriage. When the legislature recessed, she returned to Clayton, living in the attic of an elderly woman’s house.
Mama lived in poverty for almost a decade. She would die when I was eighteen, and I never really got to ask her about this period. I don’t think my mother could have been amused by my father’s total disregard for their comfort. Daddy would sometimes reminisce about the days when he and Mama were young and carefree. “We had the world on a string,” he said. “Those were good times.” Daddy could justify anything. He was always blameless should things go wrong. He led a don’t-blame-me kind of life.
4
Coming Home
It’s like building a nest. First, she thinks about it, then she begins to gather the materials, then she begins to put it together.
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br /> —Flannery O’Connor
I was born on January 24, 1950, in Eufaula, Alabama—twenty miles or so from Clayton. Daddy had left the legislature and become a circuit court judge.
My aunt Betty Jean Wallace, a Southern belle from Baker Hill, Alabama, who married Daddy’s youngest brother, Jack, was in Mama’s hospital room when Mamaw and Mr. Henry arrived. Aunt Betty Jean loved to tell the story of that day: “Honey, I was standing by the door when Estelle and Mr. Henry busted in the door. Almost knocked me down. The first thing Estelle spied was your daddy. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘look who showed up. Did you get here in time to see the baby get born? That would be a no, I bet.’
“Your daddy took that cigar out of his mouth, kissed you on the top of your head, gave your mother a peck on the cheek, and out the door he went. Then here he comes again. ‘Sugah, you call me if you need anything,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you just as fast as I can.’
“ ‘I wouldn’t hold my breath!’ Estelle said. She just couldn’t stand it. But we all just laughed and laughed.”
That was my father, perpetually in motion. Focused on one thing: politics, politics, politics. That was just the way he was—always on the move. He talked fast, ate fast, and was the first out the door, calling to the rest of us: “Y’all come on, it’s time to go.” As long as Daddy had enough food to keep him going, a shirt pocket full of cigars, and an occasional manicure, he was set. He didn’t care about where he lived, or what he ate (as long as it had ketchup on it), or where he slept—he was oblivious to creature comforts.
The Broken Road Page 2