I was brought home to Clayton. Before we bought it, our Clayton house was chopped up into three apartments. We lived in the dining room, shared a bathroom with two other families, and had kitchen privileges.
My father might have kept living that way indefinitely, but my mother prevailed. We purchased the property and took over the whole space. The house was not as grand as some of Clayton’s older homes, but it had a wide front porch and high ceilings. The large trees in the oversized yard offered plenty of shade. Peeling paint, a leaking roof, and dark interiors begged for attention. Mama did most of the fixing up herself. Daddy had neither the time nor the interest. He swooped in and out, always on the move.
When Daddy was not at the courthouse, “adjudicating,” as he would say, he was mostly in Montgomery, hobnobbing with the “movers and shakers,” as he called them. These were men who hung out at the Exchange and Jefferson Davis hotels.
After Mama renovated the Clayton house, she became more confident in herself. She got a part-time job and began to spread her wings with friends. We joined the Methodist Church, although she had been raised Baptist. Daddy was a Methodist, and back then when you married you joined your husband’s church. She even persuaded Daddy to buy her a secondhand baby grand piano for the living room. On some summer days, passersby might have heard a halting version of “Carolina Moon” floating through the white organza curtains covering the open porch windows.
It was during these years that Mama became lifelong friends with some of the women who would follow her to Montgomery after Daddy was elected governor. Her best friend was Mary Jo Ventress, a home economics teacher whose husband was a banker and small-town entrepreneur. A narrow lane and a hedgerow separated our house from the high school where Mary Jo taught. During her planning periods at school, Mama would often join Miss Mary Jo in her classroom to share a cup of coffee and catch up on the news. Mary Jo would remain by Mama’s side up to the moment Mama died in the Governor’s Mansion in 1968.
My mother was relatively content during those years—she had a home, family, friends, and respect. But Daddy seethed with ambition. There was always a sense that it would be just a matter of time before we would pull up stakes and move on. To him, a house was not a home, just a place of convenience where you went to get ready to go somewhere else.
He was restless at home and unhappy in his job. The duties and community expectations of a circuit judge were not his style. He dreamed of real power, and the country courthouses of Barbour and Bullock counties became like prisons to him.
Yet by all accounts he fairly and responsibly discharged his duties as a judge. He was well liked by the African American community. He was known for ensuring that African American lawyers who appeared before him were treated with deference, were addressed as Mister. He often invited them to eat with him in his office rather than suffer the indignity of eating in the segregated restaurant on the courthouse square. African American attorneys reported that Judge Wallace, down in Barbour County, was one of the fairest judges in Alabama.
It may surprise some people to learn that after being elected to the Alabama House of Representatives at the age of twenty-seven, Daddy became known as a progressive—and some said a liberal—Alabama Democrat. In his first legislative session, Daddy introduced more than forty bills to fund programs for the poor, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy. In 1947, he introduced legislation that when passed became known as the Trade School Act. In 1949 and 1951, he and a fellow legislator co-authored the Wallace-Cater Act, allowing municipalities and counties to use their revenues to create industrial parks and attract industry. He regularly railed against large corporations and blocked legislation to raise the sales tax, which he referred to as “sock it to the poor” legislation. In 1951, Daddy asked Governor Jim Folsom to appoint him to the Board of Trustees of the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington and at the time one of the most prestigious African American colleges in the South. During his two-year tenure, he often proposed programs to elevate the college’s public profile and expand its curriculum. He never missed a Board of Trustees meeting during his term. His dedication to Tuskegee belied his coming to the politics of segregation in the decade to follow.
Daddy’s service as a trustee at Tuskegee Institute in the early 1950s, and his respectful and judicious interactions with African American attorneys and their clients, was an interesting footnote to the scholars and historians who grappled with the complexity of Daddy’s character. Yet this was who he was … and then was not. For Daddy was willing to bend his moral universe toward power. As I would learn again and again in sometimes painful ways, he was ready to compromise not only himself but his family for the dream he had since he was a child—to be the governor of Alabama.
During the stiflingly hot and humid summers of central Alabama there wasn’t much going on in the courthouses. Jury terms would not pick back up until after Labor Day. There were non-jury cases, a few divorces, and the weekly docket calls to make sure that anyone who was locked up the week before had a chance to apply for bail. It was mostly about county roustabouts getting out of control. Family members would appear on our front porch to ask Daddy for mercy and to set the miscreant free.
“It was just a big ol’ misunderstanding,” most would say. “Things got out of control, and that gun just fired and, you know, shit just happens.” After a tongue-lashing, Daddy would often release the offender to a “responsible party.” While he preferred that people think that he was hard on crime, he had a soft spot for people who were born with no chance. People never accused Daddy of being a softie; they just thought he was fair-minded.
Daddy’s workdays, which meant any time that he was not at home, were commonly twelve to thirteen hours long. When he wasn’t in the courtroom, he could most times be found sitting on the courthouse steps or leaned up against a corridor wall conversing with lawyers, townsfolk, and perfect strangers. Although it might have been years between a person’s first encounter with Daddy and the second, Daddy never forgot a face and a name. It was uncanny—a powerful tool in his political bag of tricks that he would become famous for.
The manacles of restraint, self-discipline, and dignity Daddy dragged around under his black robe ran counter to his nature. A passion for fighting and huckstering oozed from his pores. Circuit court judge was the only job Daddy would ever have that required him to face a crowd and let other people talk while he just listened. He also had to let a group of twelve people decide how things were going to turn out. Then, at the end of the day, his family expected him to come home and be happy to be there.
It was well known that my father had a wandering eye. Miss Mary Jo told me much later in life that Mama was not the only wife in Clayton whose husband “sought adventure elsewhere,” as Mary Jo would say. “But honey, when your mother caught on, there was going to be a big price to pay.”
Mary Jo was referring to one of my favorite stories about my mother: the Case of the White Cadillac.
Wednesday afternoon was deemed a half day of rest and repose for commercial establishments in small towns like Clayton, Alabama. It was as much a Southern tradition as refraining from going to the picture show or ironing clothes on Sundays. Windows were shuttered at noon on Main Street, and only a small workforce remained in the clerk’s office in the courthouse where Daddy’s office was. By early afternoon, the comings and goings around the courthouse square went pretty much unnoticed. That is, unless you were driving a white Cadillac with a red leather interior.
Miss Mary Jo told me the story in her thick Alabama drawl: “Back in those days, anything as unusual as a white Cadillac parked downtown on a Wednesday afternoon would certainly draw attention, which then always led to speculation. So the talk goes out that George was holding court by himself on Wednesday afternoons. That didn’t take long to get back to Lurleen. All she had to do was stand in the middle of the street in front of your house to have a bird’s-eye view of the courthouse. And sure enough, Wednesday afternoons, just like cl
ockwork, here came that white Cadillac.
“One Wednesday, she picked me up in that dark green worn-out Chevrolet Bel Air of hers and we went and parked on the other side of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse. Oh, honey, that Cadillac had trouble written all over it. Lurleen and I called it the something’s up car and we were right. After a while, there was so much smoke from Lurleen’s cigarettes in that car, I got out and walked over to Seale’s Café to get a glass of water. Just as I stepped back out on the sidewalk, I see a woman in a ‘too tight to wear to church’ blue dress with a clutch purse under an arm that had so many bracelets on it that it was a wonder the poor woman could even bend her elbow. Her hair was so teased up you could tell she was a regular at some high-class beauty parlor wherever she came from.
“Lurleen had the car running and was waving me to hurry up. We followed that Cadillac right through town, past the cemetery and the church. We fell back a bit once we hit the highway. Well, here comes a hill so we just flew on past her. Then Lurleen pulled into the middle of the road and starts pumping the brakes. I still get a neckache just thinking about it. It was going to be either pull over or get run over. The poor woman pulled over on the shoulder of the road and just sat there, ‘wide-eyed and terrified’ as we used to say.
“Lurleen got out and walked back to that poor woman’s car and invited her to step outside, but she wasn’t going to budge. That is until Lurleen went back and opened the trunk of our car and pulled out a tire iron. ‘Surely she is not going to bust out that woman’s windshield,’ I said to myself. And, for the most part, I was right. Soon the entire hood of that poor woman’s car looked like a crushed-up can of sardines. She finally opened the door and began babbling like a brook. On and on she went, just a poor damsel in distress and Judge Wallace was just trying to help a damsel in distress.
“Needless to say, Lurleen decided to follow in your daddy’s footsteps and help that woman, who, at that point, was indeed and entirely in distress. Lurleen’s assistance and advice was such that I assume she never came back to Clayton, or if she did, it was not in that white Cadillac.”
My father’s generation of politicians was not the last that felt the need to physically and mentally overpower women. That kind of behavior seems to be more often about power than pleasure, boosting the ego of insecure men who find themselves powerless in other ways.
Daddy was notorious for enjoying the company of women. He craved their attention and adoration. Throughout his life, it was more important to Daddy to be recognized than it was to be truly valued. Uncle Gerald used to explain it best when he talked about his and Daddy’s father: “When we were growing up, Daddy used to tell us, ‘Now you boys just remember, it’s more important that you got where you wanted to go, rather than what you had to do to get there along the way.’ It makes life a whole lot easier, thinking that way.”
Although much has been written about Daddy, my uncle Gerald Wallace has not been given his full due. He was the glue that held the Wallace clan together. Although there were times when Daddy disparaged him in public, Uncle Gerald was Daddy’s last resort. He was the family fixer, the go-between for making things right, Mama’s advocate when Daddy was on the warpath or flailing around when he was cornered. Uncle Gerald was Mozelle’s favorite son. He was a raconteur and rascal, a hard-drinking and conniving man you couldn’t help but love.
After Uncle Gerald and Daddy came home from the war, Gerald was down on his luck. He had contracted tuberculosis slogging through jungle trails and crawling through rice paddies in the Solomon Islands. He spent two years in military hospitals. By the time he was discharged in 1947, he had lost one lung and a wife. Over the course of the following seven or eight years, he was in and out of sanatoriums and veterans’ homes. When a second wife divorced him, Gerald headed to our house in Clayton. “You can come stay with us until you get on your feet, and that better be quick,” Daddy told his brother.
Uncle Gerald was a smallish man with skin that hung loosely from a bony frame. He had a shock of Wallace hair and dark piercing eyes always covered by black-framed sunglasses. He couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He drank beer and whiskey, smoked Lucky Strikes, and wore hand-me-down clothes. Most of the grownups in town called him Sag.
Uncle Gerald usually stayed in a worn-out plaid bathrobe, held together by one of Daddy’s frayed belts, until late morning. He dressed for lunch. In the afternoon he and Mama shared smokes on the backdoor steps and on some days enjoyed an occasional late afternoon cocktail, when whiskey was available.
Whiskey was a hard-to-find commodity in a dry county (a county where the preachers and the bootleggers round up people and haul them to the polls to vote no on a referendum on whether not liquor can legally be sold or consumed in that county). Not only was Barbour County dry—Daddy was a judge, and you can see how difficult it would have been for Mama and Uncle Gerald to enjoy cocktail hour at our house in Clayton. But then, nothing is impossible.
On many occasions Mama asked Daddy to buy a bottle of bourbon when he was in Montgomery and bring it back to Clayton. Sometimes he would but most times not. “You two are going to get me beat next time I run,” he’d warn his brother and wife before handing the liquor over.
My first-grade school picture.
Uncle Gerald left Clayton to go to law school at the University of Alabama in 1957. I was seven years old and my brother, George, was five. My mama was probably sorry to see him go. If there was ever a man that Mama counted on other than Daddy, it was Uncle Gerald. Perhaps, in some ways, he was more her type: slow to anger, always had time to talk. There never was a physical attraction between the two, but Gerald empathized with Mama, listened to her, and made her feel that she had value. He was the family peacemaker and, when required, most likely to succeed in getting Daddy off his “high horse.” On more than one occasion, I remember Mamaw saying to Mama, “If I were you, I’d pick up that phone right this minute and call Gerald.”
I’ve painted a picture of my father as a man with one foot out the door. That is not entirely true. He loved us and enjoyed being with us, and the times I spent with him when he was occasionally in the frame of mind to be a father were glorious. Daddy never slipped into a room quietly so as not to disturb. He flung doors open with a presence that was vibrant, crackling with energy, and impulsively affectionate, hugging me fiercely and tousling my hair. We watched the Saturday night boxing matches together when he was at home, with rowdy commentary from both of us. Daddy had been a two-time Alabama Golden Glove champion and captain of the boxing team at the University of Alabama.
There was never a time that I can remember that he did not have a small bag of M&M’s in his right-hand suit coat pocket for me—a consumable token of his love. But in return, there were certain conditions. I needed to behave in a certain way. “Honey, now you need to smile,” he would say. Our relationship was based on his needs, not mine. I never doubted his love for me, but I never experienced those moments between a father and daughter when just being together was enough. He was there and then he was gone, and even when he was present I rarely felt that he gave me his undivided attention.
After Mark and I were married, there were times when I would become unsettled listening to his family reminisce. They sometimes invited me to share memories. Mark asked me why the stories I told were usually about my parents with less or even nothing about me. I guess I assumed I just wasn’t very interesting. I didn’t express my thoughts and feelings and opinions—Daddy never asked for them. In fact, until I had children of my own, I didn’t realize that that kind of attention on his part should have been part of my life. I believed my mama when she said to me, “Peggy Sue, your daddy loves us, but this is just the way he is.”
In 1988, Mark ran a statewide race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court. The campaign was an uphill battle—there were thousands of hands to shake, money to raise, sixty-seven courthouse walk-throughs and rallies, long nights on the road. Our son Le
igh was nine years old, and I was pregnant with our second son, Burns.
One evening I found Leigh lying on the bed in his room. He was facing the wall. I could tell he was crying. I walked in and sat down beside him, putting my hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
He turned toward me. “I miss Daddy. I wish he would come home.”
I leaned in close. “I understand,” I said. “I know you do.”
Leigh looked at me in thought for a moment then raised up on his elbows in the bed. “You do know how it feels, don’t you, Mama?”
His words pierced my heart.
My mama would put her foot down, and we did occasionally have what today would be called some “quality” family time. In the summer of 1957, we vacationed in a small wooden bungalow several blocks back from the water’s edge in Panama City Beach, Florida. Mama loved to fish, swim in the Gulf, and beach-sit for hours. It was the perfect place for her, but not for Daddy. No phone and nowhere of particular interest to politick soon became a carbuncle on my father’s rear end. His misery was infectious, although he tried mightily to feign fun times for the sake of the rest of us. There were no walks on the beach or building sandcastles with Daddy. Even when he went to the beach he wore dress shoes and a short-sleeved white shirt and tie.
One night, as a token of goodwill, Daddy agreed to take us to a beachside carnival. I was excited. It would be the first time in my life that all of us had done something together.
It was a miraculous night. The fair was all whirling lights—a garden of delights for a seven-year-old. Upon seeing the Bullet Ride, I felt emboldened and insisted that Daddy and I throw caution to the wind and go on it. After some whining and begging, Daddy consented.
The Bullet consisted of two metal cage-like structures, both attached to the ends of a metal arm that could rotate 360 degrees. After we got buckled in with what appeared to be nothing more than a man’s broad leather work belt, a swinging motion commenced. Confident that this was as bad as it would get, Daddy encouraged me to wave to Mama. He patted my knee and smiled. “Here we go, Uudlum Scuudlum,” he chirped. When it became apparent we were about to go over and around, Daddy tensed and gripped the sides of the metal cage. By the time we had made one complete revolution, he was white as a sheet. “You are scaring my daughter,” he yelled to the carnival worker. “Stop this damn thing now!” The growl of the smoked-up diesel engine powering the ride drowned out his demands. My mama was standing nearby smoking a cigarette and laughing. She finally had him where she wanted him, caged up and panic-stricken.
The Broken Road Page 3