The Broken Road

by Peggy Wallace Kennedy

  I felt glamorous, although unsteady on my feet, as Aunt Bill and I walked along the downtown sidewalk. Aunt Bill pointed to one of the stores. “This is where your mama will take you shopping when your daddy wins.”

  We returned to the hotel and were waiting in a crowded suite when the first hint bloomed that Daddy could lose the election. As evening turned to night there was still hope that voting boxes in north Alabama would heavily favor Daddy and offset the lopsided numbers for Patterson coming from the state’s southern counties. But as the night wore on, it became apparent that John Patterson would become the next governor. His hard-line racism had given him the edge. My father had lost.

  Daddy gathered us up and took us to a waiting car to drive to a local television station on the outskirts of Montgomery. He was going to concede. I sat in the middle of the front seat next to Daddy and buried my face in his side. I felt his arm surround me as he pulled me close and whispered: “Well, we lost, sugah, but it is goin’ to be all right. Sweetie, now don’t you cry.” The tears I was drying with the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket were not for me, they were for him.

  While he was making his concession speech, we sat in the lobby to wait. Directly across from me there was a large wire cage, barren and rusting. Inside was a small monkey. I can still see it sixty years later. It looked as sad and lost and forlorn as I felt.

  Following Daddy’s televised remarks, we were driven back to the Greystone Hotel. A crowd of supporters, some crying, greeted him on the sidewalk as he stepped from the car. It was time for him to speak to his campaign supporters who were waiting for him. He was gracious in defeat. This is just the first round, he must have thought—I can hold on for four more years. He contained his anger and disappointment. My grandmother Mozelle’s stoicism, her commitment to “never let anyone see you cry,” had been passed down to my father.

  Although there is disagreement about the events that immediately followed, depending on who tells the story, and overlooking Daddy’s vague memory on the subject, it is generally agreed that Daddy said at some point that night, “I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

  Those five words, spoken in the heat of his intemperance and rage, would follow us for the rest of our lives.

  Later on in his life, Daddy told me several times that he had never said that. “Seymore Trammell, or somebody in his camp, just made that up. I would have never used the N-word like that.”

  Perhaps Daddy did not say those words on that night in 1958. But during his first term as governor, Daddy stood in the schoolhouse door, never punished or fired the state troopers that attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and sent law enforcement officers to Birmingham to support Bull Connor’s reign of terror in the summer of 1963.

  6

  Into the Darkness

  The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much and forgetting that you are special too.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  If I had asked Daddy in the summer of 1958 if he was a racist, I’m not sure what he would have said. For many years, I felt obligated to defend Daddy’s character and actions. I took the official Wallace line: Daddy was a segregationist but not a racist. Now I see that Daddy, in the words of Dan Carter, who wrote The Politics of Rage, the definitive biography of my father and the Wallace years, represented the reflexive racism of Southern men and women of his generation.

  What is the difference between a segregationist and a racist? A racist is defined as a person who believes that one race is superior to others. To be a segregationist means upholding a caste system—a system of apartheid. The idea of “separate but equal” was belied by the ways blacks were systemically terrorized with lynchings and beatings in the South (and the North too) and looked down upon and denied basic rights. There was nothing “equal” in segregation.

  And yet, like so much in the South, it was complicated. I know in our house when I was growing up the use of the N-word was strictly forbidden. My parents would never have talked like that. But if I had asked Daddy after he lost the primary to Patterson in the summer of 1958 if he would do whatever it took to be elected governor in 1962, he would probably have said, “What do you think?” He would have done whatever it took to be elected.

  Our family life was rough between Daddy’s loss in ’58 and his second run in ’62. When Mama tried to console him after his loss to Patterson, he snapped back at her, was angry and often accusatory. When she broached the subject of “what is next in our lives,” Daddy responded: “It’s always on me to figure out a way to take care of you-all. When I tell you things will work out, that means I will figure it out.”

  The problem was that Daddy’s track record of working things out was pretty dismal. Mama just gave up. “I guess we are all on our own,” she must have thought to herself. She knew we were on the verge of sinking back into the kind of poverty that she had experienced before Daddy became a judge. Uncle Jack had taken over Daddy’s circuit court judgeship and no more paychecks were coming. Mama took a part-time job at the Agricultural Extension Service in Clayton.

  Daddy became a partner in Uncle Gerald’s one-man law firm in Montgomery. On occasion he and Uncle Gerald would collect a fee from a client. Most of the time, Daddy was walking the streets, roustabouting with acquaintances and strangers. Money, in the form of “legal fees” from a few who believed that Daddy was going to win the next election and wanted to reserve a seat at the table, kept Daddy afloat in town.

  Daddy’s frequent absences from home continued. Montgomery, where Gerald had his office and where Daddy did his politicking, was two hours by car from Clayton. After his defeat, it often felt as if he had abandoned us. And on those days and nights when he did reappear at home, it usually was time to batten down the hatches. My parents’ fights began in the general vicinity of the kitchen, roiled through the dining and living room, and often ended with the slam of their bedroom door. Their tumultuous confrontations were never physical, unless a flying ashtray or dinner plate hurled by Mama found its mark. Daddy’s talent for the bob and weave of boxing no doubt worked to his advantage. My parents fought about money, my mother’s sense of abandonment, or lipstick on his collar.

  Mama had nothing of consequence with which to threaten Daddy.

  “What can you do, Lurleen?” Daddy would say in a taunting voice. “You don’t have any skills. You’re not smart. Where are you going to go? How are you going to live?” He could be brutal. Hard as nails. I went numb inside when Daddy treated Mama this way. It was the only life I knew, and it was just the way my father was.

  There never seemed to be a resolution—a coming together. Daddy wasn’t satisfied until you came around to his point of view, no matter how long it took him to convince you. If Mama threw up her hands, turned, and walked away, Daddy would follow her or sit down beside her on the sofa. Daddy was through when he got through; Mama was going to listen.

  As a young boy, Daddy watched as his daddy, usually drunk and in pain, raged through his house while his mother sat still in a chair. She never fought back, just waited for him to fall on the floor passed out, or move on out of the house, headed for someplace to drink and carouse. My father must have wanted his mother to strike back, to protect herself and the rest of them. But she never did. Daddy viewed not fighting back as a weakness. Mama’s just giving up was not acceptable to him.

  And yet Mama always believed that their marriage was worth saving. In spite of it all, she loved him.

  During that period, Mama struggled to take care of us. I wore cardboard inside my shoes to cover the holes in the worn-out soles that winter. My grandparents sent what little money they could, and a seamstress friend of Mama’s helped keep up our clothes. There was no talk in the house about our financial circumstances. Mama did what she had to do. She fed and clothed us.

  Mama’s meager circumstances were driven home to me years after she died. One of her friends who lived in Clayton when we did gave me a small cardboard box, the kind that a jewe
lry store would use for an expensive piece. Inside was an assortment of change and a little ledger sheet entitled CARD FUND. On the paper, Mama’s name appeared along with the other members of the Friendly Card Club. The club collected monthly dues from its members to send cards to friends and families on special occasions. According to the ledger, all members of the card club had account credits by their names, except for Mama: she was a dollar and seventy-five cents in arrears.

  Gerald and Daddy’s Montgomery law office was a place frequented by more storytelling hacks and political wannabes than clients. But it was a crowd that Daddy could not pass up, as they offered opportunities for adulation that soothed Daddy’s bruised ego after his trouncing by Patterson.

  It also became the perfect place for Daddy to feel aggrieved. The people of Alabama had abandoned him (yet it never occurred to him that perhaps he himself had abandoned us). After many years of sobriety following his coming to terms with the effect alcohol had on him, Daddy began drinking again, and his anger and penchant for violence spiraled out of control.

  On more than one occasion, Gerald was able to break up impending fistfights before the first punch was thrown. Daddy became indiscreet in his relationships with women, and the word soon spread through the grapevines of Montgomery society.

  When Daddy was not holding forth in the law office, he could be found either in the lobbies and anterooms of one of the three hotels in downtown Montgomery or in the Elite Café. Although he no longer had a title to append to his name, most people still called him Judge. Some people thought it was beneath Daddy’s dignity to chase down people in hotel lobbies or join an already occupied restaurant table and take over the conversation, but he did. He seemed desperate for attention. It was all he could do to keep up appearances with the little bit of money he was making from his law practice along with the paltry sums of cash slipped into his palm by still-faithful followers. In spite of the dire financial circumstances of our family, he showed no interest in getting a job.

  During the spring of 1959, Mr. Henry and Mamaw came for an extended visit and the house brightened. Mama and Mamaw sat in metal yard chairs in the backyard with cups of coffee and cigarettes and used Mr. Henry’s slingshot to scare marauding mockingbirds feasting on ripening figs hanging from the limbs of the tree in our yard.

  Mr. Henry carried his toolbox around the house looking for things that needed tending to. It was well known and a source of some amusement that Daddy was not one to have any interest or expertise on projects that required a nail, a hammer, or a screwdriver.

  During their visit, Mamaw chose her words carefully on the issue of Mama’s future. She quietly suggested coming back home with her and Mr. Henry. Mama could start over. It was no secret that the relationship between Mamaw and Daddy had always been less than perfect, but after the governor’s race, Mamaw and Daddy’s conversations became more heated and contemptuous when Daddy would occasionally come home from Montgomery.

  With her back against the wall, Mama was faced with what she came to believe was the ultimate truth of her life. Her husband was drinking and womanizing in Montgomery and rarely home. It was clear that what mattered to him was the adulation of the crowd and becoming governor of Alabama. His family was strictly secondary. She had no choice but to make her own way. And the thought of going home to the broken road must have felt as though she was taking refuge, returning to a place of safety and simplicity where she wouldn’t have to wonder when and if my father was coming home and deal with his temper and his self-righteousness and self-serving sense of grievance—the fallout from his defeat.

  She and Daddy had been married for sixteen years. She was thirty-three years old.

  7

  The Broken Road

  We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  There is a photo of my mama, now lost in some obscure family album. She is sitting on the back porch steps of our house down in Clayton, her sleeveless white cotton blouse standing out against the black mesh of the screen door behind her. Her tanned legs are folded beneath her like the wings of a small bird. Elegant fingers drift through her coarse mane of chestnut hair. She holds a lit cigarette, tightly clenched in the fingers of her other hand. The frame focuses on her, but there are faint shadows of others. She looks beyond them with wistful resignation. Perhaps her solemnity and distant affect were the physical embodiment of her recognition that the life she hoped for would never come.

  This photo might have been taken soon after she came back to live on the broken road. It was not even a road, just an abandoned roadbed, asphalt heaved up and cracked, mingling with kudzu and shrub trees along the side of a new and improved roadway. It was like a signpost of a first glance of happiness pointing to the way home, where moments of acceptance and love were always waiting.

  My grandfather, Mr. Henry, used to tell Mama, he’d say, “Now Mutt, if things don’t go to suit you down there with George and y’all need a place to stay, you come on up here and find the broken road cause we won’t be far away.”

  Finding a place where life is safe, understandable and predictable, a no-time-to-pack-up-your-clothes car ride and, “yes, we have enough gas to get there,” kind of place. Where “don’t you be silly” and “that’s ridiculous” sounds like laughter, rather than a hissing snake. Simple is better, not a place for complications, opening your eyes every morning when the sun comes through the window, warming up the room. Open doors to front porches, no need to lock the chain. Smiling because you want to, instead of smiling so they’ll vote.

  A life where contentment exists, with no secrets to keep or share, because there are none. No signposts needed, just look for the broken road. No longer a road to ride on, just there to point the way.

  When we passed through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to cross the bridge over the Back Warrior River, Mama always said, “Now you look for the broken road.”

  I stared out the window, looking hard to see. Then there it was, the abandoned road that would never abandon me. Can’t ride it, can’t walk it, just follow beside it to the end. Then you turn down that pig trail path, just wide enough to pass. And when you see that wooden house with flowers on the porch, roll down the window and wave your hands and happiness will wave you back.

  Some of my happiest memories are of driving to the broken road with Mama.

  A difference in views among us, all based on the road we take. Back roads share secrets, tell stories, uncover the shame and the triumph of life, while the expressways just get you there, no cause for looking at all. No SEE ROCK CITY signs on barn tops, pulling off in a no-name town. Picking pears in an unfenced orchard. Scampering away to the tune of “who’s out there stealing my pears.”

  My story is much like that of the broken road, heaved up and cracked for the truth of what power can do. It mingles amid history for the sake of the truth, gives rise to the inspiration that no matter who we belonged to “each of us can overcome,” and offers hope that America will take the “road less traveled by” before it is too late.

  The broken road of my childhood still remains with me, packed up somewhere inside, rustling around every now and then to remind me of those days in my life when everything was possible. Where Mr. Henry and my grandmother, Estelle Burns, sat on their front porch into the night. “Do you see any headlights?” Mamaw would ask. “Not yet,” Mr. Henry would say. “Then look harder,” she would reply.

  No locked doors to bang on, no windows nailed shut. Perhaps one day, the broken road will call me home.

  The lesson of the broken road is one of coming to terms with the past, not for the sake of forgetting or forgiving, but rather for truth. For history depends on what is told, taught, and accepted by those who lived it. The “we don’t remember that the way you just said it, or that is not what I heard, or you should have been there” should encourage each of us to share and speak of what we saw, what we did and what others did for us and to us. For it is through our collective recollections that we, mos
t often, will come closer to the truth. Saying “this just makes him, her, or those times back then look so bad” is no excuse.

  The crossroads of history are littered with points of view, of the “how it was” rather than the “what it was,” stark images in black and white. Much better to see them that way; all those blends and nuances of color and appliques of fabrics do nothing but get in the way. “We disagree” is certainly all right, but “why are you saying these things when it just looks so bad” is not.

  No truth is ever complete, precision not required. But each of us should be willing to speak it as we know it, withdraw it when we just thought we knew it, and defend it when it can set a record straight, mend a broken heart, encourage acts of courage, and is the right thing to do. It’s like Mr. Henry said one time: “The one that’s yelling when you do the telling is the one who cooked the books.”

  My heart lifted at the sight of Mr. Henry and Mamaw’s whitewashed wooden house with its rusting tin roof. It sat up on four brick pillars, just high enough for you to crawl underneath in case the cat had kittens next to the chimney rocks or some critter fell dead beneath the house and started smelling. The front porch sagged, but the tin roof did not leak when the rain fell, and the sound of pattering rain on it put you to sleep on rainy nights. In springtime, cleared-out spaces beneath pine trees and hardwoods were decked out with yellow daffodils and wild flowers. Dogwood trees and a few crepe myrtles were spread around the front yard.

  Mama with Mr. Henry, Mamaw, and her older brother, Cecil Burns.

  The only modern conveniences at Mamaw and Mr. Henry’s house were electricity and a telephone. Water was drawn from a well not far from the back door of the house. A cast-iron pot hung from a homemade rusting iron swing-arm next to Mamaw’s dugout fire pit. On washdays Mamaw used a beat-up boat oar to lift wet clothes from the boiling pot so she could hang them on the clothesline. If they happened to be bedsheets or homemade quilts, Mr. Henry had to stand up a notched board in the middle of the line to keep it from buckling. The outhouse, sitting just beyond a small garden plot behind the barn, was a one-holer. Bathing was done in privacy on the back porch with freshly drawn well water in a tin bucket and plenty of lye soap.