Daddy stood in the well of the Alabama house of representatives. Packed crowds in the gallery above waved signs and acted intemperately with hoots, hollers, and heel-stomping. “Let the people decide,” Daddy said.
Why do liberal newspaper editors so viciously attack the idea that the governor might succeed himself? The answer is easy. The liberals want the state destroyed, all power and all benefits to come from a centralized government. They want us to quit doing and start begging. I believe in the cause of freedom. The people of Alabama sent me north and east and west to tell the story of Americanism in the South. It would have been easy to remain in Montgomery in comfort and in peace, but because I believe in the cause of freedom I have gone among wild-eyed fanatics. I have walked through stomping crowds of leftists and I have been cursed by them and I have been beat upon and their spittle has run down my face.
Wallace supporters fled from the capitol into the night, ready to fight for four more years. Daddy’s judge and jury were the people of Alabama, and they had his back. They thought it perfectly reasonable for Daddy to defund road projects, cancel contracts, move the location of a proposed junior college to the other end of the state, and pull liquor advertising from newspapers if that is what it took to whip the troublemakers that disagreed with him back into shape. After all, families stick together, and Governor Wallace was family.
Once again, the succession bill bullied its way through the House but was held up in the Alabama senate with a filibuster. On October 22, 1965, the final vote to break the filibuster was defeated by three votes. Daddy was both stunned and infuriated. It never occurred to him that his behavior toward the holdouts in the Senate had been counterproductive. He had launched public tirades against them in their home districts. He had hurled invective. He had threatened to make their constituents pay. This, of course, had emboldened the rebellious senators to dig in their heels.
In the end, from Daddy’s perspective, it was not all about whether he actually meant to do the things he threatened to do; he just wanted to have his way, and unless the referee catches you breaking the quarterback’s finger in the pileup, it’s just another way to win. The 1965 defeat of the succession bill was personal. Daddy viewed it as an attack on his character and fitness. Rejection was not something he handled well.
None of the state senators who filibustered the succession bill to the end would be returned to service following the 1966 election; they either didn’t run or were overwhelmingly defeated. However, in return for their sacrifice, Alabama would elect its first female governor, and the Wallace Dynasty was assured.
14
Dynasty
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
—Maya Angelou
In the fall of 1965, while Daddy was at war with the Alabama legislature on the matter of gubernatorial succession, I was a freshman at Sidney Lanier High School, where a war of another kind was being fought. It was the year Delores Boyd and other African American students integrated my freshman class. Although there were no known or perceived threats to me, I was accompanied to school each day by a detail of state troopers.
While my bodyguards protected me, black students were accosted, isolated, and threatened with violence almost daily. Although my instincts invited me to welcome them, befriend them, and stand by them, I did nothing. All eyes seemed to be on me, watching to see what I would do as I witnessed bigotry and intimidation.
Although Daddy was in the midst of a fight for his political future that fall, he sometimes returned to the mansion for dinner. “How was school today, sugah?” he would ask. I could have reported on the treatment of my African American schoolmates. I said nothing. Each time he asked, I was silent. I lost the opportunity to become my better self and stand up for Delores, who would one day become my friend.
Instead, I became a joiner and a cheerleader, participating in the sort of activities that boastful parents roll out at neighborhood cookouts and pre–Sunday school chatter. Mama came to cheer me on during football nights, sometimes lingering to talk to my friends and their parents. She had such an easy, winning way about her, putting everyone at ease with her total lack of affectation and her warmth.
She stayed up until I came home on weekend nights after being out with friends. She told me how silly it was to cry every time I listened to Paul McCartney songs. My first official date arrived at the front door of the mansion. For a casual observer it would seem to be nothing more than normal family life, but for me it was much more. It was the beginning of the end of another cloverleaf necklace. These necklaces are something Southern girls weave from the clover growing in our yards. They signify good luck.
As Mamaw would say, “You dry them little necklaces in some tissue paper then put ’em up somewhere where you can remember, so maybe you can take ’em out and frame ’em one day when you get set up in a house of your own.”
The enchanted life I was leading was about to end.
The night of the final vote on the succession bill, it was Albert Brewer, the Alabama house speaker and a friend, who called the mansion and asked for Mama. After exchanging brief greetings, Brewer told her that the succession bill failed for the third time. “Lurleen, there’s a lot of talk up here about you running next time,” he said.
Mama chuckled. Brewer could hear the click of her cigarette lighter. This was the first she had heard of this rather audacious idea. She gathered herself for a few moments and replied, “If anyone is going to run for governor, it’s going to be you. Martha and I will hit the road and hold teas from one end of the state to the other.”
“Well,” said Brewer, “all I can say is you’d better get your running shoes on.”
I remember Mama telling us the succession bill had failed. “Hold on, your daddy’s coming home with thunder. Nothing you can do to fix it. Find a place to lay low.”
Seven weeks following the defeat of the succession bill and two days before Thanksgiving, Mama received the results of a uterine biopsy from her doctor, Joe Perry. She had cancer. Her diagnosis led to radiation treatments in early December. Mamaw and Mr. Henry came for Christmas early, and Aunt Bill and her husband drove straight through from Sea Island, Georgia, on Christmas Eve. Mama was not going to allow her diagnosis to ruin her favorite time of the year.
Mama checked into the hospital on January 9, 1966. The next morning, a team of surgeons removed a malignant uterine tumor while performing a complete hysterectomy. While offering an optimistic prognosis following her surgery, Dr. Perry suggested that all the talk he was hearing about her running for governor should be put aside so that she could spend more time with family.
Perhaps Mama should have heeded Dr. Perry’s advice. Enjoy one last year in Montgomery, spruce up the house in Clayton, go down home while Daddy ran for president, and settle in to die. On the other hand, if she were governor, she could exercise her own power, be one who could build, heal the sick, and encourage others. If she chose to leave the capitol and become a housewife again, none of that would happen. She must have wondered deep down if she would survive. She was thirty-nine years old.
By late January the word was out that she was in. Whether it was cigar smoke or high-heeled shoes, it didn’t matter so long as it was a Wallace.
In late February, Mama called me to come upstairs. She patted the sofa cushion beside her. “You and I need to talk about something,” she said. “Now hear me out before you say anything. I am thinking about running for governor. This is something I want to do.”
My response was a clear, unequivocal no. I was afraid. There had been no conversations about Mama’s surgery or what was facing her, much less the rest of us. The politics I had witnessed involved not the glory of winning and all that it could bring, but long nights on dark roads, loneliness, and neglect. There were always to-do lists of the important things that had to be done before anything could be done for me. For my entire life, Mama had been in the
same boat with me. She was on my team of heartache. Mama understood that it was politics when they had to send someone back to pick me up because they had forgotten that I was even there. Now she wanted me to think it was okay for her to become the purveyor of sorrow in my life, rather than be the only one that thought of me first. Mama’s promise that things would not change just because she would be governor fell on deaf ears. I felt betrayed when she said, “Just think, the campaign will be so much fun for you and me.”
On February 24, Mama announced her candidacy before an overflow crowd in the house chamber in the capitol. Wallace supporters came from all of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties. Mama made some brief remarks; then Daddy took the stage. He rained down fire and brimstone, railing against the federal government, the federal courts, and any other “federal” he could think of. He knew how to raise the hackles of working-class and low-income white voters who were listening in by invoking “states’ rights.”
Even before the cheering stopped, most political prognosticators were ready to announce that Lurleen Wallace was not just the most popular candidate in the race—she might as well be the only candidate. “Anybody who runs against Lurleen Wallace is going to be wasting their time and somebody else’s money,” an old-line politician said. “George might have lost this race, but those SOBs who filibustered his succession bill are going to elect his wife.”
Mama at a campaign rally for governor, 1966.
“She is in it to win it,” her supporters said. “When she gets elected, we will have two governors for the price of one. He is going to be her number one adviser. So it really don’t make a hill of beans who is carrying the keys to the governor’s office in her purse.”
Mama campaigned from town to town through the spring of 1966. The crowds were loud and boisterous. Mrs. George C. Wallace became Mrs. Lurleen Burns Wallace and finally just Miss Lurleen. For every skeptical eye that looked crossways at her, there were thousands of weatherworn hands that reached out to shake the hand of their Lurleen. She was one of them.
Many observers saw Mama as a mere extension of Daddy’s ambitions. Daddy could move a crowd into a state of hysteria. Mama portrayed herself as just like the people who came and stood in courthouse squares to hear her speak. Her common touch was a powerful political tool. She lingered in crowds to listen for as long as it took. She acted as if it was a privilege for her to shake someone’s hand and to listen to them. She always had time for people. There was only one Lurleen.
Mama’s presence rather than just her words gave her power. Daddy noticed. There was no doubt that he was proud of her emerging confidence.
I’m not sure exactly what the political agenda was that Daddy hoped Mama could accomplish. I think in large part he had her run because he was still aggrieved about losing on the issue of succession. He thought about those legislators who had voted against him—I’ll show you: Lurleen will run. Nobody is going to throw the Wallaces out in the road.
And make no mistake—he did show them. But I don’t think Daddy had counted on Mama being quite so capable and popular. His oversized ego bristled when he saw Mama swamped by admirers while he waited by the car. At times, it was just about more than Daddy could bear.
“Gerald, I want my own car and driver,” Mama said in late March.
“Is George getting under your skin?”
“No, I’m getting under his. I think the man is jealous.”
Gerald laughed. “He doesn’t like to get upstaged.”
“Well, he better get used to it!”
In the May Democratic primary, Mama bested ten other opponents without a runoff by receiving over 54 percent of all votes cast. In the general election, she carried sixty-five of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties with 63 percent of the total vote. Her victory was stunning, and was a record Daddy hadn’t equaled. While most of the votes were the result of white voters’ affinity for Daddy’s politics, there was no doubt that it was Lurleen Wallace herself who brought thousands of voters to the polls.
It was a sunny 46 degrees on January 19, 1967. Mama, wearing a tailor-made knee-length skirt and suit coat of black velvet with a white silk ascot and a pillbox hat, stood before an estimated crowd of a quarter million well-wishers who lined the streets of downtown Montgomery to view the largest inaugural parade in state history and witness the swearing in of Alabama’s first female governor and its most beloved citizen. As Mama raised her right hand to take the oath of office, I gazed down from the capitol steps at the thousands of faces and heard their roars of approval. It was the day the Wallaces became the most powerful political family in the history of Alabama.
That night, Mama’s friends and our family gathered at the mansion to celebrate our good fortune. After making sure that Daddy was in earshot, Mamaw leaned forward on the sofa she was sharing with Mr. Henry and Mama. “Well, George,” she said. “This is for sure one time you can thank Lurleen for keeping a roof over your head and food on the table. Can’t be any arguing about that anymore, now can there.”
For the first five months of her term, Mama was engaged with the duties and obligations of her governorship. She passed a bond issue to improve mental health services and create the Alabama state parks system. But it was her character and purpose, her caring for the down and forgotten and the thousands of middle-class families, both whites and African Americans, who saw their own hopes and dreams in her life’s story, that laid claim to the legacy she would leave behind.
The broken road touches history, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1967.
“When your mother was governor, every Sunday after church my parents would ride my sister and me by the Governor’s Mansion. Daddy would pull over for a minute or two,” a friend of Mark’s told me many years later. “My mother wanted my sister to know that Miss Lurleen lived there and that one day she could be a governor too.”
Then, in June 1967, Mama’s cancer returned. Hopeful and optimistic outlooks from her physicians and her friends encouraged her to fight on for her benefit and for ours. But in the early morning hours of May 7, 1968, just two weeks before I graduated from high school, Mama died at the age of forty-one. She had served as governor for only fifteen months.
Later that same day, her body was returned to the mansion. Her open casket was placed in the sitting room between the pair of floor-to-ceiling pier mirrors that faced each other. They were the same mirrors I stood between after Daddy’s inaugural ball in 1963, only five years before, when I said to myself that a carefree, magical life was mine.
I stepped through my second-floor bedroom door and walked to the balcony rail. I saw Mama’s reflection falling back on itself again and again.
“There was never any magic in this place at all,” I thought to myself. I felt heartbroken and very much alone.
The following day, Mama’s body lay in state in the Alabama capitol rotunda. More than thirty thousand people stood in line for hours to say a last goodbye to their Lurleen.
15
For You
I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other, then someone at my side says: “There, she is gone.” “Gone where?” Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
—Henry Van Dyke
In the winter and spring months of 1968, Mama never told me she was dying. There were no conversations about moving on without her. We never reminisced or recapitulated. We never talked about what she might want me to tell my children one day when they asked who she was and what kind of grandmother she would have been. Perhaps she had hope until the final moments of her life and was unable to accept her destiny. More likely, she didn’t want to burden me as I was preparing to graduate from high school.
“Peggy Sue, pinch me, I must be dreaming.” May 3, 1966.
Mama did not live long enough to tell her own story. There were no diaries, no handwritten letters to us, no family movies, and only a few family ph
otographs scattered about. The person that my mama was, and the person she could have become had she lived, will always elude me. The author Anita Smith described Mama as a “Lady of Courage” in her book The Intimate Story of Lurleen Wallace: Her Crusade of Courage. Ron Gibson, the book’s editor, wrote in the introduction: “She rushed onto the stage of history only in time for a brief, if nonetheless memorable, performance before the lights went out. The audience applauded her dignity in the role in which she was cast—that of the protagonist of cancer. It is because the reader will come to know such a figure, tragic as her circumstance may finally have been, that this is not a sad book. It is a happy book.”
Mama’s deification through her suffering and death overshadowed her life. And for those who loved their Lady of Courage, there was no reason to defend her individual accomplishments as governor of Alabama, to investigate how her shortcomings made her who she was, or to set her free on the pages of history. To them, her nobility lay next to her in her grave.
The real story of Mama’s life became irrelevant to history, and eventually even to our own family. We all too often circled the wagons to protect the memory of the Lady of Courage rather than celebrate who she was. I became accustomed to not looking beyond the stories that we always told, the ones with a punchline rather than those with depth.
The Broken Road Page 11