The Broken Road

by Peggy Wallace Kennedy

  Mark nodded his head. “That was all he said.”

  I thought to myself, Harold See did what Daddy did on the day state troopers attacked John Lewis on Bloody Sunday in March of 1965. “I never told Al Lingo to attack those marchers on that bridge.” It was not Daddy’s fault.

  Hard to take, to say the least. You would have thought I had been put through the wringer enough times with my father’s political life. Now here it was, perhaps even closer to home—the same opportunism and gutter politics. But one thing was different: Mark always put me and our sons first. He was always, always there for us. And that made all the difference.

  On June 11, 1999, after serving twenty-one years on the bench, Mark retired. He was doing something for me, Leigh, and Burns that Daddy never did—he was coming home to us.

  25

  The End of an Era

  Maybe all one can do is to hope to end up with the right regrets.

  —Arthur Miller

  On Sunday, September 13, 1998, we stopped by Jackson Hospital on our way home from church. After twenty-six years of paralysis and fighting back, Daddy was seriously ill with sepsis, a virulent bacterial infection.

  “Daddy, are you sure you are going to be okay?” He nodded yes. We promised to return the following day.

  That night, Mark and I were watching Gary Sinise accept an Emmy award for best actor for his portrayal of Daddy in the made-for-TV movie George Wallace. As Sinise began speaking, our phone rang.

  It was my brother, George. “Peggy, you need to get back to the hospital.”

  By the time we got there, Daddy was gone.

  Two days later, Daddy’s body was returned to the capitol rotunda and placed on a bier in front of a marble bust of Mama where her body lay three decades before. Over the course of the day and night that followed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people—as many African Americans as whites—came to pay their respects.

  Daddy had repeatedly called Mark and me to come visit him during the last two years of his life. These were often late-night visits. We’d come in and he would begin talking: “You know, I was wrong about race and segregation. I know that now. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.” It was clear that he was sincere and that he was ashamed and regretful. He would talk for hours, circling around these points.

  Governor George Corley Wallace at St. Jude Catholic Hospital on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, March 1990.

  I might have wanted a more personal apology and a recognition on his part of how his behavior had shaped my life in ways that had been damaging and difficult. But that wasn’t who Daddy was. I came to see that the fact that he brought us close to him again and again, time after time, and unburdened himself was his way of apologizing to me. It was what he was capable of, and I came to be satisfied with that—he was asking for my forgiveness, not only for the ways he had impacted my life but for the man he had been. And I did forgive him. And I loved him.

  Mark and I returned to the capitol just after midnight. We walked up the steps, passing the place where Daddy and Mama once stood before cheering crowds of thousands. A capitol guard asked the line of mourners to give us a moment. I pulled a small bag of M&M’s from my jacket and put them in Daddy’s right-hand coat pocket.

  “Always the right pocket,” he would tell me back in Clayton. “Sugah, if you’ve been good, look in my right-hand coat pocket. There will always be something there for you.”

  “If it was ninety-six degrees at your daddy’s funeral, it must be at least a hundred and ten today,” Mark commented. We were walking across the large blacktop parking lot in front of Walmart.

  “There must be a hundred black cars in this parking lot,” I said. We wandered around, refusing to admit to each other that we had forgotten where we parked.

  “That may be true. But we may have the only black Volvo with a Clinton sticker on the bumper.”

  “You have a point.”

  An SUV pulled in a parking space just ahead of us. The driver got out and headed our way. We smiled as she walked up in front of us, hoping to avoid the worst nightmare of a family in politics. “You don’t know me, do you?” “Of course we do.” “Then who am I?” Instead, she said it for us: “You don’t know me, but I work up at the funeral home where your daddy was brought. Peggy, I’m from Barbour County—just like you. We have always loved your family. Your mama was a special lady. She and my folks used to have coffee sometimes, right there across from the county courthouse at Seale’s Café. Those were precious times.”

  It was so blazingly hot and humid on the blacktop in the Alabama sun that all I wanted to do was escape and find our car. But I smiled—the practiced smile of the wife and daughter of elected officials.

  “Clayton was a great place to grow up, and Seale’s Café was the best,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t want to keep you-all in this heat,” said our new friend from Clayton. “But I was blessed, and I mean blessed to be working at the funeral home when your daddy was brought in. I could not believe my eyes, and I called Mama and told her that the governor had just come in. She was as excited as I was.”

  “I’m so glad you got to see him.”

  Mark’s eyes cut toward me.

  “What else was I supposed to say?” I channeled back via a slight shrug. The sweat stood out on my forehead and was rolling down my back.

  “I was hoping that they would let me do something, but I wasn’t sure,” she continued without missing a beat. “Then, praise the Lord, the funeral home director came up to me and told me they wanted me to do his hair. I called Mama and told her, ‘Mama, they want me to do the governor’s hair.’ She gasped into the phone, just gasped. So, I asked Mama, ‘Mama, what am I supposed to say to him?’ And she says, ‘Honey, just talk to him. Just talk to him. Because he’s home folks from Barbour County. He’s just like us. You don’t need to put on no airs for George Wallace!’ So I did just that. I talked and combed and combed and talked.”

  By that time I was melting. We hugged each other, and I thanked her for taking the time to tell me about her encounter with Daddy.

  After about five yards’ worth of walking she turned back to me. “I forgot the most important thing of all. How did you like his hair?”

  Perhaps it was a combination of the heat and my Barbour County manners that creased my mouth with a big smile—my best smile. “Honey,” I said, “I have never, and I mean never seen that hair looking any better than it looked that day.”

  “Praise the Lord,” she said. “You’ve made my day.”

  The inside of the Volvo was hot to the touch, but not as hot as the softening pavement. “Let the windows down,” I said.

  Hot air rushed around us. Mark turned to me and said, “You know, your daddy would have loved every word of that.”

  “He probably heard every word,” I replied. “I loved that man.”

  Burns met us in the driveway when we drove up. “Leigh and I filled up the pool with new water. Come swimming with us, Mom.”

  I smiled. “That sounds like a good idea to me.”

  When they were young, my sons would sometimes pull books from the shelves of our family history, with questions for me to follow. But none of what they read could adequately address or capture the essence of humanity that lay hidden beneath the overwhelming facts of what their grandparents stood for and what they did.

  “Tell us more, Mom. What did you do back down there in Clayton when you were a little girl? What was Mawmaw Lurleen really like? Do you think she would come over to our house and sit outside with us and tell us stories? I bet Paw Paw, back when he could walk, would be up and down all the time. Would you let him smoke his cigar inside the house? Why did he do those things to other people?”

  The spring after Daddy died was when Mark and I took Burns to Atlanta to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Museum. I saw Daddy through Burns’s child eyes. I thought about who Daddy was when I was nine years old, living down in Cla
yton before he vowed never again to be “out-niggered,” before he won the governorship, before the civil rights clashes of the 1960s and the era’s fraught politics and tumultuous social change. I thought of Mama, Daddy, and me standing in the shade of an oak in the yard of my childhood when there was no burden to bear, no heartaches, and nothing to defend or explain away, when my parents were just like the other parents of Clayton, who sat on front porch swings while their children played in the yard.

  26

  Doors

  Although the world is full of suffering, it is full of the overcoming of it.

  —Helen Keller

  One day, a psychiatrist told me to draw a picture of myself. “That is me,” I said, pointing at a stick figure with flowing lines of charcoal hair.

  “What does the picture mean?” he asked.

  I traced my finger along the drawing. “You see, I walked down the street to my house. I went inside, locked the door behind me, and turned off the lights.”

  Some days you wake up feeling fine and then depression taps you on the shoulder. “I’m still here,” it says. “Always waiting for the next shoe to fall. And remember—it’s better to be bitter than to feel nothing at all.”

  I would come to realize that depression had been with me for as long as I could remember. “Why, she’s just a sad little thing,” I heard people say about me when I was young. Then it became “What’s wrong with her?” when I was grown.

  Depression hides in the crack and crannies of life, oozing out like black tar. It’s sticky and leaves ugly smears on whatever it touches. It lies low, like morning fog. It brings darkness and offers escape in days of dreamless sleep. It is a disease, not just a state of mind. Depression is not something you get over; it is something you climb out of. It’s patient. It lies in wait inside you until a word, a song, a memory, or loss unlocks its cage. It encourages our mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives to ask “What’s your problem?” or “You better be thankful for what you’ve got.” And finally, “All I have to say is get yourself together. Get over this.”

  Depression taps at your window and scurries along the ceiling overhead at night while your family tries to make the best of it. “Let her sleep,” they say. Not for your sake but for their own.

  “Who wouldn’t want to trade places with me?” I asked myself as I looked at blooming camellias through a wall of windows in my kitchen. I was the daughter of governors, I’d grown up living in a mansion with servants, had a husband at the pinnacle of what young lawyers dream of becoming and two beautiful sons.

  The house I lived in was unique and wonderful, according to a reporter. “Why, it’s akin to a little gem box,” she said. The lines, angles, and artful views from nooks and crannies unsettled me. Bright spotlights on paintings, overly green plants basking in washes of morning sunlight, a lamp dimmed and glowing atop a perfectly situated end table that had once belonged to my mama—all this hurt my eyes and angered me. The perfection of my house—its shininess, bleached white walls, soothing grays—made me feel slipshod.

  I hid my thoughts. Friends swooned as I gave them the tour. Unlike my house, which sang in perfect pitch, the choir in my head sang one of Daddy’s favorite tunes, “You could be pretty if you wanted to.” He said that to me one time; it has always stayed with me.

  I would ask Mark: “Why does he say things like that?”

  Is there nowhere in this place for me just to throw stuff on the floor? I sometimes wondered.

  My depression would jump from behind a door or settle in the bed next to me. There had always been a fix, a string of psychiatrists and therapists, talking it out, sitting in the sun, a parade of colorful pills. Most days, I sat for hours, staring out a window, happy to wait until it was time for bed. I was no match for its ferocity. A cliff lay straight ahead and there was nothing I could do but close my eyes.

  Mark tells me how beautiful the fall of 1995 was, how Leigh, as a high school senior, played with great heroics on the football field and how happy he was when he was named the most valuable player of the year and we all stood up and cheered at the football banquet when he was given his award. He laughs with our son Burns as they reminisce about Burns riding his “trick” bicycle in front of our house, then kicking up red dust as he made the perfect slide.

  Mark smiles at me and I smile back, knowing that I have no memory of those moments in our sons’ lives.

  It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We were returning home from a long weekend visit with Mark’s family. Burns and Leigh were in the backseat. I slumped in the passenger seat, fighting off the nausea that ran along beside the blinding pain of the migraine headache. I’d had them before and so had Mama.

  It was after dark when we pulled into our driveway. We let our sons out of the car and went to the emergency room. “My wife has a migraine headache. She has them all the time. A shot and fluids will make her feel better,” Mark told the staff.

  The doctor was cautious. “I want to take some X-rays of your head to be sure everything is okay up there. Then we’ll give you a narcotic to ease the pain.”

  When I returned from the scans, Mark and two doctors were standing in my room. A nurse came in and gave me a shot. I could tell by Mark’s darting eyes that something was wrong.

  “The X-rays show that you have some sort of mass behind your right eye,” one of the doctors said. “We don’t think it’s anything to worry about, but we want to keep you overnight and do more tests in the morning.”

  The shot eased the pain in my head and lured me to sleep. Mark told me not to worry, and the door shut behind him. I glanced at the wall clock. It was a few minutes after ten P.M. I closed my eyes.

  Mark was called back to the hospital at one thirty A.M. The staff had found me in the stairwell, two flights down from my room, and managed, with some difficulty, to get me back into bed. I was emotionally unstable and combative and in restraints.

  Mark was visibly shaken when he walked into the hospital room. I fought the restraints. “Why are you letting these people tie me up like this?” I shrieked. “Take me home right now.”

  A nurse followed Mark to my bedside. “The doctor instructed us to wait until you arrived to give her another dose of a sedative to calm her down. He thought it would be better for her to see a familiar face.”

  But Mark’s presence had had the opposite effect. There he stood all perfect. His whole family would be like a gaggle of geese, wandering up and down the hall, taking over the waiting room, wringing their hands at the thought of how many problems that Wallace wife of his was causing him.

  I could feel myself falling, being chased by demons. There was a gunmetal taste in my mouth. I heard a chair scrape across the floor and saw Mark walking around to the side of the bed. I told him that I needed to go to the bathroom. He helped me use a bedpan. I told him I was thirsty. He held a cup of water close, so that I could sip from a straw. Panic set in as I realized that he was not going to set me free.

  In the morning, a cheerful nurse came in, sat on the bed beside me, and took my hand. She would eventually free me from the restraints and help me get changed into the clothes Mark brought from home, but only after she had regaled me with an embellished account of the day she’d met my daddy.

  I was angry and threatening when the doctors arrived: an internist and a psychiatrist and neurologist. I insisted that I be allowed to sit in a chair. Before I was through with them, I would have their medical licenses. They told me the mass behind my eye had been determined to be of no significance and believed what had happened the night before was symptomatic of a “reactive psychosis caused by stress.” They were confident that it would pass in a few days.

  But it didn’t.

  “I’m not drinking anything until you tell me where I am.”

  “You’re dehydrated, and if we don’t do something about it they’ll hook you up to an IV.”

  It turned out that I was in Birmingham at University Hospital. “You weren’t getting better at the hospital in Montgom
ery so we brought you up here yesterday,” Mark said. I had no memory of the move.

  Several days later I had still not improved. It seemed my only option was a series of electroconvulsive treatments (ECT). They were going to be done in the basement of the Lurleen Wallace Tower that was ajoined to the hospital.

  I used to wonder if the picture taken of my mama in the first few days of her governorship was meant to be her official photo. She is standing behind the governor’s desk with her arms awkwardly splayed as if she had to hold on to something. Her red dress is cinched with a wide cloth belt of the same color. Telephone, dictation machine, and intercom cables on the credenza behind her. An arrangement of pink and purple flowers in an awkward vase. A too-heavy enameled pin on her dress collar. A lovely smile.

  The Red Dress photo, as it came to be known, looks unstudied and casual. It was hung in public buildings, college auditoriums, and the hallways of state-run hospitals, including the hospital I was in. Improving mental health care in Alabama was one of Mama’s signature accomplishments as governor. If Mama could see me now, I thought more than once when I was in the hospital, what would she say to me?

  “Ready to roll,” one of the ECT treatment nurses said each morning. “How many we got today?”

  I was wheeled through the crowded hallways. Between the two elevators, one of which would take me to the basement to receive my treatments, Mama’s Red Dress photo hung on the wall.

  Daddy knew all about my health problems. He worried over them, and often became emotional when he spoke to me. He’d ask me if I was okay. He wanted me to promise him that I would get well. He never asked where I thought my depression came from, if there could be a connection between him and me.

  After a week of treatments, Mark took me home. Leigh and Burns were waving at the end of our driveway. A WELCOME HOME MOM sign was stuck to the door. Life settled back into more or less predictable rhythms.

  Happiness comes and goes. Contentment is often episodic. But chronic depression stays with you for life. Keeping it at bay is a challenge, but it is not an impossible task. Overcoming the shame of not being strong enough, of being unable to just suck it up and keep going, is the first step to hope, not for a cure but for an opportunity to live with depression and still feel well and find happiness in the smallest of things.