And She Was: The Madness of Madeleine Morgan

By Elizabeth Wells

A Southern girl embraces the 60s and 70s, only to
become mentally ill when the era is over. In the end,
she regains her sanity and achieves her dream of
becoming a writer.

Elizabeth Wells:
If I had to say what inspired this story I would say that I have lived
an uncommon life, met unforgettable characters, and done things most
people wouldnt do. The idea was to get it into a book that recorded
much of my own personal history. Since the beginning of man, such
inspiration is always necessary to the persons who create stories of their
own. William Faulkner said, Listen to the voices. I do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493160006

Elizabeth Wells

Elizabeth Wells lives with her husband, Rob, in Wilmington, NC with an “alley cat” named Sammy who likes to take a walk on the wild side.

Book preview

AND SHE WAS

THE MADNESS OF MADELEINE MORGAN

Elizabeth Wells

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Wells.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4931-5999-4

                eBook           978-1-4931-6000-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/04/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Telling It All

Chapter 2 Pop

Chapter 3 Preacher’s Kid

Chapter 4 My Baptism

Chapter 5 When the Baptists Saved New York

Chapter 6 Higher Ground

Chapter 7 UFO

Chapter 8 The Photo Album

Chapter 9 When Our Friends Took Mother

Chapter 10 Two Funerals and Two Arrangements

Chapter 11 Shiloh

Chapter 12 It’s Only Rock’n Roll

Chapter 13 My First Love

Chapter 14 Meeting Dawn

Chapter 15 Dawn’s House

Chapter 16 The Wedding

Chapter 17 Leaving Home

Chapter 18 Free at Last!

Chapter 19 The Price of Freedom

Chapter 20 Love and Hate

Chapter 21 The Family Tree

Chapter 22 Christmas, 1971

Chapter 23 Cold Start, Warm Finish

Chapter 24 Summer of ’72

Chapter 25 Happy Thanksgiving, Goodbye

Chapter 26 Mad Holidays

Chapter 27 Snowtime

Chapter 28 Radicals

Chapter 29 Visitors

Chapter 30 Fraternity Daze

Chapter 31 Appearances

Chapter 32 Comedy of Errors

Chapter 33 Death, Art, Vikings, and Flowers

Chapter 34 Teaching and Graduation

Chapter 35 Gorman Street

Chapter 36 Atlanta Again

Chapter 37 Moving

Chapter 38 Mutti

Chapter 39 Good Girls, Bad Girl, Good Guy, Bad Guy

Chapter 40 Trips

Chapter 41 Hollerin’

Chapter 42 An Indian on the Couch

Chapter 43 A Roommate and a Goodbye

Chapter 44 Music and a White Cat

Chapter 45 A Pregnant Girl and a Pregnant Cat

Chapter 46 Dad to the Rescue

Chapter 47 A Pair of Lunatics

Chapter 48 A Midget named Lonesome

Chapter 49 The Hitchhiker

Chapter 50 Whiteville Beach

Chapter 51 Teaching

Chapter 52 Goodbye, Paradise

Chapter 53 Rescuing Noni

Chapter 54 A Good Start

Chapter 55 The Avon Lady

Chapter 56 Doomed Lovers

Chapter 57 Sick of Love

Chapter 58 The Final Blow

Chapter 59 Vengeance

Chapter 60 Mountaineers

Chapter 61 Another Planet

Chapter 62 Roosters, Chickens, Mules and Donkeys

Chapter 63 Unexpected Visitors

Chapter 64 A Rude Discovery

Chapter 65 Farewell

Chapter 66 Homeless

Chapter 67 The Magazine

Chapter 68 The Business of Selling Lies

Chapter 69 Top of the Morning

Chapter 70 IBM

Chapter 71 Two Weddings

Chapter 72 A Business of One’s Own

Chapter 73 Two Bulls in a Pen

Chapter 74 Heaven out of Hell

Chapter 75 Lovers and Leaving

Chapter 76 Woodland Hospital

Chapter 77 Transference

Chapter 78 More Than One Person

Chapter 79 Religion and Madness

Chapter 80 Waiting for Jesus

Chapter 81 Annie’s Place

Chapter 82 The Witches

Chapter 83 Richard and Elise

Chapter 84 Death Wish

Chapter 85 At Last

This book is dedicated to my family,

in hopes they never read it.

Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realized joy could be.

– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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CHAPTER 1

Telling It All

O ur families can shape our fears and help mold our dreams, determining who we are to become. First, they give us our genes, then they help weave that complex tapestry of our environment, creating ties that we are never quite able to sever.

My name is Madeleine Morgan. It is the late summer of 2007 and I have driven from Worthington on the coast of North Carolina to spend the afternoon with my grandmother on her farm near Beaulaville. I passed through miles and miles of depressing, dismal swamplands, then mercifully into farm country where vibrant green grass, huge oak trees and deserted tobacco barns punctuated the landscape that Time had forever changed. The earth was a verdant paradise, covered in tall corn fields and sprawling vegetable gardens. The sun had come out, making it a fine summer day.

I was going to pick up the quilt that my grandmother had promised to give me, and I wanted to get it before any of my aunts carried it away, or worse, before my grandmother passed away. She made it long, long ago before there were high-tech sewing machines and sewed most of it by hand in fine little stitches.

I finally pulled into Grandmother’s driveway and Cordelia, our family caretaker from years ago, greeted me at the door. I hadn’t seen her since my grandmother’s birthday party. Both she and her son were there that day.

At 73 years old, she had not changed much in her appearance, except to add a few more pounds and short gray hair. She could have carried my little grandmother around like a baby doll.

Cordelia! I cried, running up to kiss her.

Oh, Look! she said, It’s Maddie! Don’t you look good for an old woman! She hugged me so hard it hurt.

Where did my father find you? I asked Cordelia.

Oh, he heard on de grapevine dat I moved to Beaulaville, she said. He’s kep up with me all de years.

Cordelia looked straight into my eyes. Yo’ daddy is a great man. He got dat basketball scholarship for my son, den Leroy went pro, and we’ve lived mighty good from dat. My boy bought me a Mercedes, brand new, and built me a big brick house in Beaulaville. Then it got so lonesome in dat big house, and yo’ daddy was lookin’ for someone to stay with his mama, so here I am! she laughed. Come have some of my famous chocolate cake!

I followed her inside the ancient farmhouse. My grandmother was sitting in her old rocking chair, her small feet barely touching the floor.

I walked over to her and gave her a kiss on the forehead. Hello, Grandmother, I said in a loud voice, so she could hear me. How are you?

I reckon I’m okay for an old settin’ hen like me. I laughed. She loved to make people laugh.

Grandmother became 100 years old in February. We gave her a great celebration at the community center. I wrote a poem for her and one of my nephews played the violin. A newspaper photographer took her picture. The place was packed with our huge family and other well-wishers. My aunts had her dressed for the occasion in a pink suit and set her on a white wrought iron park bench with a pillow under her and a tall a plant beside her—a good background for all the people taking pictures of her. She was delighted with all the attention.

Now she is sitting on the indoor porch of her old white country house, wearing a navy blue dress, her pearls, and crowned with her tightly coiffed white hair. It is hard to fathom that this matriarch of the Morgan family, a little finch of a woman, gave birth to ten children. Nine girls and one boy. The poor boy was my father.

The old window air conditioning unit was making a lot of noise, so she asked me to turn it off in an effort to hear us as we exchanged pleasantries and talked about last week’s stormy weather. Her mind was clear and she was loquacious—she loved to talk. Incessantly. Her memory was legendary.

Tobacco used to grow in fields on both sides of the house and behind it for acres and acres, but now all the land is planted in cotton. The barns are decaying, looking like they belonged in a Bob Timberlake painting. The old well had been sealed up long ago, but it was still there. A rusting tractor sat under a shed. The chicken coop, the pack house, and the corn crib, all newer than the house, were unpainted but still standing. There are huge oaks surrounding my grandmother’s house, draping around it like a thick shawl. The long low lines of sunlight on this afternoon slide through the wavy old windowpanes and pronounce every wrinkle in my Grandmother’s face.

Aside from her sometimes improper English, she was as proper as a lady should be. She never swore or used foul language. Having grown up on a big dairy farm, there was not much time for school, but she had the sagacity of a scholar. As was her habit, she began to tell a story. Cordelia brought the cake in on Grandmother’s good china. I dove into mine but my grandmother took tiny little bites. Cordelia wolfed hers down.

Yes, the storm we had last week was bad, but I’ve seen worse, Grandmother said. Much worse. On October 15, 1954, your birthday, Maddie, Hurricane Hazel hit North Carolina. It was the worst storm I ever saw, she began.

I sure remember DAT storm, said Cordelia. It tore our house to pieces—I had to go stay wif my sister and we was all scared as a ‘glass-eyed’ mule. We laughed. Cordelia looked at the clock and said, Oh, it’s time for my soap. I’m gonna go watch it and then I be back. I’m sure she had heard many stories since coming to live with my grandmother and didn’t need to hear another one. She also knew instinctively that I wanted some time alone with my grandmother.

I’ve never heard much about Hurricane Hazel, I said.

Mmmhmm… Grandmother continued. Well you ought to hear it because it was on your birthday. It hit here about eight o’clock in the mornin’. I looked out the windows and it shot a big pine tree right through the barn like a bullet. It took my sister’s roof off, but no one was killed. There was people that did get kilt, though. It blew my pack house all to splinters. All my buildings had to be rebuilt after the hurricane. I lost my chicken coop and all my chickens. It tossed our old car around like a toy. If I’d a-known the storm would be that bad this far inland, I’d-a shet all my chickens up in the kitchen.

It came on a full moon. We were all scared to death and hunkered down on the floor. The house was creakin’ and swayin’ and it blew the roof off the front of the house. The only thing that held the rest of the house together was the Good Lord. I knew we had to get to Grace’s house somehow. Her house was a lot newer than mine and built strong. Your mother was pregnant with you and she started to go into labor, as if the storm wont bad enough. I lay beside her on the floor and squeezed her hand. She moaned and groaned and I felt so sorry for her. Five of my girls were there with me. The other four were with their husbands. Zeke, your daddy, was away at Wake Forest Seminary near Raleigh. I told the girls we were gonna have to move to Grace’s soon as the Eye came through. It gets real calm when the Eye passes over. That was our only chance to git over there.

Anyway… She coughed into her handkerchief, then continued: "We waited and waited, it seemed like it would never stop—the winds so loud you couldn’t hear nobody talkin’. Everything was being tore to pieces. But, finally, the Eye come over us and I said, ‘Okay, girls, we’ve got to go to Grace’s and carry Annalee. Come here and put your arms up under her.’ My girls were strong—they’d worked in tobacco all summer and was tough as nails. Annalee was a frail thing; I knew she’d be easy to carry. So we started out the door with her across the field. I held her head and neck. I don’t know how long it took us, but the winds started up again, and Jean, my youngest one, got blowed into the side of Grace’s house. She had broke her arm, but we didn’t know it yet. I banged on the door and Grace let us in.

Oh, Father, Grace said, Is she in labor?

Yes, I told her. Tell J.C. to go and stay in the kitchen. And tell him to take a look at Jean’s arm.

Grandmother took a deep breath and said, J.C. was a medic in the army. Anyhow, I told Grace, ‘She’s goin’ to have this baby soon, I can tell.’ J.C. got up and took his cigarettes and left the room.

Okay, I said. You girls go on in the front parlor and play some cards or somethin’. Grace go get me some clean sheets. I’m gonna lay her down on the rug. The bed’s too soft. She’s got to have somethin’ hard to push against.’ Grace went and got the sheets and we put a clean sheet under her and laid her down on the rug.

Grandmother paused to take a sip of her sweetened iced tea. Then she continued. I said, ‘Grace, go draw up some of the water you saved and put it in the kittle on the wood stove.’ It was dark in the house. We had no power. No phone. Thank the Lord they had a wood stove like mine. That’s all Grace had ever cooked on. She walked back to me and said, ‘Okay, I’ve set the water to boil. What else do you need?’ I said, ‘Go tell J.C. we need a lantern in here and get a sharp knife. Dip the knife in the boiling water. Here, put a pillow under her head.’

Grace went and got the lantern, the knife and the pillow. We tried to make her as comforble as we could. She was moanin’ and groanin’ to beat the band. Annalee asked me, ‘Mrs. Morgan, have you ever delivered a baby before?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I told her, ‘Plenty of ’em. I used to be the midwife around here before I had so many younguns of my own. And don’t call me Mrs. Morgan anymore. Call me Mama Morgan.’

‘Thank you, Mama Morgan,’ she said, ‘I think this baby is about ready to come out.’ Then she wailed like the wind outside.

I told her, ‘Take deep breaths. I know you wish your own mother was here.’

She nodded. She’d been in labor a little over two hours, not very long. I had taken her skirt and underwear off and put a sheet over her. Grace held the lantern as I pulled the sheet up a little. I was down on my knees and prayin’ silent-like. I knew the Lord still hears you when you pray that way. I prayed, ‘Sweet Jesus, let this baby be okay.’ Grace leaned over and wiped her forehead with a wet washcloth. The wind was blowin’ so hard we still had to shout to hear each other. Grace’s house was swayin’, too. We could hear trees crashin’ down. The pumphouse got blowed through the windows and Annalee screamed. It was time for her to start pushin’.

I said, ‘Push as hard as you can. Use all the strength the Lord give you. He’s with us.’

She was so dilated, I started to see the top of your little head. It was covered with somethin’ white. ‘Keep pushin,’ I said, ‘I can see the head.’ She pushed hard two or three more times and the head come out. It was covered in a white thin skin. I knew what it was, but I didn’t say nothin’. Grace couldn’t see from where she was. That was good. I didn’t want to scare Annalee. ‘The head’s out,’ I said. ‘It’s comin’ out real easy.’ I kept lookin’ at the white skin around your head. I knew it was a caul. I’d never seen one before. It’s awful rare for a baby to have a caul.

What’s a caul, Grandmother? I asked her.

I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s like a real fine skin that’s wrapped around the baby’s head. It don’t hurt ’em. It’s s’posed to mean the baby has special powers. They can tell the future and can’t never drown, some people say, but I don’t put no stock in that kind of thing. We laughed.

Grandmother went on. People used to save the cauls and sailors would try to buy ’em to keep from drownin’ at sea. Mostly, people saved them and kept them as a heirloom.

It’s ironic that this wonderful act of creation was happening during the storm’s destruction, I pointed out.

Mmmhmm… Grandmother said and took a deep breath. Some people say the people with cauls go mad and try to kill themselves. Neither Grandmother nor I said anything for awhile. She fidgeted with the pearls her daughters had bought for her, stared out the window at the setting sun on the bright green lawn, and then she continued, I don’t know what it’s s’posed to mean. Anyway, I reached down to see how easy I could pull off the caul so you could breathe. It came off pretty easy. Then I reached down and started ever so gentle pullin’on your head. Your neck was out. Annalee cried out and your shoulders come out. Then the rest of you shot out like a bullet. You started squallin’ and flailin’ your arms and your legs and I was so relieved.

I said, ‘Annalee, the baby’s out and it’s a girl. You’ve got a beautiful baby girl.’ I told her to be real still and I cut the cord.

We got some water off the stove and toted you in the bathroom. Grace got your mother a clean nightgown and we put you and her in the bedroom on a nice soft bed. She was all flushed and beamin.’

The storm was movin’on and the sun started peepin’ out from the clouds. We didn’t even care no more about the storm, we were so happy you were okay.

And that’s how you were born fifty-five years ago, come October.

I’ve heard part of that story before, I said. But not about the caul. What did my mother do with it?

I told her all about it and she said to have J.C. bury it in my backyard, after the storm was over.

Cordelia came back from watching her soaps. Was that the best cake you ever ate?

Yes, I said, it was as good as I remember it being. Grandmother took another sip of tea and said, I’ve got more things to tell you that you never heard, but I’m goin’ to keep it short, because I’m gettin’ tired out.

Don’t strain yourself, Grandmother, I said. You can tell me next time.

That’s right, Maddie. She don’t need to be tellin’ no more stories—it’s time for her to get in bed and take her medicine, Cordelia said.

There may not be a next time, Grandmother said. I’m 100 years old. I don’t see you very often and I want you to know these things. Grandmother raised her voice when she said this.

The sun had sunk like a ship and it was getting dark. Grandmother asked me to open the windows.

My grandmother, your great-great grandmother, had twenty-two children, she announced.

Twenty-two children! I cried.

Lawd a’mighty! Cordelia said. It’s a wonder she was still livin’. Twenty-two children! Mnnn hnn hmmm… Cordelia shook her head.

Yes, my grandmother said. But of course, after that, they had to put her in an insane asylum.

I laughed out loud, but I shouldn’t have.

Grandmother, I said, why have I never heard of this before?

The family don’t like to talk about it. And that’s not all you never heard. Apparently the importance of her centennial year brought on something of a confessional.

Well, your Great Aunt Delilah—that’s on your Granddaddy Morgan’s side—lived down the road in Benton. Her husband never was any good to her, beat on her all the time. One day she was in the kitchen peelin’ and cuttin’ up potatoes for dinner. Here comes Axle walkin’ in the screen door—she had sent him out to pay some bills. She asked him if he paid them and he said something smart to her and slapped her across the face.

Was he drunk? I asked.

No, you know there’s no drinkin’ in your granddaddy’s family—or mine neither. Axle was just plain mean, that’s all.

Dey be mens like dat, Cordelia said. Call the Law on ’em. Women don’t have to put up with nothin’ that bad.

So then he smacks her again, Grandmother continued. Delilah decided she had took enough. She stood up, wiped her hands on her apron, takes the potato knife and stabs him clean through the heart. Grandmother took the last sip of her tea. He dropped cold dead. I drew in my breath.

Then Delilah went to the phone and called the police and said, ‘Come get this jackass out of my house!’ We all laughed.

Praise the Lawd! Cordelia cried, slapping her knee. A woman can only take so much.

Your granddaddy saw the whole thing. She never spent a day in jail. Claimed it was self-defense and she had the bruises to prove it. But the family never spoke to her again. We didn’t want any murderers in the family, guilty or not.

I looked around the odd closed-in porch, filled with sparse furnishings, everything in perfect order, and I stood up. Grandmother flicked a piece of lint off her dress.

You know, Maddie, my grandmother said, out of all my grandchildren, you and Trudy are the only ones I ever had to spank.

Grandmother, you’re kidding! I laughed.

When you were a toddler, it once took four people to hold you down to change your diaper. My Lord, you were something! And spoiled, like your daddy, him being the only boy and all, Grandmother said.

Grandmother, do you have any faults? I asked her.

I have one. I don’t die. Cordelia and I laughed.

Well, I said. I came to pick up the quilt you said I could have. The red one.

Oh, Cordelia said, we got it laid out for you. Let me go git it out of the back bedroom.

When she returned with the quilt, I looked at it in amazement and saw the tiny perfect stitches.

Grandmother, are you sure you want me to have this? Grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair. Cordelia looked at me.

Maddie, take de quilt and let me go put her to bed.

Okay, Cordelia. Thank her for me tomorrow when she’s awake. I love you, Cordelia!

I love you, too, baby. Don’t you go gettin’ in no trouble, you hear?

I won’t, I said. I’m glad my grandmother is in good hands.

I walked out the screened door and got in my car, laying the quilt beside me on the passenger seat. It was perfect for my bedroom—a lot of tomato red, one of my favorite colors.

I was glad I had a chance to talk with my grandmother. I didn’t know it would be the last time I ever saw her. She died of a stroke at the age of 102.

All the way home, I thought about my grandmother’s history. My grandmother and my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, were sharecroppers. They worked in tobacco, and all their children worked in tobacco, right alongside the black folks, until my grandfather died. Then Grandmother opened a little country store out on Highway 70 and sent three of her children to college with what money she made in that little store. She wanted all of her children to be educated, as well as they could be.

According to Aunt Grace, Grandmother was a mean woman until my grandfather died and she started going to church and opened the store. I couldn’t imagine her ever being mean. Knowing her all of my life, it just didn’t seem possible.

I remember the store very well. It was on the main thoroughfare from the coast to Raleigh, a small concrete block building with a tin roof and no central heating. In the winter, the heat came from an old potbellied wood stove Grandmother lit up at five o’clock in the morning to get the place warm for early risers. All the widowed farmers in the community would come in, sit around the stove in cane-backed chairs, dipping snuff and chewing tobacco, vying for a bit of Miz Amy’s attention. They talked about the weather, last year’s crops, anything they could engage her in. She was determined to never remarry, but we still teased her about the old men at the store. Especially Joe White. He sat in the store all day, and the store smelled mostly like his aromatic pipe tobacco. I liked the smell of it.

Grandmother had cans of Peach snuff, chewing tobacco, a big wheel of hoop cheese, pickled eggs, pickled pig’s feet, canisters of Jack’s cookies and a huge glass and wood cabinet full of penny candies, like Mary Janes and Fireballs. There were also vegetable bins, stuffed with vegetables from her garden—tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupes, butter beans, and corn. Pepsi and other soft drink signs and calendars covered the walls. There were no drink machines back then but huge coolers as big as coffins full of ice that kept the coldest nickel sodas you could ever drink. Brownie sodas were my favorite. Out front, the gas pumps looked like those in the Edward Hopper painting. Grandmother pumped the gas herself.

Summer time was the best time at her store. Pick-up truckloads of glistening black people arrived after a long morning in the tobacco fields—cropping, handing, stringing tobacco. I would try to help Grandmother wait on them but could not understand their strange country dialect, so she would translate for me: Three Nehi grape sodas, six pickled eggs, and six moon pies, she would say, adding them up on her adding machine, then letting me ring them up on her old cash register.

Back then, sodas came in glass bottles and had to be opened with a bottle opener on the front of the coolers. Glass bottles keep drinks colder. I was highly impressed by one tall, big-boned girl who could open a Pepsi-Cola bottle with her teeth. She would spit out the bottle cap in her hand, toss it in the trash, and pour a pack of salted peanuts down the neck of the soda bottle, then drink the whole thing, peanuts and all, in one gulp.

All the black people and the white folk held a very high opinion of my grandmother. She not only sold them colas and peanuts, she gave them advice on their crops and their marriages and let them cry in her arms, laughed at their corny jokes, and most of all, gave them a place to feel at home. I’ve heard that a country singer in Nashviille who grew up in Grandmother’s community wrote a song about her and the old store.

She tended the store until she was seventy-five and the family deemed that it was no longer safe for her to be out alone on Highway 70. The family also took her car away, after she mistakenly took someone else’s car for her own, couldn’t get the key to work, and was in the process of having a perfect stranger’s car towed away downtown when the owners showed up. That was the big story at Christmastime that year. It rocked the house with laughter.

The family continued to get together at Christmas in Grandmother’s house until it got so crowded we had to move the party to a big restaurant in a neighboring town.

As many aunts, cousins and other relatives that I have, I never got close to any of them. How do you get close to someone who you only see or hear from once a year? But I love my aunts, and know they love me. Even so, I felt like the pariah of the family. Now Grandmother was telling me that I wasn’t the only one.

CHAPTER 2

Pop

A s much as I loved my paternal grandmother and both of my parents, the person who took hold of me, who greatly influenced my childhood, the person who made me shine, was Pop.

Ironically, Pop was not really my maternal grandfather. He was my grandmother’s second husband. Like my father’s father, my grandfather had died before I was born. He was killed in a mining accident, while working as a mine inspector for the state of Tennessee. But Pop could not have loved me more, even though I was not his flesh and blood, and in fact, he probably loved me a little too much. He just loved children, and sent regular contributions to Boys Town. If there was a sick child in the town, he went to visit with them.

Pop was the third son of German immigrants who were wood craftsmen. He served in the Navy and the Merchant Marines, traveling all over the world and documenting his travels in a large photo album he kept locked away, telling me I would not be allowed to see it until I was older. This album, then, became my holy grail, something I dreamed of possessing all of my young years.

With Pop, every day was a holiday and every moment a dramatic event. Standing over six feet, six inches tall, with milky white hair and watery blue eyes, my father must have felt dwarfed by him. Pop had the largest hands I had ever seen, and when they scooped me up in the air, I felt like nothing could ever bring me down.

When I was five years old, my mother gave birth to a boy they named Edward, and he immediately became a threat to my craving for attention. Pop and Noni still spoiled me the most, however, because I was the firstborn and Pop took endless pictures of me, some of which I have to this day. Edward, or Teddy, as we called him, was Mother’s favorite, and I was Pop’s favorite, so that seemed fair to me.

Because we lived in eastern North Carolina and Pop and Noni, my maternal grandparents, lived in East Tennessee, I only got to see them two or three times a year. Usually, we spent a week at Christmastime and several weeks during the summer. In between these times, he sent lots of hand-illustrated letters about Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone and packages filled with cookies and comic books, which probably cost a sizable portion of his small income. Because he never had children of his own, and I’m not sure why, I suppose I fulfilled some need in him and I certainly didn’t mind reaping the rewards of that role.

Everything with Pop was an adventure. Traveling to see Pop and Noni was an adventure in itself. We had to cross the Great Smoky Mountains and in those days, there were no four-lane highways— only narrow, snaking roads and hairpin curves that we many times crossed in the snow and ice, slipping and sliding along through a winter dreamland. At least it was a dreamland for me; for my dad, who had to do the driving, it was a nightmare.

In the summertime, the treat was to spot as many black bears as we could and get close enough to feed them, which now, of course, is strictly prohibited.

We’d pass through lovely Maggie Valley and always stop in Cherokee where we spent a few dollars on Indian crafts made in Japan, had picnics beside clear running streams pebbled with large smooth stones. The air was always pure and clean, but it was hazy with smoky clouds which gave the Great Smokies their name. The mountains, for me, became a place of great magic, mystery, and surreal beauty.

When we’d arrive at Pop and Noni’s, Noni would be looking out the living room window, signaling Pop to put the needle down on the record player the moment we reached the front door so as we walked inside, Doggie in the Window would be playing, as if all the hugging and kissing and greetings needed a soundtrack to make things more dramatic than they already were. They repeated this custom every visit, up until I was six or seven.

Noni’s house, the house she grew up in, was like a fairy castle to me. It was only a rather plain two story white frame house with a simple floor plan, but the secrets and stories it contained made it greater than treasure to me. Situated on a steep cliff at the base of a small mountain, it hung above the small town of Poplar Springs like a lonely specter in the clouds.

Poplar Springs had been a resort town in Noni’s day, famous for its natural springs and a great three story hotel where people came from far and wide to take the baths, which were supposed to be healing.

But by the time I was born, the hotel had burned to the ground, the Depression had taken its toll, the tourists were gone, and the miners had moved in. There were still three or four grand old homes on Main Street, either vacant or occupied by lonely spinsters from a bygone era. In the wintertime, the air was pungent with the scent of coal fires burning and that scent still brings back fond memories for me.

In the summertime, Pop always built us a teepee by cutting down and tying together five or six saplings, and covering the whole thing with Indian blankets from his travels. His imagination was endless. He made us a money-finder (fake metal detector) out of tin pie plates and an old mop handle that we would push through the grass hoping to find nickels and pennies he had made sure to toss over the lawn beforehand. He made a wooden airplane he attached to the heavy wire clothesline. We could sit on it and push each other down the lines to make us feel like we were flying.

We found box turtles in the garden and Pop would paint a dot on them with Noni’s nail polish, then we’d look for them again the next summer. We picked cherry tomatoes and watermelons and cantaloupes that Pop had planted and Noni would cut them into wedges for our lunch.

Teddy and I played Cowboys and Indians up on the mountain behind the house, and Pop would hide behind a tree with a real gun and shoot blanks at us, scaring us half to death, but making our play seem larger than life. The highlight of our summer visit was to climb to the top of the mountain where a huge beech tree stood, carved with the initials of my mother’s family, going back to my great-great grandfather. We’d come down from the mountain, hot and tired, full of ticks and chiggers, and eat popsicles in the cellar which was built into the side of the mountain where it would always stay cool. The roof of the cellar was attached to the roof of the back porch, which was attached to the second floor, so on hot summer nights Teddy and I would crawl out the bedroom window upstairs and sit on the roof, identifying constellations. Other nights, we’d catch fireflies in jars and watch them until we decided to let the captors go. I thought Popular Springs was the grandest place in the world.

In the wintertime, we’d play in the snow; Noni made the best snow cream, and we’d help Pop build great roaring fires in the fireplaces. I loved to play in the closet under the stairway, pulling down hatboxes and trying on Noni’s huge selection of hats. There was nothing more reassuring than waking up on a cold winter morning, tiptoeing down the stairs barefoot and going into the little bathroom on the first floor, turning on the small electric heater and warming one’s toes while counting the flamingoes on the gray and cream wallpaper as Pop made oatmeal and hot chocolate for breakfast.

For as long as I could remember, Noni had some kind of illness, which I now believe to be mental illness, so Pop did all the cooking and household chores. She spent most of the day in bed. Depression was not well-treated in those days.

I never tired of inventing games with Pop and Teddy, playing with Noni’s big jar of buttons, or finding hiding places in the closets and nooks of that old house. Unlike Grandmother Morgan’s house, which was spare and pristine, Noni’s house was packed with so many cherished objects that she let us play with, like the ceramic old balloon man and woman, the old Mexican and his burro, the ceramic loaf of bread with scriptures printed on colored cards that fit inside it—cheap curios that were priceless to us. Pop had tons of magazines, so I never got bored or felt less than enchanted.

I suppose because my father was a minister and we moved around so much, every three years, and always lived in parsonages, never owning a home of our own, Pop and Noni’s house became what I considered to be my true home. It never occurred to me that it would not be there forever, waiting for me like a fortress in the sky, no matter how far away I roamed.

And without Pop, it would have been just another old house. It was his presence, his imagination, his stories, his games, his many creations, that gave it such a big space in my heart.

CHAPTER 3

Preacher’s Kid

M y father was a liberal Baptist minister. That sounds like an oxymoron, but there are many kinds of Baptists in this world.

A Baptist from First Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina could not be dragged into a Freewill Baptist or Independent Baptist Church, and vice versa. My father did not believe in the death penalty, war, or segregation. He attended Wake Forest Baptist Seminary, which most Fundamentalists thought of as an atheist factory, but of course it was not. He did not preach hellfire and brimstone, he read scripture and explained the context in which it was written, resulting in sermons that often flew over the heads of his audience in small town churches. Like his mother, he was a raconteur. But he was a devout man with a good mind and a devilish sense of humor and fun, which developed into entertaining anecdotes about various members of his congregation. He was also a practical joker.

I’ll never forget the night he hypnotized our babysitter while my mother was still at church. He gave the girl an empty glass and said it was Pepsi-Cola and told her to drink it. She did, even though it was empty, then let out a huge burp.

Dad and I laughed like hyenas, until my mother came in and put a stop to it, along with a strict ban on all hypnosis, a skill my dad had picked up while in college.

The Reverend Morgan met my mother, Annalee, while they were attending college. She was a demure, svelt, soft-spoken lady who dressed stylishly but modestly and majored in music and French. Besides playing piano and organ, she had a lovely soprano voice, all of which made her the perfect choice for a minister’s wife.

My parents lived amicably with Grandmother Morgan for a year or so before I was born and my dad was still in the seminary. My Father’s first church was in Elizabethtown. It was there that my first memory took place: I am sitting at a little yellow table with matching chairs that Pop had made, eating chicken and dumplings and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Somehow, first memories always involve certain colors. My color was yellow, because of the bright yellow table and chairs. I felt warm, well-provided for and much loved. I was three years old. But I did not feel like a child and never thought of myself as a child.

My best friend was a 21 year old mentally challenged boy who lived a few doors down, named Willie. Although he was much bigger than me, I thought we were a perfect match. We used to play hide-and-seek among the large hydrangea bushes that surrounded our small clapboard house. When we tired of that or other childhood games, we would go out back and chase the chickens—our favorite thing to do.

Because my father grew up on a farm, he always carried a part of it with him, so there we were, living in the city limits of Elizabethtown with a chicken coop and seven or eight chickens. Willie was enthralled with the feisty white birds and loved to gather their eggs. He’d go home covered in egg yolks and chicken manure, but very happy.

My mother took Willie with us everywhere we went. She adored him as much as I did. We were sitting in church one Sunday morning and my father was up in the pulpit, praying. My mother had on a new hat, a wide-brimmed white straw hat with feathers. Willie looked up and pointed at the feathers, grinned at me, folded his arms up under his armpits, flapped them, and started squawking Bwak-bak ba KECK! Bwak-bak ba KECK! My father lost his composure and the entire congregation laughed. We had to get up and take Willie home; he wouldn’t stop squawking.

Another interest of Willie’s was Sputnik, the Russian space satellite which was all over the news. He’d sit in front of our little black and white television screen and chant, Sputnik, Sputnik, Sputnik.

We were on our way to the grocery store one day and in the middle of the road stood a uniformed policeman, directing traffic. In his uniform, he must have reminded Willie of the Russians and Sputnik. Willie opened the car door and lunged at the policeman, shouting, Sputnik, Sputnik, Sputnik!

It took us half an hour to get him calmed down and back in the car; the policeman was flailing his arms, traffic went awry, drivers were shouting and honking their horns, it was utter chaos. I’m awfully sorry, my mother purred to the policeman, it won’t happen again.

It didn’t. On hearing of the incident, Willie’s parents took him to Raleigh and put him in Dorothea Dix Hospital. They tried to reason with my mother and me, saying it was the best thing to do before something worse happened, but we were inconsolable. My father tried to intervene, to no avail. Willie remained at Dorothea Dix, where he developed pneumonia and died. My parents shielded his death from me until years later, but I still knew that I had lost Willie forever. It was the first great tragedy of my young life.

We moved to another neighborhood and did not take the chickens. My father disposed of them the way he had been taught to on the farm. I was not supposed to know about it, but woke early from a nap and ran to the kitchen window before my mother could reach me, catching a glimpse of dead chickens in the backyard. I screamed and cried for hours.

That night I had a horrific nightmare; my mother and I were walking through a deep forest and she kept warning me to look out for knights in shining armor. I got lost and could not find my mother; I knew the knights in shining armor had captured her and cut her to pieces with their swords. A family from our church found me and put me in their car and told me they would take care of me, but I knew my mother was gone forever. I cried and cried, and continued to have the same dream over and over, throughout my childhood at various intervals.

One of our frequent visitors was my father’s college roommate, whom I was told to call Uncle Truman. He was a minister also— and a licensed airplane pilot, a guitarist, a ventriloquist and very gifted artist, who had dropped out of medical school and followed my father into the seminary. Uncle Truman was a Renaissance Man. He had a daughter my age whom I did not much care for. But I loved Uncle Truman. He would entertain the children from our church on Sunday nights with Happy Danny, his ventriloquist’s dummy, although I was secretly afraid of the doll and glad when it was time to put him back in the suitcase. Then the parents would come in and Uncle Truman would draw a stunning picture on an easel with chalk pastels, usually something to illustrate some part of Jesus’ life. He would turn out all the lights and turn on a spinning color wheel that would cast alternately green, red, blue and yellow light on the artwork. The effect was breathtaking; it illustrated the passage of time from dawn to dusk. As Uncle Truman would tell the Bible story, the scene he drew would change in mood as his voice would change in tone, creating a memorable background for a story that would forever burn in our minds.

One day, Uncle Truman, his wife and daughter rode with us to the beach. We had a picnic spread out on a quilt on the sand. Then my dad and Uncle Truman took us two girls in the ocean, way out past the breakers near the shore, over our heads, over their heads, and proceeded to try and teach us how to swim. We were both petrified and had to be taken back to our mothers. To this day, I have great respect for the ocean.

One disadvantage of being in a minister’s family was the moving from place to place. It was not always easy for me to make friends. For example, when we moved to Sea Haven, a little fishing village on the coast of North Carolina, a little girl stopped in our driveway while riding a brand new bike. I asked her if I could ride it and when she said no, I slapped her, which resulted in my mother’s having me follow her to her house and apologize to both the girl and her mother. Her name was Julie, and we became best friends, although the pecking order had clearly been established. She would follow my lead from then on.

The church had given us a record player for a housewarming gift, along with two records: Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (side 1) and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C (side 2) and the other record was the soundtrack to Oklahoma. I quickly memorized every word, every song in Oklahoma and knew every note of the Prokofiev by heart. I’d strut around the living room in one of my mother’s dresses, smeared with lipstick and rouge, holding a large, wooden spoon as my microphone and had Julie pretend to accompany me on the piano.

At the age of five, I knew that I wanted to be a performer; I wanted to sing and dance. But we were too poor to afford dance lessons and all the costumes like the other little girls wore, so I had to settle for piano lessons. My dad worked out a deal with Old Mrs.