10

Freaky Little Bastard

In my sundress and Mary Janes, I show off at my fourth birthday party in 1949 in our yard. Ronnie, fourteen, towers over us. Behind me, first and third from the left, are Byrd and Buddy McIntyre. The other kids lived on a neighboring farm.

I can imagine the intense humanity within our tenant house in the year before I was born: my just-married folks, a confused little boy, and my granddaddy, Ed Bishop. A widower now, he’d moved in too.

Ronnie was crazy about Granddaddy, and I would be later. He was a handsome old man, smart, of noble bearing. “He had a heart as big as a bushel basket,” Ronnie told me, picking the perfect metaphor for orchardist Ed, who could snap a twig off a tree and accurately predict its yield.

The tenant house was rough. The pantry lacked shelves for canned vegetables from their garden. Daddy, busy on the farm, kept putting off building them, until Mom put her foot down: No more sex until you do. Daddy built them that afternoon.

Mom was still babysitting Buddy and his little brother, Byrd, up at the big house during the day, while getting reacquainted with Ronnie in the evenings. Early was learning to be a stepdad while tackling the biggest job of his young life: supervising hundreds of acres for fastidious new owners.

The motoring gentry watched for years as Daddy worked along the dangerously narrow shoulder of the highway at Bridlespur’s residential entrance to trim ivy on the brick wall and pick up the trash that marred the ornamental gateway to the big house. One day, he found a bent-up bicycle along the roadside. Granddaddy urged him to repair it and give it to Ronnie, who’d never had a bike.

Daddy told me that he and Mom looked pitiful during their early married years. “Poor-poor” is how he described them, and he was not one for exaggeration. Their clothes were shabby. The cook at the big house felt sorry for them. Daddy fixed up the bike and sold it for ten dollars. Ronnie never forgave him. Daddy’s desperate need for that ten bucks didn’t come across to nine-year-old Ronnie. “They didn’t have any feeling for me,” he later told me.

During that period, Mom took Ronnie to Moneta to see his grandpa Emmett. They walked up as the old man was using a mechanical device to separate cream from raw milk. The cream wasn’t collecting at the top of the separator as it should. Grandpa blamed it on Ronnie’s presence. He seemed to think the bastard kid jinxed it, or that’s how it seemed to Ronnie.

Another time, on a hot day, Mom left Ronnie and a dog sweltering in a car while she attended a long service inside her childhood church. She didn’t want to have to explain who he was. “She didn’t know what to do with me. She couldn’t cope,” Ronnie later told me. As Ronnie perceived it, when people looked at him, they thought, You freaky little bastard. When Daddy’s favorite brother visited from out of town, Mom sent Ronnie to his room. Ronnie felt like an outcast.

Mom beat him “hard and often,” according to Ronnie. Many times he’d done nothing wrong, but when she was anxious or frustrated, such as when riding in the back seat of that lead-footed brother-in-law’s speeding Buick, she’d haul off and whack Ronnie on the head. Somehow the head whacks when she was under pressure felt true to me, even though I hadn’t been a victim of them.

* * *

SOME YEARS AGO, I drove two hours to the funeral of one of my favorite old ladies from our former church in Keswick. I was at the reception afterward when an elderly woman greeted me from a chair, “Mary Carter Bishop!” Then she said four surprising words: “I taught your brother.” I had never before found anyone in Keswick who knew that Ronnie was my brother. Gladys Leake, Ronnie’s teacher at Cismont School and an occasional principal by the time I got there, learned from a Moneta friend that Ronnie was Mom’s son, not her cousin. Gladys kept that secret for sixty years, until she heard from her friend that I was writing about Ronnie. Soon after that funeral, I went to see Gladys.

“He was one of my very favorite children. He was smart, sweet, clean, neat. I thought he had potential, really, to be great,” she told me. But Ronnie had a thick shell around him.

One day, Gladys announced to the class that an attendance officer would be visiting the following morning. The man traveled round the school system giving kids pep talks about concentrating on their studies and not missing school. Ronnie brought a knife in his sock the next day and laid it on his desk. He told Gladys he was afraid the man might take him away.

Gladys presented this to me as a more or less harmless incident, but one of Ronnie’s classmates told me later that the knife was about eight inches long and that Ronnie was plunking it menacingly into his wooden desk. Gladys deputized several big boys to wrestle it from Ronnie. Another time, when kids were outside during recess, he went back inside and turned all the desks upside down.

Gladys tried repeatedly to break through Ronnie’s walls. “I said, ‘You should open up and talk about your problems with people.’ He said, ‘But she . . . ,’ and then he must have thought, ‘I won’t say any more.’ He never said a word about your mother. Just the ‘but she.’ He’s been on my mind all these years. I loved him dearly. I still love him. But he was someone I couldn’t help.”

* * *

ANY ATTENTION RONNIE got from Mom and Daddy shrank immediately upon my birth in 1945. From that day forward, Ronnie moved to the permanent back burner in the Bishop household.

At last, Adria was a legitimate, seal-of-approval mother. That she named me Mary signaled her hope that I’d be pure and saintly. Her community cheered my birth. Anne McIntyre’s mother, Julia Sophie du Pont Andrews, sent a sterling silver baby cup engraved with my name and birth date. Nano McIntyre sent a decorated white flannel Christmas stocking from FAO Schwarz in New York. Mom’s Roanoke friend and landlady Mallie Moran sent a tiny brush and comb, and a pink silk jacket.

When I was ten months old, Mom took a picture of Ronnie and me in the side yard at our house. I’m standing in my diaper and a light-colored dress inside a wooden playpen that was elevated—raised, I suppose, so chickens, dogs, cats, and snakes couldn’t reach me while Mom did her housework. Rolling hills and the Southwest Mountains stretch behind us. Thin, long-limbed Ronnie, ten years old, wearing a plaid shirt, shorts, and a faint smile, stands beside the pen with his left hand supporting my back.

When I was about four and Ronnie around fourteen, Mom ordered him to take off all his clothes and stand naked in our tiny front foyer. Ronnie’s head dropped forward and his eyes were cast down as Mom dusted him head to toe with what I remember being an asthma powder, but it could have been a pesticide because by that time he was sleeping in the barn. She delivered it with a pump-action duster that she worked vigorously, as if she were killing those tobacco worms back in Moneta. Her eyes blinked rapidly and her face was angry, as if she didn’t want to see Ronnie’s skeletal frame. He looked as humiliated as any kid I’d ever seen. It was my first glimpse of Mom as another kind of mother.

Except for that memory and other general recollections of him as a gloomy, unwelcome presence at our house, my memory bank of Ronnie as a boy is empty. It was only through my conversations with him, decades later, that I filled in the blanks.

When Mom and Daddy took us anywhere in the farm pickup, I, the little princess, rode up front with them. Ronnie rode in back. He said I was a mean little shit to him. Deep in my mind is a filmy recollection of sticking my tongue out at him. He had to have been jealous and resentful, and how he acted that out toward me, I don’t know. I still sleep with my hands protecting my throat, and for no reason I know, I imagine that somebody’s peering in the window at me. I fear waking up to find an intruder by my bed. Ronnie told me that he spied on other people in Keswick. Why wouldn’t he have spied on my cozy life as a child basking in the adoration he’d once had from Polly and Roy?

Daddy told me that Ronnie’s and Mom’s personalities clashed and that Ronnie was rebellious. My folks were stumped as to what to do. When he was twelve and I was two, they enrolled him at Miller School, then a private boarding school for poor white boys in the Blue Ridge Mountains twenty-five miles from Keswick. It was a cross between an orphanage and a reformatory. For Ronnie, it was Boys’ Home all over again—mandatory farm labor, rigorous academics, vocational training, this time with a more military regimen. In an undated photo taken by our front porch, Ronnie wears a grayish-blue wool cadet-style uniform with black stripes running down the sides of his pants and on his jacket.

At the annual Miller School reunion in June 2015, I learned that Ronnie’s nickname was Slim Idaho. Classmates couldn’t remember why the “Idaho.” (Did Ronnie like potatoes?) But Ronnie called himself Slim for the rest of his life. Right before their picnic that day, in the shadow of the brick buildings where Ronnie labored and studied, the sweet old alums of Miller School christened me Sister Slim.

Except for two pairs of bibbed overalls issued each year, the boys produced their own necessities. They even bent the rails of their iron bed frames over the anvils in the school’s forge. On the school’s fifteen-hundred-acre farm, they milked the cows, picked the lima beans, shucked the corn, baked the bread.

Ronnie and the other boys slept in the unheated top-floor dormitories of Old Main, the Victorian building that’s still the heart of the school. When it snowed, the boys were forced to clamber out the windows to the high roof and sweep it clean to prevent leaks when it melted. The alums said the roof was slick, and it’s a wonder none of them fell off. As temperatures dipped, the school issued each boy three blankets—one in October, one in November, one in December. A glass of water left in the dorm froze overnight.

Each boy’s first year, he was declared a New Boy and forced to submit to the wishes of all who’d been there longer, the Old Boys. Ronnie shined their shoes, brought them water, and absorbed without lip the punches to his arms that any Old Boy might throw in a hallway. If he whined, they’d punch again, harder.

I asked Ronnie’s classmates how he reacted to this Lord of the Flies hierarchy. How aggressively did he lord it over the next wave of New Boys when he had his chance during his second year? They didn’t recall, yet one of them did offer this: “If I remember right, he kept to himself. Some guys just didn’t fit in.”

At first, Ronnie bought into Miller School’s promise that if he behaved himself, he’d be rewarded with a decent job after graduation. Less cooperative boys warned him that the school was a crock. “They were right,” Ronnie told me. “It turned them into professional shoeshine boys.” Actually, quite a few of his classmates became school principals, career military men, construction contractors, and well-respected businessmen.

In the spring of 1949, the school’s superintendent expelled thirteen-year-old Ronnie, then in the eighth grade. The record says only that Ronnie had shown a “disregard for rules.” Alums said that the superintendent was stern. They remembered the rubber paddle he flayed on their rear ends and the patterns its cut-out holes left in their hides.

Ronnie came back home to Bridlespur that spring but rarely approached our house, mostly sleeping in the barn. He went to work as a bag boy at the A&P grocery in Charlottesville, then as a caddy at Farmington Country Club in town. He set up an account at Morris’ Store at Keswick, where he bought potted meat, Vienna sausages, saltines, and when golf tips were good, strawberry ripple ice cream.

Ronnie insisted to me that our mother didn’t want him at our house and that she denied him food. I don’t know the truth about that, but I have no recollection of him eating with us or sleeping in the house, although he must have slept inside before I was born and when I was too young to remember. After his stint in the barn, early in his teens, he and friends from nearby farms, including preteen Buddy McIntyre, built a two-story log cabin up on the mountain for him to sleep in.

Daddy helped with construction of the pine-log hut. He contributed long barked slabs from trees he milled for fence boards, and he joined the young guys in nailing the steep roof together. The cabin was only eight by ten feet but tall enough that Ronnie, already six feet of his eventual six foot four, could stand up straight even on the second floor. With its steep roof, it looked more like a chapel than a house.

The cabin sat near the property line between Bridlespur and the nineteenth-century estate next door, Ben Coolyn, Scottish for “breezy mountain.” Charlie Hallock and his family moved into Ben Coolyn’s manor house on Charlie’s eleventh birthday in 1950. Ronnie, then fourteen, was a wonder to Charlie and his three brothers. He was the rare kid who answered to no adult. Charlie didn’t learn until years later who Ronnie really was.

A free agent, irreverent, Ronnie came and went as he pleased. He provided the Hallock boys with their first cigarettes and soft-core porn called blue books—pulp magazines featuring racy pictures, stories of derring-do, and science fiction.

Ronnie roamed Keswick like an undercover agent. He crept around the houses and peered in at the rich people in their dining rooms and in their bedrooms. For all its high-class charm, Keswick, to Ronnie, was a vulgar, craven place.

With all his prowling and peering, he was tweaking the monster’s tail. Keswick’s servant class customarily looked the other way at wild behavior by the rich, but here was Ronnie trespassing on Keswick’s most precious commodity: the freedom of the elite to do as they pleased, safe from prying eyes.

Ronnie had been stealing food from the estates for years. From his mountain refuge, he could wander an array of bountiful farms from their unprotected back acres. They were his buffet. He sampled fresh food from gardens, orchards, meat houses, and kitchens. With pride, Ronnie bragged to me how he pilfered figs, grapes, and peaches. He itemized, with the gusto of a gourmand, his early scores as a hungry boy: a head of cabbage, a jar of homegrown fruit, a pint of preserves, and cartons of frozen peaches. He broke into smokehouses, sliced meat off the hanging hams, and cooked it over an open fire.

The kitchen at Ben Coolyn was Ronnie’s greatest temptation. The Hallock boys occasionally spirited him into their house against the wishes of their parents. Ronnie knew that the boys’ mother kept her pantry fully stocked for her sons. In the middle of the night, Ronnie would unscrew the window screen in the Hallocks’ kitchen and climb inside. His most cherished booty was two angel food cakes. He’d fumble around in the darkness for canned goods. Often he’d get back to his campfire and curse his rotten luck that he’d bagged only cans of tomato paste, unpalatable even to a starving boy. The Hallocks came to expect Ronnie’s food burglaries, one of them told me. “Something would be missing, and we’d say, ‘That was probably Ronnie.’”

By the early fifties, when I was an oblivious first grader and Ronnie was sixteen, he was ramping up his thievery. Ronnie admitted to me later that he stole a sword, a gun, and a woman’s purse containing forty dollars.

On the other side of Ben Coolyn, middle-aged Leon Sebring Dure Jr. had moved into East Belmont Farm, an expansive estate with a Federal-style house built early in the nineteenth century. Dure, former White House correspondent for the Washington Post and managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, would soon become a key player in Virginia white leaders’ search for a way around court-mandated school desegregation. Dure invented “freedom of choice” as a way to keep most schools racially exclusive. Under his plan, white families received state grants for their children to attend all-white private schools. His system was struck down by federal courts in the late sixties.

When Ronnie filched weapons from East Belmont, he would learn for himself that Leon Dure was not a man to be toyed with. Ronnie hid one of Dure’s .22 rifles in a hay bale on another farm. A farmer discovered it when he went to feed his cows. I remember Mr. Dure—all rich people were “Mr.” or “Mrs.” to us—and he was an austere, formidable figure. He and the other powerful men and women of Keswick began to compare their notes on Ronnie Overstreet. They’d all been had by this renegade boy. They vowed to rein him in, and Mom and Daddy were targets too.

* * *

IN THE FALL of 1952, Leon Dure and his wife convened a summit of Keswick landowners fed up with Ronnie’s intrusions. They called in county sheriff’s deputies and summoned Mom to the library at the McIntyres’ house, where New Yorker magazines lay askew on the coffee table and horse show ribbons adorned the pine-paneled walls. Buddy McIntyre Sr. sat behind his desk. The Dures and other neighbors sat on the oxblood leather sofa and chairs.

Before Ronnie’s nocturnal prowling, these estate owners had never felt the need to lock their doors. Now, for the first time, they were locking them, and they didn’t like it. They told Mom that she’d better do something about Ronnie, or else. She took it to mean that she, Daddy, Ronnie, and I would be kicked off the farm. For Daddy to lose his job and our home would throw us into peril just as we were getting established—and it all would be because Mom gave birth to that illegitimate kid way back when. Years later, she would remember her humiliation that day. “Those old buzzards,” she said of the men, and perhaps women too, who called her on the carpet. Left to choose between her first child and her new family—Daddy and me—she chose us. In some sense, she had already chosen by leaving Ronnie to fend for himself.

I don’t know where I was when she faced that day’s ultimatum. For decades I had no clue what went down. I was seven years old. It was a Saturday. My folks must have given me strict orders to stay in the house, or else they sent me to somebody else’s house, which was a rarity.

I don’t know if my parents tricked Ronnie into being captured, but if they did, he would have smelled a rat. At least three deputies were present. Knowing what I do now about Ronnie’s lifelong defiance of authority figures, I doubt he calmly turned himself in. I imagine that his long legs carried him across the fields and into the woods, and when they caught him, that he fought like a wildcat.

He was seventeen years old, already six foot two, and underweight at 128 pounds. Ronnie told me he was jammed between two deputies in the back of a squad car as they roared out of Bridlespur’s farm road, headed for the highway. Destination: Western State Hospital, a notorious mental institution in Staunton, forty miles west of Charlottesville.

* * *

I DON’T KNOW who suggested Ronnie go there. Mom and Daddy, they both told me later, believed a mental hospital was a better place for him than a home for delinquents, where Ronnie would fall in with other bad boys. They weren’t sure what to do. But they were certain about one thing: They had to obey the farm owners’ orders to stop his stealing.

Since opening as the Western State Lunatic Asylum in 1828, the sprawling hospital was known throughout Virginia as a dismal, punishing place. Whenever I or any of my kid friends acted up, our mothers were sure to warn, “You’d better watch out or they’ll send you to Staunton.” Ronnie must have heard it too. Just like me, he never thought it would actually happen.

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Western State was run by Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, one of the nation’s most maniacal eugenicists. In 1947, when he retired at age eighty, he was still urging Virginia to quadruple its sterilizations of sick, poor, and socially disfavored people. He himself claimed to have personally sterilized six hundred men.

Ronnie assured me that he wasn’t sterilized at Western State, and his name does not appear on the Virginia Hospital Board’s list of individuals compelled to be sterilized during the period he was there.

In 2009, I filed a request for Ronnie’s records at Western State. It had been so long since he was there and that institution had changed so much, I doubted those records still existed. A few weeks later, I found a large envelope in my mailbox, return address: Western State Hospital. I took it to a quiet place in my house and opened it. Inside I found twenty-six heartbreaking pages that brought to life the drama that was playing out at home when I was too young to understand.

It was October 4, 1952, when the deputies brought Ronnie to Western State. Documents completed during his first days there threw many preliminary diagnoses at him. They stated that he was mentally ill—and mentally retarded—and that he suffered from delusions of persecution. A doctor examined him at five thirty that evening. Ronnie had a watch and thirty-five cents in his pocket. A social worker summed up his recent history: “Home environment good. Resents being corrected by mother. Threatens to injure mother by force. Patient wanders, threatens others and steals guns.”

The most disturbing pages for me were that social worker’s notes from October 22, 1952, eighteen days after Ronnie’s arrival, when my parents went in for a visit—I must have been left with friends of theirs. The pain of all the parties, even my own, is vivid. It was difficult to read my mother’s self-serving account of Ronnie’s behavior.

Patient’s mother and step-father came to the office today as requested for a history interview. Mrs. Bishop was a large, young appearing woman, neatly but cheaply dressed. She and Mr. Bishop seemed about the same age. They were pleasant and cooperative, answered questions readily and gave some spontaneous information. Mrs. Bishop expressed a desire to help the patient in any way she could, but showed little real warmth when speaking of him. Her husband came to the patient’s defense several times with the remark that several accusations had not been proven against the boy.

Mom, then thirty-six, told the social worker that from early childhood on, Ronnie had a “very high temper.” She noted also that he’d had an asthma attack the night before he was picked up on the farm and brought to the hospital. The social worker continued:

His half sister, age seven, seemed to like him although he would frighten her at times. He has for the last year threatened his mother, called her names, drawn pictures in which he would be shooting or stabbing her. He stole various articles in the community—axes, guns, knives and liquor, and the sheriff warned them that something would have to be done. Informants refused to permit him to bring stolen articles into the house, so he hid them in a cabin he and some boys built in the woods. He frequently wore a long dagger in his belt.

Recently Mrs. Bishop has been very much afraid of the patient. He has threatened her many times, but has not actually tried to hurt her physically. However, informants had no control over him. He stayed out the better part of the night. Often, when he came in in the early morning hours, his eyes would look “glassey” [sic] and his mother believes he was either drinking or taking dope. She has seen him drink on only one occasion, but empty whiskey bottles have been found in his room.

As far as it is known, patient has never actually had a date. Last year he went to a neighbor’s house nearly every night, possibly to see the neighbor’s daughter. The daughter was about 25 years old. The neighbor asked patient not to come so often, since the daughter had other boy friends. Shortly after this, patient let all of the air out of the neighbor’s tires and it is reported that he damaged other property around her home. He reads a number of “sexy” magazines.

Patient is very particular to keep his face and hands clean, to wear a clean shirt, shine his shoes and comb his hair. However, he refused to take a bath and seldom has his hair cut.

In a separate interview, Ronnie had his say. He asserted that Mom and Daddy had rejected him and made him feel unwanted. They gave all their attention to me and wouldn’t even help him with schoolwork. They treated him like a baby. Though Ronnie admitted to me later that he stole at least one gun, he denied it when questioned at the hospital. He acknowledged that he had few friends. “There’s just a bunch of rich boys at Keswick where I live. I’ve always stayed more or less to myself.”

During a mental test, when Ronnie failed to name four types of fish, his interviewer wrote that he exploded: “Jesus Christ, much as I fish and I can’t think of the names of them.”

A psychologist observed marked feelings of inferiority in Ronnie, who made a reference to “someone dumb like me.” She found his references to rich Keswick boys “wistful” and noted that his ambition was to attend night school and to get an “important” office job. She found his responses to her questions normal, although she said, “Anxiety and anger, sometimes well concealed, seemed to be the predominant reactions.” She came to the conclusion that he was of normal intelligence.

Three weeks after his arrival, Western State began administering electroshock treatments to Ronnie. I still don’t know why. In all, he would undergo at least five of them in less than a month. Because Ronnie was still a minor, I assume Mom gave her consent, although no such permission was mentioned in his records.

In notes from a psychotherapy session after the treatments, Ronnie argued insightfully that electroshock was hardly likely to help: “They can keep me here for fifty years or shock me one thousand times and I’ll still have the problem to solve when I get home.” Presumably, he meant the friction between him and his mother.

Earlier that month, he’d appeared for an interview before a roomful of hospital officials, including six physicians and three psychologists. Ronnie told them he came to Western State because of disagreements with his parents:

I didn’t get along with them too well, and things were going from bad to worse. I went out one night and came in about midnight and was accused of stealing some things. Two of the charges got proved against me. Things seemed to just get worse and worse, and they finally decided to put me in this place.

I have a sister who is 7 years old; that’s another thing. She is actually their child, and I guess that made them want to do more for her than they did for me. I just got fed up with that, got to running around, and got into trouble. I never took any dope of any kind in my life. I have drunk some—just a little.

Throughout the records, Ronnie refers variously to Mom as his cousin, his aunt, his grandmother, and his guardian. He said she wasn’t his “real” mother. Ronnie admitted that he’d threatened to kill her, “but she knew I didn’t mean it. It was about the only thing I could think of to keep her from picking on me. If you let me out to go back home, I’ll prove to you that I wouldn’t hurt her.”

Toward the end of the interview, Ronnie said he thought our mother would be glad if he left home forever, but “at my age and with no high school education, I couldn’t make a go of it, I don’t think.”

In a transcript of the post-interview discussion, panel members disagreed on whether Ronnie was psychotic, borderline psychotic, or understandably distraught over the way his life had panned out. Some considered him dangerously hostile. Another, a Polish-born psychiatrist new to the hospital, offered this opinion: “I don’t think he’s psychotic, but just reacting to everything like a boy would do. He’s just an unhappy boy who has had a difficult life.”

The psychologist who wrote the main reports on Ronnie’s mental condition thought Ronnie was “just a little psychotic, and maybe still salvageable.” They finally compromised by calling his condition a “schizophrenic reaction,” unspecified, with a passive-aggressive personality. They noted Ronnie’s extreme stress—“rejection by mother; poor home situation.”

Ronnie didn’t tell me much about Western State—only that there were no other kids in his building, just a bunch of loony grown-ups. To pass the time, he washed staff members’ cars. They told him he had no business being there. A psychologist there lectured Mom on her role in Ronnie’s behavior, which incensed her. Forever after, she had a low regard for mental health workers of all kinds.

Four months after Ronnie’s admission, the hospital bosses sent him to a barber school at nearby Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center, a state-run center that Ronnie recalled also trained disabled and wayward citizens in welding, clock and watch repair, and other employable trades. “Three square meals and they didn’t shock you”—a welcome change for Ronnie.

When his Western State psychotherapist called him in for a final assessment, Ronnie told him that he was contented at barber school and that he was going to dances and picnics on the weekends. “When I think of the way I behaved for a while there, I blush. I thought everybody was against me; that everybody was my enemy and I had to get them before they got me. I sure was mixed up.” To me, this sounds like Ronnie spoon-feeding the big dogs what they wanted to hear, but hey, whatever worked.

I don’t know if Mom and Daddy visited Ronnie. Hospital notes make no mention of it.

I don’t remember ever seeing him at Western State. I was there only once, as far as I recall, and it was disturbing. It was my college psychology class field trip, in the sixties. All I remember is crazed men with grimaced faces, their tongues wagging out, leering and raving from behind caged windows as I and my female classmates minced nervously into the auditorium for a show-and-tell about mental illness. When I saw the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, it reminded me of Western State with all its mad people warehoused in forbidding old buildings and dragged off to shock treatments. I had no idea my own brother had been one of them.

I asked two senior mental health professionals—a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist—to read Ronnie’s records. Neither saw the slightest indication that Ronnie was schizophrenic. The extensive hospital notes mention no visions, voices, or hallucinations, which are typical with schizophrenia. Both clinicians said the productive track of Ronnie’s life, which began the moment he was released and continued unabated until his death thirty-eight years later, disproved the diagnosis.

When Ronnie first arrived at the hospital, staffers thought he had delusions of persecution. But was he imagining that his mother had cast him aside? Was he imagining that he was an embarrassment to her? Ronnie was angry with Mom, and how, really, could he not have been? She rejected him. She tore him away from Polly and Roy and sent him to an orphanage, then a reform school, then a mental hospital.

As terrifying as Ronnie’s electroshock treatments must have been, he was lucky he didn’t have a lobotomy while at Western State, as did many patients during that time.

The last item in Ronnie’s file is a letter from Mom to hospital administrators early in 1954. She wanted them to know that late the preceding August, after ten months in state custody, Ronnie went to work at the American Barber Shop in downtown Roanoke. “As far as I know,” she wrote, “he is doing all right.”