12

I Walk into His Barbershop

Ronnie in January 1961 when he was twenty-five.

I’d been at the Philadelphia Inquirer less than three months when a reactor at central Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant partly melted, threatening to irradiate an entire region. Residents fleeing the area in cars packed with kids and dogs looked quizzical as I and an army of other reporters rushed by them toward the scene. I played only a small part in the 1979 coverage but felt the flush of glory when our news staff won a Pulitzer the following year. I could hardly believe I was on such a crack news team.

I’d think about Ronnie occasionally, but events would wash him out of my mind. I’d been assigned the job of investigating Philadelphia’s distressed public schools, and I spent more than a year analyzing a system of 273 schools, 224,000 students, and 26,000 employees. One of the city’s oldest high schools was so dilapidated, students defecated in the hallways. Teacher absenteeism was the worst in the nation. The school superintendent faked data in his doctoral dissertation. The system was rotten.

The teachers’ union was furious. On strike for fifty days that fall of 1981, they booed and spat at me as I ran alongside their protest marches, notepad in hand. A mob chanted my name outside the Inquirer’s towering white wedding cake of a building: “Send down Mary Bishop!” I’d been standing among them all day; they needed drama for the cameras.

I needed a long break, so I took a leave of absence from the newspaper and rented a creekside cabin in rural Rockbridge County, Virginia. It was beauty at the level of Keswick’s, without the pretension. I never went back to big-city journalism. Instead, I took a job running the one-woman Lexington bureau of the Roanoke Times & World-News, an hour from Roanoke. My job was to cover Rockbridge and two adjacent counties. What could possibly happen there? Murder, arson, rape, drug busts, political scandals, natural disasters, all kinds of social history. I never worked so hard in my life. Astonishing things happen everywhere. Daddy taught me that, but I’d forgotten.

* * *

I BEGAN TO think more deeply about Mom and Ronnie when in 1985, Sallie Johnson Wilcher, an elderly mountain woman, introduced me to one of the cruelest chapters of American history, the eugenics movement, a twentieth-century social program that filtered individuals judged to be genetically inferior out of the breeding pool.

Beginning in the 1920s, doctors, sheriffs, and social workers in Rockbridge County and elsewhere targeted individuals they decided shouldn’t reproduce. They rounded up unwed mothers like Sallie, as well as orphans, alcoholics, juvenile delinquents, and people with epilepsy, mental retardation, deformities, mental illness, and even contagious diseases such as syphilis. Authorities committed them to state hospitals, where many were sterilized and used as forced labor, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Nazi Germany considered Virginia’s eugenics law so efficient that it borrowed the law’s wording to set up a system that neutered thousands before the Holocaust. My high school and college classes never mentioned this cozy relationship between Virginia and the Third Reich.

In 1929, when Sallie was nineteen and the mother of an illegitimate toddler, doctors declared her “feebleminded,” a catchall label applied to a wide assortment of social undesirables. Sallie’s older brother-in-law had lured her to a barn and gotten her pregnant, just like what happened to Mom. Two years later, at the instigation of Sallie’s grandmother, who thought her wildness needed reining in, a welfare worker whisked away Sallie and her two-year-old son, Billy. Sallie was sterilized and put to work in the laundry of a large state mental hospital. She never saw Billy again.

Her son had died years before I met Sallie, but shortly before her death, in 1987, I learned she had three grandsons in a distant city. Billy’s widow sent her the boys’ pictures, along with snapshots of Billy at different ages. “Looks like his daddy,” Sallie said with a wink. She nearly wore out the photos, she squinted into their faces so often.

My Sallie stories led me to other eugenics survivors. I spent years writing about them. It could have been my mama who got locked up. She fit the formula: poor, unmarried country girl with an illegitimate baby. If she’d been targeted, I wouldn’t be writing this.

* * *

WHILE IN LEXINGTON, I had a feeling Ronnie was reading my work. Occasionally I’d win an award and my picture would be in the paper. He knew I was around—I was sure of it—but he never contacted me.

As the favored child, the onus was on me to reach out to him. He must have seen that I was writing about people and events an hour or more away from him. Maybe he forgave my not coming to find him. Maybe he saw I was busy elsewhere. Then again, maybe he didn’t want to see me. He might turn me away.

* * *

HE’D REAPPEARED BRIEFLY in my teens, flying up the dusty farm road in a big old car one Sunday afternoon. Ronnie was six foot four, well dressed in a shirt and tie, not bad looking in his midtwenties. His girlfriend, a six-foot-tall telephone operator, rode along. There was something of the greaser bad boy about Ronnie. His limbs sprawled casually across our couch, his long leg bones stacked against each other like firewood, he drawled with a sleazy nonchalance about cars and hunting and rambling alone through the woods. He laughed nervously. I felt a curious tension in the room. I wouldn’t see Ronnie again for almost three decades.

* * *

AFTER YEARS ALONE in the Lexington bureau, I wanted company. In 1987, when I moved to the main newsroom in Roanoke, I began to think more about Ronnie. I knew he would notice from my stories that I was in town. It was time for me to find him.

Mom said his barbershop was in Vinton, a little town on Roanoke’s eastern flank. I called a barber in the Yellow Pages, but he didn’t know Ronnie. Another sort of recognized his name. “Ronnie Overstreet? Oh, you’re talking about Slim. Yeah, he’s right there on Pollard Street in Vinton. Easy to find. It’s the Sportsman Barber Shop.” Ronnie’s place was across from the bank and the post office on Vinton’s main drag.

I drove there on a September afternoon. Outside the shop door, I peered through its plate glass window. Counters of the high-ceilinged shop were piled with magazines, books, and newspapers. One person was inside—a tall man, slumped, maybe asleep, in one of two barber chairs. He didn’t look familiar.

“Ronnie?” I walked tentatively through the door. He sat up, and when I saw his face, I knew it was Ronnie. He had changed, but I had trouble figuring out exactly how. He just looked odd and homely. He was staring at me, startled. I finally said, “It’s Mary Carter.”

“Goddamn,” he said, scrambling to stand and look me over. A small smile gradually appeared around his eyes and moved to his cheeks and mouth. “Pie, what’re you doing over this way?” Touchingly, affectionately, he used my childhood nickname. Judging from all the old copies of my newspaper scattered around, I knew for sure he’d been reading my stories all these years. Why had I waited so long?

In a minute, a customer slipped through the door. I settled into the line of black vinyl chairs where men waited their turns. Ronnie’s hands were masterful and quick. He could do a haircut in five minutes. In between, we got acquainted. I needed him to know how long I’d been in the dark.

“I didn’t know ’til a few years ago you were my brother. I found out by accident. They said you were my cousin.”

“Yeah, that’s the way it was,” he said, smiling awkwardly down at the floor.

“I didn’t find out ’til I got my birth certificate, and it said she had another kid. I should have figured it out.” My voice and face dripped with apology. We fell quiet for a minute.

A state trooper rushed in for a close trim. The two talked for a half hour. I was about to burst. But Ronnie let him drone on and on about some backwoods criminals. “Those mountain people don’t know any better,” Ronnie told him with a knowing snicker.

After the trooper, we talked for two hours. The facts of his life began to drop into place. We didn’t ask many questions of each other. We just said whatever came to mind, with him doing most of the talking. He mentioned foster parents and an orphanage.

“You had it all, kid, and I was cast off,” he said, throwing his giant right hand up like he was tossing something away. He threw me a fierce look. I knew he was right, and I felt exposed. I left my raincoat on the whole time I was in the barbershop that day.

But at the same time, I could tell that Ronnie had long wished to talk with me, just as I had him. I was the one person in the world who knew all the principal players in his story.

At first, as he told me what books he read or where he went turkey hunting, he tucked his head, chin to chest, rolled his eyes way back in his head, and peered at me in the narrow space between his glasses and his bulging brow. His eyes looked tiny behind thick black glasses much too small for his face. He looked frightening. The longer we talked, the more he lifted his head and looked me straight in the eye.

Oddly, because I could see he was a good barber, his own haircut was of the old mixing-bowl variety—straight, parted on the side, salt-and-pepper, and sticking out in sheets around his head. He obviously cut his own hair.

His voice veered from furious to tender. Trying to build some commonality, I criticized Mom’s treatment of him, but he called me on it. “She had it hard, Pie.” She was chased from home; she was forced to give birth among strangers in an unknown town. Our strict Methodist granddaddy did the best he could but was blinded by religion. The old man was humiliated by the sin inherent in Ronnie’s birth.

Long ago, Ronnie claimed, he resigned himself to Mom’s rejection. “She can’t handle” was his shorthand for her shame in his birth, a sentence even he couldn’t bear to complete, the unspoken “me” always hanging in the air.

Then, in a reverent tone, he posed this question: “You ever watch your mother write a letter?” Well, of course I had. Ronnie praised her “perfect” handwriting. She looked up spellings if she wasn’t sure. I didn’t mention how she, who dropped out of high school before becoming pregnant with him, routinely wrote “mabe” for “maybe” and “ect.” instead of “etc.” He took comfort in her talents and in mine and thought they were inherited.

I was always a careful speaker, taught never to cuss. I spoke like a good girl. But Ronnie inserted “damn” in nearly every sentence. A tough-guy habit, I speculated as I sat there listening. He said “nigger” a lot, hard to hear even if he was expressing solidarity with black people as his fellow underdogs. “Just me and the niggers,” he said of his callous treatment by Keswick people and those in authority elsewhere. Maybe Ronnie was why my folks freaked out so dramatically when in first grade I asked them what a “nigger” was. If Mom carried within her some evil seed, maybe it was popping up in me too.

To Ronnie, all female librarians, teachers—really, all grown women—were Old Lady So-and-So. Mom cautioned me as a child never to refer to women that way, or to men as Old Man So-and-So. Again, it must have been because Ronnie did.

He seemed to have read all my stories in the Roanoke paper. He proved it by remembering Sallie Wilcher’s sterilization and the seizure of her little boy. He remembered the young punks who strangled a Roanoke hooker, lashed her nude body to the hood of their car like a deer, and drove her miles in the middle of the night before dumping her in a country stream. He’d kept up with my work, so why hadn’t he called the newspaper and asked for me? “I’m your bastard brother, Pie. I didn’t want to drag you down.” Every advantage I’d ever had instantly felt like a minus in his column.

* * *

AS HIS TRIMMER buzzed away on a guy’s crew cut, I stood up slowly and mentally compared us in the horizontal mirror that covered the wall behind the barber chairs. I was forty-two; he was fifty-two. I couldn’t help but wonder if as I aged I might develop features like his. There were definite similarities—the straight hair, still some honey blond like mine in his gray; the deep-set eyes; the long, thin limbs; our family’s height. But something had transformed him since his visit to the farm all those years ago.

His voice was an octave lower, raspy, with crackling mucus. His face was overgrown with flesh and bone. His fingers were strangely long and his middle fingers ended in bulbs at the tips, like spring onions. Could a car wreck have messed him up? It looked more internal, more medical. I didn’t have the heart, or the nerve, to ask.

“Mary COD-ah, Mary COD-ah,” he kept singsonging to himself as we talked. He said my name just the way our mother did. He was savoring the fact that I’d come.

Before I left, I handed him a business card so he’d have my phone number. He placed it delicately in front of his 1930s cash register and smiled at it. My sister is a reporter at the biggest paper around.

I patted him on the back. He did not respond. Hugging him seemed out of line. The stiffness of his back told me this was a man who hadn’t been hugged much.

As I left, he called out, “If you need anything, you know where you can find me.”

I walked to my car, out of sight, and I wept.

Later on, I called Mom to let her know I’d gone to see him. I didn’t tell her much of what he said. She warned me to go slow. “Be careful. He might be putting on a good front.”

The year before, she and Daddy had gone to a reunion of her Moneta School classmates. Her thick silver-blue hair set in high waves, she’d worn her most upright, upscale outfit, a pink linen suit with a silky off-white blouse and pearls. She was nervous; friends would be there, but also people she hadn’t seen in fifty years. She sat primly on a folding chair, her stockinged knees squeezed tight together. Old friends came by and hugged her, and she thought for a while that it was a good thing she’d come. But on reading her name tag, one of the other women had walked wordlessly away, and another regarded her with a frosty eye and had little to say. “They turned up their nose at me,” Mom confessed to me later, her jaw twitching in a fight against tears. Maybe all of them were awkward. Maybe she imagined the contempt for which she was primed. But it didn’t matter. My perfect-posture, courageous, seventy-year-old mama went there in hopes of packing away her disgrace, only to have it refreshed. She was still that frightened, humiliated, pregnant girl, Adria Overstreet.