Chapter 2

Mary had returned to the wetlands with her secret intact: none knew that the ninth Gautreaux child was hers. But all knew what had become of Mary. “We just heard the gossip,” says her friend Julia Saucier. “That she turned to alcohol, kind of a wild life.”

Olin heard the gossip too. He knew that it was true—that his wife, like his mother, had a taste for alcohol and men. He took to leaving home, going off on long solitary drives with a pack of cigarettes. But in 1950, he took his wife and kids with him, off to Texas in search of a new start. Olin soon pledged himself to Jehovah, the better to reform his wayward wife.

Norma would not remember Louisiana; she was a toddler when the family packed the Studebaker and drove west. Her first memory would be of Texas, of fig trees that grew in an empty lot off Shoreham Street near her Houston home. The trees were straight except for one. And like her reborn father, who began now to find homilies in the everyday, Norma would tell years later of that one crooked tree that drew her.

TO BE A Jehovah’s Witness is to be certain that Armageddon is imminent. But doctrine tells that the end of days will spare 144,000 non-sinners. And after Mary shed her Pentecostalism and was a Witness, too, the family Nelson took to the road, off on Sundays in their new Chevy wagon to minister to those few who might be saved. Quiet six days a week, on the seventh Olin preached, in the Kingdom Halls about east Texas, of Jehovah and salvation and sin.

Norma and Jimmy watched their father turn red with zeal. They helped him, too, knocking on doors with stacks of The Watchtower, peddling in their Sunday best its “thou shalt not”s: abortion, war, the transfusion of blood, the saluting of flags, the celebration of Christmas and birthdays. When, on September 22, 1955, Norma turned eight, she blew out no candles.

Still, the little girl was spirited—a half-pint with curly brown hair and olive eyes running about in shorts and T-shirts. And when the school year at Berry Elementary ended, she headed to Louisiana, off to the green shack on the west bank of the Atchafalaya where she had lived her first two years. Her grandparents had bought the home from Olin and Mary—the first they had ever owned. Having shared its lone bedroom with their four youngest children, they had since built on two more, and had room enough for another little girl.

Norma had fun with her family. She explored the levees with uncles and jitterbugged with aunts. She listened to the stories Grandpa told from his rocker, and bought Coke and candy with nickels from Grandma, sitting out front of Uncle Bob’s Store on the plank that locals called the “nigger bench” because, her aunt Sandra says, “that’s where they would sit.”

Norma was happy on the river. But, come fall, she returned to a family fervent with Jehovah. She “resented the teachings,” recalled Mary. Norma was angry, for example, when she got sent to the principal for refusing, as her parents had instructed, to salute the flag. And she was nine when, back beside that crooked fig tree, Norma took for herself an imaginary friend, a blond girl her age she named Janie who told her what to wear. “She was the opposite of me,” said Norma. “Very smart, very reserved.” Added Norma: “She knew when bad things happened.”

Janie thus knew when Norma got her first bra and was unsure how to put it on and her mother called her, said Norma, a “stupid little imp.” And Janie knew when one day Norma lost her footing while climbing a tree and decided to let go of the branch she’d grasped. “Why not fall?” she thought. She was, she said, owing to her mother, “always sad in my heart.” Norma was not hurt.

Janie filled a void; she was the sister Norma wanted but did not have. Norma, though, did have a sister—the older half-sister she thought was her aunt. And in early 1958, Velma came to live with her after learning that she was pregnant.

Velma’s predicament was familiar to her family; both her grandmother and her mother (whom she knew, respectively, as her mother and her sister) had also gotten pregnant when they were seventeen and unmarried. Velma’s sister-in-law Wavia suggested that Velma leave town at once, that she go to a “girls’ home” in Shreveport where her baby could be born and placed for adoption. But Emar—the grandfather Velma believed was her father—had already disappeared one daughter. Months shy of sixty, he wondered to what end. If the family name had been preserved, it had been sullied just the same when Mary, bereft, had turned to alcohol and sex. What’s more, Mary had suffered. If sex had consequences, so did religion and the fear of rebuke.

And so, Emar intervened. “He said ‘no!’ ” recalls Velma. “She’s staying right here!” The family would remain whole.

Velma relaxed. But six weeks pregnant, she soon wished to leave home, wished to go live with her beloved sister Mary. Says Velma: “I felt a bond with her always.” Velma took the bus from Lafayette to Houston, leaving Louisiana for the first time.

Mary doted on her lost daughter. She took her, along with little Norma and Jimmy, to movies and parks. Velma in turn “kept house,” she says, cooking and taking care of the kids when Olin and Mary were at work. When Velma returned to Louisiana after four months, Norma went with her, the girl of ten eager for another summer on the river.

Mary had said nothing to Velma of their true relation. And, spared her emotional burden, Velma remained no less close to her parents or to God, turning to the Bible she’d gotten as a girl with coupons clipped from True Story magazine.

Mary, meantime, was less apt to look for truth in scripture than in palms or coffee grinds. And as Velma’s belly grew big with two boys, Norma returned to a family that was tiring of Jehovah. They soon moved from Houston to Dallas, settling into an apartment one flight above McKinney Avenue.

The apartment was small; the shower was in the hallway. But the Nelsons stayed apart—Olin happiest in his shop, Mary at her bar, Jimmy in his science fiction, Norma out back with Janie. Norma was no more at home at school; her grades at William B. Travis Elementary were rarely higher than a two out of four. When at age twelve, in 1960, she took an intelligence test, she placed in the twelfth percentile. Her teachers at Travis noted that Norma was “absent on slightest excuse” and “not interested in school work.”

Norma was interested in cigarettes and beer; she began to smoke like her dad and drink like her mom. She returned to Louisiana that summer a changed child—smoking and drinking and darting after a local boy. “Norma was a handful,” remembers Velma. “She was wild. . . . I was always in the streets looking for her.”

Back in Dallas, no one looked for her. School had started up again when Norma and a friend boarded a bus to Oklahoma City. The girls checked into a motel, lay in bed and kissed.

Norma knew what sex was. She had seen her mother “lay out with men,” she said, had heard talk of banishing her pregnant aunt. Sex was caustic. It was illicit, too; having heard her father preach against forbidden relations, she was beginning to see Jehovah in the dark spaces. When one schoolday on a softball field she bled from between her legs, she knew, said Norma, that God was punishing her.

And so, it made sense to her when the police arrived and her friend alleged, said Norma, “that I tried inappropriate things with her.” The police returned Norma to a mother enraged by her lesbianism. After the Juvenile Court of Dallas declared Norma “a delinquent child,” her father paid forty dollars a month to enroll her in a Catholic boarding school in southwest Dallas.

Mount St. Michael was of a more genteel world than the one Norma knew—of beanies and saddle shoes, beef stew and school plays; Norma played a Polynesian peasant in a production of South Pacific. But Norma was soon in trouble. When she refused to take catechism class, she landed in detention. And when, on laundry duty, she cursed at a nun who asked her to iron a shirt a second time, she got kicked out. Norma was thirteen.

Years later, Norma would tell of a great trauma she suffered in Catholic school, of being raped in a shower by a nun named Veronica. But there never was a Sister Veronica on staff at Mount St. Michael. There was instead, as Norma confided only privately, an older student named Barbara who, three nights before she was to vow to become a nun, had lain beside her in her cot, uninvited but welcome, and touched her.

Norma had reimagined herself as not a sinner but a victim. In time, she would do so over and over again, and most often regarding sex—that which in the Nelson home was profane, extramarital. Indeed, upon returning home from school, she found that her mother had begun seeing a man she’d met in a bar, a trucker named Raymond Sandefur. In February 1961, Mary and Olin divorced.

That same month, the Texas Youth Council placed Norma in a local elementary school. She stopped going to class, and turned from beer and cigarettes to whiskey and marijuana. Mary struggled to mother her. “She lost all control of me,” said Norma. Norma had shaved her eyebrows when, in April 1962, she fell into the custody of the state, “committed to an institution.”

That institution was the Gainesville State School for Girls, a cluster of brick buildings on fields of grass just south of the Oklahoma border. The state agency that oversaw the school would soon refer to it as “one of the best training facilities for delinquent girls in America today.” And Norma was not unhappy at Gainesville. She enjoyed her classes: photography and upholstery and science. She liked her fellow students, too, a white and Latina sorority of truants and offenders. (The school would not integrate for four more years.) If Norma still broke rules—pouring acid, for example, onto the coat of a teacher—she was at roll call at 6:30 every morning.

It did Norma good to be away from her family. And she began to feel differently about those two great cross-currents that had long guided it: sex and religion.

SEX AND RELIGION are not by nature opposed. Hinduism, for example, sanctifies sex and sensual pleasure, while Judaism considers sex sacred even as it forbids various relations. “The pre-Christian world generally thought of sex as a natural and positive part of human experience,” wrote the constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone. “It did not see sex as predominantly bound up with questions of sin, shame, or religion.”

Jesus said little on the matter. But decades after His crucifixion, the Apostle Paul declared that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” Celibacy was best. And it was a celibate Christian convert named Augustine who, centuries later, extended that notion, positing that sex was sinful and that “man by his very nature is ashamed of sexual desire.” It was lust, not disobedience, wrote Augustine, that had expelled Adam from Eden. It was through sex that Adam had transmitted his original sin to all humanity.

The church would canonize Augustine and adopt his dogma. More than a millennium after his death, Augustine, as Professor Stone noted, “helped shape traditional American views of sexuality.”

Those views in turn shaped an American family. In the forty years since Mary had been born to Bertha, her family had viewed religion and sex in terms of consequences. Sin led to hell as surely as pregnancy did to marriage—or banishment. But Norma had come to see her mother as less devout than hypocritical. And she now dismissed her and Jehovah, too, celebrating her newfound atheism with three dots inked by a fellow student into the fold of skin between her left thumb and forefinger. “It was explained to me,” said Norma of her tattoo, “that it was for someone who didn’t believe in God or love.”

Norma, though, did believe in love. She was sixteen and besotted with her fellow Gainesville girls, who bunked with her in brick cottages the school had named for women of the Bible: Sarah and Rebecca and Hannah and Naomi. Norma was less than pretty, with a high forehead and a sunken chin. But she was fun and rowdy, and soon had a run of girlfriends—the cosmetology student who did Norma’s brown curly hair, the Latina named Lydia who called her “mi cuata,” slang for twin.

Norma had been at Gainesville nineteen months when, in the middle of upholstery class, President Kennedy was shot dead just south, in Dallas. One year later, Norma headed home to her family in that same grief-stricken city.

The family had come to include Raymond. The trucker had married Mary in March, and moved with her and her son Jimmy into a two-family home on Vickery Boulevard. But his bride, forty years old, continued to cheat, and Raymond turned now to her daughter for answers. “He said,” recalled Norma, “ ‘what’s been going on every day when I’ve been going to work?’ ” Norma said nothing.

Mary offered no apologies. Even decades later, she looked past her own indiscretions to those of her daughter, to the alcohol and marijuana and sex that Norma enjoyed. “She drank and she took dope and she slept with women,” Mary recalled from the lobby of a Dallas nursing home, her yellow hands tightening about the silver arms of a wheelchair. The last, Norma’s lesbianism, repulsed Mary. Looking back with clouded blue eyes at the memory of an impenitent daughter, she mouthed a confession. Said Mary: “I beat the fuck out of her.”

IT HAD BEEN liberating for Norma to discover at school sex different than she had known at home, sex open and reciprocal and gay; it was girls she desired, she later reflected, they who were “soft and gentle.” But she was sixteen now and she told herself that it was time to marry. She had just taken a job as a waitress on skates at a Dallas drive-in when a little man in a big Ford pulled up.

Norma took him in. He had brown eyes and a black pompadour. He ordered a Coke and a “furburger,” and asked Norma to come for a ride in his black Fairlane. She did.

His name was Elwood McCorvey. He was twenty-one and new to Texas. He had come south from a Catholic home in Brooklyn, where he and his younger brother had helped their parents run a bakery.

Back in Brooklyn, Elwood had spent his days off from work on the family boat in Canarsie. He had enjoyed movies, too. And he was at a cinema on Kings Highway when he met a girl from Manhattan Beach named Carol. The two were soon a couple, Elwood, fifteen, sharing his life with the girl one year his junior: boat rides and homemade pasta and church dances and midnight Mass. Carol, though, was Jewish. Wanting to end the relationship, her mother sent her to school in Connecticut. Elwood joined the navy.

Elwood was home from a stint in the Mediterranean when Carol graduated from high school. She got back in touch. She was eighteen and a day when, in November 1960, she and Elwood married. Carol, however, wished to go off to college, and soon wished, too, that she was single. When Elwood returned from his next tour aboard the USS Allagash, docking in Rhode Island, she handed him divorce papers.

Elwood was distraught. He left the navy and turned to cars, passing his days calling out from a Camaro or a Mustang or a hot rod to every young woman he saw—some of whom hopped in for a ride that would last a few days or weeks or months until, says his cousin Tony, “they got rid of him.”

Elwood needed a job. His aunt Zell told him to go work for his cousins in Texas and he did, driving a truck for their sheet metal plant outside Houston. He welded, too, able to wriggle his five and a half feet into ducts and pipes. But the little man who now went by “Woody” was “hotheaded,” says Tony. He would quit and drive off and look for women.

Woody had now found a brunette named Norma. After driving her around town a few nights, the gearhead and the carhop slept together at the Shangri-La Motel, where Norma had moved in.

Norma did not like having sex with Woody. “It was overkill,” she said. But she liked him. On June 17, 1964, Norma wed Woody at the Dallas County courthouse, a bride in black. She was sixteen.

Waitressing could wait, Woody said. Sheet metal, too. It was time for them to hit it big. For Norma loved to perform; she was quick to recite the one snippet of schooling she recalled by heart, couplets from Macbeth about the poor player strutting his hour upon the stage. Woody had the thought that Norma could become a singer. So the couple drove to Hollywood and sold their Ford and moved into a rooming house and put their hands in the concrete depressions of stars. But Norma had never really sung much, and she and Woody soon stopped speaking of the records she would cut. Then they just stopped speaking. Money wired from family got them an Oldsmobile which they drove east to a city called El Monte, where Woody found work in sheet metal. Norma was lonely. And she had just turned seventeen—the age at which her grandmother and mother and half-sister had all first gotten pregnant—when she began to feel sick.

It was the manager of the pink stucco building where she lived who told Norma why she was sick. Norma was stunned. She was excited, too. “I really wanted this baby,” she said. “I wanted to be the first of my friends to be married and have a baby. I wanted everything to fall in line the way it should.”

But a poor marriage does not accommodate a pregnancy. Norma had not yet given birth when the marriage ended, and she flew back to Texas, to the family, and the pier and beam house, that she had wished to leave forever.

Norma would later write that Woody had suspected she was pregnant with another man’s child and had beaten her. But the little man had run from physical altercation all his life. And long before Norma alleged that he had beaten her, she’d confided in a reporter that she had in fact left her husband after finding him in bed with another woman.

Back in Dallas, Norma took a job waitressing nights; she served food until two and drinks until six. And though her tips grew along with her belly, Mary and Raymond felt for Norma, the stepfather putting money in the tip jar she brought home, the mother taking her to an obstetrician and then to a courthouse to file for divorce.

Mary took Norma to a bar, too. Norma was mindful, she said, not to drink “to excess”—a temptation that grew after she found her way to a gay bar on Haskell. It was the first of thousands of nights Norma would spend in the comfort of lesbian bars, in the comfort of her people—the unfettered, the disapproved of, the drunk. Some looked at her belly and spoke of motherhood. Some bought her a beer. Months later, Norma was at a gay bar called the Numbers when her water broke. A cab took her to Dallas Osteopathic Hospital. At 6:27 a.m. on a May morning in 1965, Norma McCorvey became a mother.