Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that don’t heal because there’s not enough material.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Like many of us, I have often wondered how my parents came to be the people they were. They are gone now and their early lives and the lives of my grandparents and great-grandparents will always be a mystery to me. My parents didn’t like to talk about their pasts. We were always so intent on pushing forward, focused on what was coming next.
My father’s grandfather, Dr. George Oscar Wallace, arrived in Clio, Alabama, in 1891. He and his first wife moved into a wood-framed house across the street from the town’s small collection of stores. He worked long hours, caring for ailing patients and tending to his drugstore in town. His meager success allowed him to build his own home, and he purchased three small tenant farms. His first wife died in 1920, and he later married Nora Mae Wyatt.
In my father’s later years, Dr. Wallace and Mother Mae, as he called her, would be his touchstones. In his mind, there seemed to be no others sitting on the limbs of the family tree who could have passed along his intellect and ambition. Daddy’s extended family members remained strangers, nothing more than awkward moments at campaign rallies or large family reunions where everyone bunched up to speak to the governor, ate, then left for parts unknown.
Daddy in the first grade.
His parents were both, in their own ways, difficult people. My uncle Gerald laughingly characterized my grandfather George Wallace, Daddy’s father, as “a man of indiscretion and perpetual drunkenness.” My grandfather had gone to Southern University and returned home to Clio to manage his father’s three farms. His endless hours of intoxication fueled his anger. He was prone to blinding headaches from a deviated septum, made worse when a friend hit him in the forehead with a pair of brass knuckles during a drunken brawl. With only one lung and a weak heart, George Wallace Sr., as described by one author, spent his days leaning on a counter in Clio’s general store, a cigarette in one hand and a Coke in the other, ready to chase another headache powder.
When Daddy and his brothers, Gerald and Jack, were young boys, my grandfather would push the living room furniture up against the walls, roll up the rugs, and force the three boys to fight. The Clio telephone company was on the second floor of the building across the street and the operator could see right into Daddy’s living room. On fight nights, the operator agreed to time the rounds and ring the Wallace phone when each was over. Sometimes she would ring the phone early when the fighting got out of hand. Most times that act of mercy didn’t matter—a round was over when my grandfather said it was and not a moment sooner. On many nights the fight ended with my grandfather passed out drunk on the floor. When that happened, his wife, Mozelle, covered him with a blanket while her sons went off to lick their wounds.
As I’ve grown older and raised two sons of my own, I have come to believe that the one person who had the greatest influence on what became the very complex and morose side of my father’s psyche was his mother, Mozelle. Amid the stories of the Wallace clan, I sometimes wondered why there was nothing about Mozelle’s family. It was as if she just appeared one day out of thin air. It was not until after her death that I found out the real story.
Mozelle was born in Ocala, Florida, in 1898. At the age of seven, she was living in Montgomery when her father suddenly died and the family fell into abject poverty. In 1906, when Mozelle was eight, her mother sent her to an Episcopal orphanage in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mozelle’s classmates at the school she attended were the Southern belles of Mobile. She was a gifted musician, and the Ladies’ Episcopal Association of Mobile gave her a music scholarship to attend Judson College.
Mozelle’s mother, Kate Leon Frink Smith, lived in Montgomery, then Birmingham until her death in 1968. She watched her grandson become governor and raised four of her great-grandchildren. But we never knew she existed. No one mentioned her name. One of my cousins found her on Ancestry.com long after Mozelle had died. Was Mozelle’s background kept secret from me or just deemed irrelevant? I don’t know.
Mozelle Smith Wallace and George Corley Wallace.
After less than a year, Mozelle decided to leave Judson College. She had met my grandfather at a train station when she was on her way to school. Mozelle somehow discovered that George Wallace had left college and returned to Clio, and she followed him there and settled into a boardinghouse and gave piano lessons to the few children whose parents could afford to pay. Moving to Clio with the thought of snaring my grandfather was a long shot—an audacious plan. Mozelle pulled it off. It showed the force of her will, the kind of drive that she passed on to Daddy.
My mother’s upbringing was very different from my father’s. Her household was warm and loving. She was born on September 19, 1926, and lived in Northport, Alabama, just across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa. The doctor who delivered her suggested the name Lurleen. Her father, Henry Burns, worked as a hand on coal barges. It took him away from home but provided more income than farming; for an uneducated man, it was about the best he could do. The Burns family often lived on the brink of poverty, but there was nothing to suggest that Lurleen and her older brother, Cecil, ever suffered the indignities of destitution.
My grandmother, Estelle Burns, whom I called Mamaw, ran the show. “Mr. Henry” was tenderhearted and gentle. My mother inherited my grandmother’s backbone. After Mama was elected governor, she hung a framed quotation on the family dining room wall:
A woman may be small of frame,
With tiny feet that patter,
But when she puts one small foot down,
Her shoe size does not matter.
Those words were tailor-made for Mamaw and, my husband says, ruefully, me. Although Mama was of average height, I’m only four feet eleven, and Mamaw was also small. But don’t let our size fool you.
Mr. Henry’s sentimentality often brought him to tears. His love for his children exuded from every pore and his devotion to his daughter, Lurleen, was palpable. He nicknamed Lurleen “Mutt” in recognition of her determination to follow his every footstep, and he wept for her on the night she died.
As I’ve already mentioned, my parents’ accounts of their childhoods were spotty at best. Perhaps if I had been told more, it could have made a difference in who I became. Perhaps it would have made me love more. I felt an isolation within the family. It would have been wonderful to have bonds of affection with aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews.
When our sons, Leigh and Burns, were young, Mark would drive them past the house he grew up in. There were no such places for me. The Clio house was destroyed by fire. Mr. Henry and Mamaw’s place was abandoned, consumed by neglect. The house in Clayton that I grew up in burned to the ground. Sometimes I wonder if history is warning me never to look back, to let it rest and leave it alone. There was too much to know and nothing to cheer me up. There were no swings on front porches, only dark days and darker nights. No places to take my sons to show them how it was. Only graveyards with headstones: names and dates. That’s all.