Maybe all one can do is to hope to end up with the right regrets.
—Arthur Miller
On Sunday, September 13, 1998, we stopped by Jackson Hospital on our way home from church. After twenty-six years of paralysis and fighting back, Daddy was seriously ill with sepsis, a virulent bacterial infection.
“Daddy, are you sure you are going to be okay?” He nodded yes. We promised to return the following day.
That night, Mark and I were watching Gary Sinise accept an Emmy award for best actor for his portrayal of Daddy in the made-for-TV movie George Wallace. As Sinise began speaking, our phone rang.
It was my brother, George. “Peggy, you need to get back to the hospital.”
By the time we got there, Daddy was gone.
Two days later, Daddy’s body was returned to the capitol rotunda and placed on a bier in front of a marble bust of Mama where her body lay three decades before. Over the course of the day and night that followed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people—as many African Americans as whites—came to pay their respects.
Daddy had repeatedly called Mark and me to come visit him during the last two years of his life. These were often late-night visits. We’d come in and he would begin talking: “You know, I was wrong about race and segregation. I know that now. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.” It was clear that he was sincere and that he was ashamed and regretful. He would talk for hours, circling around these points.
Governor George Corley Wallace at St. Jude Catholic Hospital on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, March 1990.
I might have wanted a more personal apology and a recognition on his part of how his behavior had shaped my life in ways that had been damaging and difficult. But that wasn’t who Daddy was. I came to see that the fact that he brought us close to him again and again, time after time, and unburdened himself was his way of apologizing to me. It was what he was capable of, and I came to be satisfied with that—he was asking for my forgiveness, not only for the ways he had impacted my life but for the man he had been. And I did forgive him. And I loved him.
Mark and I returned to the capitol just after midnight. We walked up the steps, passing the place where Daddy and Mama once stood before cheering crowds of thousands. A capitol guard asked the line of mourners to give us a moment. I pulled a small bag of M&M’s from my jacket and put them in Daddy’s right-hand coat pocket.
“Always the right pocket,” he would tell me back in Clayton. “Sugah, if you’ve been good, look in my right-hand coat pocket. There will always be something there for you.”
“If it was ninety-six degrees at your daddy’s funeral, it must be at least a hundred and ten today,” Mark commented. We were walking across the large blacktop parking lot in front of Walmart.
“There must be a hundred black cars in this parking lot,” I said. We wandered around, refusing to admit to each other that we had forgotten where we parked.
“That may be true. But we may have the only black Volvo with a Clinton sticker on the bumper.”
“You have a point.”
An SUV pulled in a parking space just ahead of us. The driver got out and headed our way. We smiled as she walked up in front of us, hoping to avoid the worst nightmare of a family in politics. “You don’t know me, do you?” “Of course we do.” “Then who am I?” Instead, she said it for us: “You don’t know me, but I work up at the funeral home where your daddy was brought. Peggy, I’m from Barbour County—just like you. We have always loved your family. Your mama was a special lady. She and my folks used to have coffee sometimes, right there across from the county courthouse at Seale’s Café. Those were precious times.”
It was so blazingly hot and humid on the blacktop in the Alabama sun that all I wanted to do was escape and find our car. But I smiled—the practiced smile of the wife and daughter of elected officials.
“Clayton was a great place to grow up, and Seale’s Café was the best,” I said.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you-all in this heat,” said our new friend from Clayton. “But I was blessed, and I mean blessed to be working at the funeral home when your daddy was brought in. I could not believe my eyes, and I called Mama and told her that the governor had just come in. She was as excited as I was.”
“I’m so glad you got to see him.”
Mark’s eyes cut toward me.
“What else was I supposed to say?” I channeled back via a slight shrug. The sweat stood out on my forehead and was rolling down my back.
“I was hoping that they would let me do something, but I wasn’t sure,” she continued without missing a beat. “Then, praise the Lord, the funeral home director came up to me and told me they wanted me to do his hair. I called Mama and told her, ‘Mama, they want me to do the governor’s hair.’ She gasped into the phone, just gasped. So, I asked Mama, ‘Mama, what am I supposed to say to him?’ And she says, ‘Honey, just talk to him. Just talk to him. Because he’s home folks from Barbour County. He’s just like us. You don’t need to put on no airs for George Wallace!’ So I did just that. I talked and combed and combed and talked.”
By that time I was melting. We hugged each other, and I thanked her for taking the time to tell me about her encounter with Daddy.
After about five yards’ worth of walking she turned back to me. “I forgot the most important thing of all. How did you like his hair?”
Perhaps it was a combination of the heat and my Barbour County manners that creased my mouth with a big smile—my best smile. “Honey,” I said, “I have never, and I mean never seen that hair looking any better than it looked that day.”
“Praise the Lord,” she said. “You’ve made my day.”
The inside of the Volvo was hot to the touch, but not as hot as the softening pavement. “Let the windows down,” I said.
Hot air rushed around us. Mark turned to me and said, “You know, your daddy would have loved every word of that.”
“He probably heard every word,” I replied. “I loved that man.”
Burns met us in the driveway when we drove up. “Leigh and I filled up the pool with new water. Come swimming with us, Mom.”
I smiled. “That sounds like a good idea to me.”
When they were young, my sons would sometimes pull books from the shelves of our family history, with questions for me to follow. But none of what they read could adequately address or capture the essence of humanity that lay hidden beneath the overwhelming facts of what their grandparents stood for and what they did.
“Tell us more, Mom. What did you do back down there in Clayton when you were a little girl? What was Mawmaw Lurleen really like? Do you think she would come over to our house and sit outside with us and tell us stories? I bet Paw Paw, back when he could walk, would be up and down all the time. Would you let him smoke his cigar inside the house? Why did he do those things to other people?”
The spring after Daddy died was when Mark and I took Burns to Atlanta to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Museum. I saw Daddy through Burns’s child eyes. I thought about who Daddy was when I was nine years old, living down in Clayton before he vowed never again to be “out-niggered,” before he won the governorship, before the civil rights clashes of the 1960s and the era’s fraught politics and tumultuous social change. I thought of Mama, Daddy, and me standing in the shade of an oak in the yard of my childhood when there was no burden to bear, no heartaches, and nothing to defend or explain away, when my parents were just like the other parents of Clayton, who sat on front porch swings while their children played in the yard.