The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much and forgetting that you are special too.
—Ernest Hemingway
If I had asked Daddy in the summer of 1958 if he was a racist, I’m not sure what he would have said. For many years, I felt obligated to defend Daddy’s character and actions. I took the official Wallace line: Daddy was a segregationist but not a racist. Now I see that Daddy, in the words of Dan Carter, who wrote The Politics of Rage, the definitive biography of my father and the Wallace years, represented the reflexive racism of Southern men and women of his generation.
What is the difference between a segregationist and a racist? A racist is defined as a person who believes that one race is superior to others. To be a segregationist means upholding a caste system—a system of apartheid. The idea of “separate but equal” was belied by the ways blacks were systemically terrorized with lynchings and beatings in the South (and the North too) and looked down upon and denied basic rights. There was nothing “equal” in segregation.
And yet, like so much in the South, it was complicated. I know in our house when I was growing up the use of the N-word was strictly forbidden. My parents would never have talked like that. But if I had asked Daddy after he lost the primary to Patterson in the summer of 1958 if he would do whatever it took to be elected governor in 1962, he would probably have said, “What do you think?” He would have done whatever it took to be elected.
Our family life was rough between Daddy’s loss in ’58 and his second run in ’62. When Mama tried to console him after his loss to Patterson, he snapped back at her, was angry and often accusatory. When she broached the subject of “what is next in our lives,” Daddy responded: “It’s always on me to figure out a way to take care of you-all. When I tell you things will work out, that means I will figure it out.”
The problem was that Daddy’s track record of working things out was pretty dismal. Mama just gave up. “I guess we are all on our own,” she must have thought to herself. She knew we were on the verge of sinking back into the kind of poverty that she had experienced before Daddy became a judge. Uncle Jack had taken over Daddy’s circuit court judgeship and no more paychecks were coming. Mama took a part-time job at the Agricultural Extension Service in Clayton.
Daddy became a partner in Uncle Gerald’s one-man law firm in Montgomery. On occasion he and Uncle Gerald would collect a fee from a client. Most of the time, Daddy was walking the streets, roustabouting with acquaintances and strangers. Money, in the form of “legal fees” from a few who believed that Daddy was going to win the next election and wanted to reserve a seat at the table, kept Daddy afloat in town.
Daddy’s frequent absences from home continued. Montgomery, where Gerald had his office and where Daddy did his politicking, was two hours by car from Clayton. After his defeat, it often felt as if he had abandoned us. And on those days and nights when he did reappear at home, it usually was time to batten down the hatches. My parents’ fights began in the general vicinity of the kitchen, roiled through the dining and living room, and often ended with the slam of their bedroom door. Their tumultuous confrontations were never physical, unless a flying ashtray or dinner plate hurled by Mama found its mark. Daddy’s talent for the bob and weave of boxing no doubt worked to his advantage. My parents fought about money, my mother’s sense of abandonment, or lipstick on his collar.
Mama had nothing of consequence with which to threaten Daddy.
“What can you do, Lurleen?” Daddy would say in a taunting voice. “You don’t have any skills. You’re not smart. Where are you going to go? How are you going to live?” He could be brutal. Hard as nails. I went numb inside when Daddy treated Mama this way. It was the only life I knew, and it was just the way my father was.
There never seemed to be a resolution—a coming together. Daddy wasn’t satisfied until you came around to his point of view, no matter how long it took him to convince you. If Mama threw up her hands, turned, and walked away, Daddy would follow her or sit down beside her on the sofa. Daddy was through when he got through; Mama was going to listen.
As a young boy, Daddy watched as his daddy, usually drunk and in pain, raged through his house while his mother sat still in a chair. She never fought back, just waited for him to fall on the floor passed out, or move on out of the house, headed for someplace to drink and carouse. My father must have wanted his mother to strike back, to protect herself and the rest of them. But she never did. Daddy viewed not fighting back as a weakness. Mama’s just giving up was not acceptable to him.
And yet Mama always believed that their marriage was worth saving. In spite of it all, she loved him.
During that period, Mama struggled to take care of us. I wore cardboard inside my shoes to cover the holes in the worn-out soles that winter. My grandparents sent what little money they could, and a seamstress friend of Mama’s helped keep up our clothes. There was no talk in the house about our financial circumstances. Mama did what she had to do. She fed and clothed us.
Mama’s meager circumstances were driven home to me years after she died. One of her friends who lived in Clayton when we did gave me a small cardboard box, the kind that a jewelry store would use for an expensive piece. Inside was an assortment of change and a little ledger sheet entitled CARD FUND. On the paper, Mama’s name appeared along with the other members of the Friendly Card Club. The club collected monthly dues from its members to send cards to friends and families on special occasions. According to the ledger, all members of the card club had account credits by their names, except for Mama: she was a dollar and seventy-five cents in arrears.
Gerald and Daddy’s Montgomery law office was a place frequented by more storytelling hacks and political wannabes than clients. But it was a crowd that Daddy could not pass up, as they offered opportunities for adulation that soothed Daddy’s bruised ego after his trouncing by Patterson.
It also became the perfect place for Daddy to feel aggrieved. The people of Alabama had abandoned him (yet it never occurred to him that perhaps he himself had abandoned us). After many years of sobriety following his coming to terms with the effect alcohol had on him, Daddy began drinking again, and his anger and penchant for violence spiraled out of control.
On more than one occasion, Gerald was able to break up impending fistfights before the first punch was thrown. Daddy became indiscreet in his relationships with women, and the word soon spread through the grapevines of Montgomery society.
When Daddy was not holding forth in the law office, he could be found either in the lobbies and anterooms of one of the three hotels in downtown Montgomery or in the Elite Café. Although he no longer had a title to append to his name, most people still called him Judge. Some people thought it was beneath Daddy’s dignity to chase down people in hotel lobbies or join an already occupied restaurant table and take over the conversation, but he did. He seemed desperate for attention. It was all he could do to keep up appearances with the little bit of money he was making from his law practice along with the paltry sums of cash slipped into his palm by still-faithful followers. In spite of the dire financial circumstances of our family, he showed no interest in getting a job.
During the spring of 1959, Mr. Henry and Mamaw came for an extended visit and the house brightened. Mama and Mamaw sat in metal yard chairs in the backyard with cups of coffee and cigarettes and used Mr. Henry’s slingshot to scare marauding mockingbirds feasting on ripening figs hanging from the limbs of the tree in our yard.
Mr. Henry carried his toolbox around the house looking for things that needed tending to. It was well known and a source of some amusement that Daddy was not one to have any interest or expertise on projects that required a nail, a hammer, or a screwdriver.
During their visit, Mamaw chose her words carefully on the issue of Mama’s future. She quietly suggested coming back home with her and Mr. Henry. Mama could start over. It was no secret that the relationship between Mamaw and Daddy had always been less than perfect, but after the governor’s race, Mamaw and Daddy’s conversations became more heated and contemptuous when Daddy would occasionally come home from Montgomery.
With her back against the wall, Mama was faced with what she came to believe was the ultimate truth of her life. Her husband was drinking and womanizing in Montgomery and rarely home. It was clear that what mattered to him was the adulation of the crowd and becoming governor of Alabama. His family was strictly secondary. She had no choice but to make her own way. And the thought of going home to the broken road must have felt as though she was taking refuge, returning to a place of safety and simplicity where she wouldn’t have to wonder when and if my father was coming home and deal with his temper and his self-righteousness and self-serving sense of grievance—the fallout from his defeat.
She and Daddy had been married for sixteen years. She was thirty-three years old.