Later that day, as evening threatened, Cokie’s husband, Victor, handed the baby to her four-year-old sister, Martha, and asked her to rock the newborn back to sleep in the old family rocking chair. Sweet Martha instantly fell in love with her little sister. But when it came time for dinner, Victor had vanished. He was already off drinking somewhere. Fine by Cokie. One less mouth to feed.
When the dishes were done, Cokie finally took a moment for herself. She walked into the back bedroom, dipped her hands down into the old iron crib, and picked up her brand-new baby girl—little Rose Anna Whitehead.
Cokie hadn’t always been the warmest or easiest mother to her brood; life was too demanding for any slack or too much affection. But she caught herself gazing at this baby a bit differently than she had the rest. Sure, Rose Anna was a quiet, beautiful child, the kind born with her eyes wide open to the world, but that wasn’t it. In fact, it wasn’t anything special about the child at all. It was a wisdom and acceptance that had begun to dawn on Cokie with age: there would be no rising above circumstances here in Lake Providence, a town buried deep in poverty. She would see no American dream come true. She was the wife of an alcoholic sharecropper living on a tenant farm her boys tried their best to keep up in his absence but only seemed to lose more ground on each month.
That night, looking into Rose Anna’s wide blue eyes, the baby’s ten perfect, wiggling toes and fingers all reaching out to her mother, Cokie accepted the truth that so many good Southern mothers of her means had to: love was about the only thing she might ever earn in her life. Then and there, in ways she feared she hadn’t with her other children, she dedicated herself to putting love first with this child. She was going to give all she had to her perfect little “Rose.”
* * *
—
I never got to meet Cokie, but she was my grandmother, born in Greenway, Arkansas, on October 4, 1914. Raised by distant, indifferent relatives, she was for all intents and purposes an orphan, with little love or family and no home to call her own. So when a dirt-broke, dusty-blond, blue-eyed, sixteen-year-old boy from a logging family confessed his love for her, she didn’t hesitate. At the ripe old age of fourteen, Cokie Landrem married Victor Willie Whitehead and soon had a daughter, Hattie Faye, then a son, Billie-Ray. But Billie-Ray died of mysterious causes that neighbors and relatives called a “rare heart condition.” Most now admit it was likely a simple case of appendicitis that these young parents didn’t have the know-how to handle.
Cokie had gone only as far as the fifth grade, and Victor had made it only to the third. With few skills and even less knowledge, Cokie and Victor tried their hand at sharecropping on a wealthy man’s tenant farm in Lake Providence. In the South at the time, many landowners still paid the tenant farmers who worked their land with only food and clothing up front and the promise of shared profits at the end of each season. But when that time came, those sharecroppers were often told they’d earned nothing more than the food and clothing they’d already been given. Others were told they hadn’t worked hard enough and now owed their landowners a debt.
Cokie and Victor were a rarity among sharecroppers in their community in that they, like their landowners, were white; most in their occupation were black, descendants of slaves who were supposed to have been liberated by a civil war but had instead met this new injustice. And, like their black neighbors, each year Cokie and Victor’s debts grew larger no matter how hard they toiled. The way Victor coped was not a rarity either: he turned to drink.
But by the time Rose Anna turned two years old, she was still far too young to know the family farm was anything but heaven. It had little yellow chicks wobbling out of an incubator, baby pigs that grew bigger each month before they inevitably “found new homes,” and ample dirt and rain for all the mud pies a little girl could dream of baking. Beyond their house were fields of clover with white pom-pom blossoms on them. Sweet Martha lovingly showed Rose Anna how to use her fingernails to make slits in the stems, weaving one into the next to build long strings of pom-pom-blossom jewelry.
But the truth was, their father’s alcoholism had taken its toll. He was rarely home, and when he was, he was no longer a helpful presence. The eldest boys did their best to keep the farm going without him, but it was a failing enterprise.
Luckily, the family owned a milk cow, so there was butter to be made. But they never ate it; Cokie would churn it, press it into a mold, and sell it. There were pecan trees, so the kids would pick the pecans up off the ground, put them in a burlap sack, and sell those too. Cokie even took a job at the dime store as a cashier, working six days a week for twenty-five dollars. She paid ten of that to a neighbor named Gertrude, who looked after Cokie’s kids and her own while Cokie was at work. Gertrude was a small black woman with a few missing teeth, pigtails, and who liked to chew tobacco. She became a second mother to Cokie’s little ones, and Cokie gave her free rein to do so. She didn’t see Gertrude or her mothering as inferior in any way. There was simply no space for racism in her home. She and Gertrude were sisters of survival above all else.
Although not thoughtful or considered, Cokie’s perspective on race was extraordinary in 1950s Lake Providence. Sitting atop Louisiana’s northeast corner, the town has a terrible history of slavery, racism, and poverty that continues to this day: in 2013, CNN reported that it was the poorest city in the United States, with the added honor of having the greatest wealth disparity. In the last half century, the population has hovered around four thousand souls, and although African Americans had been the majority since General Grant marched in with his Union soldiers, Grant gave all of the supposedly liberated land to white folks. Until 1962, black people weren’t even allowed to vote. During the time Cokie was raising her children, there was still an almost total separation of the races. But it was tough to see this divide in her home or in Gertrude’s. Gertrude even listed Cokie as “next of kin” when she died. So the youngest children in Cokie’s home grew up perilously naïve about the deeply racist world around them.
Martha would eventually get a job at the town’s Dairy Queen. She walked there every day after school, and on weekends. The cook was a black woman, and Martha liked her very much. They talked all shift long about anything and everything, so Martha came to believe they were best friends.
Then one day, Martha and her best friend walked into town after work. They hadn’t gone far before a white shop owner launched out of his store and lit into Martha: “What the hell kinda show ya puttin’ on?!”
“We were just walking, sir,” Martha said in her slow, notably well-enunciated way.
He looked at them both, his eyes red with rage, then he turned to Martha’s friend and began bellowing and cursing, demanding that the frightened young black woman get out of his sight. Martha’s friend had no choice but to run for her life.
Martha’s walk hadn’t been some kind of protest or demonstration for civil rights. She hadn’t known that she and her friend were doing anything radical by walking together. But it was radical in that time and place, and now she was getting a frightening crash course in bigotry.
In her soft, still immaculately enunciated words, I could still hear the anger and fear in sweet Martha’s voice as she told me this story over half a century later. “That is where you come from, Lance.”
* * *
—
Even as life grew increasingly difficult, Cokie stayed true to her quiet promise to try to love her new Rose a bit better than she had her older children. Come payday, Rose Anna occasionally received a piece of citrus fruit. Her mom would tell her it was “a real expensive treat shipped all the way from a place called California. Out on an ocean called the Pacific. Where the movie stars live.”
Of course, Rose Anna’s special treatment didn’t go unnoticed by her siblings. One night, just before her third birthday, Rose Anna was busy throwing a fit because she had to share the sofa with her big brother Don. She complained t
hat every time he moved, jumped, or bumped around, it was hurting her legs and arms. It was absurd. Don adamantly defended his right to wiggle about, but their mom took Rose Anna’s side again. Don was banished from the family couch. Yet even after he was long gone, Rose Anna continued to cry and fuss that she was unbearably uncomfortable. It made no good sense.
A great many things soon stopped making sense to Cokie. Rose Anna never stepped into the bedroom she shared with Martha that night. And when Martha woke up the next morning looking for her beloved baby sister, she found only Gertrude in the kitchen. With the tone of a woman who’d long since stopped losing tears over tough turns, Gertrude stated: “Your mama and Annie gone ’way to the hospital last night, honey. Don’t know when they gon’ be back.”
It turned out that soon after Don and Martha had fallen asleep, little Rose Anna’s aches and pains had become excruciating, and when Cokie asked her to straighten her legs, she couldn’t. They were frozen. Worse, she was struggling to breathe.
That night, without a single soul knowing it, an outside force had arrived in Lake Providence, and now that force had a death hold on Cokie’s precious Rose.
* * *
—
In the middle of the night, Cokie rushed her Rose to the hospital in town, and doctors hurriedly put in motion prescribed emergency procedures—procedures not to save the child, but to isolate her. Cokie was forced from the room and made to strip off her clothes, and those clothes instantly vanished, likely to be burned. It seemed that her Rose was showing all the symptoms of the potentially deadly, disfiguring, and immobilizing virus called polio.
In 1950, that word struck terror in the hearts of parents across the nation. Starting in 1916, a polio epidemic had swept through at least one region of the country each summer. Cesspools of still and polluted water were polio’s favorite breeding grounds. Wealthy cities quickly made advances in sanitation and sewage to help prevent outbreaks. But few considered improving the infrastructure of a shrinking city of mostly “Negroes” a priority. Rose Anna’s hometown was riddled with just such pools of dark, still water. Now her lifeless legs were an omen that a Louisiana outbreak was brewing.
Most folks who were exposed to the polio virus never got sick. The 5 percent who did usually experienced only flu-like symptoms. But for the unlucky 1 percent Rose Anna now belonged to, the virus would ravage their motor neurons, leaving their limbs, lungs, and throats paralyzed—some so severely that they died. This 1950 outbreak would kill nearly three thousand people in the United States, and over the next decade, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide, every single year. There was no cure. And there were no truly effective treatments.
The Lake Providence doctors’ primary responsibility now was to keep Rose Anna quarantined while she was still contagious. Whether Rose Anna lived or died wasn’t up to them; it was up to her own luck and will. She’d already lost the game of luck to even contract the disease, much less start losing mobility, so if she was going to live, her will was what she had left.
Kept from her daughter’s side, Cokie felt her heart breaking. Rose was her chance at a rebirth, a chance to turn love and care into a life’s purpose. But like it had so often, life had less charitable plans for Cokie. Preferring her church’s deep-fried feasts to regular Sunday attendance, Cokie wasn’t the most devoted Baptist, but now she put pride aside, got down on her knees in the waiting area, and apologized to God for a surprisingly long list of sins. Then she prayed for what she was really after: her child’s life.
That night, with her mother praying to a savior who thus far had shown her little generosity, and with no one at her side to calm her terror and pain, little Rose Anna Whitehead gasped for air and lost consciousness. But she did not lose her will. No, sir. It turns out her will burned far too hot for dying.
II
The bellows groaned as it sucked air out of the goliath iron cylinder. At a glance, the contraption looked ripped from a science fiction film. Taking a closer look through the small windows in its sides, nurses could see a little body lying on the “cookie tray” inside, its chest expanding in the vacuum the suctioning bellows created, drawing into the body what its muscles no longer could: life-sustaining oxygen. The groaning stopped, then it began again, this time forcing air into the cylinder, the pressure pushing air out of the tiny body. Over and over.
Weeks after surviving her isolation in Lake Providence, Rose Anna had been moved to a hospital in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an iron lung was now doing her breathing for her. Of course, if you ever asked little Rose Anna if she’d lived in an iron lung for the weeks it took for her body to stop the virus’s immobilizing march, for one-quarter of one lung to regain enough strength that she could breathe on her own again, she would vigorously deny it. “Why would I need anyone’s help to breathe, thank you very much.” For the rest of her life, this “Thank you very much” would be her genteel replacement for “Kindly go fuck yourself.” She’d be provided with ample opportunities to use it.
Rose Anna’s performance of her iron lung lie was so convincing that save for one photo of her asleep in the contraption, her doll-like head sticking out of one end of the massive metal beast, her secret would have been safe. But perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate lie. To an oxygen-deprived three-year-old separated from her mother and siblings, perhaps it all just seemed like a nightmare, too horrible to be real: something to wake up from, not remember.
She would have opened her eyes on occasion to check her toes and fingers, to see what still wiggled and what had stopped responding. While her hands, arms, and lungs slowly regained some strength, her legs and torso seemed to grow worse. She must have feared what would happen if the paralysis reached her chin and overtook her head. She surely would have seen what was done to the children who began losing that fight. A knife would slice a hole in their windpipe, a tube would be shoved into it, and a nurse would pump a bag to keep the child’s brain alive as long as possible before the child’s body gave up, the frightened child unable to call out for her mother.
For those lucky enough to survive polio’s degenerative, contagious period, it was a leap from the frying pan into the fire. Survivors would be transferred to long-term-care facilities to endure years of painful, further-disfiguring surgeries and rehabilitation. And thanks to the nature of how and where this virus often spread, most parents proved too poor for regular visits. Survivors became orphans of circumstance, left to brave terrible surgeries to fuse bones, cut away dead muscles, and transplant ligaments in often futile attempts to salvage limbs—all of this in a time before modern anesthesia or effective painkillers.
* * *
—
If it hadn’t been for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there would have been little hope of waking Rose Anna and her wardmates from their living nightmares. A survivor of polio himself, the thirty-second U.S. president stood with braces on his legs when he took the oath of office, stealthily holding on to the lectern for support.
A decade before becoming president, Roosevelt had opened the nation’s first full-fledged rehabilitation institution for polio patients, in Warm Springs, Georgia. He had long felt that the country needed a home for modern advancements in polio treatment. He found his answer in Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who was pioneering a polio therapy that sought to eliminate the need for aggressive surgeries or immobilizing limbs with casts, splints, metal bars, and leather straps. Her belief was that hot baths and warm wet packs could relieve pain and spasms, and that by stretching and exercising what muscles remained, some patients might regain some movement. These methods didn’t yield great gains either, but at least they didn’t lean on the pain and further disfigurement of scalpels.
The steaming water bubbling up out of the ground in Warm Springs made it an ideal home for Roosevelt’s toughened tribe of young polio survivors. Everyone around Rose Anna knew that this was the only place she might find an advan
ced, humane shot at recovery. But the Whiteheads were dirt-poor, the cost an impossibility for Cokie. Once again, FDR would indirectly help.
Roosevelt had founded the March of Dimes in 1938 as an alliance between doctors, scientists, and volunteer fund-raisers to support polio research and education and help patients who couldn’t afford Warm Springs. After a wildly successful national push, the March of Dimes’ efforts became localized. Chapters popped up in thousands of counties across the nation, each asking Americans to send in one dime during the Christmas season to help.
It must have felt like an answer to Cokie’s late-night hospital prayer when the local March of Dimes, operating out of her own Lake Providence Baptist church, came knocking to say they’d raised enough money to pay for Rose Anna’s full-time care in Georgia. It was Cokie’s first turn of luck in a good long time, but it came at a cost. Warm Springs was an eight-hour drive from Lake Providence, and she might only afford to make that kind of journey twice a year at best: maybe for a birthday, maybe for Christmas. That would be it. And how long would Rose Anna be there? No one had a good answer to that question.
But here’s the extraordinary thing about Cokie Whitehead: she could find hope in the smallest cracks and crevices. Before there was ever a shot at recovery at Warm Springs, three-and-a-half-year-old Rose Anna was allowed a rare trip home from the hospital in Vicksburg. Within minutes of being home, she had found her old wooden potty chair, and without any instruction pulled herself up onto it, then, using its back like a walker, started scooting it forward with her arms, dragging her limp legs behind. Repeating those steps, she began moving freely about the house under her own power, showing an incredible amount of ingenuity and determination. It was a major event in the family, and thanks to Cokie, it was the topic of discussion on porches for a mile around that night. “And her daddy said she’d never walk again! Look how wrong he was! She’s walking!” Cokie said to anyone who’d listen, and even louder to those who wouldn’t. Her daughter was going to beat the odds. “My Rose will walk again, and all on her own. You mark my words.”
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