“They look real to you, sugar?”
“How the heck should I know?”
“Well, I don’t think they real gold, baby. No.”
“They look real enough to me, Willie.” And she wanted one.
From high atop a float, a woman popping out of a sequined gown spotted little Anna down below and waved. Anna enthusiastically waved back, and that busty woman threw a fistful of beads and “real” gold and silver coins down toward Anna’s wheelchair. Anna quickly rolled out from under Willie’s control, positioning her chair over as many of those beads and coins as possible, and then glared at anyone who dared try to grab such treasure from a girl in a wheelchair. “Get ’em, Willie!” she cried out. Willie gathered up every last one. The trick to this game figured out, Anna waved like mad at every passing float, and by the end of the parade, they had collected a massive cache of treasure for themselves.
This was the only story Anna ever readily shared from her time in New Orleans—never the traumas, just Willie, his swearing bird, their beignets, and the acquisition of her “real” gold coins. The rest I had to dig and beg for. I suppose that’s the spirit of a survivor, of an eternal optimist—despite all the “nos” and “nevers” thrown at her, she was always looking to the bright side, or for some hopeful sound to grab ahold of.
Two days into her coma, she thought she heard one.
The sound was far away, but she locked onto it and wouldn’t let it go. It was a parrot, swearing in Creole. And following the sound of Willie’s cussing parrot, Anna slowly made her way out of that coma her doctors had said she would never escape. A few days later, tough old Willie, who claimed to have seen it all, shed tears when he saw his Anna smiling up at him again.
One of the most well-worn pages in Anna’s long-saved essay “Our Suffering” contains this passage:
We can rebel against our condition and make ourselves and those around us miserable. Or we can accept it with resignation and patience, and derive great benefit from our suffering for ourselves and others. This patience is not a passive acceptance of our suffering and a meaningless surrender to our wills. But it is an active and energetic exercise of the will….We must continue in our efforts, not despairingly, but hopefully aware that one day our struggle will end and we will be victorious.
I can only imagine how those words buoyed Anna’s spirits in the months to come as doctors built a cage for her body: steel bars down both legs from hips to feet, then bolted into shoes. The metal inside and out would take the place of hamstring, calf, abdominal, and back muscles—a body remade of steel, aluminum, leather, and copper. Rubbing braces would build thick calluses on her legs and feet. Bolts would stain her flesh as they corroded. The curving of her spine would slow but never improve, lifting one leg far higher than the other. And in that time, Rose Anna Whitehead would rename herself once more. She was no longer an Anna. That was a girl’s name. By her own decree, she was now a woman. A survivor. And she would be called Anne.
Her spine now made of steel, Anne refused to cry or complain any longer; she refused the morphine that gave her such horrible nightmares. Because somewhere in her coma, she had found her mother’s sturdy, some say foolish optimism buried deep inside of her. And once awake, she put that optimism next to the rage she’d found in her broken heart, and made a decision to use her hopefulness and energetic will to prove every one of this hospital’s staff of realists wrong in every possible way.
I understand the mighty power and dangers of Anne’s rage and foolish optimism all too well. They live deep inside of me too. Because just to my left, keeping me company as I type these words, are four of Rose Anna’s shimmering gold Mardi Gras coins. Because, of course, despite many more trials ahead, and every assurance that she’d never fall in love or have and raise children of her own, tough little Rose Anna Whitehead grew up to be my mom. And that inheritance, from mother to daughter to me, would prove a force with the strength to move things in directions few in our world would have ever dared imagine possible.
CHAPTER 4
A Body in Motion
I
The same high school physics teacher who taught me that nothing starts moving without an outside force getting it going also taught me that a body in motion won’t stop moving without something forcing it to slow down.
* * *
—
At the age of fifteen, nearly thirteen years after her nightmare began, Anne finally found herself on the long-awaited ride back home to Lake Providence, free of all of the hospitals’ terrors for good. On that journey, she made a list of things she’d been told she’d never do. It included walking with her own two feet, having a “normal” boy fall in love with her, going to prom, going to college, driving a car, traveling abroad, holding a full-time job, getting married, and having children. While Anne had come to accept that suffering would always be a part of her life, she refused to accept these limitations. So each morning, she dedicated herself to receiving her suffering with an open heart, then got to work proving everyone wrong.
Anne was finally home, but she’d be damned if she was going to sit still.
Lake Providence had changed since Anne left. In the years she was away, Anne’s black neighbors had won the right to vote, and her high school had been integrated, but racism there was far from dead. Many white folks left town when integration arrived. The remaining white kids headed to a new private school that could charge tuition their parents hoped the black families couldn’t afford. Anne’s family most certainly couldn’t afford it, so that fall, Anne walked like a pendulum into her mostly African American public school.
For Anne, it wasn’t strange to be a minority. She already knew what it meant to be different, and she once told me that it felt like her black classmates didn’t gawk at her the way the white kids in town did. Her new classmates understood what it was like to be judged on appearance over character, and perhaps they didn’t want to pass that pain along.
What Anne could no longer ignore was her white neighbors’ bigoted remarks and racist slang. When she asked them about it, some would say, “That’s just the way it’s always been.” Others outright argued the superiority of the white race—ideas they’d learned from their parents and grandparents. Anne knew better. She’d already seen more of the world and met more kinds of people than most here ever would. Polio had given her that unexpected gift. And because polio didn’t discriminate, Anne had grown up surrounded by diversity. Hell, her life had been saved by a black man and his foulmouthed bird—why wouldn’t she share a classroom with a child who shared his shade of skin? But as her big sister Martha knew too well, in Lake Providence, this kind of attitude made Anne dangerously unique in a whole new way.
Anne had only about half of her high school days left, but she made up for lost time. She made the honor roll, went to football games, and joined the band—and not just any band, the marching band, for which she figured out how to balance on her crutches so she could play her clarinet standing up. And when prom arrived, she didn’t lament her single status but had her mom get out needle and thread. Anne wasn’t going to let that New Orleans nurse be right about her missing prom. Cokie tailored a spectacular dress—tight up top to straighten Anne’s back, and in regal princess fashion, with a billowing cloud of baby blue chiffon below.
The night of the prom, Anne posed for a portrait on the family sofa. Cokie helped her sit up nice and straight, then spread out all the blue chiffon, perfectly covering Anne’s braced legs. Cokie stepped back and pressed her camera’s shutter, and the zirconium flash cube burned up in an explosion of light. Her Rose looked like an honest-to-God movie star that night, and that’s not hyperbole. I have the photo on my desk, and I’ve worked with many a movie star. My mom looked absolutely stunning.
Over the next two years, Anne did everything she could to eclipse the label of “cripple,” but on occasion it proved too tall an order. Martha
can remember a high school football game Anne was supposed to meet her at. Martha arrived late and chatted up the ticket boy to try to find out if Anne had already gone in. She had to think, “What makes Anne distinctive?” She described her sister: “She has beautiful blond hair, blue eyes, with glasses, cat-eye glasses…”
At this school, that should have sufficed, but a friend walked up and told the boy:
“You can’t miss her. She has polio.”
Martha was furious: “Of all the things you could say about my sister, of all the things she’s done, why the hell would you say that?!”
It’s true that Anne’s hard work was partly an attempt to build a smoke screen, but that smoke screen began paying dividends most dared not dream of in her hometown. At seventeen years old, Anne hadn’t seen her father in years, so she wrote him a letter that included this shocker: “I graduate in May, you know. I can hardly wait. I plan to start college at Northeast in the fall. I went and took a scholarship test there and I got a letter from them last week and they asked me to come for an interview.”
Cokie and Victor couldn’t have imagined finishing elementary school, and now their most challenged child was packing up a baby-blue piece of secondhand luggage with her few earthly possessions, on the cusp of doing what few in their town or family had ever done: leaving for college. Cokie was in awe. The nightmare that had stolen her daughter’s limbs, and nearly taken her life, was now revealing its flip side: Anne, though immobilized—or perhaps thanks to that—was becoming a genuine mover in a town where little ever moved.
* * *
—
The following spring, an item appeared in the local Lake Providence newspaper: “CLAIMED BY HONOR SOCIETY. Roseanna Whitehead (Northeast State College) was among the 26 freshman women initiated recently into Alpha Lambda Delta, national honor society….Miss Whitehead, a graduate of Monticello High School, aspires to be a doctor of medicine.” Nowhere in the article is there a mention of disability. Hot damn. She’d finally eclipsed that characteristic with her academic excellence.
But good grades aren’t enough to build a full life, and Anne hadn’t become an expert flirt just for sport. She loved boys. And tall, dark, and handsome was her thing.
The war was raging in Vietnam, and like so many others, Anne began writing letters to the young soldiers over there. If one wrote back and asked politely, she’d send a photo of herself from the shoulders up. She was beautiful in those photos, so she had little trouble getting letters and photos back. Most of the young men would ask to meet up in person when their tours of duty were complete, and that’s when Anne’s replies would slow. Or occasionally a young man would stop writing her, likely wounded or killed in combat. To those who had lost limbs but still wrote, Anne might reveal her own condition in hopes of comforting her new brother in that struggle.
Anne filled a gold, wallet-size photo book with the pictures of the men she wrote to and fell for in college. Years later, it surfaced, and we flipped through it together. I called it her “golden book of boys,” and I pointed out a stunningly handsome young man near the back. Tall, with thick dark hair and a square jaw, he looked like an absolute teen idol. When I asked her if they’d ever met in person, I could feel her heart sink. “Yes…that was Don.”
Anne hadn’t met Don through a letter-writing campaign where she could easily hide her most visible difference; she’d met him in college, in person. He knew what her legs and body looked like, and he didn’t seem to mind. From the day they met, she began waking up an hour earlier each morning to stand in front of her dorm room’s mirror, leaning on a crutch to put on her makeup, roll her hair with giant curlers, and get herself just right. And guess what? It worked. Don began asking Anne out on proper dates. And after one such date, Don leaned in and kissed her full on the mouth. It was wetter than she’d imagined, but it still seemed too good to be true. The most handsome boy in school was pursuing her. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It seemed everyone but her mom had warned her it never would.
It quickly became clear to anyone who met Anne and Don that they were getting serious fast. Don had even whispered the words “marriage” and “kids” once or twice, and now he wanted to come home with her to Lake Providence to meet her family over the summer. He was a proper son of the South and wanted to show Anne suitable respect before going any further. Anne had dreamed of getting married one day, and occasionally even imagined the more medically dangerous idea of having children. Now a man was suggesting they might try both.
Anne finished her spring semester in late May and headed to Texarkana to visit Josie and James. Their daughter, my cousin Debbie, was a teenager then. She remembers Anne “writing all these letters to Don, and Don writing all these letters back.” Debbie would lie on her bed listening to Anne read them out loud, fascinated if not tantalized. Anne even had a picture of Don that she put up at the head of her bed. And when Don finally arrived in person, he was everything Anne had promised, if not more. Even James, Anne’s fiercest protector, thought he was “grade A.”
Don loved Anne and wasn’t afraid to show it or talk about it with anyone. But no matter how high love soars, it can dig holes twice as deep.
When Anne finally met Don’s folks, Don’s mother was kind to Anne’s face, but once Anne left the room, she expressed a deep concern: “How will she ever give you children?” Don pushed back, but just like Anne’s doctors, Don’s mom was certain that Anne’s body couldn’t handle a pregnancy. By the end of the summer, she had done her homework to prove her case, and had convinced her son that Anne could never give him a family or her the grandkids she deserved. So, his own heart breaking, Don ended things with Anne.
Anne’s grades suddenly plummeted from As and Bs to Ds and an F. She was devastated. She even reached out to a young priest named Embry whom she’d met in New Orleans. He had been a handsome teenage priest-in-training who little Anna had tried to tempt with love letters to leave the seminary for her. He had successfully resisted her charms. Now she needed to know how he had accepted that he would never love a woman, never get married, and never have a family. A week later, he wrote Anne back:
The best one can do is to love more, beyond what might be expected in return. One must see his own value and self-worth to become of value to others. This value and worth we have is from God. He loves us, and that’s something. And we have things to do in this world, even if it’s not big, because we have responsibilities as Christians. But it’s tough to be a Christian; it takes blood, sweat, tears, and the sacrifice of life.
Anne had never been a very religious young woman, but her prayers to God in New Orleans had worked out well enough. And so, after receiving Embry’s letter about God’s love and purpose easing heartbreak, she began visiting churches near campus.
She would forever begrudge the local Baptist church for having stolen the money that forced her from Warm Springs. Now she yearned for a new church, a more holy and uplifting Christianity, but despite her numerous Sunday outings to this chapel and that, none seemed to fit. It was all too hellfire and brimstone, and she’d had more than enough of that in this life already.
As it turned out, all of her searching would prove to be in vain. The faith she was after didn’t require any footwork. It came knocking.
At the very back of my mom’s “golden book of boys,” there was a picture of one of the most handsome young men I’d ever seen—shiny dark hair, a distinctive jaw, and crystal-blue bedroom eyes. I tried my best not to make my keen interest too clear, and thank goodness, because when I casually asked, “Who’s he?” my mother took a long, thoughtful breath and said, “That’s your father, Lance.”
II
Two cute, clean-cut men in pressed white shirts, black slacks, and name badges that deemed them “elders” despite their hardly being out of their teens knocked on Anne’s dorm room door one day. They were the picture of perfection. Kind and polite, they didn’t preach about
hellfire but spoke of a new and everlasting restored gospel of Jesus Christ that claimed all men were inherently good, and that things like love and family didn’t end when we died. “We will all be reunited in heaven. Because family is forever.” To Anne’s Southern heart, this meant her family would now come first for all of eternity. It was very appealing for a young woman who knew too well the pain of not having her family near.
Anne had a thousand questions. They had every answer. The point of life was to pass a test: to see if you could stay true to the word of God despite temptation. It was also for Heavenly Father’s souls in heaven to come down to Earth and get bodies. One look at Anne’s legs and torso and they knew what to share next: “And in heaven, the bodies we get here on Earth will be healthy and perfect again, forever.” Much like mine, my mother’s “too-good-to-be-true” filter often fails. She was happy to believe that in these Mormons’ Celestial Kingdom (the highest floor of their multilevel heaven), she would have a perfect body and be surrounded by her family forever.
Anne immediately began attending services at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Coming from an alcoholic home, she loved its rules against drinking and smoking. Her life thus far had been so messy; the tidy structure of this new brand of Christianity with its adherents’ well-ironed Sunday clothes, sharp haircuts, and love of all things “celestial” and white, must have felt like sweet relief. Earthly life had shown her only chaos. This church was so very orderly.
It didn’t hurt one bit that her missionaries soon introduced her to another young man on his mission in Louisiana. He had grown up in Provo, Utah, the heart of Mormondom. And he was just about the best-looking young man Anne had ever laid eyes on: tall, dark, and handsome. If he wanted to talk to her about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or Heavenly Father, she didn’t mind one bit. He could have recited the phone book and she would have said “Amen.” His name was Raul N. Garrison. When she got up the nerve to ask what the N. stood for, he paused, a sly grin creasing his bedroom eyes, and answered, “Nothing.” And he meant it. His parents hadn’t given him a middle name, so he’d added the initial himself. It’s worth noting that this is how contemporary Mormon prophets present themselves: Thomas S. Monson, Gordon B. Hinckley, Spencer W. Kimball. He was trying to elevate his stature by taking on a middle initial like all the best “men of God” do. It was LDS bold. He was confident, and a rebel to boot. What a dream.
Mama's Boy Page 5
