by Neil Sheehan
Henry Tripp, Vann’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, was the last Tripp to know the pride of owning a big farm. He had eight children who needed land, and with crop income so low there was no way he could generate cash to help them buy ground of their own. He began parceling up his farm. In 1902 when Vann’s maternal grandfather, John William “Bill” Tripp, married Inelline Smith, who preferred her nickname of Queenie, Henry Tripp gave Bill forty acres, a mule, and enough timber from the farm woods for a house, a barn, and a hog shed.
Queenie endured the marriage and the existence it entailed for a dozen years and five children—four daughters and a son. They were all born in the iron double bed she and Bill shared in the largest of the four rooms in the pine-plank farmhouse his brothers had helped him build. That room also served as the dining and living room for the family. Everyone gathered there in the evening until it was time to go to sleep. There was no electricity and no plumbing. Light came from kerosene lamps, water from a well in buckets, and there was a privy. Nothing inside or outside of the house was painted: paint was an unnecessary expense. The babies were delivered by a midwife. A doctor cost more money and was reserved for a more serious medical problem than a birth. Myrtle Lee, Vann’s mother, was the third-born child on July 18, 1905. There were no Lees in the Tripp or Smith family lines as far as anyone could remember. Myrtle acquired her middle name for the same reason so many Southern children received it—to honor Robert E. Lee.
Bill Tripp’s tobacco and cotton and corn never brought enough money to pay off the “supply merchant,” as the owner of the local general store was called. Each year Bill would have to borrow again at interest rates never lower than 30 percent for the fertilizer and plowpoints and other necessities of farming. For the family to survive, Queenie also had to have flour and salt and a bit of molasses and sugar, kerosene for the lamps, and bolts of cloth to cut and sew into clothes. As soon as the fresh vegetables from the garden were gone in the fall the Tripps subsisted on the pellagra-and-rickets diet that was one of the curses of the post-Civil War South—hog meat and gravy with biscuits for one meal and hog meat and gravy with corn bread for the next. Myrtle and Mollie and the three other Tripp children were lucky enough not to contract either disease from the vitamin deficiency. Tens of thousands of white and black children across the South were less fortunate.
The poverty made so much else that was difficult to bear still more difficult. Dying, for example. There were no fancy caskets or wakes at funeral homes to allay grief. The family washed the body, dressed the deceased in the best clothes he or she had owned or the living would spare, and placed the body in a pine coffin and nailed down the top. The next morning the preacher came, the relatives and friends assembled, and the body was buried.
Epidemics of dysentery from the bad sanitation struck like late frosts to cull the young. Vann’s uncle, William Arthur “Buddie” Tripp, the only son of Queenie and Bill, remembered when his cousin Moses took sick during one epidemic. Moses was Buddie’s best playmate, and he went over to Moses’s house to cheer him up. Moses was too ill to talk. He just lay in the bed and looked at Buddie. The doctor rode by every day in a horse and buggy and gave Moses medicine. It didn’t do any good. Moses was a strong boy. He lay in the bed at least a week before he went. Mollie came down with dysentery during the same epidemic. She was older than Moses and perhaps hardier. Her body fought off the disease. No one had told her that Moses was sick. She was surprised one morning to look out the bedroom window and see a procession of relatives passing by the house.
She got out of bed and found her mother. “Momma, what’s happening I know somethin’s wrong,” she said.
“Your cousin Moses died, Mollie,” Queenie told her. “They’re buryin’ him in the cemetery up next to the woods.”
The Tripps had their own family cemetery in a field near the woods behind the grandparents’ house, another relic of the years before defeat. Buddie walked with the procession. He remembered that there were no flowers on Moses’s coffin. The pine box with his playmate in it rode to the grave on top of a flatbed farm wagon.
Queenie kept badgering Bill to abandon farming and move the family to Norfolk. He could do carpentry and was a competent mason, and there was work to be found in Norfolk. The port had become one of the islands of relative prosperity in the South. Norfolk had picked up considerable traffic from the new east-west railroads hauling coal and cotton for export to New England and Europe. The modern, deep-draft ocean freighters had to load at Norfolk, because they could not sail up the James River to Richmond as their smaller precedessors had been able to do.
Bill Tripp was a taciturn man with little capacity for love, another reason the marriage was difficult. He did love his land and he wouldn’t leave it, so Queenie left him. In 1914 she put the five children up with her parents while she went to Norfolk to get a job. She told Bill she would earn enough to support all of them better than he had.
Vann’s grandfather did not farm long for an empty house. Shortly after Queenie left and before future events might have rescued him, Bill Tripp learned that the owner of the general store was foreclosing on his debt. The county judge issued a writ, and the sheriff sold the forty acres and everything on it at auction to pay off the loan. Bill loaded his shotgun and went to the sheriff’s house to kill him. He was not mad at the sheriff for handling the auction; an auction was a sheriff’s job. He was mad at the sheriff for arranging to auction the farm to himself. Perhaps the sheriff had schemed for it and persuaded the supply merchant to foreclose.
Bill was intercepted and arrested before he could shoot the sheriff. The judge gave him two years on a chain gang building roads. A blacksmith fastened irons around his legs above the ankles. A guard ran the chain through the loops on the irons to shackle Bill to the other prisoners. The men worked chained together all day long, ate and performed their bodily functions together, and slept chained together at night. The chain and the leg irons were not removed until Bill was released and banished from the county for another two years because the sheriff was still afraid. When Bill returned, one of his brothers staked him to a lease as a sharecropper. He was never again to have his own land.
Queenie picked the right time to leave the farm. The armies of Europe marched against each other in August 1914, and the carnage on the Marne and at Verdun and on the Somme was as expensive in resources as it was wasteful in lives. The extravagance of Europe’s self-destruction gave life back to the South. There were profits to be had on a scale that had not been seen since the Cotton Kingdom, and nowhere were the good times of World War I to come in greater lavishness than in Norfolk. Cotton boomed. The constricting of the textile mills of Britain, France, and Germany, with warfare on the oceans as well as on the Continent, meant that America soon had a corner on the world’s cotton trade. Vann’s grandmother found a job in a mill that was producing long cotton drawers and undershirts, the “long Johns” that men wore in cold weather until the advent of central heating. This mill paid by the piece rather than by the hour. Queenie brought Mollie to Norfolk to help her turn out more underwear. Mollie was ten years old at the time. She remembered that she was not yet tall enough to reach the top of the seaming machine and had to stand on a box to be able to flip over the undershirts and drawers so that her mother could sew them faster.
Mother and daughter between them sewed long Johns so swiftly that in less than a year Queenie had saved enough to bring the other four children up from North Carolina and to open a boardinghouse. She rented a three-story place of about twenty rooms in the oldest section of Norfolk, near the wharves on the Elizabeth River. The house had been a mansion in the pre-Civil War era. (It was torn down during urban renewal in the 1960s.) A boardinghouse is a sensible business for a country woman who knows how to cook and care for men. Queenie’s choice was also shrewd; housing for workmen is a prime commodity in wartime. After Woodrow Wilson persuaded Congress to enter the fight by declaring war on Germany in April 1917, Queenie’s problem became one
of trying to find space for an extra bed and for another chair at the tables in her dining room.
“Mars Moulds a Great City” was the title an enthusiastic historian of Norfolk chose for his chapter on World War I. In a period when millions of dollars had the economic impact of billions, tens of millions in military construction projects were literally started overnight and whipped forward with spare-no-money speed. Norfolk was “swept down upon by a tidal wave of progress” and forced to “ride upon the flood of prosperity,” as a local newspaper phrased it. The Navy seized the moment to obtain funds for an 800-acre base beyond any of the admirals’ peacetime reveries on the end of the peninsula just north of the city. Rows of piers for battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, a submarine basin, a seaplane lagoon, an airfield, hangars, multistory concrete warehouses, barracks, machine shops, and hundreds of other buildings began to appear. The old Norfolk Navy Yard at Portsmouth across the Elizabeth River was torn apart and modernized with a battleship dry dock that was the largest and most complicated example of concrete construction in American history up to that point. The Army looked at the congestion in the ports of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and decided that Norfolk was the best alternative from which to ship troops and supplies for the expeditionary force it was creating in France. The result was the wharves and rail marshaling yards and assorted facilities of the biggest Army transport base in the country. The troop trains steamed into Norfolk, and every day and through the night thousands of men embarked for France. Everything from socks to mules to locomotives was shipped off with them to help defeat the Kaiser’s gray-clad soldiery. Norfolk’s population doubled from a prewar 68,000 to 130,000 as men and women from all over the South and from Texas and Kansas and even Minnesota came to labor in the war effort. Within the year and a half before the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Norfolk was transformed from a modest city beside the sea into a port of significance and the greatest naval base in the Western Hemisphere.
Queenie gave up the boardinghouse in 1921 when the last of the base construction was done and the money tree was no longer bountiful. With her profits, she bought a small house in another section of the city, and she found work as a ship stewardess on overnight passenger steamers that plied between Norfolk and New York. Her children had begun to spin off during the boardinghouse years, which did not trouble her, because she saw Norfolk as an improvement for them. Mollie had eloped at the height of the good times in 1918 with a ship welder who was staying at the boardinghouse. She was just fourteen (her welder was nineteen), but young marriage was common then and she wanted a home of her own. Her older sister, Lillian, also married a boarder, who had a job at a dry-cleaning establishment; she divorced him after a son, and married a Norfolk policeman.
Mertie, as Vann’s mother was called within the family, did not find the kind of providers her sisters married, nor did she settle into a job. The practical choices she faced were to marry a workingman who wanted a family or to seek a relatively pleasant job like her mother’s. Her education did not fit her for anything else. It had stopped after the elementary years in North Carolina, because Queenie had needed the girls to help her with the waiting on table and bedmaking and other chores of the boardinghouse. Myrtle had sufficient looks to have found a provider had she set her mind to it. Her features were somewhat homely—her mouth slightly crooked and her nose too big. Her long brunette hair was attractive, her smile appealing, and her trim figure more appealing still, especially her pretty legs. She was also sufficiently intelligent to have found a job like her mother’s had she wanted to stay single. Myrtle disliked making practical choices. “I’m Myrtle and there’s not another one in the world like me. I love myself,” was Mollie’s way of summing up her sister’s character.
Myrtle was a dreamer. She never thought about tomorrow. She liked to dance, to laugh, to drink, and to make love, and she did not worry about the consequences for herself and others. When she found a job, she did not keep it long. When she made some money, she spent it right away on clothes and makeup. In the spring of 1923, three months before she turned eighteen, she struck up a romance with a French merchant sailor named Victor LeGay and took a train to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, just below the Virginia border to marry him there in a hasty ceremony. They shared quarters for six months. LeGay had been gone about a month when Myrtle got pregnant by Spry. The indications are that she had started seeing him before LeGay’s departure.
Johnny Spry’s pleasures were gambling and chasing women. He had known Myrtle when she was a girl, having grown up in the same neighborhood in old Norfolk where Queenie had her boardinghouse. One of the benefits of his job as a city trolley driver was the opportunity to meet women. He and Myrtle may have renewed acquaintance that way. She seems to have loved him as much as Myrtle could love any man. She staked out her claim by riding on the seat behind him when he drove his trolley. Spry’s wife, who was aware of his habits, quickly spotted the affair. She leaped onto the trolley one day and lit into Myrtle to try to scare her off—the two women screeching, slapping, and pulling hair in an old-fashioned catfight. Spry was amused at being fought over and recounted the scene to a son many years later. Myrtle was not deterred. She intended to divorce LeGay as soon as she could (she subsequently did obtain a divorce in the Circuit Court in Norfolk, charging LeGay with adultery) and seems to have let herself get pregnant in the hope that a child would persuade Spry to divorce his wife and marry her. Johnny Spry did not believe smart men married women like Myrtle. He had ended the affair by the time the child was born on July 2, 1924.
Myrtle’s son need not have been illegitimate. She was still legally married. To avoid embarrassing herself with the doctor who delivered the baby, she lied and said that LeGay was the father. The lie gave the boy a pro forma last name on his birth certificate. Although her family knew about the affair and also knew that LeGay had been gone too long to be the father (Lillian was renting the apartment next door to Myrtle’s), they would have kept the secret if only for the child’s sake. The boy could have grown up ignorant of his true parentage.
Myrtle made her son illegitimate. She told everyone she knew who his real father was. She also told her son as soon as he was old enough to ask about a daddy. Spry always said that she named the boy John Paul after him “out of spite.”
With the purpose of his conception gone when he was born, Myrtle did not want the baby. She left him in Lillian’s custody while she went off in search of amusement and another man. Lillian put him into the crib with the first son of her second marriage, Vann’s cousin George Dillard, who had been born two weeks earlier and had been delivered by the same doctor. Vann and his cousin also shared the same bottle, and Lillian gave him the care and affection she gave her George. Myrtle took him back several months later after she found another man to pay the rent on another apartment for a while. He experienced his first pain then from the neglect and rejection his mother inflicted on him with her egocentricity and the instability of her life. Mollie decided to check up on the baby one day. “I know my sister; she’s not takin’ care of him right,” she remembered thinking. She found him deserted. He was lying in a crib in his own filth, crying from hunger. She took him home, cleaned him up, and began raising him with her two infant sons. Periodically Myrtle would come back and claim him. Her ego made her want to pretend to be a mother. Vann’s aunts would watch her and retrieve him as soon as she wandered off again. He spent most of his first four and a half years with Lillian or Mollie—until Myrtle became pregnant with his half sister, Dorothy Lee, and married Aaron Frank Vann in January 1929. His aunts bought him new clothes or saw that he got decent hand-me-downs from his cousins, and he never wanted for food.
The appearance of a stepfather who would presumably give him a home seemed fortunate; little Johnny, as he had been nicknamed, was losing the protection of his aunts. Mollie moved to New York in 1928, and Lillian and her family followed in 1929 after her husband lost his job on the Norfolk police force. They arrived before the Great
Depression started that October with the Black Tuesday crash of the stock market. Queenie instigated the moves. She had become familiar with New York as a stewardess on the coastal steamships. She told Mollie it was a marvelously exciting place with all sorts of opportunities and persuaded Mollie to take a trip up on a steamer to see the city. “We’re movin’ to New York,” Mollie announced to her husband as soon as she returned to Norfolk. Her shipyard welder had by this time graduated to well-paid work as a loading-crane operator at one of the Norfolk coal piers. He became a mechanic with the New York subway system. Lillian’s husband was hired as a security guard at the main branch of the Irving Trust Company at 1 Wall Street.
Mollie dyed her flowing black hair blond, hired baby-sitters for her two boys, and became a hostess in the tearoom of the Hotel Taft, then known as the Menger. The hotel was next to the Roxy Theater, the grandest of the movie palaces in those years of cinema glory. The Roxy’s patrons would go to the hotel tearoom for a snack and a light meal after screenings of first-run movies and the four stage shows daily that were accompanied by the Roxy’s own 110-piece orchestra. The headwaiter in the hotel grill downstairs was a handsome Italian who resembled a fellow immigrant, Rudolph Valentino, the lover-idol of the silent-film era of the 1920s. He was so proud of the resemblance that he had people call him Valentino. Mollie fell in love with him, divorced her Norfolk man, and became Mrs. Terzo Tosolini. She retained custody of her two sons. “My mother was a very progressive woman,” Mollie said of the quality in Queenie, and in herself, which had taken them both on the journey from Bill Tripp’s forty acres.
