by Josh Levin
* * *
That night, Connie took the Moores across the state line to Missouri, dropping them off in a town none of them had seen before. The older children stayed in a furnished house, one they thought may have belonged to Connie’s relatives. Avalon, Annie Mae, and the younger kids slept in a shabbier structure, one in which the most prominent piece of furniture was a large wooden box that looked as though it had once held a casket.
The Moore children typically found comfort in the smell of their mother’s cooking—the chicken, greens, and brown gravy she’d have simmering on the stove when they got home from the fields or school. Now they had to make do with bread, mayonnaise, and rag bologna. Annie Mae fixed as many sandwiches as she could, serving them to her family around that casket box. When Connie came by to check on the Moores, she brought over eggs to supplement their meager provisions. She also took them to a very nice house one evening, where a white family treated them to a big spaghetti dinner. MaLoyce didn’t know anything about who their hosts were or how Connie knew them—she was just grateful not to be eating bologna.
For MaLoyce and Bobbie and their brothers and sisters, this period in Missouri was a terrifying blur. They’d crawl under their beds whenever a car drove by at night, hiding from the bad people who might be trying to hunt them down. The overseer did find them, just three or four days after they’d gone on the lam. This time, he went after both Avalon and Annie Mae, telling them they needed to make him whole. But the Moores weren’t in this fight alone. Connie stood right beside them, and she wasn’t afraid to tell the boss man what she thought about his threats. “I’m not going to let you do nothing,” she told him.
Annie Mae’s daughters had never seen anyone speak to a white person that way. Their mother would later tell them she suspected that Connie had somehow blackmailed the plantation owner—that she wouldn’t have been confident enough to tell him off otherwise. Bobbie thought Connie could talk the way she talked because she looked the way she looked. The Moores didn’t have light skin, and they didn’t have silky hair. Connie didn’t seem white to everyone, but on this day, during this face-off, she was white enough to be safe.
Connie succeeded in chasing the plantation boss away, but it felt like a temporary reprieve. The overseer knew where to find them, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t come back. The Moores weren’t sure where Connie had been and what she’d seen, but they believed her when she said their lives could be better somewhere else. She’d tell Avalon and Annie Mae they didn’t have to live under this tyranny. After their latest confrontation, the Moores couldn’t muster any kind of counterargument.
A good portion of Annie Mae’s family had left the South already, moving from Mississippi to Peoria, Illinois. Avalon traveled ahead of his family, leaving just as soon as his in-laws wired bus fare, while Annie Mae and their children climbed into Connie’s white station wagon one more time. They drove along the Mississippi River, skirting the eastern border of Missouri until they reached Saint Louis, and then veered into southern Illinois. When they reached their destination, four hundred miles north of Blytheville, Connie didn’t turn her car around and head back home. She hadn’t just liberated the Moore family. She’d also finally extricated herself from a place she’d never quite been able to leave behind.
* * *
The Moore siblings had never seen white people and black people shopping in the same grocery store. They’d also never lived on a mixed street or gone to an integrated school. And thanks to their erratic educations in Arkansas, they were older than all their new classmates—kids who didn’t hesitate to mock their thick country accents.
It would take a long while for the Moores to feel as though they fit in, and to think of Peoria as their home. There was one aspect of their life up north, though, that felt very familiar. Connie’s ragtag family lived just two blocks away, and Paul, Johnnie, and Sandra went to the same school as MaLoyce and Bobbie. Annie Mae’s friend never asked for permission to stop by, and she didn’t defer to anyone else’s rules. Soon after they all made it to Illinois, Connie rubbed the Moore girls’ earlobes with ice and jabbed needles through their numbed flesh. They were all thrilled with their new piercings, especially eight-year-old Justine. The little girl was crestfallen when her mother said she couldn’t keep the holes in her ears. Connie’s beauty assembly line, it seemed, had been a rogue operation.
By the end of the 1950s, Peoria had earned a reputation as a clean-living, technocrat-scrubbed dreamscape, one of the National Municipal League’s “All-America Cities.” In 1955, the feminist writer Betty Friedan proclaimed in Redbook that she was no longer ashamed of her once-filthy hometown, writing that the “houses of vice are padlocked. The streets are sparkling clean.” Comedian Richard Pryor, who was born in Peoria in 1940 and grew up in a brothel owned and operated by his grandmother, countered in his memoir that the city’s sterile self-image obscured a more sinister truth. “They called Peoria the model city,” he wrote. “That meant it had the niggers under control.”
Although the city of just more than a hundred thousand was a lot less segregated than Mississippi County, Arkansas, the leader of the local NAACP said that, as of the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Peoria wasn’t any better than the South.” In 1962, six members of the civil rights group filed suit against the owner of a café located six blocks from the Moore family’s house; the proprietor, in a bid to shoo away black customers, had charged them $5 each for hot dogs that had a listed price of 15 cents, then had them arrested for disorderly conduct when they’d asked for receipts. Peoria also wasn’t brimming with job prospects for men like Avalon Moore. Neither the municipal bus company nor Peoria Water Works had any blacks on the payroll prior to 1963, and the Central Illinois Light Company—which employed six hundred people in the city—had a mere two full-time black workers.
The Moores’ move to the Midwest didn’t immediately lift them out of poverty. Their two-room rental on Peoria’s South Side wasn’t much more spacious than the shanty they’d lived in outside Blytheville. Avalon’s first job off the farm was on the back of a city garbage truck, and he’d bring home crates of unsold fruit and vegetables that grocery stores had left outside to rot—food that was good enough to eat, and that helped fill his children’s plates.
He soon landed a better-paying, fouler-smelling gig at the stockyards, driving pigs to slaughter. Pryor, who briefly worked as a meat-packer in Peoria before launching his comedy career, described it as “nasty work,” explaining that “all the shit that got on me during the day, the rock salt, water and whatnot, froze in the cold. By quitting time, my pants were as stiff as a board.” But Avalon wasn’t one to complain about the condition of his pants. He also didn’t grouse about the paltriness of his wages, or how Peoria wasn’t much of an “All-America” city so far as black people were concerned.
Connie did launch into tirades about these sorts of inequities, pretty much all the time. She told Avalon and Annie Mae they should be getting checks from the government to pay for their children’s needs, and she wouldn’t let it go even after the Moores told her they weren’t interested in public largesse. She was always talking about money, mostly that it was unfair she didn’t have more of it. While Connie wasn’t the type to wait for opportunities to come to her, she had the good fortune to stumble into a potential windfall in the last few days of 1959. If everything played out as she thought it should, she was going to be set for life.
* * *
Bobbie Moore was getting a geography lesson when the floor beneath her desk began to shake. At 11:30 a.m. on December 21, 1959, the fluorescent light fixtures affixed to the ceiling of her teacher John Wallace’s classroom came crashing down and flames shot up through a hatch in the floor. A photograph in the next day’s Peoria Journal Star showed a pair of children standing in the snow outside Webster School, looking up at a row of shattered windows.
The fire chief explained that gas from a broken main had built up in a tunnel beneath the school, and this invisible cloud
had combusted the instant a plumbing inspector lit a match. The inspector and his colleague had suffered first- and second-degree burns on their faces and hands, and Bobbie and her twenty-six classmates had been knocked to the ground instantly. The twelve-year-old had gotten plenty of practice doing duck-and-cover drills, but she hadn’t thought even a nuclear attack could be this loud.
Considering the force of the explosion, it was a miracle none of the students was seriously hurt. According to the Journal Star, three kids from Mr. Wallace’s geography class “suffered shock and were taken home.” The newspaper identified just one other possible victim. Ten-year-old Paul Harbaugh had been “in the classroom next to Wallace’s and…was the only student [in that room] knocked to the floor.” The paper reported that the child’s “mother said he had blood on his shirt.”
* * *
The adults at Webster School remained remarkably coolheaded after the explosion. Paul’s teacher hurried into John Wallace’s classroom to extinguish a flaming bookcase, while Wallace himself hustled students out of the building and across the street. The children’s parents mostly stayed calm, too, collecting their frightened sons and daughters from a playground near the school. And then Paul Harbaugh’s mother came roaring through, shouting that her children needed to get to a hospital.
Bobbie thought Connie sounded almost gleeful as she huddled with both Paul and her eight-year-old daughter, Sandra, telling them what to say about their supposed injuries. Neither of Connie’s kids had been badly hurt, and they didn’t seem excited about being asked to lie. Bobbie heard Paul say, “Mom, I don’t want to do it.” But Connie was determined to milk the accident for all it was worth.
On August 9, 1960, a Chicago attorney named Nathan M. Gomberg filed a complaint against the Peoria Board of Education and the Central Illinois Light Company on behalf of Paul and Sandra Harbaugh. The suit alleged that the defendants should’ve known about the gas leak, and that as a result of their negligence Connie Harbaugh’s children had been “injured and became ill and disordered for a long period of time, and their parents were compelled to and did expend large sums of money, endeavoring to cure them.” The plaintiffs asked for a judgment of $250,000 per child from both the board of education and the light company. If Connie Harbaugh won her case, she’d be entitled to $1 million.
Annie Mae Moore was disgusted by her friend’s lawsuit, but it didn’t catch her by surprise. Connie didn’t need much provocation to say “I’ll sue the hell out of them”—to turn real or imaginary misfortune into an opportunity for personal enrichment. Annie Mae would tell her children that she wished they could all go back to the barter system. If cash was illegal, she said, then maybe Connie wouldn’t be so consumed by greed.
A few months after Connie filed that $1 million lawsuit, Annie Mae closed a door in her house and unburdened herself to her husband. She told Avalon that she found Connie exhausting. Her fixation on money was “unnatural,” and Annie Mae wasn’t sure how much more she could take.
Unbeknownst to Annie Mae, Connie had been lying on a couch in their living room, and she’d picked up their conversation through the wall. “I heard you talking to Avalon about me and money,” Connie told her the next day.
Connie clearly felt betrayed. Her mother had never loved her, and her other relatives’ feelings were conditional at best. The Moores had shown her what a real family looked and felt like. Now they’d rejected her, too, after all she’d done for them. Worse, they’d been insincere, acting cheery to her face and running her down behind her back. “You could’ve just told me,” she said.
That was the last conversation Connie and Annie Mae would ever have. She didn’t come by for another visit after she left the Moores’ house that day, and she didn’t call or write. For decades after Connie left, Annie Mae would wonder where she’d gone and what she’d made of herself. She never would figure out why that strange woman had stopped at their door in Arkansas, and why she’d made it her mission to deliver the Moores to Illinois. But Annie Mae would always be grateful to Connie. As the psychic had predicted, her friend had turned on her, but not before doing some wonderful things.
Chapter 15
A Helpless Child
Seven months after the gas leak at Webster School, Connie Harbaugh’s daughter, Sandra, was admitted to a military hospital. A physician at Illinois’s Chanute Air Force Base wrote that the patient—the daughter of a veteran—had partial bilateral deafness, “possibly due to school explosion.” By early 1961, her malady had worsened. The director of medical services at another air force base, this one in Arizona, noted that Sandra had “nearly total loss of hearing due to the effects of an explosion.” That memo also alluded to a September 1960 audiology appointment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. Sandra’s doctor’s visit had been canceled, the document said, “because the mother was involved in a serious automobile accident and was hospitalized for resulting injuries.”
Four years later, Sandra’s mother would again use a car accident as an excuse, this time to avoid sitting for a deposition during the Wakefield heirship case. At this point, in 1964, her lawsuit in Peoria was still ongoing. Every piece of paper her lawyers submitted in the school explosion case referred to her as Connie Harbaugh. Meanwhile, 130 miles away in Chicago, a separate team of lawyers told a probate court judge in Cook County that she was really Constance Wakefield.
As in the Wakefield proceeding, the complaints she filed in the Webster School suit included a handful of demonstrable truths. Sandra had been a student at Webster, and she’d indeed been diagnosed with damaged hearing. It was clear, though, that Connie Harbaugh’s daughter hadn’t been anywhere close to the blast site. None of the initial news reports had mentioned Sandra’s name, and all three children who’d reportedly gone into shock due to the explosion had been in a sixth-grade geography class. In 1959, Sandra had been an eight-year-old second grader.
Connie Harbaugh was undeterred by the enormous hole in the middle of her lawsuit. She said that Sandra had suffered “permanent impairment of eyesight, particularly of the right eye”; that the girl had received a supportive letter from President John F. Kennedy; and that her son Johnnie and her friend Annie Mae’s daughter Bobbie Moore had been injured in the fiery episode, too. In addition, she supplied a list of eight medical professionals who’d treated Sandra’s infirmities. One of those doctors was Grant Sill, the shady Chicago physician who’d later fill out a delayed birth certificate indicating that the supposed Constance Wakefield was Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter. But Sill didn’t testify in the Peoria explosion case, nor did he provide an affidavit about Sandra’s injuries. In the end, Connie Harbaugh didn’t give the court any of her daughter’s medical records. She also failed to hand over that letter from President Kennedy or anything else that might back up her claims.
In Chicago, a state appeals court would rule in November 1966 that Constance Wakefield wouldn’t have to do any jail time for trying to defraud her alleged father’s estate. Four months later, a Peoria judge would dismiss Connie Harbaugh’s explosion suit after the defendants complained repeatedly that she’d refused to answer their questions. Sandra had been a small child when the ground shook at her elementary school. She was fifteen when her mother lost out on a chance to profit from the accidental detonation.
The potential payout from the Peoria case had shrunk years earlier. Contemporaneous reports on the incident at Webster School had said that ten-year-old Paul Harbaugh, not his younger sister, Sandra, had been knocked to the ground and bloodied. But in 1964, Paul was dropped from his mother’s suit without explanation. Two years after that, when opposing counsel asked Connie Harbaugh to reveal Paul’s location, she professed to have no idea where he might have gone. She was likely telling the truth.
* * *
In the spring of 1961, Connie Harbaugh wrote to the Veterans Administration to say that Paul had been taken from her. Her letter, handwritten in cursive, said she’d paid someone to “keep him and send him to school�
� while she was out of town. This caregiver, she explained, had told the local authorities a malicious lie, falsely reporting that the twelve-year-old had been abandoned.
Paul’s mother informed the VA that her lawyer had located him at a home for needy children in Peoria. “I had a call from Paul last week,” she wrote, “and he ask me to send him some…underclothing and other things that he needed because they did not get him anything and that he needed his glasses fixed because he had broken them.” Paul was a “nice boy,” she said, and she was worried about him. He needed to be “home with me,” not confined in some institution.
Connie Harbaugh hadn’t sent this note unprompted. The Veterans Administration had gotten word from a juvenile probation officer that Paul was no longer in his mother’s custody. Given that, the VA had notified Mrs. Harbaugh that she wouldn’t be receiving any more checks in her son’s name. Those benefits had come courtesy of the federal government’s Dependency and Indemnity Compensation program, which provides for the children of veterans who’ve succumbed to service-connected injuries or illnesses.
In 1953, a year after his divorce from Connie, the elder Paul Harbaugh had been discharged from the navy due to rheumatic heart disease. Five years later, he was admitted to the hospital with a blood pressure of 220 over zero. He died during heart surgery on September 24, 1958. He was thirty-five years old.
Connie M. Harbaugh—maiden name Connie Martha White; place of birth Baton Rouge, Louisiana—applied for compensation a month after her former husband’s death. She abstained from using commas and periods when filling out the VA form, and she adopted a confiding, conversational tone. She’d separated from Paul Harbaugh because he “refuse to support minor children…he did it so many time I can’t tell you.” She expanded on that story in a space labeled “remarks.”
