Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  Sallie, the musical one, the prettiest of all the Sharp girls, entered WC in the fall of 1929 with dreams of becoming a professional violinist. In June 1934, she became the first of the Sharp brood to marry, wedding Lawrence A. Taylor, who had come to Reidsville to manage the Montgomery Ward store. Soon the young couple moved away to Michigan.

  Annie Hill, called Higgy by her family, the one who most resembled her mother, became a guard on the Reidsville High girl’s basketball team, and, like her sister Susie, was salutatorian of her graduating class. She would fulfill one of her mother’s dreams. Annie Britt had wanted to be a nurse, but her father said no. She had spoken often of her failed dream, spoken highly of nursing as a profession, and Annie Hill became the first of her children to be influenced by it. She went off to Durham to study nursing at the Duke University Medical School, and became only the second female to receive a bachelor of science degree there. While working on the wards, she met a tall young medical student named Frederick Klenner, who had fallen ill. She helped nurse him back to health, and romance blossomed. Her family was aghast when they learned about it. Not only was this young man from the state where bluecoats had permanently implanted rifle balls in Grandpa Sharp, he also was Catholic, and in the rural and small-town South of that time, Catholics were regarded with even more fear and suspicion than Yankees. Annie Britt was distraught to discover that her daughter had secretly joined the Catholic Church. Grandma Sharp would have an absolute fit, certain that her granddaughter had bought a spot in hell. Both mother and eldest sister tried desperately to talk Annie Hill out of marrying the young man, but she was strong-headed and in love and nothing could deter her. The young couple settled in Winston-Salem, where Dr. Klenner was completing his residency at the North Carolina Tuberculosis Sanitarium, and there Annie Hill joined the nursing staff.

  While Annie Hill was graduating from Duke, her younger brother, Thomas, perhaps the most brilliant of the Sharp children, was receiving a degree in chemical engineering at the University of North Carolina. He moved to New Jersey to take a job with Du Pont.

  Like two of her sisters before her, Louise—Pokey to the family, because of the deliberate pace at which she moved—went to WC in Greensboro. Like her sisters Susie and Annie Hill and her brother Tommy, she, too, was salutatorian of her graduating class at Reidsville High. She majored in elementary education, received her degree in 1939, and began her teaching career with a seventh grade class at Caesar Cone School in Greensboro.

  Two years after Louise entered WC, she was joined by her sister Florence, who had been nicknamed Punkin, Pandy Poo, and finally, Flukie, a name she carried into college. Bright, but the least academic of all the Sharp children, Florence was the gay one, the carefree one, one of the most popular girls at Reidsville High. Laughter followed wherever she went. She would receive her degree in secretarial administration in 1941 and embark on a teaching career.

  By 1939, only one Sharp child remained at Reidsville High School. That was James Vance, the baby, called Kits. Only Jimmy and his eldest sister, Susie, now a distinguished lawyer, still lived in the big family house on Lindsey Street. The Sharps were proud of all of their children and proud that they had been able to educate them in the midst of the Great Depression.

  Reidsville had not suffered as much from the Depression as had many other areas. United Bank and Trust Company had closed in 1931, reopened, then failed in 1933. The new Annie Penn Memorial Hospital, named for the wife of the founder of F. R. Penn Tobacco Company, opened in 1930, was forced to close after a year, then reopened in 1932. But the American Tobacco Company not only kept operating but increased its business, protecting the town, and Reidsville was emerging from the Depression relatively unscathed.

  The Sharp family suffered only minor setbacks. Mr. Jim and Miss Susie, as the father-daughter partnership came to be known around town, lost clients early in the Depression, forcing Susie to take a temporary job in Chapel Hill as secretary to the dean of the law school. Mr. Jim had to accept some fees in chickens and farm produce and allow other clients to work out law bills on his farm in the years ahead, but by 1939 better days seemed on the way.

  Only one problem nagged the family—Annie Hill’s marriage. Although the family had been hurt by Annie Hill’s decision, and acceptance was difficult, once she had made it, the family tried to heal the rift—blood, after all, was binding—and went out of their way to make her husband feel welcome. The strain, however, was evident to all.

  In the summer of 1939, Dr. Klenner finished his internship at the sanitarium and decided to begin his practice in his wife’s hometown. Anticipating that patients would be slow in coming, Annie Hill took a job at Duke Hospital until her husband could get established. Her family invited their son-in-law to live with them, and Mr. Jim even helped him set up an office on the same floor as his in the Whitsett Building.

  In the weeks ahead, though, the Sharps would become more troubled over what they learned about this young doctor their daughter had brought home. For one thing he suffered frequent and severe migraine headaches that caused him to act, as Annie Britt said, “as crazy as a moon-eyed horse.” Even when he wasn’t under the influence of pain, they found his actions more alien and unacceptable than they had imagined, and they were relieved when his practice burgeoned quicker than expected, allowing Annie Hill to return from Durham and the two of them to move into a small house of their own.

  12

  In the spring of 1985, the ring of children’s voices was but a distant memory in the big house at 529 Lindsey Street that Annie Britt Sharp once dubbed the Chatterbox. Little about the house itself had changed in the six decades that had passed since the Sharp children were growing up in it. The front porch was much as it had been when Mr. Jim took his ease there on warm evenings, his feet propped on the rail, his hat tilted over his eyes. The big wood range, never used anymore, still stood in the kitchen, a monument to Annie Britt’s revered cooking. Grass grew now in the tiny front yard, no longer kept bare by the batterings of children’s feet, and the iron picket fence that Mr. Jim had built to keep his children out of the street now guarded the yard from intrusion. The post oak that once had shaded half the yard had died and been cut down, but the white oak on the other side survived, a marvel of gargantuanism. The holly sprigs that Annie Britt planted on both sides of the sidewalk near the gate had grown into handsome trees, offering shade of their own.

  The house was home now to only one Sharp, the fourth daughter, Louise, who never married, but it remained a shrine to family. Family photographs decorated walls and furniture in almost every room, and the house was a repository for cherished photo albums, family heirlooms, and the big family Bible with its carefully kept records of every family member.

  Annie Britt Sharp had been the keeper of that Bible. In it, she had entered the marriages of her children, the births of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Deaths had been added, too. In August of 1952, in sorrowful hand, Annie Britt wrote the last entry on her husband, James Merritt Sharp, who died from uremic poisoning at age seventy-two. He practiced law and farmed until he fell ill three weeks before his death. The following year, she recorded the sudden death from an embolism of her second daughter, Sallie, the violinist, mother of two sons, dead at forty-one. The two losses, within thirteen months of each other, were almost more than Annie Britt could bear.

  “I hope I’m the next person to die in this family,” she said in her grief.

  The words were prophecy, though not for nearly two decades. For several years, Annie Britt lived alone in the big house, checked regularly by family members and others. “I’m fine,” she inevitably replied to anybody who inquired of her well-being, prompting her daughter Florence to write a poem about her by that title. But in 1968 she got pneumonia, and although she recovered, she was never quite herself again. She lived with Florence until Louise could return home to care for her and eventually to record in the Bible her mother’s death from heart congestion at age eighty-seven on April 9, 1971. Louise b
ecame the keeper of the family Bible and the family home, touchstones for the entire family and symbols of their unity.

  The pride in family instilled by James and Annie Britt Sharp remained intense, and rightfully so, for the Sharps had become a family of great achievement and of high reputation that was zealously guarded.

  The parlor of the house on Lindsey Street was dominated by an oil portrait of the family’s greatest achiever, the eldest daughter, Susie, a matriarch who never bore children or married, beaming regally in judicial robe. Susie had achieved her father’s dreams and more. Like her father, she had become involved in Democratic politics, working in campaigns for two governors and one congressman. “I was doing it largely for Daddy,” she recalled years later. “He was the politician.” She did it without expectation of reward, but in 1949, after serving as county campaign manager for Governor Kerr Scott, a dairy farmer from nearby Alamance County, she was offered a superior court judgeship. She knew the appointment would be controversial. No woman ever had held such a position in North Carolina. Knowing that she likely would face great difficulties, she was reluctant to accept. She overcame her reservations only when she spoke them to her father. “Certainly you’ll take it,” he said.

  On the day she left home for her first session of court, her father offered his only advice. “Sue,” he called to her from the porch, “plow a straight furrow. And remember, you’re the boss.”

  Judge Sharp gained a reputation for being fair and stern, and in 1962, Governor Terry Sanford, later to be a presidential candidate and U.S. Senator, appointed her to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the first woman in the state to hold that position. As an appeals judge, she was conservative but never shied from controversial decisions, a stickler for detail and truth, a perfectionist in her opinions who labored into the late hours almost every night on her old Royal typewriter at her stand-up desk. She might have been the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court if her friend, Senator Sam Ervin, who gained fame in the Watergate hearings, had had his way, but she was born ahead of her time and had to settle for being the first woman elected chief justice of a state supreme court in the nation’s history. That was in 1974.

  Hailed as one of the finest and most astute chief justices in the state’s history, she was forced by mandatory retirement laws to step down after her seventy-second birthday in 1979. She still owned the family home in Reidsville with her sister, Louise, and retained her old bedroom there, where she occasionally spent nights, but Judge Susie, as her friends now called her, chose to remain in her apartment in Raleigh.

  Although overshadowed by their eldest sister, the rest of the Sharp children had distinguished themselves as well.

  Thomas, the chemist, married into a New York Social Register family, then went into defense research. He worked on the team that developed radar housing and invented new lacquers and fabrics before retiring from Sperry-Rand and moving to Florida.

  Annie Hill, whose marriage had troubled the family, returned to Duke to teach student nurses during World War II. The mother of three children, she later worked with her husband, whose controversial vitamin treatments gained him international attention before his death in 1984. Annie Hill lived only a short distance from the family home, and in the spring of 1985 went there regularly to have dinner with Louise.

  After three years of teaching, two of them in Reidsville, Louise had been stirred by patriotic fervor during World War II to answer a call for more nurses. She went back to school at Duke University, got a degree in nursing, and joined the Cadet Nurse Corps as a teacher. In 1947, she enlisted in the navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander before she retired in 1968 and returned home to care for her ailing mother.

  Florence was a high school teacher before marrying Robert W. Newsom, who became an executive with the R. J. Reynolds and P. Lorillard tobacco companies, then started his own consulting firm in nearby Greensboro. She had returned to teaching at a business college in recent years, and had retired only a few months earlier. She was mother of two, grandmother of five.

  James, the baby of the family, still called Kits, had become a surgeon, joined the U.S. Marines, and risen to the rank of captain. Now stationed at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Charleston, he, too, was nearing retirement and soon would move to Lake City, Florida, to become chief of surgery at a veterans hospital.

  The sense of family pride and honor that bound and nurtured the Sharps extended beyond brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, to aunts and uncles, cousins and distant cousins, and, less than two years earlier, it had been pierced by the shock of violent, scandalous tragedy.

  Annie Britt Sharp’s younger sister, Susie, married James Sharp’s first cousin, Early Garrett, who was in the tobacco business in Danville, just across the state line in Virginia. Uncle Early and Aunt Susie and their children were always welcome visitors at the Sharp house, especially at Christmas, when they would gather everybody around the piano to sing carols. Uncle Early and Aunt Susie’s daughter, Alice Marie, married her high school sweetheart, George Anderson, who became a lawyer, a civic leader in Danville, and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. The Andersons’ marriage of thirty-two years ended in divorce on December 2, 1982, and George Anderson, fifty-six years old, began dating his young secretary, Gayle Richeson, and spoke of plans for marriage. In the summer of 1983, Anderson and his secretary slipped away from the office one afternoon, picked up her son, who was twelve, and drove into North Carolina to a cabin he owned on Lake Wildwood in Caswell County, not far from Reidsville. The three were on the boat dock, preparing for an outing on the lake, when a yellow convertible pulled up and Alice Marie Anderson got out. She opened fire with a .22 pistol, killing her former husband and wounding his secretary before putting the pistol to her own head and pulling the trigger.

  Although news reports of the incident made no mention that Alice Marie was a double cousin of the Sharps, the Sharps were nonetheless horrified and embarrassed that such a thing could happen in their family.

  They could not have believed that before the spring of 1985 was out, far greater carnage and scandal, indeed beyond their imaginings, would shake the family to its foundations.

  13

  Trepidation filled the young man, but he was determined not to show it. He did not want the older man to think him a coward, but as the black Chevrolet Blazer pulled away from the campground onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, he still wasn’t sure that he could go through with it, no matter its importance to his future. He hadn’t thought he would be so anxious. He had pictured himself cool and deliberate, like the older man, prepared for whatever might happen. But he was scared and worried about how he might react under pressure. And he knew that the older man sensed it.

  “Don’t worry, everybody is nervous on his first mission,” the older man said, assuring him that even he had been a little anxious.

  The young man knew that he was more than a little nervous, but he was thankful that he would not have to take part in the killing itself. His role was one of support only. And if he pulled himself together and did it well, he knew that a favorable report would be on its way to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, only two hundred miles from this campground in the Virginia mountains.

  The young man considered himself a patriot. He was strongly conservative, an enemy of communism, and he had dreamed of the intrigue, adventure, and excitement of serving his country on clandestine operations as an agent of the CIA. He had a great-uncle who was involved in intelligence work in Europe. He had sought career advice from him, and his uncle had supplied him with the name of a friend who could assist him through the CIA screening process once he had completed college, but that was still more than a year away. The young man could not believe his good fortune in discovering opportunity much sooner and much closer to home. When he had spoken of his dream to the older man, a neighbor he had known all of his life but with whom he’d become close only in the past year, the older man had suggeste
d that he might be able to help. The young man had long wondered about his neighbor’s mysterious comings and goings and the exotic weaponry he possessed, and although the older man had hinted that he was involved in important secret activities, he had not been specific until a couple of months earlier.

  That was in late March. The older man had come to visit him at Lexington, a historic town in the mountains of western Virginia, where the young man was a junior at prestigious Washington and Lee University, a chemical engineering major who had found the going tough and switched to philosophy. He had taken his guest on a tour of the campus, ending at Lee Chapel, where Edward Valentine’s famous statue of a recumbent Robert E. Lee dominates the altar, and where, in the basement, Lee himself is entombed.

  Afterward, they had sat under a tree on the greensward near the chapel, not far from the grave of General Lee’s horse, Traveller, and in low and cautious tones, the older man confided that he was a contract agent for the CIA—“the Company,” he called it. He spoke of years of covert activities, including several missions on which he nearly had been killed, incidents that had caused him to become very close with God. Now he was about to undertake another mission, he said, this one in Texas. Weapons, he explained, were being stolen from armories in the Midwest and shipped to insurgents in Central and South America in exchange for drugs to be sold in this country at huge profit. Not only were the guns expanding Communist domination in this hemisphere, the drugs were undermining our nation. The older man hinted at involvement by the Russian KGB. As he talked, a gray-uniformed cadet from the adjoining campus of Virginia Military Institute strolled close by with his girlfriend and the older man paused and gave them hard looks, as if they might be eavesdroppers. His mission, he went on, when the couple had passed from hearing range, would be to stop one of these despicable and traitorous weapons dealers. A “touch,” he called it. On this one, he said, he needed help. Somebody he could trust. Would the young man be interested? He would serve only in support capacity, drive, provide cover. It would be a short operation. A long weekend. And he would be paid for his time. Most important, it would be a chance for him to prove himself with the Company, a foot in the door toward a career in covert service to his country.