The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  Next: another day, now a trip in a car. In the front seat, this same woman sat next to another strange woman who drove, as both turned around every now and then to say comforting things to me. I don’t remember hearing anything. Later, I learned that this car trip had taken place on April 17, 1961, a two-hour unbearable drive through nasty weather and my crying. According to the social worker who drove us and my recently appointed foster mother, Agatha Armstead, I cried the entire way from Gray, farther north up near Portland, down to West Lebanon in the more southern part, just on the New Hampshire state line.

  These remembered fragments culminate in a full memory that finds me sitting on the knee of Robert Armstead, aka Grandpa, the two of us seated at the red Formica table in the kitchen of the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse at Forest Edge, bathed in autumn morning sunshine that streamed through freshly pressed curtains. We provided a captive audience for Agatha Catherine Wooten Armstead, who presided here over hearth, home, and field, a kingdom, or queendom, rather, of her own making. Agatha, Ma, Granny, or Kit—as Grandpa called her—was the dazzling superstar of this universe. She was my mother, grandmother, teacher, guru, inspiration, best friend. She would become my everything.

  Ma towered over every memory of the next six years, not imperiously, but with genuine amazing grace. Lovingly, magnificently, immortally. For anyone fortunate enough to have been part of her extended family, blood related or not, a chance to be in her sphere—for however long was granted—was not luck. Divine intervention was at work, and so, too, from behind the scenes, was Dorothy; through her debilitating Thorazine haze, pulling strings, as she had all along, by insisting that she have some say in who the State determined were suitable foster parents for her daughters. To have that, she gave another dollar.

  Unlike my first caretaker, Bertha, Agatha did not make a conscious decision to become a foster mother. To the contrary, these were the years she had set aside for her well-earned, glorious retirement. But a confluence of circumstances that had brought her and her husband to Mercy Hospital in 1959 changed those plans.

  When agents from Child Welfare came to Dorothy’s home and discovered the conditions in which my sisters, who were ages two and three, were living, they were taken immediately to Mercy Hospital. During this time a devastated Dorothy was trying without success to reclaim us. This was before Agatha and Robert Armstead came to my sisters’ rescue and became their foster parents—the result of an all-points bulletin looking for a foster family of color.

  The anguish of the situation must have been felt by all concerned. Here were two beautiful girls, still traumatized, and no suitable home could be found because of their race. Upset at the arcane, cruel law, social workers at Mercy Hospital were desperate to find a foster home for the Rowell girls, so much so that a meeting was convened, and one of the staff recalled an incident earlier when a black couple in their late fifties had been spotted as they traversed the lobby—and how word had traveled faster than Western Union that possibly, just possibly, potential foster parents were on the premises.

  Much to the amazement of the Armsteads, before they had a chance to explain what they were actually doing at the hospital, a group of administrators swooped out of their offices to greet them as if they were visiting royalty, ushering them into a comfortable, confidential meeting. No one had the temerity in 1959 to come right out and say, “We are in desperate need of colored parents for two colored children who need to be adopted or placed in foster care. Would you consider opening up your home?” That would not be the Maine approach. Instead, what followed was a query into their biographical background, as would normally be conducted for a job interview—which, unbeknownst to the hospital staff, was precisely the reason that the Armsteads were there.

  Naturally, they were forthcoming, with Ma taking the lead in providing only the highlights of the events that had brought the two of them to Mercy Hospital that day. It was a story that really went back to her earliest days.

  Agatha had been born in North Carolina in 1903, the second eldest of the four phenomenal Wooten sisters—entrepreneurial black Bostonians renowned for their intelligence, talent, good looks, and fine upbringing. Their mother, Mary Jane King Wooten, was one of twenty freeborn children. Her mother had been forced into slavery on the King Plantation of Charleston, South Carolina. In the wake of the Civil War, the slave master’s son, Joseph P. King, fell in love with her and they married—an act of defiance for which he was harshly punished and disinherited. The twenty mixed-race offspring went on to scatter their roots, spreading some of the King lineage up and around the Boston area; some chose to pass for white at a time when Jim Crow was taking hold after the failed era of Reconstruction, with many accruing considerable wealth and property. In the meantime, other King branches settled in rural Southern towns where Native American and African American communities found common ground. In New Bern, North Carolina, in such a setting, one of the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. King, Mary Jane, married John Wooten, whose roots were African American intertwined on paternal and maternal sides with both the Kickapoo and Blackfoot Indian tribes.

  Born there in the South but raised in the North, Agatha was an old soul with ancient folk wisdom from Africa commingling with her Native American ancestors. On the surface, that mix of genes gave her an aristocratic appearance—making her petite five-foot frame seem almost tall, except when she was standing next to her six-foot-three strapping, barrel-chested husband, Robert. Agatha’s glowing complexion hid how old she really was and helped detract from the Paget’s disease, phlebitis, and cancer she suffered from. Her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes epitomized her wise being and good nature. In short, Agatha was a beauty. Moreover, she saw the beauty in everyone and everything.

  Every day that unfolded around her was Ma’s personal celebration of life, nature, art, music, language, family, and work. Not necessarily in that order. A gifted jazz pianist and singer with an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge of every flower, every genus, every hybrid, she was masterful at everything she pursued and did nothing halfway. She could cook with a capital “C,” and she could bake even better. She could cane, paint, knit, sew, hook a rug, crochet, till, plant, harvest, design, build, fix, and teach. She was a top-notch amateur photographer and movie documentarian, with her handy Brownie always holstered to record and document her adventures. She would say, “Now everybody wait right there,” and with that she was gone. We all knew how important photography was to Agatha. We would just stay there, poised in the front room in the positions she placed us in, as still as if posing for a daguerreotype. In my seated position, I could hear Agatha rummaging through her metal closet in her bedroom—through bags and bags of nondescript possessions. Finally, she would emerge, her wig slightly askew, clenching flashbulbs. She loved all that was elegant and beautiful—crystal, silver, hats, anything with style. If she couldn’t afford it, she made it with her pedal-operated Singer sewing machine, black with gold lettering. She also loved her Steinway, the baby grand piano that traveled with her everywhere.

  Agatha Armstead revered and practiced the art of letter writing, just as she respected the English language, correct spelling, grammar, enunciation, and perfect penmanship, and she spoke Spanish and Latin. She preferred an authentic turn of the phrase to an overused cliché. Due to an unfortunate altercation with her problematic son Raymond, she later wrote, “He carried on something terrible; he laid my soul low.” Poetic, yet pointed.

  Ma had her priorities, too. She placed education in school second only to education as a devout Catholic. She lived by her faith.

  The pianist, the painter, the writer, the gardener, the entrepreneur—she was who she was, distinguished in who she was, living her very own life, regardless of the opinions, gossip, or condescension of others. This had been true from childhood on and was definitely the case when—much to the chagrin of some of the upwardly mobile Wootens—Agatha married Robert Armstead, an orphaned black child.

  To some, Agatha may have alread
y seemed to have broken high society rules when she put aside the training she had received at the New England Conservatory of Music to pursue an opportunity to work alongside The Jenkins Band. The bandleader invited Agatha to accompany his band to New York City to perform in clubs up and down Harlem. Her head spun thinking about The Lafayette and The Harlem Opera House where Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed and the even more scandalous hope of passing through a revolving bookcase into the secret world of a speakeasy. She breathlessly had hoped to work with some of the most famous names in ragtime, blues, and vaudeville. Agatha had heard and learned as much of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Count Basie’s music as she could possibly get her hands on. She was inspired by Hazel Scott, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the Alma Long Scott’s All Girl Band, believing that women could hold their own in New York’s tough entertainment circles. Agatha wanted to be a part of the Harlem Renaissance. But, alas, in the midst of pursuing her dream in the late 1900s and the early 1920s, concern for her aging mother, she said, made her decide to switch gears, staying closer to home and to begin to raise a family. But why she chose to marry someone who had not met with much of her mother’s approval remained a lifelong mystery. Maybe this was her way of choosing her own path, for better and for worse.

  Robert, on whose knee I sat in my earliest real memory, was born in 1900 when his mother, Sylvia Armstead, arrived from Virginia for yet another summer of work, per the request of Mrs. Chapman at her New Hampshire estate. An unmarried Sylvia went into labor and died giving birth to Robert Armstead that August. Mrs. Chapman, who had lost her own son in a tragic accident, kept Robert and took care of him. Having come of age back in the mid-1800s, Mrs. Chapman told Robert little more about his history other than his mother’s first and last name and that she hailed from Virginia. Following Agatha and Robert’s elaborate 1920s wedding, they were invited to honeymoon at Mrs. Chapman’s estate.

  In later years, it occurred to me that he and I had a special bond because we both arrived in life without known histories—one of the reasons I have always been magnetically drawn to the histories of others and even history itself. But to some of Agatha’s family, the fact that Robert was not from any known background and had not yet put forth a plan for any known future meant only that she was marrying below herself. There were other objections. He was a hard-drinking man, susceptible to all the temptations that came along with the bottle. Some of the family even called him a rogue. He had his weaknesses, no doubt, but his Kit, his endearment for Agatha, loved him unconditionally and refused to let a word of her family’s skepticism take away from her devotion to him.

  In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Agatha and Robert went forward and were fruitful, creating a multitude, a total of ten children born to them between the 1920s and 1940s: Kathleen, Robert Ronald Jr., identical twins Richard and Ralphie, Barbara, Joan, Sylvia, and Raymond. The ultimate working man, Robert Sr. never erred in supporting his growing dynasty, laboring throughout the years for the railroads and as a custodian, managing at times to hold down three jobs simultaneously in and around Boston, even at the height of the Great Depression. Ma, meanwhile, did it all: raised the children and did her part to supplement the family income. She was a saleswoman at high-end department stores, where her flair for style won her a devoted clientele; had a small, separate income from property investments; and was an in-demand professional in the art of pressing and tailoring. With all that, she still maneuvered brilliantly to keep Robert from drinking away his earnings by doing things like just happening to pick up his paychecks before he did.

  At the height of the Depression, five-month-old Ralphie, one of the twins, was stricken with pneumonia and died in Agatha’s arms. I once asked her, as a teenager, when she had stopped mourning for her son, and she softly replied, “Never.” This was not the first or the last test of Agatha’s ability to contend with excruciating pain, emotional or physical. As it was already, her body was a memorial battlefield proving that neither injury nor disease could triumph over her sheer will to survive. But the loss of a child—combined with medical concerns that caused doctors to declare, “Mrs. Armstead, carrying one more baby to full term will kill you”—well, this was something else.

  Agatha, a practical New Englander by this era, was not so naïve as to shrug off the doctors’ advice. Yet, after taking their counsel under advisement, she conferred finally with her Higher Power, a priest, and the Virgin Mary. Agatha was determined that she would live to bring more lives into the world—five more, in fact. And she went on to be a doting grandmother to another twentysomething grandchildren and more than a dozen great-grandchildren. Along the way, she withstood the ravages of breast cancer, incurring a radical mastectomy, losing her right breast, along with most of her armpit and part of her ribs. As a result of the surgery, her right arm was permanently swollen to twice the size of her left arm. The phlebitis she suffered also enlarged her right hand, adding to the impairments that left the right side of her body constricted and concave, all of which she took in stride. Her burdens never impeded her needle and crochet work; she still knit some three dozen new pairs of mittens for each and every grand and great-grand each fall. Navy blue wool mittens with a red Charlie Brown stripe at the cuff. Year in and year out. Agatha was nothing if not consistent.

  As her long-ago dream of a musical career dimmed into the past, another dream must have begun to burn brightly in its place at some point in the 1940s after her last child was born. Where it came from exactly, no one could say, except that once she hit upon the idea of owning a farm in rural Maine that she could transform into her own personal Garden of Eden and where she could spend her retirement without the constraints of children to raise, she pursued that vision with a fervor.

  At this juncture, Agatha was reborn in her dream. From her work as a Rosie the Riveter during World War II at the Charlestown Shipyard, she had saved two thousand dollars to bring her reverie to fruition. A masterful negotiator, she continued to lobby Robert that a farm would be in his best interest, a wise investment. Having grown up in New Hampshire, most likely having to work from sunup to sundown, Robert had no desire to revisit the country. Comfortable in his familiar urban neighborhood of Boston, he would not back down and Agatha didn’t want a fight. She’d already had plenty of those. He put his head-of-the-household foot down by saying in his booming voice, “No, Kit, uh-uh.” Robert knew that Agatha could talk a wolf off a meat truck and let her know in no uncertain terms that he’d rather die before moving to the “wilderness.” Horrified by the mere suggestion of his mortality, Ma quieted him, and promised that he’d feel differently in ten years or so.

  Before long, Agatha found a “For Sale” listing for Forest Edge, a sixty-acre homestead and working farm that bordered an apple orchard and a wooded hillside, situated at the end of Barley Road in West Lebanon, Maine. The moment she read the description, she fell in love, purchased a ticket on the Boston & Maine Railroad, and took the train up from Boston to see the place. It didn’t matter that everything was in need of a great deal of work, and that the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse had no indoor plumbing or phone lines and required extensive time and resources to become inhabitable. She only saw her dream unfolding here. Nor did it occur to Agatha that there was not one other person of color in the township, probably not in the entire county or the county next to it.

  The question of race did not cross her mind when she traveled to West Lebanon to have a meeting with the man who was selling Forest Edge. He looked out of the window and saw Agatha. It was after several minutes of knocking and waiting, and singing out her signature “Yoohoo, anyone home?” with no response, that she realized she would have to administer some persuading to overcome his prejudice. Undaunted, she later returned, taking the B&M Railroad from Boston with unflappable confidence—always dressed impeccably, with a stylish hat and gloves, her chapeau tipped just at the right angle to identify that she was a woman, and 100 percent determined to do business.

  On her third visit, the d
oor was opened by a young woman who turned out to be the man’s daughter; she was instantly won over by Agatha’s demeanor and invited her in.

  The wheels were set in motion. Even though Ma didn’t leave with the deed to the property that same day and even though there were still several more hurdles to overcome, the end result was that Agatha C. Wooten Armstead became the owner of Forest Edge. She tended her dream, with the concerted effort of her children, patching up the farmhouse, barn, sheds, pens, and outhouse and working the land. For extra income she sold her pine, hay, and extra vegetables. Then in the mid to late 1950s, she prepared for the big and permanent move. There was only one problem yet to be resolved: Robert Armstead.

  Grandpa’s thinking hadn’t changed from the time he voiced his first objections. To live in the “wilderness,” away from where he could find gainful employment, that alone would kill him. He was a workingman. What was a man without work? No man at all, according to Robert. Besides, he might have been thinking that with all those dry counties, he would have to drive fifty miles for a taste of liquor.

  Agatha countered that he would find better jobs in Maine. Less competition. Robert countered Agatha and said, “If you learn how to make beer, I’ll stay.” She assured her husband that she would brew him the most mouthwatering, thirst-quenching homemade beer that he had ever tasted.

  True to her word, Ma studied up on the art of brewing and proceeded to master the ideal measurements of hops and yeast—soon yielding a brew that was said to get better every season. While she was at it, Ma learned to make root beer for all the kids.