by Lee Server
She had a natural-born laziness. She loved to sleep late, hated to do the daily chores her mother gave her, always slipped away when she was supposed to help with the cooking or wash the dishes. She loved having nothing to do but lie across the porch steps and chew gum and play with her dog and daydream, or gorge on one of her mother’s succulent Southern dinners. When she did rise out of her happy indolence it was often to seek out excitement, emotional release. Her family’s Baptist church was too sedate for her, and she liked to go sneaking into one of the passionate Pentecostal assemblages where the preacher shouted and the people would begin to shake and cry and dance in the aisles. She’d wait for the feeling to come and shake her up like that, too, and she would raise her voice to an angry God and shout and sing wildly with the other sinners.
Ava loved music of any kind and responded deeply to it. She loved to dance, feeling the rhythms of the music deep in her bones, and she ran to music wherever she heard it playing. There were guitar pickers and fiddle players to be heard on many a front porch in those days, putting out the old Southern melodies and folk songs. And there were the songs of the black laborers heard from the fields, their sinuous laments. If she came near a radio or a record player she was thrilled. Wind-up phonographs could play the thick black platters they sold at the store in Smithfield: “Lovesick Blues,” recorded over in Asheville, North Carolina, or one of the new “hillbilly” stringband recordings coming out of Winston-Salem, not far away. There was a piano in the parlor of the Teacherage, and if anyone got near the keys the girl was sure to be there to gyrate to the sound. Teenage Myra Gardner was once awarded a series of piano lessons, and Ava was so eaten with jealousy that her sister would learn the secrets of making music before she did that she angrily ran up to the piano and bit a chunk out of it. She could find a beat in anything, and even “Nearer My God to Thee” might be accompanied by Ava’s shimmy.
She discovered the movies when she was eight or nine. The talkies had come in by then, and a teacher with an automobile began taking Ava and her mother into Smithfield on the weekends to see pictures at the new stucco art deco movie theater. They were soon movie mad like everyone else. Ava loved romances and high adventures, the beautiful sad face of Greta Garbo and the working-girl struggles of Joan Crawford, and if she liked a picture a lot she would beg her mother to sit through it twice. Ava’s and Molly’s instant favorite was Clark Gable, when they saw him in Red Dust, the steamy melodrama of lust and rubber—years later a bittersweet memory for Ava, who would know Clark so well and remake the picture with him; she’d go back in her mind sometimes to that Saturday coming out of the old Howell Theater with her mother and think of Mama’s pleasure and die unimaginableness of the future that was to be. She did for a while nurse a daydream of becoming a movie star, a common fantasy for American girls in the 1930s, but one to which she gave some elaborate consideration. When she saw the Bing Crosby film Going Hollywood late in 1933 it seemed to her like a dream snatched from within her own head. There was her own future as she imagined it: Marion Davies as a starstruck fan who breaks into pictures, becomes famous, and winds up with the love of a famous sexy crooner. She went with the black girl who worked for her mother, and for some time afterward they enacted scenes from the movie. “I was Marion Davies and Bing’s part was taken by the colored girl,” she would recall. “We were acting this thing for weeks!”
Molly had thrived at the Teacherage. Much loved by the lady boarders, generations of them as the years went on, she treated them as warmly as her own children. Ava’s daddy had not fared so well. Jonas had given up the dream of regaining his land, his dream of a legacy for his family. He had taken various jobs through the years, but farming was what he knew and all he wanted to do. The years of sharecropping had meant dawn-to- dusk work and little to show for it. As the 1920s came to a close, tobacco farming was no longer the sure, steady business it had been ten and twenty years before. As the cigarette business had grown more competitive and the desire for greater profits increased, the companies in the big cities—where they could no more grow the bright leaf than they could smoke the red dirt in which it prospered—had repeatedly lowered the price they would pay for the “yellacured” crop. The farmers, with their special skills, who had nurtured the prized tobacco for the better part of a year, would go begging for a decent price at the auction house; oblivious to their potential collective power, they took what they could get. At one auction Jonas Gardner attended the price the buyers offered was one penny more per pound than it had been thirty-odd years before. Some farmers could not afford to go on when even subsistence living was uncertain (in the same period, falling prices would cut cotton farming in Johnston County by half). Conditions would only become worse with the ravages of the Great Depression. Jonas Gardner, like many rural farmers, blamed many of the country’s problems on the malevolent schemes of the wealthy manufacturers and speculators. He did not have the temperament to indulge in angry political bluster even if he had been articulate enough to do so, but he would follow with stoic, bitter interest the events that came to pass on Wall Street in 1929 and the black tide of economic disaster that rolled across the country in the years to follow. Other farmers may have expressed their frustration and resentment more aggressively: In 1932 two of Smithfield’s tobacco warehouses were burned to the ground under suspicion of arson. In the autumn of 1932 Johnston County would vote overwhelmingly for Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election, desperate with the hope of reforms and relief to come for the beleaguered farmer.
Help did not come in time to save the Brogden Teacherage. In the fall of 1934 the Board of Education, suffering from reduced revenues, determined that the county could no longer afford the luxury of providing a boardinghouse for its teachers; with thirty days’ notice the ladies would have to find meals and respectable lodging on their own. The Teacherage would be closed down indefinitely. The Gardners were out of a job and a home. They had no savings, and Jonas’s uncertain income could not be depended upon to support them.
Molly had an old friend who now ran a boardinghouse up in Newport News, Virginia. There were many such places there, catering to the shipyard workers and the merchant seamen. The friend knew of one that needed a manager, and perhaps when they came there Jonas might find work in the shipyard.
And so they left Brogden, left Johnston County, and left the state of North Carolina, where they had all lived their entire lives.
Ava was leaving her whole world behind, friends and familiar surroundings, heading off to a strange place and unknown prospects, but she did not complain or cry about the move. She had seen it at first as a great adventure. Newport News was not New York or New Orleans or Hollywood or other places she had heard about and wanted to see, but it was the world beyond the mud roads and farmhouses of Brogden. When they rolled out of Johnston County, she looked at the road ahead and not behind at the scenes of her past.
Newport News was a noisy, intimidating place after bucolic Brogden. The Gardners’ new home was a run-down house on West Avenue in a harsh neighborhood near the docks. In place of the genteel ladies of the Teacherage there were sullen stevedores with red eyes, stale clothes, and stale breath. School was no longer the inviting brick building with her mother’s kitchen always within view and the teachers all friends from her parlor. In Newport News on the first day the teacher teased her about her country drawl, and the children mocked her backwoods background.
“The teacher said, right in front of all the people, ‘What does your father do?’” Ava would recall. “I said, ‘A farmer.’ Some big horrible jerk laughed. My eyes filled with tears.”
The self-confidence of the adventurous country girl drained away. A painful shyness began to inhabit and to inhibit her. She huddled in her seat at school, afraid to be noticed, afraid to speak and let them hear her accent and see the teacher’s disdain and the other kids laughing. At Brogden the children were all farm kids, and there were few great economic differences between them. But at Newport News she was
conscious of the gap between herself and many of the other children, whose parents came from different walks of life. It was painful to go among the girls at school, Ava in her mostly homemade wardrobe, the others in their store- bought outfits in the latest styles. Her own school clothes numbered two, the way she recalled it, “one always in the wash while the other was on my back.” She would remember wearing her coat indoors when she could so that no one at school would see she was always wearing the same skirt. She felt isolated, demeaned. “Mother told me that clothes don’t make you beautiful,” she would recall, “but at that age you need material things to make you feel secure.”
Along with the social pressures causing her anxiety, there were physical and emotional changes to be dealt with—sprouting breasts, menstruation, romantic impulses, each stage of maturation carrying its own enigmas and embarrassments. Matters weren’t made easier by the awkwardness that her parents showed around the subject—anything to do with sexuality had always been forbidden and fraught with discomfort in the Gardner household. In her parents’ shame-filled view of sex, a woman could be only one of two things, “a prude or a prostitute.” When her first period arrived and the flowing blood had her on the edge of panic she turned for help not to her mother but to the hired woman who did the sweeping-up.
She charted her body’s developments—widening hips, pubic hair, a bustline—with a mixture of awe and dread. Others were noting the changes too, and she was increasingly sensitive to such scrutiny. Her baptism at the local church became a ritual humiliation when the pastor submerged her in the concrete bath at the altar before the entire congregation and she saw the water turn her baptismal shift transparent. She nurtured a distaste for the church from that time (organized religion would come to have little place in her adult life). At home there was more discomfort, covetous looks from her mother’s boarders, “revolting old men” as she remembered them, disgustingly flirting with a thirteen-year-old girl. She felt ashamed of where she had to live and the men there lying around with their rank smells and with their ugly alligator eyes following her, and she felt she could never invite a friend home to visit her in such a place. Trying to cope with the murky facts of life left her in a tizzy. “Even before I knew what sex was, I was afraid of it,” she would remember. “I had a child’s normal curiosity about ‘it’ but every time the subject came up in conversation with other girls I felt I should hide my head and not listen. If I did listen I went home with guilt complexes tearing at my mind.”
But what to do? She grew prettier every year, and boys grew more alluring. She would see them at school or on the street looking her over and smiling, and she would want to smile back and then become afraid and want to again and not know what to do. She was fourteen and wanted to talk to boys and know what they thought of her and know what they were like. But she worried about what her mother would say and worried about what the boys would want to do with her. One day it happened: She had a date. It happened so suddenly she was not sure it had really occurred. He was a good-looking football player three years older than she was, and when he came up to her in the hallway at school and asked her out she impulsively—”in one second I was in love”—said yes. The hours before he arrived to pick her up she spent sick with fear that her mother would see him or that he would see the men who lived there in her home. They went out for hamburgers and Cokes. She was a nervous wreck. “Couldn’t open my mouth,” she would remember. “A bump on a log. Bored him to death.” He took her home early and never spoke to her again. Other boys tried flirting with her, but she was plagued by insecurities. She was dying to go to the school dances but couldn’t bear to be seen in her poor clothes when all the other girls would be dressed in their finest.
She suffered through the years at school in Newport News—”I hate it more each day,” she wrote to her friend Clara in 1936—and with the seedy conditions at home, surrounded by the lecherous longshoremen, she felt a tremendous relief when her mother agreed to let her go away in the summers, to stay with her sister Inez and family in Raleigh and then for many weeks with Elsie Mae and her family at their home back in Brogden. She felt instantly more comfortable on her old home soil. The change seemed to happen as she crossed the state border from Virginia, the feelings of shame and self-consciousness left behind like a larval enclosure. By the time of her second summer in North Carolina she had blossomed to startling effect. As a little girl her looks had often drawn compliments, but the person who returned to Johnston County that summer was a young woman glowing with beauty, with a radiance to her eyes and smile and flesh; in alliance with the ripe contours of her body the effect was both lovely to look at and unsettlingly erotic.
The transformation of the tomboy from the tobacco fields did not go unnoticed at her seasonal homecoming, and that summer would become for her a kind of unofficial down-home debut. M. W. “Mokie” Stancil was a Smithfield boy who knew her during those teenage visits. “She was a very attractive young lady,” Mokie Stancil would remember. “Y’know, in those days—you don’t know this—but in those days girls just weren’t nearly as attractive. They didn’t have all this eye makeup and things they have today. And Ava was attractive without having all that stuff. There wasn’t anyone in these parts had anything like the look she had. So pure, her skin so beautiful and smooth and such. She was a really beautiful girl then, she was fourteen, fifteen.
“She wasn’t a person of any depth or any consequence to talk to at that time,” Mokie recalled. “She had some small talk, that was all, and she had a sense of humor. But she was a very attractive person. You were pleased to have her along with you. We’d get together at someone’s house in those days on a Friday and Saturday night. We had what we called our crowd, all the same age, but Ava was a couple of years younger. We sort of adopted her.
“In those days there was a pavilion out at the lake, Holt Lake, where they had a jukebox, and we all went out there to listen to some music and to dance, and Ava came with us. Boys and girls were there, and when Ava walked in everybody just stopped dancing and just looked at her, she was so pretty. They just stopped, I remember, and then the music stopped and no one fed the jukebox right off, they just stood around looking at her.”
There were other nights at the Holt Lake pavilion, and Mokie remembered how the boys would crowd around Ava, lining up to dance with her as the jukebox played Tommy Dorsey and then Artie Shaw and then Jimmy Dorsey. “Somebody would dance with her, and then somebody would break on in,” he remembered. “Nobody really had a conversation or found out much from her because there was always another boy behind him. She might ask the boy something about himself, and no sooner’d he try to answer than somebody’d tap him on the shoulder want to break in. I remember one of those boys crying to me that he didn’t think he was gonna ever get to dance with her, there were so many waiting.”
Boys wanted to take her out, and Ava’s mother didn’t think much of the idea, she and Ava’s sisters and brother, Jack, all fretted over it. In the end Jack said, “Mama, I’m watching her and nothing’s gonna happen to her, she’s a good girl,” and they thought it would be all right to let her go on one date since it was Smithfield and so long as there were chaperones and it was a nice boy. Mokie Standi, who was a friend of Jack’s, went on a double date with his girl and Ava and the boy who asked her out. “And you could see she hadn’t done much dating before. And she was shy with someone she didn’t know. She was shy and he was shy and hardly a word was exchanged between them. He wanted to keep dating her, but she said to me, ‘I just don’t want to date him again.’ “
But there were many others waiting. Ava’s mother remained very concerned and particular about whom Ava saw, and she told Mokie she was happy he was kind of looking after her daughter. As time went on he found himself with the job of screening the boys who asked Ava out. “The boys back then, we called them ‘wolves’ if they were fast, want to kiss the girl on the first date or something like that. And if she asked me about one of the boys here in town who was
sort of fast with girls, I would tell her not to go with him. And o’ course this was all just between us or I would have been a dirt bomb with those boys. So she kept it strictly confidential, and it worked out fine.”
Boys who made the cut would submit to Mokie’s questioning. “I’d tell ‘em you can’t try any of this kissing-on-the-first-date business ‘cause she’s not going for that. And some of ‘em said, ‘Can I hold her hand?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, I think you can do that. Just don’t try to be too fresh with her ‘cause she’s not gonna like it.’ “
And there were boys who wanted a date but had a problem with their own mothers: “A lot of times the town people just looked down on some of those country people. I don’t think any of the boys ever made Ava feel like that, but some of the mothers of some of the boys might look a little askance at her, at their boy dating her, thinking that she was a little beneath them or something.”
Screening all those boys, Mokie sometimes thought that he would have liked to date Ava himself, but he had a girl and that would not have worked out at all, although one time at the lake his girl had to go back to town and Ava said, “How about we go on a rowboat? I’ve never been rowed around the lake.” And Mokie told her he would be glad to do it. And they rowed around Holt Lake on a warm blue-sky afternoon, an hour or two he had not forgotten in sixty-seven years.
“Those were good times in the summers,” Mokie Stancil remembered. “Nobody hated nobody, and everybody had fun and enjoyed life.”
Like his youngest girl, Jonas Gardner had not found much happiness living in Newport News. He had not fit in with city life. He was a farmer and that was all he knew, and now he lived in a boardinghouse in a city with ships. A sickness came upon him. Perhaps it had been there even back in Brogden, just a plain smoker’s cough then, and nothing he would ever have given a second thought. It had gotten worse in Virginia and never gone away, a heavy, choking cough that brought up thick viscous scrap from deep in his lungs. Like any sensible male Jonas hated doctors, and for many months he made do with bottles of drugstore cough syrup. He caught a chest cold in the winter, and the sickness in his lungs got very bad. When he went into the hospital and the doctors found a serious infection in his bronchial tubes, there was no money to keep him in the hospital for as long as he needed. He returned home, and Molly cared for him in their room on the second floor of the boardinghouse. It started to seem as if he would never get better. Sometimes it went on all day and all night, the strangled, agonized coughing. Molly had to move him to another room so the boarders could sleep. She had to work and take care of the house and nurse him. It wore her down. Once Ava saw her break down and cry, the only time she could remember seeing her mother like that, just crying from weariness and hopelessness. Ava would come home from school each day and sit beside her father as he lay propped up in bed and read him the newspaper. He liked to hear about politics and listened with pleasure when she read to him the latest doings of his man, President Roosevelt. He called her “Daughter,” as he always did, in happiness or in consternation, his only name for her since she’d been a little girl. Sometimes he would just look at her and hold her hand and tighten his grip when she smiled at him. Pain would come to him with the hard, deep cough that felt as if his insides were being flayed, but he would never complain or curse his fate to anyone. It would be many years later that Ava would look back at that time and really comprehend what she had witnessed, her father’s modest and undefeated courage in those worst months of his illness. And she would come to remember with a terrible regret her own sometimes selfish thoughts and behavior as she sat at her father’s bedside wanting to be out with her friends and she would think of the things not said then that should have been said and the moments thrown away that could never be regained.
