Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

by Montgomery, Ben

  Besides the paying of the bills.

  A Spirit there that brings together,

  In every trial and kind of weather.

  There must be kindness every day,

  If it’s a home with shining ray.

  P.C. burned a mountain field and planted a small crop. Each Saturday morning, P.C. would leave with Armster Kingery and would not return until Sunday evening. His wife never asked him where he had been because she did not care.

  It was on a Sunday in early September 1939 that Emma Gatewood received her last beating at the hands of her husband. It was then that her endurance of his cruelty ended.

  The details can’t be found in the various biographical sketches that accompanied the honors bestowed upon her in later years. They are not found in any newspaper article or magazine story about her either, and there are hundreds. In fact, the woman who did not smoke or drink or curse would tell newspaper reporters she was a widow for years to come, even if P. C. Gatewood was alive and well in Ohio. The details of this dark time were kept by her family, and they did not speak often of it for many years.

  That September day, P.C. and Emma got into an argument that developed into their final fight. No one remembers what subject prompted the disagreement, and there is naturally some confusion about the order of events. What is known is that Nelson, fifteen, found his father assaulting his mother inside the home. He had beaten her in the face, which was swollen and bruised. Her upper and lower teeth were broken. Her left ear was black and a mole above her ear was ripped nearly off. One of her ribs was cracked.

  Nelson, who had always been small for his age but was nearing 150 pounds of bone and muscle, grabbed his father, pinning P.C.’s arms to his sides, and lifted him off the floor. He told his mother to run and she did, out the front door and into the woods. Nelson held his father for a few more seconds, then released him, and P.C. ran in pursuit of his wife. When he couldn’t find her, he returned and walked past Nelson to the stove, where he picked up an iron poker and raised it over his head.

  Make your first swing a good one, Nelson told his father. You’re only going to get one.

  The old man didn’t swing.

  P.C. left that day, and Emma returned to the house in his absence. When he came back later, he was trailed by a deputy sheriff or justice of the peace. Some family members believe that P.C.’s friend, Armster Kingery, who held political clout in the region, pulled some strings to have Emma arrested. Whatever the case, P.C. parked his truck, climbed out, and walked purposefully toward the house, the lawman tagging behind. When he jerked open the front door, his wife was waiting with a five-pound sack of flour, which she heaved in his direction. The flour connected squarely with her husband’s face and exploded into a cloud of white.

  The four witnesses disagree about minor details, such as whether the flour incident occurred in the presence of the officer or preceded his arrival, but they collectively recall that Lucy and Louise were in a state of consternation. As the lawman walked their mother to his car, Louise ran inside to fetch her pocketbook. Lucy clung to her mother until the officer pulled her away.

  The deputy placed Emma into his car and drove her to the neighboring town of Milton, West Virginia, where she was booked on unknown charges and locked inside a jail cell. She had held her own, come what may.

  Her shoes were wet. Her socks were wet. Her dungarees were wet. Her shirt was wet. Her sack was wet. When she left the Bromley shelter early the morning of August 13, rain was still falling.

  Hurricane Connie had dumped record amounts of water on its course along the coast, the giant outer bands of its counterclockwise rotation dragging water from the Atlantic onto the land, and now it was moving toward the Great Lakes region. At 10:00 AM, the storm crossed the southeastern border of Pennsylvania, sideswiping New England and slashing a diagonal track across the Keystone State, the calm eye passing Harrisburg, over Pittsburgh and slightly northeast of Erie, before moving over Lake Erie and toward Ontario in Canada. The winds had slowed to fifty-five miles per hour, and weathermen had begun referring to Connie as a storm rather than a hurricane.

  Still, the rain came.

  In two days, the storm had dumped more than nine inches of rain on New York City, bringing train traffic at Grand Central Terminal to a halt for hours. Much of Connecticut got eight inches. Power and telephone service was out for many in the region. The northern Appalachian Mountains, the Whites, Greens, Taconics, and Alleghenies were all saturated, and their streams were running wild, sending incredible amounts of water rushing downhill into the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania, the Delaware and Ramapo Rivers in New Jersey, the Delaware and Neversink Rivers in New York, the Potomac River in Virginia and Maryland, the Westfield River in Massachusetts, and the Naugatuck and Mad Rivers in Connecticut. Many of them were close to the flood stage, and there was another erratic storm a few days behind and headed north.

  On the Appalachian Trail through Green Mountain National Forest, Emma was not walking so much as wading, and atop the ridges the wind—remnants of the hurricane—was blowing strong. She steeled herself against the elements and trudged onward. For nine miles she sloshed through water, strong winds, and driving rain. She ducked out of the deluge at a little shelter near Mad Tom Notch and had a soggy lunch from her sack. She hiked on through the afternoon at a much slower pace than she would have liked until she came to another shelter, at Griffith Lake, a small pond near Peru Peak. The shelter was occupied by a group of young black men and two slightly older white leaders from a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem. The men explained that they’d come up for a wilderness trip and had found themselves stuck inside because of the storm.

  Emma enjoyed their company, though she was surprised to see them on the trail. She read the newspapers every day, so she was well aware of the tension between the races in 1955, when one in ten US citizens was black.

  The previous May, the Supreme Court had outlawed separation of the races in public schools and launched a period of protest. It would be four months before the name Rosa Parks would enter the national conversation, but sparks of rebellion had begun to flare all over America as the federal government started to act in favor of equality. The Federal Trade Commission ruled that segregation in depot waiting rooms and on trains engaged in interstate transportation was illegal. A federal appeals court in Georgia, where the former governor wrote that “God advocates segregation,” demanded Atlanta open its public golf courses to black golfers. A court in Richmond, Virginia, barred segregation on city buses.

  In many places, the advancements implemented by the government strengthened the resolve of whites to maintain the upper hand. In South Carolina, a Negro Little League baseball team won its way to the state championship, then found that fifty-five competing white teams had withdrawn. In Arkansas, a Baptist congregation fired a pastor who preached against segregation. In Miami, a group of politically prominent African Americans was thrown out of a hotel after it had arrived, by invitation, to an Abraham Lincoln birthday dinner held by local Republicans. And White Citizens’ Councils, a less secretive and less violent version of the Ku Klux Klan, sprouted across the South to put political and social pressure on blacks who tried to assert their new rights.

  Emma talked to the young men a while, telling them of her trip, and decided to press on since staying the night would have made the eight-by-twenty-foot shelter a little too crowded. She walked down an embankment and came to a rushing creek near Little Mond Pond. She couldn’t cross there, so she hiked up into the woods until she found a log stretched across the flowing water. She balanced carefully and made it across without falling. She walked down the trail a bit more and found that a flooded brook had joined the trail at a flat, narrow stretch. The water was running a mill race straight down the path. She stepped into the flow, but the water came all the way to her knee on the very first step, so she backed out. The shelter with the group from Harlem would have to do.

  Emma came from a place that was nearly all
white and completely segregated, but she did not discriminate. She taught her children to respect others, no matter their skin color or stage in life. She would not allow them to utter racial epithets and taught them to treat people as they wished to be treated themselves. One experience on the trail defined this attitude: An African American couple invited her to dinner, and when she was seated and served, they withdrew. She refused to eat unless they joined her, and she seemed embarrassed by their treatment.

  Emma found the boys baking two pones of cornbread. They had fashioned a little stove and were cooking over hot ashes from a fire. When they finished, they ate one cake and saved the other to eat on the trail the next day.

  When it was time for bed, Emma squeezed herself into one corner and ducked under her blanket as the rain plinked off the roof. Before she dozed off, the young man next to her, apparently asleep, slung his arm across her body. She moved his limp appendage back. He did it again. She moved it back. He did it again.

  Six days before, the Reverend G. W. Lee, a respected minister and local official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was killed by an unknown assailant in Belzoni, Mississippi. Seven days later, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting family in Money, Mississippi, would be kidnapped and murdered and dumped in the Tallahatchie River after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. That very same day, August 13, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot to death in broad daylight within sight of the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and police wouldn’t be able to find a single witness to testify against the white men charged in his death.

  And on the Appalachian Trail, inside a crowded little shelter in the Green Mountains of Vermont, an old white woman fell asleep under the arm of a young black man from Harlem.

  12

  I’LL GET THERE

  AUGUST 14–15, 1955

  Her sons were strong swimmers, and when they’d finished working in the tobacco fields, they’d race off toward the Ohio River and plunge into the cool water, washing away the day’s dust and sweat. It was a good distance to the opposite bank, but when they were up to the challenge they could tear across the river and reach the other side, as if they were born with gills.

  Their mother could not swim. She’d never learned how. If you dropped her into the Ohio, she could probably keep her head above water for a few moments out of sheer grit and determination, but she lacked the fundamentals of buoyancy.

  She never spoke to her family of the months she spent preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail, but they’d later learn from friends and acquaintances in southern Ohio that Emma was often seen in the woods in advance of her journey. Her children would learn that she secretly made overnight expeditions to the wilderness to determine what equipment was completely necessary, what foods were lightweight and would help her maintain energy, and what first-aid supplies she might need in an emergency.

  Despite those hours spent in forethought, she had never picked up the skill that would have proved mildly comforting at least on August 14, as the creeks and streams in the Green Mountains continued to rise.

  Emma set out at about 8:00 AM with the young men from Harlem and their leaders, and they waded through water to their knees for much of the trail that morning, coming eventually to a fast-moving creek that was fifteen feet wide. They gradually stepped into the water, which came above Emma’s knees. They slowly worked their way across, the leaders keeping a close eye on the young men. They used walking sticks to brace themselves against the swift current until they’d each made it to safety.

  A short time later, they came to Ten Kilns Brook, which intersected the trail, and this stream was swollen as well, twenty feet from bank to bank. In the middle was a large rock, and the water between them and the rock wasn’t flowing as rapidly as it was beyond the rock. The leaders went first, carefully maneuvering to the other side. Then the boys started, walking first to the rock then grabbing hold of a pole held by one of the leaders and inching the rest of the way across against the heavy flow.

  Emma was last. She baby-stepped through the calmer water to the rock, then heaved her pack across to one leader and gripped the pole for the rough stretch. When she stepped into the swift water, it nearly took her feet from under her. She held tight to the pole and kept moving, feeling the creek bottom with her feet, trying to keep her balance, until she reached the other side.

  The rain stopped that morning. The sun burned down. Emma’s soaked clothes began to dry, and gradually things seemed a little better. The group stopped at Old Job Shelter for lunch, and the boys laughed as they pelted green apples off a nearby tree. A few hours of hiking later, their clothes had dried completely, and they walked across a rustic wooden bridge to a shelter on a little island. It was a beautiful spot where the mirrored waters of Little Rocky Pond, stocked full with rainbow trout, reflected mountains covered by evergreens.

  Emma thought about staying. She would have liked to, but she needed to make progress after a slow and miserable last couple of days. She said good-bye to the group from Harlem, picked up her pace, and put in seven more miles through farmland and a long patch of lowlands before bedding down for the night at Buffum Shelter. She logged the experience in her diary, adding: “The boys, all but one colored, were very nice.”

  There is no other mention of them in her journals, and one might easily assume from the paragraphs dedicated to the chance encounter that the boys were simply Roman Catholic youths on a wilderness journey. Their story was lost for decades. But before his death in 2010, one of the white leaders would recount meeting Emma Gatewood on the trail. Rev. Dr. David Loomis wrote this version of those few wet days:

  The summer I turned 21, I worked for a church in East Harlem, New York, which had the highest density of population on earth at that time and a murder rate to prove it. Each square inch of concrete was fought over by gangs, with summer’s heat adding fuel to that fire.

  In hopes of brokering peace between the two largest rival gangs, the church I worked for had me take the four top honchos of each gang for a week-long hike along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. None of the eight could resist the church’s invitation to take an all-expenses-paid vacation far from the heat of the city.

  Our first day out, we hiked 15 miles out before a hurricane unexpectedly blew inland and trapped us inside an 8 x 20 foot trailside lean-to. As night fell, Emma Gatewood, a 5’2” grandma who was living her dream of hiking the entire trail from Georgia to Maine staggered into camp. Bruised, exhausted, her gear and provisions washed away by swollen streams, she was in dire need. What made things tricky was that Emma was a genteel white Southern lady. She could hide neither her drawl nor her unease at living in close proximity to eight young black males, her distress leading all eight to bestow on her their stoniest stares.

  It rained and blew hard…. The brute force of nature so overwhelmed us it literally dissolved the tension in our lean-to. That hurricane, by facing us with a severe, totally mutual challenge, forced us all back to what we had in common, our humanity. Like people trapped in a lifeboat, we came together to try to stay afloat. We took turns standing by a fire we had built by breaking off dead branches, thereby freeing up enough floor space for five of us to stretch out and sleep. We also took turns getting drenched collecting more deadwood.

  Hiking out once the rains let up, Emma piggybacked on a variety of youthful backs as we forded swollen torrents that would have swept her downstream had she attempted them on her own. Whoever she was piggybacking on had somehow to stay balanced mid-stream while enduring a tight, often suffocating neck squeeze from her two thin, bony arms.

  Mary Snow’s story about Emma ran in Sports Illustrated on August 15—the day Emma would face death—under a black-and-white photograph of her on the trail. The headline was: PAT ON THE BACK.

  A 67-year-old great-grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood of Gallipolis, Ohio, is determined to be the first woman to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, 2,050 miles of mountain footpath f
rom Mt. Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Mt. Katahdin, Maine. Mrs. Gatewood, alone and without a map, began following the white blaze marks of the trail early in May, and this week from Connecticut’s Cathedral Pines, Grandmother Gatewood could look back on 1,500 miles of the best and worst of nature. She had carefully avoided disturbing three copperheads and two rattlesnakes on the trail, flipped aside one attacking rattler with a walking stick. When caught without nearby shelter she had heated some stones and slept on them to keep from freezing. For snacks Grandma nibbled wild huckleberries, young sorrel for salad and sucked bouillon cubes to combat loss of body salt.

  Her contacts with other humans ranged from a miserly individual who refused her even a drink, to a generous housewife who supplied fried chicken to carry on the trail.

  Mrs. Gatewood is serenely confident that she can finish her trek. “I’ll get there except if I break something loose. And when I get atop Mt. Katahdin, I’ll sing America, The Beautiful, ‘From sea to shining sea.’”

  She could go no farther.

  She had started at 6:00 AM and faced a wicked, weedy trail all morning before coming to Clarendon Gorge. This one was wider than the others, forty feet from bank to bank, wide enough to necessitate a bridge even when the creek wasn’t flooded. The old bridge had burned some time ago and a temporary bridge had been fashioned, but rains from the storm had washed the new bridge out. There was no way she could cross.

  She walked up the gorge a ways and found a spot that she estimated was only about three feet deep, but the water was moving so swiftly that she wasn’t about to try it alone. She hollered into the woods to see if anybody was within earshot. Maybe there was a chance someone nearby knew where she could get across. She got no response. She was all alone, and she was stuck.

  She removed the damp clothes from her sack and laid them out in the sun to dry. If she was going to be forced to wait, at least she could be productive and lighten her load a bit. She spread out her blanket, too, and decided to catch a little sun. After days of gray, cloud-covered skies, the warm light was welcome.