In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  Given the amount of money involved, Civil War pensions had become a big political issue, with many Americans in the late nineteenth century regarding them as a source of corruption and dependence, like Ronald Reagan’s twentieth-century claims about “welfare queens.” So Washington had to be careful in making the awards, and the War Department opened a routine investigation of Narcissa’s eligibility. That Narcissa was from Tennessee, a state that joined the Confederacy, was not a problem because Carpenter had been a Union soldier, an investigator from the War Department concluded. Nor did he say Narcissa was disqualified because Carpenter was still married to his wife in Indiana at the time of his wedding with Narcissa. Narcissa was “perfectly ignorant on that point at the time of her marrying,” the investigator wrote.

  However, a special federal examiner sent from Nashville to Narcissa’s home found a more troublesome issue. Narcissa candidly admitted to local gossip that she had been “intimate” with a neighboring farmer, John Melton, in Carpenter’s last year and that she eventually gave birth to a son fathered by Melton. The affair contravened a law passed by Congress in 1882 meant, in the words of the commissioner of pensions in the Department of the Interior, “not to grant a pension to those widows who have dishonored the memory of their soldier husbands by adulterous acts.” In 1897, after an astonishing ten years of investigation, the filing of dozens of affidavits and the taking of depositions from twenty of Narcissa’s neighbors, the commissioner of pensions himself denied her claim to a pension. “The open and notorious adulterous cohabitation” of Narcissa and Melton “bars her claim to support from her husband’s pension,” the commissioner concluded.

  This was a serious blow to Narcissa and her family. Narcissa and Mattie, convinced they could prevail, reapplied to Washington for the pension almost annually until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, each time adding new emotional appeals by neighbors and Narcissa’s four children. All these applications were rejected. Con games were practically a way of life in the household where Louis grew up. Even Louis’s father, a poor, illiterate farmer named James Bogle, exaggerated his wealth, tricking Mattie into marrying him before deserting and divorcing her. Louis knew almost nothing about his father; all he could do was use his imagination to conjure him.

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  Louis and Elvie had grown up living in homes made of rough-cut logs or boxing planks, without glass windows to keep out the cold in the winter or screens to deter the mosquitoes in the summer, leaving them subject to bouts of malaria. Leaves from mail-order catalogs papered the walls, and through the cracks in the boards the winter winds blew strong enough to make the coal-oil lamps smoke. The floors were dirt, and when it rained, mud. Water was hand-drawn from wells. There was no electricity. Farming meant plowing behind a mule, if you were lucky, or pushing the plow yourself if you couldn’t afford a work animal. Their diet was corn bread with an occasional piece of pork fat and a few greens from the garden. In Paris, life was suddenly different for Louis and Elvie. They lived in a city and in a house that seemed like a mansion to them. They went driving fast in what Elvie believed was her new boyfriend’s shiny Model T Ford along the country dirt road that led to her old home at the crossroads in Sherry. The road was like a trench cut through a high canopy of solid trees: post oaks, pin oaks, red oaks and sycamores. Going with Louis gave Elvie, for the first time, a sense of what an exciting time they were living in. “Bootleg liquor, cigarettes, bobbing your hair as a gesture of emancipation, it all went to your head,” William Humphrey wrote about his mother in Sherry who was the same age as Elvie. “As the song they were singing that year went, ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ ” For Louis and Elvie, Paris, Texas, might as well have been Paree.

  Louis offered to show Elvie how to drive. But she was a natural and hardly needed instruction. Elvie explained that her uncle, Charles Morris, her father’s older brother, in addition to being a cotton farmer also ran the general store, which included a small space for the post office in Sherry. Once a week it was his duty to go the seven miles into Clarksville, the nearest town, and fetch the mail, which he would hold for the forty or so families to collect. To speed up his trips, Charles bought a motorcycle with a one-cylinder engine and a sidecar for the mail. Elvie, about thirteen at the time, begged her uncle to teach her to drive the motorcycle and let her go into Clarksville for the mail in his place. Everyone in her family was afraid she would get herself killed on the narrow, rutted dirt track, and driving a motorized vehicle was considered unladylike in a small Baptist community at the time. But she was already displaying the bravado and willingness to take risks that would determine so much of her life.

  By now, Louis and Elvie were in love. Elvie was also pregnant, something they did not advertise. They were married in Paris on April 2, 1921. A photograph of Louis, apparently taken for the wedding, shows him in his brown suit and white shirt and dark tie with an almost architectural pompadour, his hair piled so high that it looks as if it were pulled upward and glued in place by someone with a mischievous sense of humor. Even the hair cannot hide his projectile ears, sticking straight out. Until the end of their lives, Louis and Elvie would say they fell in love the first day he walked into the Kress store and spotted her, thinking of themselves just like the characters in the hit song made popular by Bing Crosby, “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store).” The song, however, was not recorded until 1931, ten years after they met. This lie became part of a pattern. When the facts of their lives were not convenient, they embellished them. It was a trait they would pass on to their own children, like dark hair and big ears.

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  Louis and Elvie’s dream life ended as fast as it began. After the wedding, Elvie moved into the house owned by Louis’s uncle in her belief that her new husband was part owner. But northeast Texas had just fallen into a sharp economic recession, with the price of cotton and land dropping by half in a year, and on top of that much of the crop was lost to a boll weevil infestation from Mexico. With the demand for his fruit trees drying up, Harding decided to move back to Tennessee. So a few months after the marriage he sold the house in Paris and took his own grown son, Charles, and the Model T back to Daylight. For him, it was a business decision. For the newly married couple, it was a personal disaster. Elvie was confronted with Louis’s boasts that had turned into deceits. How could they support themselves, especially with a baby on the way? Their first child, John Bogle, arrived in early December, eight months after they were married.

  Louis had no real job skills or trade. In Tennessee he had worked part-time as an assistant to a mason and as a wallpaper hanger. Elvie, of course, could not go back to work in the Kress store now that she was married. The only available jobs for women in Paris were as teachers, nurses or store clerks. Black women worked as servants. Most white women in Texas still lived and worked on farms, but that was the last thing Elvie wanted to do. She was only nineteen, but she had been in rebellion against that life of poverty, backwardness and boredom as long as she could remember. Her earliest memories as a child were of being tied to a stake among rows of cotton where her parents were working to keep her from wandering into the woods, where there were snakes and scorpions. Her toys were the dirt and a stick to dig the dirt with. Elvie’s father, James Morris, known as Jim, was a sharecropper of unprepossessing appearance: short, of medium build, with blue eyes and black hair. Each year he contracted with the biggest landowners in Red River County, the Lennox brothers, who let him live in a small unpainted house in Sherry and farm twenty-five acres of land. In exchange, he had to turn over half his cotton crop to them after the harvest. Every year, Morris thought he would make a big crop and be able to clear enough money to buy his own land and house, but each September, after the harvest, he found he had only enough cotton to sell to buy food for the winter and seeds for next spring. The Red River County tax records show tha
t from 1895, when Jim began living in Sherry, until his death in 1918, he never owned any land to pay taxes on. In 1905, soon after Elvie was born, the tax records show, his entire net worth was set at $135—for a horse, a mule, a cow, a wagon and some tools.

  Elvie had learned that cotton is a man-killing crop. As soon as the land is dry enough to be worked in the spring, it must be broken with the plow. Soon the days are long and hot, and the earth is baked hard. The plowshare must break through this rocklike earth, and then the seeds are sown. When the cotton plants are a foot high, they must be thinned with a hoe, every other plant being chopped out. Picking time came in late August or early September. Grown-ups and children strapped on knee pads and dragged long canvas sacks down the middle of the rows, picking two rows at a time, pulling out the lint and getting their fingers pricked by the pointy burrs. They worked from before daybreak until dark, under a broiling sun. After just one day of picking, the farmers and their children had aching backs and raw, bleeding hands.

  So Elvie knew she could not go back to cotton farming. She had gotten a taste of modern city living in Paris, and she enjoyed wearing the stylish new clothes that her mother, Florence, had purchased for her. Elvie also had a wanderlust, a yearning to travel and try new things, as well as a strong will and daredevil streak that she got from her mother and her father’s mother, Sarah Morris Hardin.

  Her mother had been born in Tennessee, the daughter of two schoolteachers who, like so many Southerners, made their way westward after the Civil War. Perhaps because of her parents’ status as schoolteachers, Florence seemed dissatisfied with her life as the wife of a poor cotton sharecropper, whom she had married in 1894. In photographs taken at the time, she has a dour, unhappy look. Four years after Elvie’s birth, Florence deserted her husband and daughter, moving to Wichita Falls, one hundred fifty miles to the northwest. There she rented a room in a boardinghouse and worked as a wrapper in a candy factory. Florence told people she was unmarried and had no children. She also claimed to be twenty-eight when she was actually thirty-four. More prevarications.

  Taken by themselves, these were only small fibs, but a serious pattern of deceit was emerging. Family members heard stories that Florence had been seen bringing men home, in some cases for money. Her sister-in-law at the time said, “Florence was a loose woman,” and reported that Florence had responded to the allegation by saying, “I’ve been accused of being loose, so I might as well do it. If you’re going to wear the name, then you might as well bear the blame.”

  In May 1910, Jim Morris filed for divorce from Florence on the grounds of abandonment in the Red River County district court. It was swiftly granted. But for Florence, being unmarried in her mid-thirties in Texas may not have turned out so well economically, or maybe she missed her daughters, so she came back to Sherry, and in December 1912 she remarried Jim Morris in Clarksville. Elvie was delighted her mother had come home after an absence of six years.

  Soon after Florence had deserted her family in 1906, Jim’s mother, Sarah Morris Hardin, arrived from Arkansas and moved in with Jim and Elvie to help out. Sarah was a lively, picaresque woman with a generous spirit who never shied away from adventure or difficult situations. At fifty-nine, though having given birth to nine children of her own, she remained vital and energetic. Sarah had been born in Georgia, moved to Alabama and late in the Civil War married a neighboring farmer, Lofton Morris. They soon had four sons, including Jim.

  About 1875, for unexplained reasons, Sarah packed her four sons and all her belongings into a wagon and began a long trek to Arkansas. Perhaps her husband had died; perhaps she simply left him. There is no historical record. Records do show that at some point in her journey she met up with another Alabama farmer headed west, James Hardin, and they joined their wagon teams together. According to the story passed down in the family, Sarah and James got married during the trip, but it would have been a common-law marriage because Hardin had abandoned his wife, Elizabeth Barnes Hardin, in Alabama, along with four of his seven children. He never divorced her. The recombinant family found land it liked in northeast Arkansas and settled into a new life as Mr. and Mrs. James Hardin. Like Louis Bogle’s grandmother, Elvie’s mother and grandmother took what came their way and embellished when they had to.

  Recent historical research has found that the lack of stability in these marriages, as well as the easy breaking of sacred vows, was more widespread among poor whites in the rural, sparsely populated upcountry South in the nineteenth century than Americans today presume. There were so few law-enforcement officials or ministers in this spread-out population that marriage and divorce were governed more by an “informal public” of family, kin and neighbors than by the niceties of the rule of law, according to Nancy Cott, a professor of history at Harvard who is a leading authority on marriage in the United States. Common-law marriages, desertion and what Cott calls self-divorce were widespread. There was also a sizable amount of adultery and bigamy among poor whites in the nineteenth-century South, Cott wrote in her book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.

  In Arkansas, as time passed, the new neighbors of Sarah Morris and James Hardin accepted that they were legally married, and the census of 1880 showed what a large family they had. In addition to the couple, there were three of Hardin’s sons, four of her sons and a ten-month-old son born to James and Sarah in Arkansas. Eventually, they would have two more children together. Most of this big family remained together, unquestioned, until James Hardin died in 1891. Then, in an ending like something out of a Jane Austen novel, one of Hardin’s sons by his previous wife showed up and took Sarah to court. He proved that his father had never divorced his mother and therefore that his father’s marriage to Sarah was invalid. As a consequence, a judge ruled that Sarah and her children were not entitled to inherit anything from Hardin. Sarah was left with nothing. It was a few years after this debacle that Sarah moved to Texas to live with her son Jim Morris in Sherry.

  For Elvie, having her grandmother around was fun. Sarah loved to dance, in a community where the Baptists thought dancing was a ticket to Hell, and she liked to organize square dances in people’s houses, with a fiddler and someone to play the guitar and a banjo. Sarah taught Elvie to dance, and told her tales about life on the plantation in Alabama before the Yankees came and burned it down. Actually, there was no plantation in Alabama, only a small farm, but it made Elvie dream of a better life than being a cotton sharecropper. It made her dream of fine things and faraway places. Sarah also warned her about “the laws,” the sheriff and the judge who would take your property away, as had happened to her. The moral of the story, Sarah said, was that a woman had to be strong and do whatever it took to survive.

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  In 1921, after Louis Bogle’s uncle abruptly sold his house in Paris, it was Elvie who came up with a solution, drawing on what she had learned as a girl. That October, Elvie and Louis went to the biggest local event of the year, the annual visit to Paris of the carnival, held at the city fairgrounds. There were trained lions and elephants, and “mechanical and electrical riding devices sufficient to satisfy the whims of every youngster in Northeast Texas,” The Paris Morning News reported on October 14, 1921. One of them, the paper said, “is surely sensational, that is, a regular hair-raiser.” It was known as the motordrome, or Wall of Death, an invention of the past few years in which a motorcycle rider went faster and faster around a thirty-foot wooden circle that was banked in almost perpendicular fashion so that the motorcycle’s centrifugal force propelled it higher and higher, clinging to the inside of the wall. Spectators climbed the outer wall of the wooden dome and looked over the top at the riders inside. When the riders reached the top, some spectators would reach over and put money in their outstretched hands, a tough feat for the riders, who had to take one of their hands off the handlebars and controls to accept the money. It was dangerous; some riders were badly injured or killed doing it. Elvie
was instantly enthralled.

  The carnival that came to Paris was run by the Great Patterson Shows, a major national company that traveled with its own collection of thirty railroad cars for the wild animals, performers, mechanics and equipment. Elvie sought out a manager to ask about a job. As it happened, one of their motorcycle riders was ill, or drunk, and they offered Elvie a chance to show what she could do. They gave her a uniform of tight horse-riding breeches, tall riding boots and an aviator’s leather helmet, and she was off. She sped up the steep wall on her first try, reaching the open top, and was rewarded with handfuls of dollar bills. Elvie, a tomboy at heart, was ecstatic. It was as if she had been made for this. There was the fast driving, the danger and the sense that she was in charge. The carnival provided a fulfillment that farm life, school and what little she knew of church did not. She was following her grandmother’s dictum: be strong and do what it takes to survive. At the end of the week, when the carnival prepared to move on to its next stop, in Louisiana, Elvie was offered a job for five dollars a week plus her tips, and a chance to sleep in a railroad car. As a bonus, they offered to make Louis a mechanic for an additional few dollars a week. If Elvie worried about the effect of driving around the motordrome on the baby she was carrying, there is no record of it.

  The new jobs in the carnival were a godsend to Elvie and Louis, and they paid no heed to warnings from Elvie’s family and friends that the people who worked in carnivals were a shifty lot. “Carnies,” they were called, disreputable folk who were said to be dirty and decadent and often in trouble with the law. People in Clarksville, near Elvie’s home in Sherry, were still talking about a young woman who was found murdered while working at a carnival there just two years earlier. Her family did not know she was working in the carnival, and when her father came to collect her body, he discovered that her two younger sisters were also employed there, so he took them home too. People in Clarksville had a saying, “When the carnival comes to town, lock your door.” Many families in Clarksville would not even let their daughters into the motordrome or other sideshows in a carnival. It just wasn’t proper.