by Aimee Molloy
It was October 20, 1974, and she was twenty-four years old. She’d just arrived in Senegal’s capital city with a suitcase stuffed with jeans and miniskirts, mosquito repellant, novels by African writers, a nearly empty bank account, and the intention of spending six months studying at the University of Dakar as part of a student exchange with the University of Illinois, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in expanded French studies. A few months earlier she’d been thrilled to get word that she’d been chosen as one of two students to take part in the exchange program’s first year, thrilled about the prospect of spending six months in Africa. She was far less thrilled to be told, just hours after arriving at the Dakar airport, her brain still cloudy with jet lag, that the exchange program had unexpectedly been canceled. The university representative on the other end of the phone argued with her, explaining that they had sent a telegram to her American address notifying her of this development.
“I didn’t get a telegram,” she said. It would arrive in Illinois the next day.
Unsure of what else to do, Molly called the U.S. Embassy. The woman she spoke to kindly invited her and Steve Canfield, the other American exchange student, to come to her house while they tried to rectify the situation. The woman’s home was airy and beautiful, with large rooms filled with comfortable American furniture and a big patio in the back where Molly spent her first few mornings in Africa listening to the birds perched on the flowering trees. While many young Americans might have been bothered by the reality of what they’d sacrificed to come to Africa—a nice apartment, a steady boyfriend, a place in a graduate program, and a respected teaching position—Molly didn’t feel one bit troubled. She was too busy enjoying the adventure of it all.
Each day she woke early to take a bus into crowded downtown Dakar or to the rocky shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean on the western edge of the city. Often she would ride one of the many colorfully painted, but somewhat worse for wear, buses called Alhamdulilaas, meaning “praise be to God” in Arabic. “Alhamdulilaa if we make it to our destination,” a fellow rider explained to Molly, chuckling. Squeezed in alongside students and workers, mothers and their babies, she’d travel to the ministry of education or to the university to see what she might work out. Along the way, she found herself enraptured by the scenes unfolding on the streets around her: the horse-drawn carts competing for space on the crowded roads, the women’s vibrantly colored boubous blowing in the sand-streaked wind, their hair covered in matching, artfully arranged head wraps. Groups of children drummed on upside-down buckets along the roads as young girls danced dusty circles around them. Late into the evenings, she’d spend hours walking the lively streets of Dakar, getting lost in the life of the city, among the teenage boys playing soccer on makeshift fields in the middle of the road and men huddled over checkerboards on wooden crates set on the sidewalk. She loved spending time in the markets, so exotic to her, filled with tables of old trading beads, plants and herbs for healing, and goat horns and cauri shells used to predict the future or ward off evil. She paused to watch a man walk the narrow footways along the busy streets, his wares balanced on his slender shoulders, crying out that day’s offerings to passersby: “Bale! Bale! (Brooms! Brooms!)”
Before long, Steve decided to head home to America, back to their program at the University of Illinois, but Molly was determined to remain in Senegal and somehow make it work. Because, while she couldn’t aptly describe how or why it had happened, from the moment she’d walked off the plane into the busy and stifling airport, there was something about this place she loved. And over the next few weeks she came to discover that what she was feeling was as wonderful as it was unfamiliar: a deep sense of belonging that made her weak with happiness—the feeling of being at home.
MOLLY WAS BORN IN Houston in 1949, the second of two girls, to Albert Frederick Melching and Anna Vivian Lineberry Melching. Al, as he was called, worked as a traveling salesman, and six months after Molly was born, his job took the family to Higginsville, Missouri, where they stayed until Molly was six, and then on to Danville, a corn-fed town in central illinois best known, perhaps, as the birthplace of Dick van Dyke.
Molly’s mother, Anna, who preferred to be called Ann, grew up in Madison, Missouri, but every Lineberry in the United States is said to be originally from Galax, Virginia, a Black Mountain town known for its quilts and its annual fiddling contest. It was in 1941 in Kansas City, where Ann was working as a secretary, that she met Al, whose family was from Fort Wayne, Indiana. A salesman with Farmers insurance Group, Al stood just over six feet four inches tall and had a distinctive warmth and a penchant for making others laugh.
They married a year later. Al was thirty at the time, Ann twenty-nine, and the couple was eager to start a family. But just four weeks into their marriage, Al was drafted into the army to fight in World War II. Though older than most other inductees, he was happy to be called to serve his country; he felt a keen sense of guilt that he’d previously been doing nothing to assist the war effort. He landed on Utah Beach on September 27, 1944, and began a long march across France, eventually making his way through Luxembourg, Germany, and England. Like most American soldiers at the time, Al was not prepared for the extent of death and suffering he’d witness as a member of an infantry unit. “War is hell and I’ve seen things,” he wrote home to Ann while in Europe. “It’s hard, but my future is all that counts.” Though he rarely spoke about the experience after returning home in 1947, the shock of war and devastation remained with him.
Ann kept her job as a secretary while her husband fought in Europe and remained working until Molly’s sister, Diane, was born in 1947. Being a full-time mother and homemaker proved to be hard on Ann. Trapped all day in their small house with nothing to do but care for two young girls, she often felt unhappy and unsettled, given the family’s frequent moves in just six years due to Al’s work as a salesman—from Utah to Texas and Missouri before Danville, Illinois. This was made worse by the fact that during this time, the 1950s, motherhood was glorified and women were expected to raise perfect children. The social pressure to conform to the image of the happy housewife caused Ann—like many of her generation—to turn inward: she would sometimes sneak into the closet and cry.
She thought often of the career dreams she’d long ago abandoned. One of six children, four of them girls, Ann had been determined as a young girl to graduate from college, despite the fact that growing up female in the 1920s limited the extent of her professional hopes for the future. She enrolled in William Woods College in 1931, at the height of the Depression, but after just one year, her father, Fred, struggling with the responsibility of running a farm, announced he would no longer contribute to his children’s education. Ann did everything she could to stay in college, even borrowing a hundred dollars from her brother, but she couldn’t make it work. She dropped out of college, enrolled at Huff Secretarial School, and took a job at the Westgate Greenland Oil Company, eventually rising to the position of secretary to the company president.
After becoming a mother and giving up this job, Ann tried her best to stay engaged with the world beyond her children. She studied the stock market each evening, enjoyed listening to classical music, and was a voracious reader. Her husband did not share these interests. While Ann was considered poised and proper and was interested in world events and politics, Al was the adored clown of the family. Called “Sonny” by his family, he was known for his practical jokes and loved to make his young daughters laugh, most often with his clever use of so-called Melching puns. He once left a phone message for his wife: a Mr. Lyon had called. When Ann dialed the number Al had written, she discovered she was calling the city zoo. During services at Trinity Lutheran Church, he would turn to the wrong page in the hymnal and urge his girls to sing loudly for all to hear. One summer, after Ann’s sister Thelma swore that Al, who had by this time gone bald, was growing back his hair, he ushered Diane and Molly into the cornfields to collect corn silk, which they all taped onto his bald head l
ike a flaxen wig. That night at the dinner table, when Thelma asked him to kindly remove his hat for dinner, Al revealed his new hair growth to hoots of laughter.
While his daughters loved his antics, his clownish behavior did not often impress his wife. For if there was one thing Ann Melching cared about, it was appearances. Inside their home, things were kept spotless, to the point of merciless obsession. The house felt more like a display room than it did a home. As high school students, Molly and Diane were discouraged from having friends over or from sitting on the expensive beige checkered sofa Ann had purchased from money she’d saved herself; they always had to give at least three days’ notice if they did want to invite someone over, so Ann could clean the house thoroughly.
As much as Ann tried to keep control over her house, she also tried to keep control over her daughters. She taught Diane and Molly from a very early age how to properly behave so as to project the right image. She was a stickler for grammar, understanding that to use language incorrectly would be to risk being judged poor. They could never leave the house—even to run to the corner store—without putting in substantial effort to look their best.
Ann’s desire to control her daughters was especially difficult for Molly, an effervescent, social, and passionate girl. She had inherited her father’s enthusiasm for life, as well as his height—she was five feet ten by her junior year of high school. While Ann may have preferred her to exhibit the type of poise and decorum expected of young ladies, Molly had always felt most comfortable in her own body while active and performing: in theater, on the school newspaper, and (despite not having the best singing voice) in the choir. She was a member of the pompettes, who performed during the boys’ sporting events (So fight, Danville! Fight for Danville High!). She was extremely happy and vibrant, and as she would recall later in life, it seemed she spent a lot of time simply trying to find a place where it was acceptable to dance. At home or on the street, she would link arms with her friends or grab Diane and her mother and encourage them to dance along with her. Ann inevitably scolded Molly for this behavior, embarrassed by her daughter’s spontaneity. Every time this happened, Molly felt confused. What was the point of taking up space in the world if you weren’t going to do it with zest?
As Molly’s sister, Diane, remembers, “My mother was overly involved with us, and with Molly especially. I think Molly scared her. Even as a child, Molly was an intellectual, but also very creative. She would spend hours drawing in her room and loved her art classes. Her creativity made her a little messy, a little in her own world, which frustrated my mother and caused a lot of conflict between them. My mother was always trying to get Molly to conform to her way of thinking—to see the importance of being socially accepted, financially secure, and economically mobile.”
It was only after Molly became an adult—and especially after her own daughter, Zoé, was born in 1985—that she realized Ann’s strictness and control were not a function of spitefulness, as it may have often felt, but an act of love, carefully designed to keep her daughters from experiencing the struggles that had defined her own younger years. Both Al and Ann had lived through incredible hardship: the worst of the Depression, the brutality of war, and, at least for Ann, the sting of humiliation that came with having grown up just on the brink of poverty. Forced to struggle economically her whole life, she continued to make great sacrifices as a mother in hopes of giving her daughters the opportunities she never had. After Diane and Molly started school, Ann took a job as a teacher. By the age of forty, she had wisely invested enough money from her annual salary of just $9,000 to pay for her daughters’ college tuition, her own care in the later years of her life, and her eventual funeral.
Molly and Diane would not know of their mother’s investments until many years later, after Al and Ann moved to Arizona to be closer to Ann’s sisters. Secrecy was not wholly unusual for the Melching family, as much in Al’s and Ann’s lives were kept private. Neither of them spoke to their daughters about the sacrifices they’d made, the hardships they had endured, or, for that matter, any of the bad things happening in the world—poverty, racism, violence. Instead, Molly would later realize, they did everything they could to keep bad news away from their girls, to build an artificial bubble of cheerfulness and optimism around their family. Perhaps they thought if only their daughters would conform, if only things always played out exactly as they should, no trouble would come. After all, if you can’t control the world and make it perfect, if you have to live with all that is irrational and inevitable about life, if you have to endure war, poverty, and depression, you could at least construct the perfect living room.
MOLLY IS THE TYPE of person who perseveres on the things that are important to her, and once she decides to make something happen, there is very little use in trying to stop her. This was true even when she was a child. At the age of eight she was desperate for a dog, an idea her mother wouldn’t hear of. When the dog of Molly’s good friend Lily gave birth to a litter of puppies, Molly devised a plan.
“Come over to my house next week on the morning of my birthday,” she instructed Lily. “And bring one of the puppies with you.”
When Lily arrived that morning, Molly feigned surprise, overcome with gratitude at her friend’s unexpected thoughtfulness. “You brought me a puppy for my birthday? I’m so happy!” Seeing Ann’s annoyed looks, Molly followed her into the kitchen. “We can’t turn this down,” she whispered. “After all, it’s a gift. And Lily went through so much trouble.” Molly was able to keep the dog.
It was with this very same persistence that Molly approached the goal she’d set soon after entering Danville High School: she was somehow going to get herself to France. She had enrolled in her first French class in the ninth grade and quickly proved to have a true gift for languages as well as an immense interest in foreign cultures and people. “It’s hard to explain now,” Molly says, recalling this time in her life, “but even when I was very young, I was fascinated by other cultures, by anything that was different. Most people I grew up around were seeking out that which was familiar. I was always attracted to things that were different.”
At fifteen, too young to work legally, she lied about her age in order to get a job as a waitress at the Redwood Inn, a barn-shaped restaurant that offered an all-you-can-eat buffet, to earn money for a trip to France. After several months spending her weekends waiting on farmers and churchgoers, and her weeknights babysitting, she’d saved enough for a plane ticket, and the summer before her senior year in high school—by this time, she was a top student in her French class—she applied to be part of a four-week language-immersion program at the University of Poitiers in Tours, in central France, organized through a nearby high school. The idea that a group of teenagers would travel abroad to Europe for a few weeks was such a novelty to the residents of Danville, the story was written about in the local newspaper.
Accustomed to the routine of life in her small central illinois town, Molly was immediately charmed by France. In Tours, she lived with a family she grew quite fond of. The mother, unlike her own, loved to cook and prepared large, elaborate meals each evening. In the afternoons after classes, fifteen-year-old Molly would often ride a borrowed bike through the château region. She spent her weekends touring France by bus, seeing the sights of Paris and beyond. “I was so enchanted,” she recalls. “Even by little things—how the French could spend three hours over a meal; the sight of farmers in the fields outside of Tours, bending their backs to the earth, alongside their whole family, from grandchildren to spouses.” Surrounded by students from across Europe, Molly found a new sense of wholeness in herself, awakening to the fact that as naïve as she might have been to have never considered it before, the world beyond Danville, illinois, was as interesting as it was immense.
Molly returned to France two years later, this time to spend a year as part of a study-abroad program with the University of illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she’d enrolled in 1967 as a French major. While the stud
y-abroad program was strictly and exclusively reserved for juniors, Molly—just a sophomore—applied anyway. She was turned down by the program administrators, who encouraged her to apply the following year when she was eligible. But the more they refused, the more she persisted, and in August 1968, having finally worn them down, Molly boarded a boat in New York City, the only sophomore in a group of thirty students. They went first to Grenoble for two months and then on to the University of Rouen in Normandy to study for a year.
Molly loved life in France as an eighteen-year-old as much as she had when she was fifteen. She immersed herself in the culture, the art, the theater, and her classes in French literature. She discovered Sartre and Camus and began to explore existentialism, and different political philosophies, even attending leftist meetings at the university. In Rouen, she again lived with a family—this time, it was the father who made a mark on her. He had been a prisoner of war during World War II. Fluent in three languages, he had been forced for several years to translate for the Germans. In the evenings, after the empty dinner plates had been cleared from the table, with his hands shaky from too many cigarettes and a past he couldn’t forget, he spent hours answering Molly’s questions about this painful time in his life. “For the first time, I have some idea of what your life was like fighting the war,” Molly later wrote to her father on lined white paper, alone in her bedroom. “As you know, it is very hard for my generation to realize exactly what a world war means and involves. … I’m always so proud to say, ‘Yes, my father came here to France. He was fighting with you, risking his life so far from home.’”
During every school break, and after classes had finished, Molly traveled. In the summer, she and an American girlfriend left Rouen with just fifty dollars and spent a month hitchhiking through Europe. Depending entirely on hitched rides, they made their way through Germany to Austria, down to Yugoslavia, then Greece, and took a boat to Crete, before heading back to France. Staying in hostels and subsisting on bread, chocolate, and yogurt, they spent most of their money on entrance fees to Europe’s museums and out-of-the-way galleries, the ballet, and the opera in Vienna. After that trip, Molly volunteered for a French group working in the Algerian quarters of the city of Caen on the northern coast of France. There she had her first experience with development work and how it can go wrong. With other volunteers, Molly spent weeks painting and renovating a center to be used by young children in the neighborhood. When all was finally finished, she and the other volunteers came to the center to discover that it had been trashed the night before by members of the community. When asked why they’d done this, the community members explained that they hadn’t been included in the activity by the leaders and they were suspicious of the motivation and intentions of the group. “This was my first lesson in understanding the best way to really help others,” Molly recalls. “People have to be listened to, involved, and engaged from the very beginning.”
