The first on the list may have been a Central American who appeared in the summer of 1925. Matching all the stereotypes of the hot-blooded Latin lover, he was passionate, he lavished presents on her, and he threatened to kill her if he ever saw her with another man, excluding her husband, of course. Arch did not like her seeing him—or so he later said—but he did not make an issue of it. “What could I do?” he asked plaintively. “She’d slip around and see him when I was working. It was just something I didn’t talk about.”
To avoid embarrassing confrontations, Lillie Mae would usually see her Latin in the afternoon. But sometimes at night, after she had told him where she and Arch were going, he would also follow them into a movie theater. She would help Arch find a seat in the front row—he was so shortsighted that he could barely see the screen if he was farther back—and she would then join her lover in a secluded corner in the rear. When the film was over, she would return to Arch and the other man would go home to his own wife. Near-sighted as he was, Arch was usually aware of what was happening.
Several times she carried out her trysts in front of Truman, believing, no doubt, that he was too young to notice. In that she was mistaken. “She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis,” Truman recalled. “I was only two or so, but I remember it clearly, right down to what he looked like—he had brown hair. We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical. A couple of years after that, she took me to Jacksonville to leave me with my grandmother. She and my father were more or less separated by that time, and she went out with several young men while she was there. One night I could hear them doing whatever they were doing in the rumble seat of a car. Another night she brought a man right into the house. She must have been drinking, because I could hear her giggling and her voice sounded funny. Suddenly all the lights came on and she and my grandmother were yelling at each other. She then started packing and every few minutes she would come on to the porch where I was sleeping. She would cry, put her arms around me and tell me she would never leave me. Once again I became hysterical, and at that point my memory stops cold.”
Not all of her lovers were Greeks, Spaniards, or college sheiks. One, Jack Dempsey, the ex–heavyweight champion of the world, satisfied even John Persons’ exacting standards. Lillie Mae met him when she was traveling with Truman on a train from Memphis to St. Louis. “We were sitting in the coach section when a man walked up and down the aisle and looked at my mother—I was used to men looking at my mother. Then he asked us to have a drink in Dempsey’s compartment. I knew even then who Dempsey was, or at least I knew that he was somebody famous. So we went to his compartment and my mother talked to him. After a while Dempsey suggested to the man, who must have been his manager, that he take me to the observation car for a Coke, and he and I went back there and sat watching the rails for most of the afternoon. I remember saying, ‘Where’s my mother?’ But I knew where she was. Things like that happened a lot.”
One reason Arch remained so quiet all those years, methodically counting his wife’s lovers as if he were keeping score in a card game, was that he was not above using them to help him turn a dollar. When they were first married, for example, he persuaded her to cash bad checks for him, employing her good looks as a come-on. In Dempsey, for example, he saw one of his gold mines—bigger even than the Great Pasha—and with Lillie Mae as his go-between, he persuaded the ex-champ, who was still an enormously popular figure, like Charles Lindbergh or Will Rogers, to referee a wrestling match in Columbus, Mississippi. He sent out thousands of promotional fliers, had letterheads printed with both his picture and Dempsey’s, and erected wooden stands to seat 11,500. “There wasn’t a big enough place in the state to hold the people we expected!” he exclaimed. But luck eluded him yet again. A terrible storm pelted Columbus on “Jack Dempsey Day,” November 10, 1930, and even Dempsey was not popular enough to persuade more than 3,000 people to sit in the wind and rain. Arch failed to meet his expenses.
Though she was not faithful, Lillie Mae stuck by Arch in most other ways, long after most women would have dismissed him. She overlooked his failures, defended him during his increasingly frequent troubles with the law, and helped him when she could. Though their times together grew progressively shorter, neither mentioned divorce; both of them seemed content with their civilized arrangement.
The only one hurt was Truman, and if it is true, as psychologists say, that a child’s greatest anxiety—the original fear—is that he will be deserted by his parents, then he had good reason to be anxious. Between Arch’s schemes and Lillie Mae’s affairs, there was little time for him. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I would become so exhausted that I would just throw myself on the bed or on the floor until they came back. Every day was a nightmare, because I was afraid that they would leave me when it turned dark. I had an intense fear of being abandoned, and I remember practically all of my childhood as being lived in a state of constant tension and fear.” An early memory, undoubtedly the recollection of a dream rather than an actual event, is symbolic of those lonely years: as he was walking through the St. Louis Zoo with a black nurse, he heard screams—a lion was loose. The nurse ran away and he was left all by himself, with no place to hide and no safety anywhere.
Lillie Mae made sporadic attempts to keep him with her. In the winter of 1929 she even took him to Kentucky, where, still hoping to find a career for herself, she spent a few weeks in a business college. Arch also professed endless love. But neither one was willing to be a full-time parent or make any permanent sacrifice. They loved him, in short, only when they were not otherwise engaged. Sometimes they left him with Arch’s widowed mother, who had married a Presbyterian minister in Jacksonville. More often they deposited him with Lillie Mae’s relations in Monroeville. Finally, in the summer of 1930, a few months before his sixth birthday, they left him there for good—or for as long as anyone could then foresee. Arch busied himself with his projects; Lillie Mae went off to visit friends in Colorado. Truman’s fear that they would abandon him had finally come true.
4
IT was a strange household he entered in Monroeville, unique to the South, peculiar to the time: three quarrelsome sisters in late middle age, their reclusive older brother, and an atmosphere heavy with small secrets and ancient resentments. Jennie, Callie, Sook, and Bud, united by blood and the boundaries of the rambling old house on Alabama Avenue, divided by jealousy and the accumulated hurts of half a century.
Jennie, a handsome but slightly masculine-looking woman with red hair, was the boss, the final and absolute authority on all matters of consequence. As a young woman, she had realized that she was the only one capable of supporting the family, and she had gone off to learn the hat trade in St. Louis and Pensacola, Florida, returning to open her own shop on the courthouse square. At that time women would not step out the door without some extravagant display on their heads, and Jennie prospered, turning their vague and unarticulated fantasies into fireworks of frills and feathers. Eventually she expanded her shop until it carried everything a woman could want but the shoes on her feet. She would not stoop to fit smelly feet, Jennie declared. “She was the strongest woman I’ve ever seen,” said Seabon, “and one of the finest businesswomen who ever lived. She was one of the first stockholders of both the Monroe County Bank and the First National Bank of Monroeville. She had her hand into everything.” Jennie was also known for her violent temper. She once whipped a lazy yardman with a dog chain; another time, spotting someone who she thought had cheated her, she jumped out of her car and attacked him on his own front porch, in front of his wife and children. People walked on tiptoes when Jennie was around.
Callie, the youngest and at one time the pretties
t of the sisters, with curly black hair, had started out as a schoolteacher. When Jennie’s hat shop began to make money, Jennie ordered her to quit and help with accounts, and like everyone else in that house, Callie did as she was told, keeping the books and pecking out business letters on an old typewriter. But Callie, like many weak people, retaliated by constantly nagging and complaining, her head held high in a permanent position of moral superiority. When Jennie decided to skip church, for example, as she sometimes did, Callie would become indignant. “Oh, Jennie, that’s so sinful!” she would say. “I’m goin’!” And so she would, steaming out the door in her Sunday best like a liner leaving harbor, pennants flying and horns tooting. Knowing that both Jennie and Sook, the third sister, were secret tipplers—good Baptists, particularly good Baptist ladies, were not supposed to indulge—she also made it one of her tasks in life to ferret out and empty the bottles of bourbon they had stashed away. Jennie, for one, was unrepentant and always managed to keep a safe supply; weekend mornings she often could be found on the porch sipping what she discreetly called iced tea. If a neighbor, like Mrs. Lee from next door, happened by, she would invite her in for a glass—and then go into the kitchen to brew a pot of real tea.
Jennie put up with Callie’s sniping, but it was not in her nature to remain silent, and the two of them bickered endlessly. Indeed, there was almost nothing they did not quarrel about: whether they should have company for dinner, serve steak or chicken, set the table this way or that. According to a script they had followed a thousand times, Callie was invariably victorious in those small battles; but Jennie would win all the big ones, and when she did, Callie would run to her room in tears.
Two years older than Jennie and four years older than Callie, Sook was nonetheless the youngest in mind and spirit. Somewhat stout, with white hair cropped close to her head, she was so childlike that she was thought to be retarded by many people; in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded. She had rarely left Monroe County; she had never read anything but the Bible and Grimm’s fairy tales in all of her adult years; and she had never been to a movie, never had seen Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, or any of the other stars everyone was talking about, never even noticed when the silents learned to talk. Her job was to stay home and take care of the house, and she knew little of the world outside its gates.
Only occasionally did she make longer excursions. One was on that day each fall when she went into the woods to find ingredients for her dropsy cure, whose recipe had come down to her from the Indians, or the gypsies—no one knew for sure. When she returned, she would boil all her gleanings, chiefly herbs and sourwood, in a giant washpot in the backyard, and neighbors would know from the red glow that night that Sook was making her medicine. Whatever it was, it seemed to work, and several victims of the disease praised her as they would a saint.
A second excursion also took place in the fall when she searched the woods for pecans to put into her Christmas fruitcakes. She would make a dozen or so and give them away to relatives and people she admired, such as the man who peddled tinware from a wagon or President and Mrs. Roosevelt; the Roosevelts’ thank-you note, which bore both signatures on White House stationery, was one of her most treasured possessions. Yet even the gentle, innocent Sook had a dark side, an addiction to morphine, which had been prescribed as a painkiller after a mastectomy, and her habit sometimes made her moody and irritable. “If she ran out of her medicine, she’d act wild and wouldn’t be fit to talk to,” recalled Seabon. “‘Oh! Oh!’ she would moan, and call to me: ‘Seabon! Run down to Dr. Coxwell’s and get my medicine. I gotta have my medicine!’”
Surrounded by contentious, difficult women and half-invalided by asthma, Bud, who was as tall as he was thin, kept to himself. Though he was the putative head of the clan, by both gender and age, he long since had deferred to Jennie, and much of the time he would remain in his room, breathing the acrid fumes of a cough-suppressor called Green Mountain, which he burned in a saucer turned upside down on the fireplace mantel. The rest of the time he spent either supervising the farm he owned outside of town or rocking in a chair on the front porch. Jennie and Callie had had their share of beaux, but Bud had never taken out a woman, or shown an interest in sex of any kind; no one presumed to ask why. He never spoke harshly about anyone, and the only person in the world he seemed to dislike was his younger brother, Howard, who lived with his wife on a farm nearby. Long ago they had argued over land they had inherited from their father, and they had not spoken since. When Howard and his wife came to dinner, as they did every Sunday afternoon, the two brothers would sit across the table from each other and exchange not so much as a syllable.
Yet beneath the emotional storms, the fights, tearful exits, and oddities of manners and behavior, there was a foundation of calm, order and a now-vanished simplicity to life on Alabama Avenue, and it is easy to understand why Lillie Mae, who had wanted so desperately to leave, was drawn back so often. For all their intrigues and harsh words, the Faulks were a family. They knew that whatever was said, in the end they could always count on one another. They took care of their own.
In 1930, when Truman went there to live, Monroeville was a small country town, scarcely more than a furrow between fields of corn and cotton. That year’s census listed 1,355 people, but even that tiny figure probably was exaggerated by local officials, who wanted a number big enough to qualify for a post office. There was not one paved street, and a row of oak trees grew right down the middle of Alabama Avenue. On hot summer days cars and horses kicked up red dust every time they passed by; when it rained that dust turned to mud. Without a map it was hard to know where the town began and the surrounding farmland ended. Yards were big, with two or three outbuildings, and most people kept chickens, some pigs, and at least one cow. The Faulks did not have a cow—Sook would not milk one—but they did raise chickens, and turkeys too, and every winter Bud would bring in from his farm a couple of hogs, which were soon sent to the smokehouse.
Everyone followed farmers’ hours, up by dawn, in bed by eight or nine. In the Faulk household, Sook and old Aunt Liza—all elderly blacks were called “aunt” or “uncle” by the white people they worked for—would start cooking breakfast, the big meal of the day, at five: ham, eggs, and pancakes, of course; but also, in an almost excessive display of the land’s bounty, fried chicken, pork chops, catfish, and squirrel, according to the season. Along with all that, there would be grits and gravy, black-eyed peas, collards (with corn bread to sop up the collard liquor), biscuits and homemade jams and preserves, pound cake, sweet milk, buttermilk, and coffee flavored with chicory. After that cockcrow banquet Jennie and Callie would walk down to their store, Bud would retire to his bedroom, and Sook would go on to her other domestic chores, which included keeping an eye on Aunt Liza and overseeing Anna Stabler, the old black retainer who lived in a little shack in the backyard. Anna was almost part of the family, and so cantankerous that she made Jennie and Callie sound almost sweet-tempered. “Fuss! You could hear her fussing two miles away!” said Mary Ida. “A Negro didn’t sass a white person then, but Anna said anything she pleased to any white person she wanted to. Sook would cuss her out for not cleaning in places you couldn’t see, like the bottom of the piano, and Anna would just stand up and blister her back. Then they would both laugh and go on with what they were doing.” Part Indian, Anna denied that she had any black blood at all, plastering her cheeks with rouge to prove that she had red skin. Weekends she sat on her porch and played her accordion, proudly wearing her best dress and stuffing her jaws with cotton in a vain effort to disguise the fact that she had no teeth.
Jennie and Callie came home for lunch, which was usually left-overs from breakfast, then came back again for an early supper, much of which had also been part of that early-morning feast. When dinner was over, everyone wandered out to the porch, which was the center of activity most of the year; winters are short in southern Alabama and some years so mild that
they are scarcely noticed at all, fall merging into spring with only the briefest punctuation in between. After a while neighbors dropped by to gossip: talk was the chief form of entertainment, and everybody knew all there was to know about everybody else. Once a week Sook and Callie invited in some friends, usually Dr. Logan and Dr. Bear, to play a card game called rook. Sook, who was the best player on the street, would mix up a batch of divinity candy for the occasion and dance around in a fever of excitement all day. Jennie was the only one who remained aloof; card games, she said, were a damned-fool business. Her only passion was her garden. Her japonica bushes were a neighborhood landmark, and she guarded them as if they were precious jewels, which to her way of thinking they were.
Even the Depression, which hit the South first and hardest, did not alter that placid routine. There were more people for Sook to distribute hand-me-downs to, and “Hoover cars,” horse-drawn wagons with rubber tires stripped off scrapped Model-T’s, were beginning to make their appearance. But money had never been as plentiful or as important in small towns like Monroeville as it had been in the cities, and its sudden disappearance mattered comparatively less. The Faulks were hurt by the hard times, but they never suffered real deprivation. There was, as always, an around-the-clock banquet in Sook’s kitchen.
5
FOR Truman, who had stayed in that house so many times before, often for weeks on end, there was nothing to get used to, there were no adjustments to be made. All that summer of 1930 he swam every day at Hatter’s Mill, which was the place, out Drewry Road, where most of Monroeville went to picnic, swim, and applaud the daring young men who dived from a window on the third story of the old millhouse. He slept in a bedroom next to Sook’s, and when he was not swimming at the pond, he was usually with her, in the kitchen, the yard, or the fields beyond. After he entered first grade in September, they had less time together. But they still had afternoons and weekends, and as the air began to stir again after the close days of summer, she taught him how to fly a kite. He, in turn, accompanied her on her autumnal forays into the woods, helping her gather the ingredients for her dropsy medicine and the pecans for her Christmas cakes. She did her best to be both mother and friend, and to a large extent she succeeded.
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