Gifts Given: Family, Community, and Integration’S Move from the Courtroom to the Schoolyard

Letter #1:   The blast that launched this ship

(1951-1962, the back story begins plus a glance at 1935 and 2006)

Danny,

May your life be mighty fine. Ten years ago, I remember a young man with a head topped with red and quite a bright mind stationed inside. Your youngest, I assume. Every time I greet your wife, I am reassured that you have a clearly demonstrable grasp of what’s important. Being grateful seems like a proper response. Well, this could be seen as the appropriate and requisite amount of diversion, but yet, I continue. May your children give you more children. May your body allow you to crawl around eye-to-eye with the smallest head in the room, and if you’ve got a genetic connection, well all the better. May your mind give you a moment of peace, and may you have the wisdom to sustain that moment for the duration. At that point, others will begin to call you Daniel, a book I recommend you not read.

Why not write a book instead! Assume that this was a bright idea. Creating stuff is our natural state, the whole image of the Boss thing. If you need any evidence, just look around. Yes, the need for editing might also surface, but my recommendation is never censor; that is the definition of the iconic Judas (a book that might be of interest to read). May the real Judas be grateful. (I’m sticking to my thought of the only proper response.)

So create. Let your spirit soar, glide, careen, and envision. If there’s a you you spy in the process, then let it be defined as WILL, a will that does not allow the Judas of self-destruction to intervene. The real Judas I’m sure was just another slice of creation talking to himself.

‘Tween what we see and what be, is blinds. Them blinds’ on fire.

—which is to say, we might see Heaven, if Hell didn’t come to mind.

Hard work, Boss… Waitin’ for the Word.

More on Clinton and ’56, the year America tries out court ordered integration in my hometown.

Just the facts, Ma’am (Hope these tidbits and back story can help you.)

My oldest brother, Sidney, was a freshman in high school at the start of integration’s inaugural year. He remembers a smallish group of demonstrators gathered just off school grounds on the first day of school. Maybe there were 10 to 20 demonstrators with placards revealing names he had never associated with the Negro community. (We are years away from James Brown’s I’m Black and I’m Proud.) By the end of the first week, I guess all hell broke loose, and we had tanks in town. Some things a kid doesn’t forget. At that point, Sid says the protesters were seldom seen or stopped all together. In his class, there were only one or two black students, and he recalls a plan to have two white students escort each black student to their next class throughout the day. He wasn’t sure about other classes, but it was safe to assume that all 12 black students had similar escorts as a buffer against any problems. I’m sure student leaders like Jerry Shattuck were a part of the plan, as I’m also sure that there were many instances of both prejudice and conscience.

Sid remembers one incident in particular. He noticed a commotion in the hallway at school and saw a white and black student with knives drawn. Surrounding them was a circle of students expecting a moment that they would surely regret watching for the rest of their days. Suddenly, he saw our mother moving through the crowd and stepping forward to the center of the conflict directly between the two young men with their knives pointing at each other. Once she had positioned herself between the knife points, she turned to the Negro student and held out her hand. She didn’t say a single word. Her actions were the only ultimatum she needed. The black student simply put his knife in her hands. She then turned to the white student and, as Sid says, gave him the look, which he thought was only seen within the domain of our family. With those coal-black eyes, this English teacher never needed to say a word.

Her look and the outrage, disappointment, or anger it could deliver could not possibly have a more powerful grip on the mind by the mere addition of words. That penetrating gaze was always sufficient. In fact, withholding her thought would allow any eventual utterance to gain an even more excruciating impact on delivery. Needless to say, the white student folded the knife and released it to a higher power.

Sid, of course, was not an unbiased bystander, but his memory imbues our mother with a position of power and authority among her peers. In fact, he felt that the administration was barely able to hang on against the intense pressure bearing down on them. I’m sure that word of this incident and our mother’s actions spread throughout the school. I know that my mother always took pride in the fact that she could handle any and all classroom situations and viewed sending a student to the office as a sign of weakness, a capitulation of a teacher’s authority and power.

Growing up, my mother had focused her passionate intensity into her piano studies. All her children heard the performance of selected Beethoven sonatas (the Pathetique, in particular) and Schumann’s Fantasy pieces. Her piano performance defined what human expression was capable of—simply a maximum of nuanced intensity with an extraordinary variety of touch and attack. No wonder she held onto some works of rapturous expressivity and dramatic power throughout her life. She went to Milligan College, which had a policy of providing practically a free education to all valedictorians of secondary schools. That’s right. She was one of those people who didn’t allow herself to make less than an A and could obviously back up such a point of view. She grew up in Etowah, Tennessee, a bustling town of 3,000, and Milligan was 150 miles away and about as far away as her dad was willing to let her go. Her piano teacher wanted her to enter the Julliard Conservatory, but New York was out of the question for her dad. She was his first-born. Her dad, Harry Warren Long, was a railroad engineer on the L&N Railroad, and we all called him Pop. He was either one-half or one-quarter Cherokee Indian. His mother, whose maiden name was Crowe, was either a full-blooded or half-blooded Indian, and his dad (my great-granddad) had a farm on the outskirts of Athens in McMinn County, 10 miles from Etowah. My granddad’s two sisters lived in Athens, and both had the black hair and black eyes of my mother. My brother Harry points to Pop’s two sisters as the clearest evidence that our mother was one-quarter Indian and we boys were one-eighth because the two sisters in Athens could easily pass for full-blooded Cherokee squaws. My great-aunt Nell was like Pop, a creature built from goodness and a love of others. Pop was a touch long and lean, whereas Nell was broad and sturdy. Their sister Midge was slender and always stylish with those famous piercing black eyes to guide.

Back to ’56:

Although there was relative calm once the National Guard arrived, the threats to everyone associated with the integration never stopped. Pressure on some was merciless. We learned that some of the racists drove through the African American neighborhoods on Foley Hill during the first week of school. Shots were fired into homes, and, in one case, dynamite was thrown. Luckily, no life was lost, but the nightly terror and tension had to be a terrible burden to those families. Makes me mad as hell to think about it.

In late October, my brother Sidney remembers walking from the gym to our dad’s law office after basketball practice when he spotted a group listening to a speaker near the courthouse and suddenly heard the man talking about our mother. The speaker was John Kasper, a central figure in Clinton’s integration story as a prime organizer of racial hatred. Kasper had attended Columbia University and worked in a New York City bookstore that was supposedly a center for interracial gatherings. Who would have imagined this avowed disciple of Ezra Pound would launch his career as a far-right activist by coming to our small Tennessee town to foment hatred and fear of racial interaction. When Sid first heard him, Kasper was talking to the crowd about why they should not be influenced by the examples of my parents. It is obvious if you look at Eleanor Davis that she is a woman with Negro blood in her veins, and Sidney Davis is a man who obviously married a mulatto, and their progeny are thus evidence of the mongrelization of the races, which every white American rightly fears will be the result of a mixing of the races in our school system. The evidence is incontrovertible. Just look at Eleanor Davis with her big lips, black eyes, and black hair. No wonder she and her husband are protecting the Negro children. Don’t let them spread their mongrelization by integrating our school system.

Sid Jr. continued on to our dad’s law office and told him about what Kasper was telling the crowd and asked him if it was true that our mother was part-Negro. Dad responded, Well, as a Southern family, there might very well be some Negro heritage in the family tree, but in the particular case of your mother, what’s undoubtedly true is that she is part-Cherokee, and that explains those black eyes and hair.

We lived on the edge of town, miles away from the courthouse and school. I’m sure I had little understanding of what was going on in our community. I would catch a glimpse of my parent’s anxiety or anger directed at forces removed from our home life. There would be an occasional flurry of phone calls or a heated exchange that was connected to the integration, but it all seemed distant and unconnected to my world. I felt safe and unaware of any threats. I was the youngest and probably the most carefree. I would soon be eight years old in the fall of 1956.

My parents always took great pride in the fact that they had executed their plan for a family even with the obstacle of World War II. The plan was to have two years of marriage without kids, followed by having three children spaced three years apart. They married after graduating from Milligan in 1940. Sid was born in December ’42, Harry in January ’46, and me in November ’48. I guess I’m the ultimate fulfillment of my parent’s grand scheme. (The concept of planning did not enter the picture for the next generation of Davises.)

There were only a dozen or so houses in our neighborhood along the highway toward Oak Ridge. Each home was situated about fifty to seventy yards away from the road and was perched on the spine of a modest ridge that looked down at the highway below from both sides. The size of each lot of land was ample, about two to four acres. A couple of properties were considerably bigger and gobbled an expanse of land beyond their home. Our home was initially a most modest place, four small rooms and a bath above an open garage and laundry area below.

As kids at the house on Oak Ridge Highway, some form of fun was always happening. During the day, our games in the yard would include our neighbor Ricky Sharp. Sid and Ricky were typically on one team and Harry and I on the other. Sid would handicap himself in some way to make the proceedings fair, given the fact that he was 14 and playing with 11 and 8-year-olds. The greatest gift Sid gave to Harry and me was his willingness to figure out a way to play with his two younger brothers. Ricky, being my age, was the perfect addition to the mix. For football, Sid would move in a modified slow motion, maybe a touch slower than the fastest of us. Gang tackling became our specialty against Big Sid. Indoors we had monkey football, a full-contact game played entirely on our knees. The living room, which had little more than a piano and a couple of chairs sitting on its hardwood floor, was the perfect indoor football field.

As for the night that a cross was burned in our front yard, we three boys were in the house alone. So assuredly, we were up to something fun when one of us must have noticed the fire in the front yard. Sidney had gotten an archery set the previous summer, complete with a straw bull’s-eye target plus bow and arrows. My Granddad Davis had tried to take his first grandchild out to shoot a shotgun earlier that year, and that was when Sid decided he had no desire or need to shoot a gun ever again. In any case, when we noticed the fire, Sid went to get his bow and arrows. The cross was burning near the Oak Ridge Highway in our front yard, which was about 150’ from our house, maybe even 200’. There are a considerable number of trees in our front yard, and I think Sid imagined he would have excellent cover to take aim toward the burning cross and discourage anyone from coming closer. A burning cross is an excellent beacon in the Southern autumn night. Who knows what creatures might be attracted? I guess this is one of those moments when Hell rather than Heaven might come to mind. As my friend Henry, as created by the poet John Berryman says, Henry liked Fall. He was prepared to live in the world of Fáll, forever. Impenitent, Henry.

I don’t know if Sid actually shot an arrow at anybody or not. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t go outside because I knew some form of nightmare had begun. Where were our parents during these couple of hours? I have no idea, a PTA meeting at school, perhaps. I do remember that we weren’t sure that calling the fire department or police was going to do us any good. I fear that we suspected there might be a bigot or two on the force. Maybe there was a riot downtown, and the authorities were trying to figure out how in the hell do you deal with that! As I recall, the cross simply burned itself out after a few hours.

I do remember carrying the cross around to our backyard. It seemed to have been covered in cloth. I assume it was made out of rags and old bedding wrapped and tied around the 2-by-4’s of wood. Maybe it was doused in gasoline to get things off to a rousing start. I know that I have no memory of our neighbors contacting us that night or in the weeks ahead for that matter. To an extent, no one wanted to be the focus of the forces that were gathering and emerging in our community, forces as old and divisive as one tribe’s fear of another.

The charred cloth on that cross remains a vivid memory of that time for me. I guess I was in the third grade. That year I had the dubious honor of racing from the classroom to get outside for recess and, unfortunately, hitting a broom handle on the way out that managed to fall into a Coke bottle on a shelf above my teacher’s desk. That Coke bottle fell and struck Mrs. Ridenour’s head, knocking her out cold. I think I found out about it while playing dodgeball or kickball or alternately chasing or being chased by Mary Lou Sweeney or Mary Jane Macres.

By the way, Mary Jane’s aunt was my dad’s secretary at this time. Her name was Helene Macres, and she had a daughter named Gretchen who was the best flutist in our high school her final years. I remember being invited to an Easter celebration at Big Ridge State Park that allowed me to get a glimpse of the Greek Orthodox tradition. Other than the two Macres families, I’m unaware of other Greek families in our community at this time. So I imagine this gathering of Greeks, complete with lambs being roasted on spits, must have encompassed a few Tennessee counties’ worth of Greek ancestry. Because all the Macres girls were so beautiful, I’m sure some concept of adding Greek blood into the Davis mongrelization of races was an idea that would be firmly in place soon.

My family first moved to Clinton after World War II, and many of the returning veterans, including my dad, had organized themselves into a political force in the county. I thought that Dad and this Veterans Party had swept into office, but Sid Jr. says that my dad never won an election. He took on the duties of County Attorney in the initial lawsuit brought to court by the African American families of the Green McAdoo School because the attorney he ran against had a stroke after winning the election. Well, somebody had to do the job, and I guess it seemed my dad was game and probably a touch green and naïve to county politics. As things turned out, I’m sure whoever appointed Dad to this post found out that they had gotten more than they bargained for. He told stories of raids on the county corruptions related to both gambling and alcohol. I have images of him busting up bottles of booze in what I guess were illegal establishments. Seems like caves for storage and distribution were discovered. The concept of Anderson County as a dry county will clarify that it was illegal to buy and sell alcoholic beverages within county lines. So, post-Word War II Anderson County was trying to have a good time with some illegal consumption and wagering, and this young attorney from out-of-town started busting up the party. I assume this was enough reason that Dad never was elected to office until he ran unopposed for Circuit Court Judge twenty years later.

Back to ’56: Sid Jr. said that our dad and mother were involved in calling folks to organize a home-guard when the fear of a lawless anarchy seemed likely. Kasper and other white supremacists had goaded the crowds to action and stoked the flames of their anger. There was talk of a rally to burn crosses after the Friday football game, and the energy of bigotry and hate began to spill into the streets surrounding the courthouse. Supposedly, Dad had called someone associated with the armory to ask them to make available their weapons stash if needed. I’ve heard the story that fellow attorney Buford Lewallen had stationed himself in the top of the courthouse with a machine gun, possibly a touch of overkill on the law and order front. I’m pretty sure not even a warning shot was fired, but many in Clinton were not going to cower because of the hate spewing into town. I saw Coach Jody Fisher among the group of home guard that is pictured at the new Green McAdoo Cultural Center. This recent addition to Clinton is certainly an extraordinary undertaking to commemorate an extraordinary time. The bronze statues of each of the 12 black students who started integration at Clinton High School and actually in America are quite impressive.

Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, Tennessee

(Van West photo)

I believe Coach Fisher played football for the University of Tennessee before coaching in Clinton. Of course, he was married to our eighth grade teacher with a specialty in math and rearing tall blond beauties; in my mind, one of them is seated in front of me while her mother is writing a math problem on the board in front of us. The challenge is to have my hand up with the answer before she lifts the chalk from the blackboard. Any delay would surely mean that I would once again be second to Charles Carmichael, who was definitely smarter than me but did not have the advantage of my keen, cut-throat, competitive skills nurtured by the many hours of monkey football, backyard hole-ball, my Olympic games for 11-year-olds, my two older brothers, and discussions at a family dinner table that would challenge me to get a word in edgewise. Yes, Charles the Smarter would usually beat me without any awareness that others were doing their damndest to make him second—at least once. Imagine my consternation when you Danny or Bill Reeves or, heaven-help-me, Jacque Arnold would pop out an answer before me. Oh well, get ready for my next at bat. I did have three uncharacteristic, lucky swings in my modest career in which the ball sailed over-the-fence—barely. In any case, I still have this luscious blond hair seated in front of my mind. Who knows, she might turn around, and I will have to reassess the cornerstone of all my libidinous energy, the Mary Jane or the Mary Lou, a dilemma which would surely keep both safe from me.

—A pause to consider our Mormon brethren and household arrangements of our Great-Uncle Solomon back in those temple-to-palace days of yore. The eighth grade is a particularly curious year in our shared history, since we were separated from all the other elementary students and housed that year in our community’s National Guard Armory. The vast central area of that building became the site of our extensive training in square dancing. Odd that our class devoted so many hours to the intricacies of the do-si-do. Speaking for all the just-arrived, teenage males in our class, I would just like to say thank you to those teachers who decided upon a curious city-boy goes to the ranch eighth grade play that made our training in square dance maneuvers necessary, and thus allowed the young, pubescent changelings to regularly give each girl in our class a spin in our quite eager hands.

It was on our eighth grade trip to Nashville after visiting the wood carving of Leonardo’s Last Supper in the Upper Room Chapel and taking a stroll around Old Hickory, the home and grounds of Andrew Jackson, that I suddenly encountered Mrs. Fisher, my only teacher who was both a cheerleader and a polio victim. It was late, and of course we were racing around the hallways of our hotel in Nashville when I passed an open door and saw Mrs. Fisher seated in her robe taking the pins from her hair and revealing its breathtaking length. Before then, I only remember seeing her neck as she wrote yet another math problem to be solved. She proceeded to comb through her hair, which I assume was her bedtime ritual. I stood unnoticed and motionless. Her luxuriant hair seemed to extend well below her shoulders. It was stunning. I had never seen hair so long; her own private treasure which she shared with only her family. I passed on, changed.

My mother always pulled out a book of my school pictures to show the exact moment that I changed from her innocent young boy to an oh-so-full-of-himself little kid. She would point to those first and second grade pictures and say, Look at those eyes, such a sweet child. I would only have to hint at my disappointment, and your eyes would well up with tears (Heaven help me if I got the full force of the look.). Now look at your third grade picture. That’s a kid so full of mischief he can barely contain himself. Knocked Mrs. Ridenour out cold! And you should be ashamed of destroying Mrs. Beets’s class picture! I stared down at a curious group of fourth graders all lined up on the school steps, all of us seemingly having oversized heads stuck on midget-like bodies, and all of us about the same height, including Mrs. Beets, whose deeply-earned Lincolnesque wrinkles distinguished her from our youthful faces. And then, there was me: shoulders scrunched up and forehead scrunched down, eyes shut with the grimace of an irritated baby gorilla. The evidence was irrefutable: Doug was not growing up to be as well-behaved as Mother desired. I do think that I was the only one of the Davis boys who actually got his mouth washed out with soap, which was often bandied about as a threat. Mother says that I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of any protest but just said delicious and moved on. Trust me: that taste in my mouth changed my genetic code enough to never want that to happen again. Later, changes would come,—switched again, after birth.

Meanwhile, my brother Sid was the undeniable sword drill champion of the First Baptist Church. Given that he is the Michael Jordan of competition, I’m sure my brother was well on his way to championship status a few years after his rebirth—at age six! If you needed Amos, chapter 2, verse 11, Sid could get you there faster than lickity-split. (I went to find my Bible and discovered I have a ridiculous amount of books in this house—six rooms and my Bible is hiding. I know it’s here somewhere; as we would say around our dinner table, By Jove, it’s the word of God. Seems like that should carry some serious weight.)

There are thousands of books in my house that I had managed to successfully ignore until I went looking for the Word. Each volume is now seductively whispering, There’s something about two and eleven or this guy Amos. Understand that these words have only been allowed to spew forth because I was called to jury duty this Wednesday, and I knew you needed me (since my brothers remain mute) to assist in your endeavors. It’s now Friday morning and I don’t want to rewrite the ending of my band piece to appease its commissioner who said, Wow! How long is it? . . . Well, instead of eleven minutes I was thinking five, and I love your ending, but we need something that ends loud. Thus, I need to avoid my present reality. I did avoid the obvious, Why didn’t you tell me? response to the band director ( . . . or worse), but having created one perfection, I’m reluctant to redo the 30-some perfectly organized parts to accommodate his lack of communication. Now THAT, I’m sure is ’llow’d.

(Sorry Danny, the reason is gone but the rhyme remains. As Samuel Beckett says, The words are inside me, outside me, floating like flakes, in this hard, cold, black, place. Enough said. I’ll banish the present ’til it becomes later.)

So when they line up young people to find Amos, bet on Sid. He’s good, too good if you ask me and the members of the Clinton High football team. As we guys know, by the time you are 15, there is a good chance that a hefty dose of athletic reality has struck; up to that point, one can envision a connection between yourself and the likes of Willie Mays or Bob Cousy. Yes, Sid was only 14 when he started high school, but all those who were 15 or older knew he was good, too good to be in the band instead of playing on the football team. Well, in the midst of his freshman year of basketball Sid turned 15 and knew himself that he was good. As far as I know, it would be the following year or two before Sid would make it a point of showing how good he was in the touch football games that were played on the school grounds. Needless to say, some were infuriated that his talents never made it to the football field and, yes, touch might become shove on occasion. Sid, I’m sure, deserved it for how much pleasure he was taking from out-shining our campus stars. Yes, those other folks trying to find Amos didn’t have a prayer.

Now religion seems to be lurking on the periphery. The First Baptist Church does play a role in this story. It was during the tumultuous times of ’56 that I listened each Sunday to the amazing power of language—used to cajole and soothe, to shock and rivet, to overwhelm in the power of ultimatum that is the climax of every Baptist service, yet another opportunity to accept or reject or at least to sit there and wonder how much pressure could you stand, resisting the call to stand up and walk to the front of the congregation, impelled by a conscience that knew someone had died to save you, an eight-year-old sinner in need of saving now that that sweet child of six was long gone, and… who was stacking the deck for God Almighty? None other than the incisive eloquence of Reverend Paul Turner.

Reverend Paul Turner

I’m not sure who the preacher was before Paul Turner at our church, but there is no doubt that every one who heard his sermons in that church remembers him well to this day. Ask any of us. The effect was shattering in its impact. Each piece would lead to another; every angle of existence would point to one conclusion. Yes, there was going to be a plea for your very soul, and eternity was beginning to assume its appropriate proportion. Weight. A serious moment of decision, that’s what this is all about.

That’s what our community faced in 1956 as 12 black children were going to be allowed to walk down the hill from their homes to go to the high school in their home town. Clinton had been given a special opportunity to be among the very first to step forward into a future whose time had come. My parents, Sid and Eleanor Davis, were lucky to be in a position in their new home town to stand up and show the power of their convictions. (As in the case of most Southern towns, a court order was clarifying, just as it was over fifteen years after Clinton’s integration when busing in Boston would show the Northern side of this equation.) My dad took a stand for the law whose process created this clarifying judgment: separate is inherently unequal. Five years earlier, as a newly appointed County Attorney, my dad had defended Tennessee’s separate but equal education law, a case which attempted to trade a 25-mile bus ride to Knox County’s all-black high school for a quarter-mile walk down the hill to Clinton High. Believing in the necessary process of law, my dad had simply built his side of the argument and won. Judge Taylor upheld the state’s separate but equal law. Get back on the bus ye children. Was Dad disturbed to be aligned with a tool of oppression wrought with bigotry? I only know that my father, Leo Burnett, and Reverend Paul Turner went to Foley Hill to walk those 12 black children down to school in early December of 1956 when the forces of bigotry had gained a frightful fever pitch. Whatever gauntlet of hate that might amass, these men were willing to stand with the young, black students and join their walk down the hill to resume their education. As I understand it, circumstances had inexorably led to this moment, a climactic ultimatum of conscience, to accept or reject, stand up and step forward so that all may see and hear you proclaim your belief. I’m sure each of the three white men who took that walk that day may have had uniquely different beliefs guiding them, but all three stood up and chose that day to step forward for all to see. They were simply impelled and emboldened by conscience. As for the children they joined, it is heart-wrenching to think that any child would have to face a wall of bigotry to get an education. The pressure they endured being the first to integrate and begin the dismantling of all the Southern Jim Crow laws that had allowed the weight of law to uphold persecution, these 14 to 18-year-old children and their families who had to face the galvanizing of all forces of repression and fear that came into Clinton from both the South and the North, . . . all of our black community in Clinton had to face America’s broken promise and Christianity’s blinding hypocrisy and stand up and step forward to make it right.

Dad, in hat near the front, walks with students.

Pictured are: Maurice Soles, Ronald Hayden, Sidney Davis;

(back) Minnie Dickey, Jo Ann Allen, (unknown reporter), Bobby Cain, Reverend Paul Turner, and Leo Burnett. (Photo by Don Cravens//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)>>

As I sit here, weeping for this world, I try to muster the only action that makes sense—forgiveness. May all those who live here forgive each other. Forgive those who would harm you, but stand up and step forward when necessary.

As for Mother, her name was often Estalee, a slightly shorter and considerably wider version of the Eleanor I’ve mentioned. Estalee took charge of my world at a point before I entered the realm of actual memories. I must have been a handful even if I was younger than the age where mischief fully takes charge, because in addition to Estalee, there was a caretaker known as Miss Alverson who would appear as Estalee’s tag-team partner. My guess is this was close to 1951, since my smarter brother Harry would be starting his schooling—or, as I once read a 6-year-old African child state, I wake up every day and go to the job. As for my real mother, this was the point when I believe she resumed her work as a teacher, a position she always understood as a calling rather than a job. She always thought of herself as a professional like a doctor or lawyer, one who had taken an oath to society to provide a needed service. So if she came upon a broken bone in her student’s work, she was obliged to set it straight to reduce the possibility of permanent impairment. This work was always at the center of who she was and was always her greatest gift. As Sid Jr. says, Without question, she was my best teacher, and that’s including Harvard and law school. So Mother is fulfilling her vocation while I’m home with Estalee or Miss Alverson. I do remember Miss Alverson making me milktoast when I felt sick and Estalee making chocolate meringue pie, which will have to stand as a pretty good analogy of the difference between the care-taker and my second mother.

It was in 1952 that my mother Eleanor realized exactly why society repays the services of teachers with cash rather than a bushel of corn and beans or half-a-hog, as doctors and lawyers of this period were used to receiving for services rendered. Gratitude meets conceivable in many forms. Cash was going to work best for Eleanor after ’52. Some might say that ’52 was when God pulled out his smite stick and smote my family within an inch of its life. I, of course, wouldn’t find such a creator worth worshiping no matter what word, be it Good News or not, was being used to justify such behavior. I’m more aligned with the concept that the only God in evidence in this life is the God within each and every one of us. It helps me clarify who’s responsible for what. Then, yes, forgiveness is the only logical next step. Whatever point of view my mother could come up with was still going to leave a lot of explaining to do after ’52. At some point historians and scholars, not to mention hospital records, might help clarify exactly when Dad took flight using a vehicle traveling between Clinton and Nashville, I think for some case before the state Supreme Court; I hope not