Other than her remarkably musical name, Ora Issey Spice was absent from bedtime stories but she did have a brother named “Hangman” whom mother spoke of from time to time. “Did he hang people, Mama?” Nope. Just a nickname (I hope). Uncle Hangman was a diabetic who had to shoot himself up with an old blunt needle that would hardly penetrate his skin. He was too poor to afford a new needle.
Grandmother Spice’s family were pioneers, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans who “combed their teeth with a wagon wheel.” Born in the late 1800s, my great-relatives worked their way across this young country. They had no running water, no electricity. Funny, it wasn’t much more than a hundred years ago they were all just kids. Now they are weeds in the wind, a trickle down your back.
Life is a locomotive, and as long as you watch it from a distance it takes a long time to go by. Ride that train and you’ll be gone in the blink of an eye, the landscape moving with you.
“Night Train”
By the time Grandma Peggy was twenty years old she had three children and was fending for herself while Grandpa Jim was camping out in the fields of Ohio. He lived as he did back in France, sleeping under trees and building campfires. He never fully returned from the war. In one of those fields near a farm that had just been robbed of some chickens, the sheriff found Grandfather roasting a bird under the stars. The judge sentenced him to a year in prison for stealing chickens, and while Jim was in prison, Peggy gave birth to their fourth child, a blue-eyed girl named Betty Jane. My mama.
With James Glen in jail, Richland County officials took a personal interest in the Glen children. They removed all three sons from Peggy’s custody, but for the next few years Peggy managed to elude the authorities and keep her baby girl. She’d already lost her boys and her husband—she was not letting go of her daughter for anybody.
Baby Betty was sleeping in Peggy’s bedroom when the social worker came to take her away to the orphanage with her brothers. The social worker had official papers and a police officer with her as she pounded on the front door. Peggy hurried to the bedroom and gathered up my mother and climbed out the window. Peggy went a-running as fast as she could through the cornfield with my mother in her arms, leaving the social worker still standing on the porch. The social worker took Peggy’s flight personally and would pursue Peggy as if Betty were her own child.
I heard this story of Peggy running through the cornfield so many times that it became my story, too. I was there—inside of my mother’s skin as her mother ran for our lives. My daughter, too, somewhere inside of me. We all ran across the cornfield with my grandmother.
Peggy lived on the run. She found an apartment and a roommate and worked as a waitress to take care of my mama. She always looked over her shoulder because Richland County and the social worker would not give up. There were close calls as they kept on coming for her.
One evening, Peggy was waiting tables while her roommate was sitting with the baby. Betty-nanny was in the apartment watching the sandman floating by sprinkling baby-light magic on her blue and quiet eyes. There was a knock on the door. Peggy’s roommate answered and came face-to-face with the social worker looking for Peggy and her child. “Peggy is not here. She’s at work. You go on and get outta here now,” and she closed the door. The social worker was employed by the devil himself and would not be deterred by words. This time she went around the back of the house and climbed in through the window, grabbed little Betty, and climbed back out and ran. The social worker kidnapped my mother.
It was a harsh time in America and Peggy had no husband at home to make her “legitimate.” She never had a chance to win her children back. The courts ruled Peggy an unfit mother and all four of her children were permanently separated from their mother’s care. The Glen kids, along with a million other orphans of the Great Depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate toward children’s homes.
At least the Glen children had each other at the orphanage. Their bond was unusually strong, their word true. In a crucifix of rhyme and spit, each one vowed not to be adopted if it meant being separated. By swearing faith to one another they created an extraordinary sense of integrity for their family and future families, although this promise condemned each to a childhood of institutions. “Night Train” belongs to the women of my clan.
Here I’m going
Walking with my baby . . . in my arms
Cuz I am in the wrong end of the eight-ball
And the devil is right behind us
And the worker said
She’s gonna take my little baby, my little angel, back
But they won’t get ya, no
Cuz I’m right here with you
On the Night Train . . .
My mother’s stories are the heart of me, the country from which I come. Escapades of her ghastly childhood in the orphanage were the Grimm’s Fairy Tales of my own. Trolls and dragons could not compete with my mother’s impossibly gothic reminiscences of the 1930s and the orphanages where she grew up.
Many nights, lying there with my mother (Father was always at work) my brother and I would ask Mama to tell us one of her stories. Of course we knew them all by heart, or at least we thought we did, but we’d ask for them like you might ask someone to play a song. Play that one, Mother. Tell us about One-Ball!
One-Ball
Of all the people Betty Jane met—the nice cook who baked her a cake when she was twelve, or the kind, young couple who bought her new clothes and gave her a private room of her own (and then returned her to the orphanage because she refused to live there, separated from her brothers)—Mother recalled the matron, “One-Ball,” with the most chortles and disdain. One-Ball alone received a name from the orphans—one worthy of her half-human heart.
One-Ball was named for the solitary ball of hair, the bun, she pinned up on her uncommonly cruel head. It was speculated among the children that the name more likely referred to the one testicle she hid up there under her skirt, thus, “One-Ball!” My mom would laugh so hard about that. Lying with us, thirty years away from that orphanage, it was finally safe for the little girl inside her to giggle out loud.
One-Ball liked to sneak up on kids, trap them, catch them as she hid in a shadow holding a belt. It was the surprise element that was the sadism. She kept children in a constant state of terror and exhaustion. After years of silent acceptance, my mother finally confronted her tormentor, redeeming a lifetime of torture. Old One-Ball almost ended up No-Ball-At-All. If you get my meaning.
Mother had her own bedroom now, being fifteen years of age; she’d earned her privacy after thirteen years in orphanages. On this particular evening, One-Ball, bored and restless, was scouting for an unguarded child to pounce on, and stealthily she entered my mother’s bedroom. Betty was seated at the vanity, brushing her hair with her back to the room. One-Ball hoped to grab her by the hair—the element of surprise brought the terror that was so satisfying. Mom spotted One-Ball in the mirror and she kept her cool, waiting until the old witch was nearly upon her and then she rose suddenly, with her hairbrush raised in the air. This time it was One-Ball in the hot seat.
Mother faced her tormentor. “If you ever sneak up on me again, try to hurt me, even touch me, I’m gonna ram this hairbrush down your throat and it’s gonna come out your butt.”
Bold move, Mom. One-Ball staggered, her soul shrinking, and retreated like a demon caught in its own reflection. One-Ball did not catch my mother that week or any other, ever again. She was a bully and bullies can only eat the fearful.
One-Ball