Stories of My Life

Several weeks later a wire came asking if she would be interested in an overseas assignment. Canteen workers were still needed, as the army would be in Europe for some time.

Once when we were children we were playing either Old Maids or Flinch, and I realized Mother was shuffling and bridging the deck like a riverboat gambler I’d seen in a movie. “Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked. She visibly blushed and confessed that on the boat taking her to France in 1918, she had learned to play bridge and dance—two activities her own mother would certainly have frowned on. But the chaplain in charge of the volunteers said that they would be needed skills when they arrived in France to entertain the troops.

When I was an adolescent, Mother told me about the chaplain, a kind man that all the young women liked and admired. Then one night after the dancing lesson he asked Mary to come down to his cabin for some forgotten purpose. “I was so naïve—he was the chaplain, after all—so I went. I had no idea . . .” Once there, the chaplain closed the door and threw his arms around her. Alarmed, she jammed the heel of her pump into his foot. He let go with a howl and she fled. The incident was never spoken of again until she had daughters of her own. I can remember at about thirteen staring wide-eyed at my proper mother when she thought it time to tell me this cautionary tale. I never had to utilize the heel-of-the-shoe trick myself, but I think Mother would be gratified to see that I passed it on to Lyddie Worthen for her use against her lecherous floor boss at the Lowell mill in my novel Lyddie.

Mother remembered her time in France as fun. The war was over and the troops were mostly on vacation. I can only assume she put her card-playing and dancing skills to use and had no more occasions on which to employ her foot-stabbing technique.

She had learned in Clinton and in Rome that she did not want to be a teacher, so on her return was delighted to take a job as a YWCA secretary in Petersburg, Virginia, which was near a large army post. But she couldn’t forget that she had planned for most of her life that she would be a missionary. She went over to Richmond, where there was a Presbyterian seminary and a new school for training women for church work, as the seminary did not enroll women in 1921. The president of the General Assembly’s Training School for Lay Workers (as it was then called) was a friend of her uncle George’s, and he advised her to go to Greensboro, North Carolina, to a church that had recently lost its Director of Christian Education.

She had hardly settled in Greensboro, when Dr. Edgert Smith, head of the denomination’s foreign mission board and a friend of her father’s, came to visit the church. The first thing he said to Mother was: “Where is Charlie Goetchius’s daughter who was going to China?” “I’m the one,” she said. “Well, daughter,” he said, “you’re not getting any younger.”

Dr. Smith not only got her released from her new job, but he persuaded the church to give her a scholarship to the Assembly’s Training School.

And that was where she met my father, which is the beginning of our family story.

Children in the same family have different parents. And even the same child will seem to have a different parent at a different stage in his or her life. After I was grown, my mother and I often tangled. We had a running controversy about clothes. She was very unhappy that I would not buy her grandchildren “Sunday clothes.” My argument was that we couldn’t possibly afford fancy clothes that could only be worn on Sundays and then not even every Sunday, clothes that would be quickly outgrown and might or might not fit a younger sibling. During the early seventies, I shocked her when she realized I, a minister’s wife, wore pants around the house. “Suppose one of the women from the church should come by and see you,” she said. She couldn’t believe when I retorted that at our church in Takoma Park, Maryland, a number of those lovely church ladies were wearing polyester pantsuits to church services. She was hurt and puzzled when my husband joined African Americans marching for the right to vote in Alabama and spent several nights in the Selma jail. “That’s not the Alabama I know,” she said. And until tapes revealed that President Nixon was a world-class cusser, she defended him against all my charges. But there is a great deal of my mother in Susan Bradshaw, Louise and Caroline’s mother in Jacob Have I Loved. It is no accident that I was writing the book while my mother was dying. The pivotal scene where Louise confronts her mother and her mother’s word allows her to leave both the island and her lifelong envy of Caroline could not have been written if I had had a different mother.

One story to prove my point. I was nine years old and we had recently moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where my father had been called to serve on the staff of the First Presbyterian Church and to begin a new congregation in a community just out from town. The church had found us a house and furnished it, and we had frequent visits from members. On these occasions Mother would always serve a rather elaborate Chinese tea. The pièce de la résistance of these teas was her antique denshin box. It was a wooden box about fourteen inches square with nine beautiful porcelain interior sections. In each of the separate sections Mother would put a different treat—sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sesame cookies, and peanuts. Usually small Western cookies or candies would complete the nine sections and keep the refreshments from seeming too exotic.

This picture appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in the fall of 1941 when we had just moved there. The famous denshin box is on the table.

One particular afternoon I had decided to be helpful. The denshin box needed to be refilled. I carried it carefully to the kitchen and filled each lovely little section. Then, just as I started back toward the living room, the heavy kitchen door swung back, and the box and all its contents went crashing to the floor. Mother’s precious antique sections lay in several dozen pieces at my feet.

Before I could even start to cry, my mother was at the door. She didn’t even glance at the floor. She looked straight into my stricken face. “Are you all right, darling?” she asked. At that point I burst into tears, but she put her arm around me and told me not to worry. Daddy could probably glue the thing back together anyhow. I was nine, but I knew that day that as long as I lived I would remember that my mother had cared more about how her child felt than any cherished antique, and I resolved that if I ever had any children I would remember that scene. I must never forget that a child’s feelings are always more important than any possession.

The Lexington farm house.

George Raymond Womeldorf

When we were reading submissions for the National Book Award, Julius Lester, who was also on the jury, said wistfully that he wished we could see at least one book that had a good father in it. Soon after that I began to write Preacher’s Boy because I knew what it meant to have a good father. Robbie’s father in the book is a minister who loves his children wisely and well. My minister father sprang from stern Calvinist roots, and I, being a whiney, attention-craving child, often disappointed him. But I know he loved his children every bit as much as Robbie’s father did, and one day when I was fourteen, I understood that fact in a way I never had before.

World War II ended the summer of 1945, and the following summer we prepared to return to China. My parents had spent nearly eighteen years as missionaries there, and my father, especially, could hardly wait to return. I think all of us were eager to go home at last. My father had given up his work in Winston-Salem. We suffered through all the needed shots, including the inoculation for black plague. We had made the rounds of the relatives to say good-bye for another seven years, when the word came down from the mission board that the inflation rate was through the roof in China and our departure would be delayed. We had no home to go back to, but someone lent us an unheated summer cottage in the mountains for a few months until an apartment in the complex for missionaries in Richmond, Virginia, opened up in the late fall.

My father was hardly ever there. The mission board had him traveling all over the South speaking

in churches and to college groups about missions. The idea was that at any time the mission board would give us the go-ahead to go back to China. By now my brother Ray was in training to become a navy pilot and my sister Elizabeth was ready to go to college, so they would not be going with the family. But my two younger sisters, Helen and Anne, and I were scheduled to return with our parents.

There was a large desk in the Richmond apartment that was, quite naturally, my father’s workspace. In a big family it is important for individual privacy to be respected. We did not go into each other’s bureau drawers, much less into Daddy’s desk. But I was desperate for paper that I needed for a school project and went into his desk hoping to find some. What I found instead was an official-looking letter from the mission board. If I had no business going into his desk, I certainly had no right at all to read his mail, but the envelope had long ago been opened and I was curious. I pulled the letter out and read it. Several months before, the executive had written to say that given the current rate of inflation, sending Katherine to high school in Shanghai would be too expensive—that if my folks would leave me behind, they could return to China at any time.

I can still feel the tremor that went through my body. My father’s closest friends were Chinese, as well as the life’s work he believed God had called him to do. China was home and we longed to go home. We could not and it was all my fault. If it weren’t for me, my parents and younger sisters would be back in China already. Other missionary parents were leaving their children behind. In the apartment across the hall, Margaret, who was just my age, was going to be left with friends in Richmond while her parents returned to Korea.

I don’t know how many days it was before my father came back from his trip. It seemed like years. When he finally returned, I had to first confess that I had gone into his desk, worse, that I had read a letter addressed to him, and then I had to say that I knew why we hadn’t left for China yet. I somehow stumbled through all those confessions, and then I said, as bravely as I could manage, “I know how much you want to go. It’s all right if you go without me.”

Daddy looked at me with the most loving expression I had ever seen. “Sweet girlie,” he said, using his pet name for his four daughters. “Sweet girlie, we wouldn’t leave you behind.”

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham believes that God is commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son as proof of his love and obedience. But just as Abraham is about to thrust the knife into his terrified child, an angel grasps his hand and there in the thicket is a sheep that God has provided for the sacrifice. Most people find this story horrifying, but what my father taught me that day was this: No matter how sacred the calling appears, it is not God’s will for parents to sacrifice their children.

It is no secret that my books have often been attacked by Conservative Christians, people whose core theology would probably be quite close to my father’s. One such person, who was very critical of the language Gilly uses in The Great Gilly Hopkins, asked me testily, “What would your father think of such a book?” And I was happy to reply that of all my books published before his death, The Great Gilly Hopkins was his favorite. “Of course,” I added with a bit of the mischievous spirit I inherited from him, “my father had read Jesus’ parable of The Prodigal Son.”

George Raymond Womeldorf, whom I called Daddy until the day he died, claimed that the only whipping he ever got was in the Sunnyside one-room schoolhouse. It seems that every school day closed with the Lord’s Prayer and during the middle of the prayer one evening, the boy behind him hit him in the back, and Raymond (as he was always called at home, since his father was George) came out with a “strange noise.” The elderly teacher, Mr. Hall Lackey, whipped both boys but not, according to Daddy, very severely.

My father was born on a farm a few miles out of Lexington, Virginia, on September 7, 1893 (or 1894; the records disagree.) His parents were George William Womeldorf and Lillie Belle Clements. He started at Sunnyside School at the age of five with his older brother, William, and his two older sisters, Katherine and Mamie. Maude, Joshua, Herman, Cora Belle, and Florence came along in due time. He characterized himself as something of a runt who didn’t start growing until his early teens and was consequently able to slip along between the ends of the double desks and the wall and visit his friends without being seen by the teacher. There were five-year-olds and twenty-five-year-olds among the thirty-plus students, though the older boys only came to school when the weather was too bad to work on their family farms.

Except for the bullying of the small boys by the larger ones, he remembered his school days at Sunnyside as pleasant ones. Everyone had to work to keep the building going. The boys chopped wood and carried water, which was a coveted task, for the boys enjoyed the leisurely stroll to the spring. The girls, sometimes with help from the boys, swept the floor. He wondered how anyone learned anything at Sunnyside with all the different ages and stages of students. No grades were given, and the learning was a bit haphazard. This may help explain why my father was twenty when he enrolled in Washington and Lee University even though he started elementary school when he was not quite six.

At some point, Mr. Lackey retired and a Miss Ella Pultz took over. The lady was very strict and an excellent teacher. At some point she closed the building at Sunnyside and moved the school to her home, which was a three-mile trek each way from the Womeldorf farm, but Raymond recalled that “the deeper the snow, the better we liked it.”

When William and Katherine were old enough to leave Miss Pultz’s school, they began the seven-mile trek by foot over muddy roads to continue their education in the town of Lexington. After a year of this my grandfather decided that he needed to move closer to town. He had nine children and he wanted all of them to have a good education. It was then that he bought the farm one mile east of Lexington that I pictured as the setting for the farm in my book Park’s Quest. The stone part of the house dated to Revolutionary War times, but most of the house was frame, Victorian style, with a gabled round window in the attic that I called a cupola in the book. The old frame barns and fields were just as I described them there, and the springhouse, which plays such an important part in the plot, was my favorite place on the farm and is depicted exactly as I remember it. I knew that one day the farm would likely pass out of the family, so I thought I could keep it if I put it into a book. Indeed, after Daddy’s sisters Cora B. and Florence died, we had to sell the farm. We were sad to do so, but there were debts that had to be paid, and none of the next generation was going to be farming.