I don’t know how Jonnie Mae did what she did, keeping her family together and in one place while others dispersed and seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. Together the family toiled and worked and sent Rebecca, the oldest, to Elizabeth City College for an education. She came back to Tims Creek to teach in the York County Public Schools, and to work to send her sister Ruthester to North Carolina Central, which was then North Carolina College. And Ruthester in turn returned to York County to send Rachel to Winston–Salem State Teacher’s College. Already it was the late fifties, and my mother, Rose, a few years younger than Rachel, would be ready for college in a few years. This break would give the family chance to gear up for the final haul, and Jonnie Mae could sit back with satisfaction at having sent all her girls to school, which was a true achievement in those days.

At this point Rebecca and Ruthester had been married for going on a decade. Both were childless. Rachel seemed disinterested in men, and though her mother nudged and pushed and argued and coerced her to find a husband, she never did. They all waited on Rose, the ace in the hole.

But Rose never went to college. She never finished high school.

Rose loved pleasure, a foreign thing to Jonnie Mae Cross Greene. She would slip out of the house with tall country boys trying to forget long days of farm work in their brand-spanking-new Dodges and Chevrolets and Fords, going out to good-time, finger-popping juke joints, places that were no more than old barns and abandoned houses that sold liquor and beer and had a music box in the corner cranking out Johnny Walker and Little Richard and the Ink Spots. I can imagine her now, looking much older than sixteen, her long, slender neck exposed, some potent young man, his callused hands clutching her slender waist, nibbling at her neck, her tongue touching her top lip.

At sixteen she just disappeared. Vanished. At seventeen she returned, broken and pregnant. She bore Isador, and in a year she ran away again, leaving her child, only to return once more, battered and full with another child, Franklin. I don’t think it was the children out of wedlock that hurt Jonnie Mae the most—her standing in the community was unbesmirchable, and she was accorded more sympathy for having a wayward daughter than for harboring two illegitimate children in her home. But the loss of power, the blatant disregard and disrespect, shook her. The actual possession of the children soothed her somewhat, but at the same time they were reminders of what she could probably only see as her failure.