After 26 years and six pulpits, Jim left the ministry to teach philosophy. In the fall of 1962, he went (alone) to Jamestown College in North Dakota. My brother moved our mother and me into a little rental house in Memphis before heading off to college.
Grace’s letters that autumn speak mostly of her writing and its deadlines. Then: On Thanksgiving, out of the blue, Jim calls to say that he is coming to Memphis for Christmas. Also, he has applied for a house on campus for the next year; he wants us to join him. In a letter to a friend, Grace writes: “What am I going to do? I honestly do not know.”
After Jim’s holiday visit, she writes to my sister (now at Oxford) that we “had a very happy Christmas on the whole and it was good to have a family again — both Geneva and I felt we were more complete.” At the tail end of the very next note to her, Grace says: “We are planning to move to North Dakota some time next summer.”
What was her thinking? In a zigzagging letter to Grandmother, she puzzles it out: “It is almost impossible to work out a livable arrangement unless both people involved work on it together. At least that is my feeling about it. I am fully aware that many women have adapted themselves to an existence which may be similar to mine, but the fact that I could not do it seems to me an indication that I can’t because I do not believe that is what life is for me. Some things Jim said while in Memphis for Christmas indicate there is still the same thinking in his dealings with me which has prevailed, perhaps always: ‘Now, when you come up there, you have to be like those women up there — they LOVE their husbands, they are not the kind of women that do a lot of other things — they really love their husbands.’”
So why did she decide to go? “I’d rather be married than not married. I miss the completeness of a family. I miss Jim in many, many ways, and I have a genuine, deep affection for him when he is in his more attractive, normal, outgoing relation to me.” It would be interesting to live on a campus. She wants now 15-year-old me “to have a normal family life” for a few more years. Plus, it’s difficult “to have poise and courage” in the situation she is currently in.
She returns to the challenges: She’s read an article in Christianity Today about illnesses afflicting ministers — with symptoms of depletion, discouragement, bitterness — saying they usually involve unresolved inner conflicts. She tells her mother that the fact that she thinks any real solutions lie “in something that has happened to Jim and can’t be corrected without a miracle or treatment he would never agree to leaves me with a sick, chilled feeling.” She is “going back into something with my eyes open knowing it will demand more than I perhaps have the ability or courage to give and yet at the same time, aware that the alternative — of making a new life for myself without him, working, and trying to help Geneva and A. to adjust to this unfortunate situation — is not what I want, either.”
The only right decision is to go, she says, but with no false chin-up attitude that will crumble at first sign of failure. She concludes the letter to her mother: “Let me have your reactions. But please don’t be Pollyannish or too soothing. Life still has much meaning, I have more faith than I have ever had, but I believe my insight into myself and into life’s deepest possibilities enables me to look it straight in the face and not try to varnish things over with a good-spirits tonic.”
Atypically, Grace has kept her mother’s response. Grandmother is “glad you are trying hard to work things out. Just keep on groping, and if writing it down helps — and I feel it does — send it on to me. I think the big trouble with both of you is hurt pride and resentment, and the fact that Jim is so darn sure he is right about everything.” Also: “You know a woman can let a man think he’s boss when he really isn’t. Funny thing, but some people used to say I was the boss. Guess it was because poor Daddy had so much trouble, he had to lean on me. I had to be strong.”
In April 1963, Grace again writes her mother, saying that she has “finished my second set of publications! It is quite an emotional let-down and I am sort of at loose ends and yet glad to be able to do a few other things. Geneva is happy that I am acting like a mother again and able to take up skirts, mend, and iron a few things when she is in a jam.”
As for the upcoming move, “I really have no idea what the future holds for me in this entirely new church, state, life. I suppose this is a place where I shall have to let my faith in God and his plan for my life take over and hope that I can accept what comes and that something new and different and exciting and challenging will come. I like to think of it as an experience, but at times I feel rather sick to think of how different my life will be from anything I have known.”
We move to Jamestown. A letter from January 1964 notes that “before Christmas, Geneva had been a bit nostalgic about former Christmases when more family and friends were around, and when the tree was piled high with gifts from church members and friends and it took hours to open them.” But this Christmas brought its own pleasures. My brother took the bus up from Nashville. Grace whipped up her Yuletide traditions: a coconut cake, a white and dark fruit cake, chocolate fudge cookies, lemon cookies, fruit peel, panettone. She roasted a pheasant a neighbor had given us and two wild ducks Dad had shot.
The Jamestown letters tell of blizzards, of our fox terrier Sheba sinking deep into snowbanks, of minus 24 temperatures. Their campus social life is “interesting and varied.” Jim’s book, “A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion,” sent to publisher after publisher over the years, is at last accepted for publication. Grace writes of A’s academic successes; she is “staggered with honor that such a person is kin to me.” Illustrations for her book arrive: She says the drawings of Jesus are “too pretty” and wants “to superimpose a forceful, strong rugged Rouault on them.” She is reading James Baldwin and finding him “a perceptive and richly rewarding writer.”
Throughout her North Dakota letters, Grace makes clear her growing affection for what she calls “The Great Northwest.” She writes of the broad and somewhat bleak prairieland, the vastness, the sweep, the bright coldness of this section of our country and the sincerity and friendliness in the hearts of the people.
Before the end of the school year, Jim has taken a new position. The three of us would be moving again — to a small town in North Carolina. I’d already been to two high schools. I asked Dad to promise that we would stay two years so I could graduate from the next one.
