In the spring of 1966, Jim drove to Tennessee to visit his mother. He left this note for Grace: “When the deadline on my contract was up, I found that I could not sign it. I turned it in yesterday unsigned with a note of resignation. It seemed the only thing to do.” Weeks later, he found a job at Jacksonville University. He’d need to be in Florida by August 15.
In early June, back in Chapel Hill to work on her masters, Grace typed a four-page document to herself: “Why I Want a Divorce — An Effort to Get My Thoughts in a Focus Beyond Emotionalism.”
Life with Jim, she writes, “for both him and me, has become intolerable. We do more to hurt each other, to keep each other from functioning as normal human and productive beings, than we are able to do to encourage and help each other.” She enumerates the causes: “Our different attitudes about almost every subject,” her view that Jim “is always looking for something he’ll never find, and that he thinks I am not the kind of wife he needs and wants, and that if I would only change, things would straighten out.
“In view of this constant friction and tension, there is no peace, no happiness, no companionship — just day by day wondering what will cause unhappiness, tension, misery — and trying to avoid it if at all possible.”
She writes of her teaching job “which came to me out of the blue and yet which I think my whole life was preparing me for.” This “is a life saver, something that gives me personal satisfaction, a feeling that I am worth something as a person and that I am able to give something of my self, my talents, abilities, training.” The job has enabled her to be “less tensely involved in my personal unhappiness.”
Also: “The fact that Geneva is now leaving home to go to college frees me from the responsibility which has held me in the family situation in spite of personal torment and humiliation.
“I am aware that my children may turn against me, that I shall be considered a failure, that I am putting myself out with nothing for my old age, and that my loneliness will be a constant emotion I shall have to face. But the choice is not too difficult to make when viewed opposite that situation which now exists in our marriage — a hopeless, irremediable one, I am convinced.
“Our married life is founded on illusion and I think it is only his pride that makes him want to go on, and that it wouldn’t last any longer than the first few months of the situation which he got in Florida.”
The next day, she goes to see a lawyer.
At the end of July, she writes to Jim, saying she wants a separation. He reacts strongly to her “severe” letter. He writes that he wants the marriage to continue. They must both try harder. She should come with him to Florida.
In early August, they meet at a lawyer’s office. At the beginning of the session, Jim repeats his protest. Very shortly thereafter, he “became very businesslike. He had prepared eight questions, very good ones.” By the end of the session, Jim and Grace had agreed on the terms of a separation and had begun talking about what he should take with him from the house they had been renting in Laurinburg.
Grace later wrote to a friend: “The decision had been a long time in coming and was a very difficult one to make and to accept. Now that the break has actually come, there is a definite sense of severance. When Jim signed the papers in the lawyer’s office I felt it, and as I walked out by myself, I realized the utter desolation and loneliness that can come following such a drastic step. Yet I prefer this to the ugliness and hopelessness of the other.”
Finally, she writes, “I really think all the children will find both Jim and me more enjoyable when we are not in that farcical situation. And perhaps Jim will become the able fine teacher everyone thinks he is except himself.”
Grace now undertakes, in visits and phone calls and letters, to explain her actions to her children. To my sister, she writes that, after the session culminating in the separation, “Needless to say I felt bereft, full of a real sense of loss, felt a rush of the loneliness I’ll feel over and over, but also I recognized that I could stand those better than I could stand more despair and the constant unrelieved misery of trying to be something I am not and trying to live in a situation where neither of us was doing the other any good at all.”
Grace told me the news in person, during a weekend visit to Chapel Hill. She told N. of my reaction: “She quite calmly said, ‘I am not surprised, I almost knew it was coming, but of course I am sorry you feel that you have to.’ I am sure she was hurt more than she showed, but she was sincere and accepting without committing herself in any way.”
At the end of my summer job, I drove with Dad in the family’s ancient, oil-burning Chevy to Jacksonville. At the big-box store across from his apartment, I bought him basic cooking utensils. Back in Laurinburg, I packed up my belongings. Grace and I drove to Boston. She dropped me off at college — and headed back to the freer life she had envisioned in that document in June.
Jim applied for a divorce in Florida, where the residency requirement was shorter. It became final in May of 1967. Their complicated 30-year marriage was over.