Grace Notes: The Introduction

This is the beginning of something I’ve been working on about my (unusual) mother.

Grace McSpadden was a winsome girl from bluebonnet country, as smart as she was lovely. She knew it, too. High-spirited and strong-willed, she was determined to live a rich (and fully examined) life. In college, she worked for the Daily Texan, interviewed Carl Sandburg, dreamed of being a journalist. But this was the 1930’s. It didn’t happen.

She married — a preacher. They moved often, from one small southern town to another. They lived in genteel poverty. She cooked and washed and sewed. They had three children. She sang in the choir and did church work. He preached fine sermons but felt professionally stymied and sorely under-appreciated. She failed to be the helpmeet he pined for; she longed for things they could not afford. Their marriage grew more and more unhappy.

I imagine that the life Grace lived and the attitudes she held are representative of those of many of her contemporaries in comparable circumstances. But three things about her stand out: Her lifelong bent for self-reflection. How doggedly she held on to her hopes. And the fact that she wrote it all down, year after year, in letters to family and friends and, occasionally, in probing notes to herself.

Also: She kept carbon copies.

I have two manila folders full. In 2020, amid the crises we alI experienced plus a few extra of my own, I found the folders in a “Memorabilia” box. I put the papers in chronological order and, for the first time, read them through. I saw what a long path she had walked to become the person she was when she died at age 58. I was struck by how little I had known of that path. And I felt that what Grace had left behind, wittingly or not, was a rare record of the experiences of so many of our mothers, who lived, as she did, in the middle of the last century.

The Grace I knew in my young adulthood (I was 24 when she died) was full of fresh accomplishment. She’d earned a graduate degree, bought a house, become a dean in a small liberal arts college. She was teaching college English and African-American studies, and pursuing ground-breaking research on the work of Richard Wright.

My college friends marveled at the sort of mother I had — recently divorced, striking out on her own, a mother who urged us to read Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, a woman who knew how to counsel a student seeking a safe abortion. A striking, vibrant, confident woman. While so many others’ mothers seemed forlorn, mine was flourishing.

On occasion, I could’ve used something less extraordinary. Here’s an example: When Grace dropped me off at Wellesley, she promptly went home and wrote an article called “How to Tell the Kids Goodbye without a Tear.” Proud to have it published, she enclosed it in a note to me. (Would a tear be so terrible?!) Here’s another: In a brief visit home before returning to college after a summer job at Glacier National Park, I told her I’d hopped a freight train from Glacier to Spokane. I thought she might say, “You could’ve lost a leg!” Or, “You could have been raped!” She said, “Oh, how I wish I could have done that.”

Now, though, I think I get it. Reading these letters, full of struggling to force herself to defer to her husband, of stretching dollars and mending clothes, of manses crying out for repair and cars with holes in the floorboard — now I see that this was a woman who had been yearning for years to live the life she was finally living. Yearning to get back to the hopes she’d outlined to herself as a brand new college graduate. To become, as she had put it early on, “A Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.” And damned if she hadn’t gone and done it. But what a journey — from the wish to the reality — it had been.

Grace Notes 2: Growing Up

Her brother died of appendicitis when she was six, another baby was stillborn, and Grace became the oldest child of Joseph Knowles McSpadden and Eleanor Porter McSpadden. They lived in the small Texas Hill Country town of Clifton. As an adult, Grace wrote reflections on her childhood. Reading them now, I am struck by how many themes would be repeated from one generation to the next.

“Daddy was a Texan all the way: He was outspoken, individual, had strong feelings, a hot temper which he lost quickly and got over quickly, moving from loud denunciations to equally loud declamations about how he loved Mother or us, whichever was the object of his wrath. He was most affectionate and loved to have us around him. He was sensitive and his feelings were easily hurt. He was an avid Bible reader and was outspoken about injustices and discrepancies in the Word and in life. He was given to saying, ‘I want to ask the Lord about…’ and then giving some instance of something he wanted to have explained.”

At first, the family were comfortably well off. “He was on the way up as a successful business man; made rather good money. We had a Baldwin baby grand piano, Mother had a real pearl necklace and a fine diamond ring. We had built our own home, which was attractive and well-furnished. But things went bad and he lost the zip and punch.”

Joe lost more than punch. Amid the Great Depression, he spent the little money the family had on a losing run for county judge. In the wake of that loss, Grace’s brother Tom later told me, Eleanor sold the diamond ring (and a lot more) to move the family to Austin. This made it possible for each of the children (by then also including Josephine and Joe Jr.) to go to the university, while Eleanor ran a boarding house.

“Daddy loved Mother and admired her. He was hard to live with, I’m sure, and I have seen him hurt Mother a great deal. She had a wonderfully patient and sweet and enduring nature and most of the time would put up with his outbreaks and vituperations,” Grace wrote. Uncle Tom told me that one day, when the family were all at home and the parents had been arguing, Eleanor walked out the front door, saying, “I can’t take this anymore.” A good while later, she came back. “I can take it,” she told her children. “I come from good stock.”

Eleanor, wrote Grace, was “wonderfully skillful in making a meal out of practically nothing. I can remember once in Clifton before we moved when there was no money and nothing much to eat in the house. We wondered what kind of lunch we would come home to find at noon. We found delicious pan omelet with chili. I never shall forget the feeling of ‘marveling’ that I had for her.

“Mother came from a family dedicated to learning and proud of its educated sons and daughters. Every one of them pursued higher education [this in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s}, and each was constantly aware of the need to make the best of himself through constant improvement of mind, body and spirit. Mother’s sister, my Aunt Pearl, was vigilant in seeing that we read the right things and said the right things and acted the right way; Mother was only a little less so. We always had the feeling we could do anything we set our minds to.”

It didn’t always go quite that smoothly. At the University of Texas, Grace majored in English and journalism. She was religion editor of the Daily Texan. She was inducted, together with Claudia Taylor (later Lady Bird), into the journalism honorary society. But she had had some readjusting to do, in the wake of the family’s move. She reflected on this when, just after graduation in 1935, she went to a leadership session at Geneva Glen Camp in Colorado, where she wrote:

“When I graduated from a small town high school I felt, as I think most high school graduates do, that I knew a great deal about everything. Because the school was small I had had an active part in most every event or activity the school offered. I think I must have tried my hand at everything!

“Yet this ability to do a great many things even on this small scale had the unfortunate effect of developing in me a feeling that I could do most anything I wanted to and, through this ability to do a lot, ‘get by’ with other things. This attitude prevailed until I had completed the first semester of my university work. When my grades came in my pride went plop! Because of my financial conditions I was unable to pledge a sorority and, since our family had just moved into the university town, I was almost wholly lost. Here I was doing nothing and I had thought I was able to do and know everything.”

Her disappointment in herself jolted her. “After a summer away from home, and after I had had my first college love experience, I began to see more clearly what had been wrong with my attitude and to resolve to make it healthier. And now, after four years and four summers of college, church work, study, reading, friendships and self-study, I feel that I am nearer finding my place in life than I have been since I left high school.”

Still, she added, “I know so little, yet I have the most burning desire to learn more. I realize that I am very emotional, and because I feel such a need for friends, I have to be doubly careful in physical control. With this greater self-realization and equipped with a stronger and deeper faith in myself, which has come chiefly through reading, religious experiences and friendships, I feel much more sure of my life. And even though I cannot see my way clear to obtaining the work in religious journalism which I want to go into, I am keeping my eye on my goal.”

Grace Notes 3: Moving Out

The closest Grace came to the hoped-for post in journalism was a secretarial job in the publishing branch of the Presbyterian Church administrative offices in Louisville. As her daughter, as a lifelong journalist, I yearn to know more about her search; I never heard her talk about it. (How many of us heard about our mother’s early yearnings, I wonder?)

Within a year, she became engaged to my father, James Arthur Overholser (“Jimmy, she calls him below”), who was completing his graduate work at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Thinking about this new future, she typed a note to herself:

“There are certain things in my life which I want to do. I want to keep up with progress and development in the movies and on the stage….Friends are necessary to my happiness, and I want to cultivate the attitude of constantly being on the lookout for new friends…Letter writing has always been a joy to me, but somehow I have always exercised my talent for procrastination more directly in this line than in any other. If I find myself relapsing into it again, I hope I can have enough common sense and some of Daddy’s ‘horse sense’ to cut down the number of people to whom I am writing so that I won’t be inclined to ‘put-offness.’”

When she moves to her expectations for the deepening relationship with Jim, she soars. So high were her hopes for mutual personal growth. So determined she was that “material hindrances” should not dominate their lives. So confident in the prospect of seeing these things come true.

What I’d give to have Dad’s letters in response. No one, apparently, kept them.

“I want my correspondence with Jimmy to be one of the most productive and inspirational things I can find. I don’t know what sort of letters he is likely to write, but I know what I want to do and I shall not hesitate to express to him my wishes and desires. He is a source of challenge and help to me and I want him to know when he has helped me. Today, the day after he left for his church in Smyrna, the thought came to me as I sat at my desk in the window that our correspondence could be one of the dearest things we could ever experience. Even though we hate to be separated, if we can keep in mind personal development of ourselves, with the ultimate purpose of future development together — the more satisfying and happy because of what we have accomplished apart — then I think we have no need to worry about our lives together.

“It isn’t necessary to be thinking of the actual material hindrances all the time; why can’t we let this period be dominated by a desire to work and read and cultivate and develop something into our lives which will be the means of furthering our happiness later? I like to think of preparing myself for something big that is to come in my life; certainly I wouldn’t attempt to make a speech or write a book — a small book! — without long and intensive and adequate and thorough preparation — therefore, why should we want to rush into something which could be all the fuller and happier if we had fitted ourselves for it? We have just begun to know each other. I think he is in sympathy with these attitudes and wishes of mine which may have a tendency to lean toward the idealistic, yet I think I am practical enough to realize where idealism must stop and let realism come in to guide things — and because of his complete, I hope, understanding, he will want to develop himself to fit his own life for a greater life with another.”

Looking back over the three decades of their marriage, reading this makes me sad.

In the note, she returns to her hopes for her own growth — specific indeed. “I want to read a newspaper daily. I also like to hear the news broadcasts. Books I must choose more carefully, and I must read at least one each month, varying them to include novels, philosophy, science, biography, poems, drama and history.” She vows to exercise daily, keep flowers in her room and “be on the lookout for beauty in the street, in the windows, in the park, and wherever I go; and when I think of the moon it will be so easy for me to think of its beauty when Jimmy and I saw it together.

“I will spend only enough money to keep me up and up and not buy anything just because I happen to want it very much. When I go home Mother and Daddy will need that money to help pay for the wedding expenses.

“I want to regain the feeling I had begun to have that spiritual development is necessary in a full, productive life. I don’t want to consider it a duty and an obligation; rather, I want to do it because of its intense meaning and inspiration in my life. I want to rely on God’s help in directing my life, and if I don’t depend on Him, I can’t expect Him to see my needs and wishes.

“These are the things I want in my life — personal development along the above lines. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

But there was one more thing she needed to take care of: “I must work out and clearly understand my feelings for Bill, and I must explain everything to him so that he will understand our relation to each other. I need help and strength to do this.

Bill? Who was Bill?

Grace Notes 4: Approaching Marriage

First, Grace had to take care of that previous relationship. “Bill” — I wish I knew his last name — seems to have come up from Texas to see her in Louisville.

“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to tell Bill goodbye,” she wrote in a note to herself. “It is almost 2 o’clock now and I imagine his train is just leaving. Last night when he asked me if I was footloose and fancy free I told him about my interest in Jimmy. He made it easy for me by his sympathetic kindness, but later he showed me how hard it was after all. I have never seen anyone as sweetly honest as Bill is. All my life I shall be grateful for his friendship and for his love.

“As he left today Bill made this request: ‘If I don’t see you again, tell the young man I think he is getting the thing nearest to perfection on this earth and to govern himself accordingly.’

“He’s gone now. I wonder when we shall meet again.”

Grace turned her attention to the wedding date. She wrote to a friend that Dad was yearning to be married sooner than they had agreed upon, and that she had resisted the change at first. “After we had been together, and after I had talked things over with him and with his mother, somehow I decided that I wanted to go ahead myself. There are so many things in favor of our going ahead — indeed almost as many as those I had thought prevented our doing it now. He will have a raise in salary when he is married, and he will be so much happier than he is now — at least that’s what he says.

“The two things that have been in my mind as paramount objections are the fact that I will have so little money, and that I hate to leave my work so soon after Dr. Sweets brought me all the way from Texas and gave me a position in the office.”

Shortly before their wedding, she wrote a long letter to Dad recounting a lunch conversation she overheard between two women she didn’t know who were seated at a table nearby.

“Apparently, they had not seen each other for several years, and this luncheon engagement was sandwiched between a trip to Yellowstone Park, Seattle, Vancouver, lower Canada and the Great Lakes which the single woman was taking beginning Sunday, and the very busy life of the married woman. They had grown up together in a small town, both had become successful in their work, and each was still interested in what the other was doing in her life.” The married woman was a writer, completing a biography. “Miss Iva, not as pretty, yet more vigorous, teaches foreign languages of an indefinite sort in a university or college, probably at Lexington.

“Each had her own ambitions in life, the married woman to finish her book and get her mother settled in some resort in Virginia; the single one to take this trip which would be her first pleasure trip since 1930 and to really enjoy herself on the money which she was spending. They spoke of some books they had read, some of the things each had done this past winter — other little and important things. Nothing was unpurposeful in their entire conversation. Their lives must be well-ordered.

“And why was I grateful? I think it was because of the impression they gave me. I have heard so many table conversations that consist of nothing except trivialities. So many people discuss people. These two women were examples of two people who were living carefully and busily. They were doing something with their lives and were achieving more than they probably realized, not because one was a writer and the other a teacher, but because each was apparently trying to do her best and make the most of what she had.

“Whenever I have the feeling that I am not worth much, that my life has had little direction, that I am accomplishing little, I can find a great deal of stimulation in something like this. What others are doing, what use they are making of life, their outlook, how broad is their life — all of these things are in a great sense a challenge.

“How great a relief, and what a sense of security, it is to realize that one has within himself that which will stimulate and challenge and re-invigorate. To have within, a source of mental and spiritual energy — that helps tremendously, doesn’t it?”

Grace seems suddenly to become aware that Jim may not know what to make of this. “Thinking back over what I have just written, the thought comes to me that I must often sound like someone who is just discovering what life is like. These impressions come to me so vividly at times that I feel the strongest urge to put them down and see what I can make of them. I hope you will realize that I have thought through much of my life, more than some things I say might indicate, but nevertheless, something is always giving me a surprise. I thrive on thinking through some impressions and experiencing for myself, and in trying to figure out their meaning for me and others, I like to tell them to another person.”

Then comes a new topic — beginning with a paragraph that makes me itch to shout, back across the decades, “Mother! WAKE UP!”: “Today I filed some more material for Dr. Sweets, and in some of the items I came across a folder on ‘The Minister’s Wife.’ In it were three articles written by wives of ministers who were discussing the attitude some people seem to have toward that part of a minister’s household. Somehow I had never thought so much about being ‘different’ just because of the man you married — I don’t want to be so much and I really don’t see much need in it. I am copying, when I have a stolen opportunity, these articles, and I’ll send you carbons so you can see what I have been reading — perhaps you’ll tell me to throw it away and forget it.

“I love you very much. Each day I want to love you so much again and I always do.”

Next among her papers is a clipping from a booklet called “Typing Tips,” from December 1935, featuring this ditty called “Success:”

“Once upon a time I planned to be

An artist of celebrity;

A song I thought to write one day,

And all the world would homage pay;

I longed to write a noted book, —

But what I did was learn to cook.

For life with simple task is filled,

And I have done, not what I willed.

Yet when I see boys’ hungry eyes

I’m glad I make good apple pies.

— By Elizabeth A. Thomas

Grace put a checkmark by the third verse (italicized here).

I am puzzled. This was published two years before she married. Why did she clip it and why keep it among her papers?

And when did she add the checkmark?

Grace Notes 5: Minister’s Wife, Mother

Grace McSpadden married James Arthur Overholser on March 30, 1937, in Austin.

Back at the manse in Smyrna, Tennessee, she writes to her parents of her happiness: “We have a great deal of fun every day playing and singing on the piano, washing and drying dishes, going out and seeing how the flowers and the garden is growing, and just being in love. I don’t miss anything — I’m having the time of my life and enjoying it immensely.”

For the next dozen years, her life would be a series of moves from one small southern town to another while Jim sought to move up in the ministry, to conclude his graduate education — and to find escape from his disappointed hopes. Meanwhile, Grace would give birth to three children, sing in the choir, seek to be a model minister’s wife, keep house in one new home after another, and struggle to make ends meet.

Still prone to self-reflection — and a touch of judgmentalism — she continues to write notes to herself. She hears some mothers complaining about their children marrying and being “gone forever,” and writes, “Things I am anxious to avoid doing when I grow old and have children and grandchildren: losing all interest in everything except what my children do and say; talking unless I am in conversation with some person about some special thing; and getting into the middle-age habit of looking backward instead of finding renewed joy in what life holds — if not for me then for the world. I am not the only thing in it.”

Grace and Jim soon moved to a new ministry, in Blytheville, Arkansas. Their first child, a daughter, is born. Grace’s letters, now to both sets of parents, mostly recount routine details of their daily lives — and, before long, reports of Jim’s efforts to find a new pulpit.

She also writes of packages she is sending to Tommy and Joe, her two brothers, both in the armed services.

September 30, 1942: “Here it is my twenty-ninth birthday — the last one of my twenties. I remember rather well when I first hit them because I was thrilled to have attained that ripe old age. And now I am almost at the thirty mark. Doesn’t seem that I am ready to be that old yet.”

November 1942: “Our church services are growing every Sunday. Our music has become so lovely that visitors come each Sunday to hear the choir the whole town is talking about. And Jim, being inspired by all these crowds and just naturally getting better and better all the time, is preaching such sermons that they are brought up and talked about at meetings of every sort. He preached once on Reasons for Not Going to Church, and you should have heard the comments.

“Tonight Jim and I will go to the high school to hear a lecture sponsored by the Rotary Club which is on the general subject of the settlement of postwar problems. The lectures have all been fine since they give us a chance to get different opinions and ideas about things we hear and read about. Since Christmas, we spent $1.50 on a three- month subscription to the Sunday New York Times. I surely do enjoy that paper, even when I have to read two weeks’ copies together like I am doing now. It takes time to read it and that is something I have very little of now.”

A March 1943 letter to her parents tells of visiting a church in Memphis (small and disappointing) that was considering calling Jim. She begins the letter by noting that they are about to celebrate their 6th anniversary. (They’ve already served in two churches.) “I’d rather stay here, because I think Jim is destined for something better and this isn’t it. Besides, we’ve just had a raise and I want to see how it feels to get $2400 for a while.”

Not long after: “Well, at last it has happened. If everything goes along as Jim believes it will, we shall be leaving Blytheville in about a month. For Texarkana — the Arkansas side. There seems to be large growth in that city now, the church has over 400 members, and they are thinking of paying $3300 salary. We will probably go as soon as we can after the 12th of March since I can’t be moving around much after that time. And here I’ve got not only moving ahead of me but also a change in doctors and worry about whether I can get into a strange hospital with so little advance notice, and the prospect of facing a new and strange congregation looking like a second cousin of an elephant!”

Late in April, my brother is born. According to family lore, his birth comes in an inferior hospital on the Texas side of town because Grace wants Texas on her son’s birth certificate. Her Texas roots are not the only thing Grace takes pride in. She tells her parents that, at the church’s welcoming reception, she overheard a Mrs. Booker saying, ‘Why she just doesn’t look like most people. She’s different looking. Like a movie star or somebody you don’t see around every day.’”

In a letter dated two days after D-Day, Grace writes of having missed the siren intended to alert people to the invasion of the Normandy beaches. “I didn’t know anything about it until I saw the big headlines in the paper. It is a terrible thing and hard to face when I think of all the boys going through hell. Being able to hear about events almost as soon as they happen is a wonderful thing but I find the radio stimulates and prolongs my upset feelings. I want to hear it and yet I want to turn it off.”

Meanwhile, a letter to a friend back in Blytheville describes the new church and manse, adding: “Can you see why I feel very happy? There are many difficulties, but where wouldn’t there be? I am glad we could move to such a pleasant place. I really hated to leave some of the people in B., but I know that it was best.….I could go on and on, I suppose. I like to visit with a typewriter. I guess it’s a good thing I have diapers to fold and mending to be done.”

A July 2, 1944, letter to her parents discusses what she hopes will be an upcoming reunion of all the McSpaddens: “Josephine wrote such a nice letter — written on her streamliner away up in the clouds (Grace’s sister is now a stewardess) and said she was planning to come home in September and hoped I would be able to come then, too. But I didn’t know whether Joe could come. I hope he does get to. I certainly shall come, if you have room for all of us, because I want so much to be all together again.”

Twenty days after that letter, Grace’s brother Joe is killed in action over Italy. He was 22.

Grace Notes 6: Growing Challenges

When Grace received word of her brother Joe’s death, Jim was in Richmond, working on his doctorate. In her letter to him, Grace seems to waver between yearning for Jim to be at home with her and urging him on. August 1944: “Dearest Jim, I can hardly stand it without you to lean on, but I’ll manage if you won’t worry. Somehow I knew all the time that Joe wouldn’t come back. He was just in too much danger. It’s terrible for Mother and Daddy; they have lost their oldest and youngest sons now. Be sure and write me soon. I can hardly see how I can get by these few days until Mother and Daddy come.”

A few days later, Jim left Richmond for several days of travel on his own. Grace wrote, “Now you are in New York and I have been trying to imagine what you have been doing all day. I am glad you went and I shall be interested in hearing all about your doings. I notice you plan to stay until Monday p.m., and I am glad you can stay that long.

“Josephine left this morning…I took her to the station and then came back and visited awhile with Daddy and then took him to catch his train. We have managed to regain some of our composure, but it has been hard. There is such a vacant feeling and somehow I don’t even want to see a newspaper. Thanks for the nice cards — shows you are thinking of us, too. Have a good time, darling.”

A couple of days on, she writes of how much she’d like to be with him in New York — a city Grace will later delight in and describe in delicious detail. Here, her references to their different tastes in travel feel discomfiting: “Dearest Sweetheart, Well, I feel almost like I had been to New York, thanks to your most interesting letter. I think you have had just the kind of trip to the Big City that you have always yearned for — no female along to make you stay at a place you couldn’t afford, nor slow you down in your marathon trek around the pavements, nor make you eat at a strange place where you had too little to eat and it cost too much! I confess I still wish I had been along, especially to walk on Times Square early in the morning and to ride atop the bus and go to Coney Island. Think of your having done those things! It’s hard to believe here in my everyday existence of baby baths and potty sessions.

“I feel very lost and forlorn this morning. Mother left at 5:30 A.M. and I was sorry to see her go. I haven’t been able to settle down to anything I need to do. I’ll write to you instead. I’d much rather. Don’t think too much about us but go ahead and have a good bachelor time while you have a chance. Next February or thereabouts you may wish you were there again. Family troubles are a burden, remember. And now’s your opportunity to give way to that submerged desire to ‘be single again.’”

It’s hard to know what to make of this seeming selflessness. It doesn’t bode well.

A few months later, Grace writes to Jim’s parents: February 1945: “The Overholser fortunes are at the lowest ebb in history, except for some of those red, red days early in Blytheville. Early in January we decided that it would be best to figure out the Income Tax and send our check at that time instead of waiting until the 15th. Shortly after that, we had to buy our automobile license, and that took $20 just like that. We were beginning to see that we must go deep into our reserve pantry, which consists mostly of beans and tomatoes and jellies and preserves which the congregation gave us. Then Jim had his final appointment with the dentist and what do you suppose the bill was — $172.80!! Well — he had saved the Christmas money planning to pay that bill with it, but all he had was $100. He wrote a check for that amount and cleaned us out. All we had at home was enough to buy the baby’s milk for the remainder of the week. It was then just after the 15th and no more money until Feb. 1. Well, there was my nice little amount I had saved to buy a washing machine. We ‘borrowed from it’ and paid everything we had to, and bought only groceries we needed from the two places where we have accounts.”

October 1946, Grace writes to her sister in California. Josephine is newly pregnant. “I am sure you know that we are speaking from the heart and from experience when we say how happy we are for you. There are many things that will be different for you now; Jim has always said, ‘When a child comes into your home, peace flies out the window.’ And being married and living in a home without children is not the same as marriage with children. You can’t expect a child to fit into your home just like something else new does, adding variety and beauty and interest and charm. A child changes a home because everything has to be fitted to his needs.”

Well, maybe not everything. “Lately we have been doing some interesting reading in the new anthologies of modern British and American and French and Italian poets. Robinson Jeffers (who lives in Cal. at Mt. Carmel-by-the-Sea) is one of the interesting. Also John Crowe Ransom, Ezra Pound (I wonder what the U.S. will do to him?) and the tragic Hart Crane. About 11 o’clock some night, read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Renascence’ again. She certainly wove a spell with her words.”

Finally, Grace writes, “we have lately devoured travel books because we have the traveling urge again, and no telling where we’ll go, once given the chance. But we will take our family with us and enjoy it with them and let them enjoy it through our help.”

In fact, Grace and Jim did have a big trip coming up — a trip on which they would decidedly not be taking the children. Before that, though, there’d be yet another move — and one more baby.

Grace Notes 7: “The Moral Is To Keep My Mouth Shut”

The next letter comes from their new home in Greenwood, South Carolina (they’d been in Texarkana for 2½ years). January 1947: “Jim was properly and legally installed by the Presbytery commission last night and it was an inspiring and meaningful service. I sang the contralto solo in ‘Hark, Hark My Soul!’ yesterday morning, and people were very kind to say how nice for the preacher to have a wife who could sing!”

The family moved temporarily to Richmond for the summer, with Jim continuing to pursue his doctorate. Grace typed a note to herself: “A conglomeration of reading which has produced a strange mixture of thoughts has been my program for this 10 days or so we have been here at Union Seminary. ‘Your Carriage, Madam! A Guide to Good Posture,’ ‘Modern Parents,’ ‘The Psychology of Christian Living’ and a book on Reaching Maturity. As a result, I have had many unconnected thoughts held together only by one dominating idea— self-improvement ideals.”

Among these ideals, Grace wants to develop a “more smooth, graceful walking and sitting posture” and to remember that “an envious person is one who has not lived his life to its fullest.” But most of her reflections concern her interior struggles as a mother, a wife, a woman. “Looking back over this past year, I find myself filled with dismay at the way I have gradually fallen from my high aspirations in regard to the bringing up of our sweet daughter. The coming of Brubba has decreased the amount of time I had to give to introspection, and has, more than that, taken up my time to such an extent that I have struggled to be calm and patient and objective. I have lost perspective, too, and cannot often look at anything dispassionately.

“Jim and I very seldom discuss the children’s actions or our attitudes toward their actions before them, but we have been guilty, and I hope now that we can refrain from it altogether. And in matters that have to be decided, I must try to remember to defer to him at the moment. Later, perhaps, I can explain my position, and perhaps change the feeling for a later decision when it comes.”

Turning to a yet more painful (to me, reading it now) sentiment: “After observing some of the other women here, and some of the men also, I have reached several conclusions. I think men do not like to hear women talk very much, especially in a group, and I find myself feeling the same way. Yet, if she has something to say, and says it in a fairly intelligent way, without prolonging it, or using too many unnecessary gestures or repetitions, they will accept and admire. The moral, I guess, is to keep my mouth shut unless I can say something that is acceptable. And think before I speak — always, always.

“If there were only some way to avoid the few things which upset Jim so, I believe our married life would be a model of connubial bliss. Spending money in any way that seems to him useless or extravagant, even though it may not seem so to me, is perhaps the worst of all. I realize the only way to remedy it is to cease to want anything that I think he will be upset about paying for. He is not the least bit niggardly, but his conceptions of the way to spend the money we have do not include blowing it all on an odd meal, which though different may not be outstandingly good.”

Then, this textbook self-admonishment: “If I can remember to be calmer and quieter, and try to be neutral and detached, I believe I can produce a better atmosphere in our home. I know I am inclined to be positive and assertive and too quick, but if I can only keep my mouth closed until I know what is best, I believe everything will be calmer in the long run. Even though I hate to be stepped on, the upheaval which any protest produces is surely not worth it. And, object as violently as I will, still it is the woman’s place and responsibility to produce that complacency of spirit in a home which makes for the happiness of all therein. A man will not strive to do it, simply because he doesn’t know. I guess I can think of that as my career — to avoid any situations which may cause trouble, either for Jim or for the children.”

To think of that as her career.

Letter to her parents, September 1947, reporting on a church leadership meeting she went to in Columbia, S.C.: “The church here is strong, filled with fine people (I am speaking of the state as well as our own) but is certainly not the most forward-looking or aggressive section. Rather, I think it ranks with Mississippi as being the two states addicted to keeping the Presbyterian Church as it was 50 years ago. They don’t favor expansion. Complacency is rampant, and it’s all the worse because it is of the most pleasant sort.”

Grace’s third child (that’s me) is born in March 1948. In a letter to her sister in May she writes: “This is the first baby I’ve been able to nurse. She is happy and smiles and laughs a great deal. I’ve been lucky with this one as with the others and weigh what I did before she came. I have been amused lately by the comments which come about ‘How did you get back your figure so quickly?’ and ‘You must feel good to look like that after three children.’ You know how I smirk and pat myself on the back!”

Grace’s father dies of cancer in September. In November 1948, Grace writes to her mother, recalling the last Thanksgiving when the McSpadden family had all been together: “I remember quite vividly that Thanksgiving day in 1936 when we were all seated around your table heaped with good things and Daddy felt moved to make a ‘little speech’ in his quiet way. ‘This may be the last Thanksgiving dinner we will have all together, children. Here Grace is taking her wings out for her flight away from the family nest. Later you others will be doing the same.’ Then he went on to point out how much family life means and how fortunate we were to have had so much good experience in that way. We all felt sad but encouraged and we closed it by having each one of us give a prayer of thanksgiving with hands clasped around the table.

“He was right; it was the last Thanksgiving. And now, 13 years later, I can think of a major happening for almost every year since then. Seven grandchildren, 2 deaths, 4 marriages, numberless moves on the part of all, new friends, different ties — yet all of these do not dim the meaning and sacredness of that fine day when we sat together as the McSpadden family. Although it won’t ever come again, the memory is fine and strong and challenging; and I’m glad he was prescient enough to see where we were going and to say what he did.”

Grace Notes 8: Seeking Something More

Back in Greenwood, things seem to go along nicely. Jim’s ministry is flourishing, Grace moves more deeply into church work, and their home life features all the familiar juggling of a young family. Also: Grace gets her hair cut short, with bangs. Church members tell her she looks 15 years younger. “Jim likes it all right, but said I have lost my natural dignity.”

In a November 1949, letter to the parents, Grace writes of Jim’s article in a journal published by Union Seminary: “To me it is the high point in Jim’s career. This article is the result of all the reading and clear thinking he has done since he was in college. He has an unusual ability of absorbing and assimilating what he reads. He puts it through the mill of his mind, mixing it with ingredients from many books and magazines and conversations, letting it simmer, and then produces thoughts and ideas of his own. He thought this article out one night when he couldn’t sleep. Went to the church next morning and wrote it all down without having to struggle too much over the phrasing. The editors accepted the article, writing him, ‘We certainly want it; it’s tops.’”

In a Christmas 1949 note to herself she reflects on their decision not to travel to Ohio to be with Jim’s parents, staying at home instead and getting “modest gifts” for the children. “But our wise buying was not enough to stretch our meager funds. We have had a difficult time this last year trying to make our finances satisfy our simplest needs. A week before Christmas, we were faced with the undeniable fact that there wouldn’t be enough money to go through until our next check came. We figured what our expenses would be, counted our money, and we lacked about $6 having enough. The only thing we could do was to borrow from the Lord — which meant going to the tithe box, opening the church envelope already filled for next Sundays offering, and taking out the $8. One thing which had taken the last of our funds was a ton of coal. The national mining situation affects people like us in ways John L. Lewis isn’t bothered about since we are not his particular flock.” Their own flock, she notes wryly, has sent eight different fancy-fruit baskets.

February 1950, to her parents: “We were down in the dumps about a month ago when we heard Evans Brown, our friend over here at Anderson, say with great excitement that the Corpus Christi church was to call him. He is about Jim’s age and certainly no better preacher than he is — about average I should say, although he is very friendly and affable. We hadn’t really thought about going a lot, but it did seem sad for the church to go within 43 miles of us and get someone, didn’t it?” On a happier note, Jim and Grace have been enjoying local outings — to Columbia to see foreign films, to Anderson to hear the Buffalo symphony, to Greenville to hear the Cincinnati symphony.

Then comes a February 1950 letter to her mother, with arresting news: “Jim wants to finish his thesis next summer if he possibly can, the two months we are in Richmond. He has been able to write some of the first chapter. Most of it was done by his staying at the church until 11 two nights a week, because all day the interruptions are almost constant. If he does this and gets through with the comprehensives, he should get his Th.D. in 1951, May. Then, we want to go to Europe for him to study and get the continental background for the theology he sorely needs. If he has a doctor’s degree plus training, even for a few months in some of the European universities, he can be in line for teaching in a seminary if the call comes.

“In order to go we will have to sell almost everything we have except dishes and silver — even the car, or mainly the car. We hope to be able to save a little something, but what it will be I can’t see now. Jim has written to the Board of Education in Louisville asking for a try at a $500 scholarship. He would probably spend about six months in Europe. He doesn’t want to go without me; perhaps the best thing to do would be to prevail upon you and the Overholsers to help take care of our children during one summer; I would come back in September and live with one of you all and send the children to school while Jim lived over there more cheaply than we all could. This is just theory yet, of course.”

What a theory.

Meanwhile, their lives perk along. April 1950, to her parents: “Thursday we will have Dr. Miller (a visiting church official) for dinner. Tomorrow Jim has a luncheon engagement and I have my garden club luncheon. He will go for A. at 12, taking G. along and dropping me at the luncheon. Then he will come back and let them eat the lunch I will prepare before I go. When they finish he loads them in the car and takes them to Mrs. Lucia Smith’s where they will stay until I pick them up after my luncheon at 1:45 or 2. Thursday he has a Salvation Army luncheon and meeting. Friday I have to go to Newberry for Presbyterial. My final report as Secretary of Assembly’s Home Missions I must do tonight if I can find the necessary hours after church.” Meanwhile, her ”children’s work in the Synod has taken up a lot of time lately.” Grace ends with the thing she says she’s proudest of: She has made coats for both her daughters — although she confused “interlining” and “interfacing,” leaving the collars “a bit limp.”

The visiting minister, it seems, was satisfyingly complimentary: “His comment Sunday night during the service really endeared him to us, gratitude-starved as we sometimes say we are. Dr. Miller said something like, ‘It has been a real pleasure to be more closely associated with your fine pastor and his lovely family this week. And I want to tell you something — whenever a man has been in a place 3½ years, he is free to move. Before that it’s too short and a church is just stealing that calls a man sooner. But that timing is legitimate, and whenever any good church asks me where a good pastor is, I’ll know where there is one. Now you better be watching out and take care of them, because churches are going to be casting eyes on your pastor. And I want to say this, too. The minute I laid eyes on that girl [referring to 37-year-old Grace] I knew there was something extraordinary about her. And then I knew what it was when I found she came from Texas. You here in South Carolina are going to have to send a lot of people out West to take the place of this one you have gotten from Texas; they don’t make them any finer.’

“It certainly does make your heart feel good to hear things like that. And we can tell the difference all this week. People had been taking us more or less for granted. We have one member of our staff who blows her own horn and no one is in doubt of her good qualities, but we seldom hear anyone say what a fine pastor and his family we have. We were walking on air for a few hours.”

Grace Notes 9: An Improbable Dream Comes True

That a preacher and his wife in 1951, with virtually no money, three young children and no assured future employment, would sell almost everything they have and set off for Europe for three months: Good heavens.

Grace’s letters to their parents throughout the winter of 1950–51 reflect their determination — and the cliffhanger ups and down of their progress. Would Jim get the grant he’d applied for? How long would they stay? Could they take the children? If not, who would? And what would the family do afterward?

In a February 1951 letter to her mother, Grace writes that Jim has heard from the church administrators about possible grants to support his studies. “The amount of the scholarships is $2000-$3000, depending on length and who all goes. If we cared to apply, we could take the family and remain a year for study in one place. We have seriously considered this and rejected it for several reasons. In the first place Geneva is not old enough to appreciate the advantages or get anything out of it; she would be a burden instead of an interested helper, and it would be very hard on her. And since one of our main reasons for going is to travel, see museums, churches, go into back villages and poke around, attend concerts, go by train, bus, bicycle and hiking, we could not be free with the children to do this. So we are making application for just Jim, accompanied for three months by me; he to stay at least six months and perhaps more if money and study holds out. I wish I could stay six months, but I don’t feel that I should go off and leave the children for more than the summer.”

Continuing to unspool to her mother their unsettled prospects, Grace soon writes, “Next fall and winter until Jim returns early in 1952, I will have to live either with the O’s or with you, if either of you will be so kind as to take us in for a few months. I told you that I would much prefer living in Texas during the winter and we certainly want a Southern address because churches in the South are strangely prejudiced against any northern-sounding address when they go to call, except in the very large ones.

“If you would keep Geneva in the mornings, I would try to get a job in a church or office and work half-time in order to help pay my way. Then when Jim returned, we would live somewhere until he had a call or found something to do; this is the only going-out-on-faith part of it all, but we feel that we can always work somewhere and we want to do this badly enough that we are willing to take that chance. So — I’m asking you to consider it all and see whether you want to have that experience (!) next winter. Please feel free to decline. Then I will try the Overholsers and see if they want to put up with us. I want you to feel perfectly free to decide any way you wish. It is your life now to live as you wish.”

What I’d give to have seen my grandmother’s face as she read this letter.

It contained one more interesting note: “This evening, Geneva is having fun looking at Kodak pictures. She knows who you are in every one.” The photos featured a trip to Houston the summer before, during which we played with cousins from Port Arthur. One of them, my brother recalls, was a girl about his age named Janis Joplin. (Our grandmothers were sisters.)

These wintertime letters also included Grace’s customary report on cultural highlights. They’d seen “King Solomon’s Mines — one of the most exciting movies I’ve ever seen” and Lauritz Melchior, the Robert Shaw Chorale, the Slavenska Ballet, Oscar Levant and “the Italian picture ‘Bitter Rice.’” All of this available in nearby small towns and cities.

Remarkably, Jim’s parents agreed to keep us (ages 3, 7 and 10) for the summer at their home in Springfield, Ohio. And Grace’s mother agreed to have her and the children in Dallas for the school year to follow.

A letter to Jim’s parents: “I believe the children will be fairly easy to take care of next summer, but there is one thing that bothers me slightly. The washing problem for three children in summer is something you probably haven’t faced since Jim and Alf were small. Think about it very realistically for a few days and then tell me what you think. I will sell my washing machine and then when we start again I’ll probably buy a Sears Kenmore automatic. Would you like to buy one yourself to use this summer, or another type that would be good, and then sell it to me later?”

Things sped toward a close. “Jim will preach his last sermon here the last Sunday in May, one week after he gets back from the Commencement exercises in Richmond.” Grace got a note from the Presbyterian Church Department of Children’s work, thanking her for the ”fine service you have rendered in past years and looking forward to having you work with us again in the very near future.” Also, to Jim’s parents: “I have already packed two boxes of dishes, five of books, have started on our clothes which is a problem what with determining things Jim and I will need this summer, the children this summer and next winter, Jim next winter and us next winter. Incidentally, do you want me to bring any blankets or sheets? Say the word. I plan to bring the typewriter, iron and pressure cooker. We have already sold the piano, dining room furniture, water heater, washing machine, baby bed, youth bed, two living room tables and porch furniture.”

Meanwhile, their travel agent couldn’t get them on the boat she’d promised, but found another and booked that, along with hotel rooms in London and Paris. A decision on Jim’s grant is overdue by more than a week: “We have expected a call, a wire, or some word, every hour. It was the worst suspense I’ve gone through in many a day.” But “in spite of this unknown UNKNOWN, Jim decided he must tell the Session Sunday April 22, to meet the church’s requirements.”

Then: In an April 29 letter to her mother, “You will be disappointed to hear that Jim did not receive the grant. Maybe for one of three reasons: his age; the size of this church which the man came here and saw; and probably the most important one, the fact that Jim is taking me along and we plan to travel for three months — perhaps they figured he could leave me at home and afford to pay for his own study. But, Dr. Blakely wrote that the Board of Education (not the foundation, which might have given him $2500) was giving him $750 which he said was small but might help a little. Indeed it does, and since we have never had miracles in our lives yet we really hadn’t expected this too much and therefore aren’t torn up.”

Miracle or no miracle, Grace and Jim packed their family into the car the day after school ended. They drove to Springfield, dropped their children off and boarded a train to New York. At 11:30 AM, June 1, 1951, they sailed from Pier 2 in Hoboken aboard the SS Homeland. Grace’s mother flew up to see them off.

Grace Notes 10: Europe

For three months, Grace and Jim traveled, from Edinburgh to Vienna, Paris to Rome. By tube, by Métro, train and boat, they took in opera, theater, ballet, museums, castles and mountaintops — as well as hot cross buns, gateaux and crusty baguettes. (How could they afford it all?!)

When it was over, Jim headed to Basel for studies in theology and philosophy with the likes of Karl Barth, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger. Grace headed home to pick up the children and move in with her mother.

Throughout the summer, the three of us kids lived with Jim’s parents. Tales of those months live on: We played under a live electric line felled by a storm. We ran barefoot across wet tar. One morning, my brother poured my “Grapenuts.” They tasted funny: Gaines Meal, our grandmother determined (with the aid of their dog, Lady). There were many long drives in the country, with the classic backseat squabbles — sometimes followed by switchings from our grandfather.

Meanwhile…

June 8, 1951, shipboard letter: “Dear Big and Little O’s, Mother, Family and Kind Friends: “This is our last day in the big, wide endless ocean, for they tell us that late tomorrow afternoon, we shall see first the French, and then the English coasts. There are many Germans on board the SS Homeland, as few ships go to Germany now. We have nice table mates, two from Hamburg (now living in Staten Island), one from Austria (Hartford, Conn.), and one from Bremerhaven (Iowa). It makes one’s heart sick to hear how many are going back to Germany, hoping, by some good fortune, to get to see their relatives in the Russian Zone. Our tablemate from Austria is hoping to buy his mother out of the Sudetenland.

“There is much going on in the way of singing, eating, dancing at night, movies when the weather permits, meeting and talking with people from all over the U.S., lying in our deck chairs watching the sea when the boat dips down and back.

“There are many different ‘characters’ on this boat. About 120 students are going to Paris to study and some are quite Bohemian in dress and action. Lots of entertainment, too. Last night, a Spanish girl and an Indian (complete with turban, tunic, etc.) did a Balinese dance. I know the three little lambs will be interested in hearing this: there is a New Yorker who is quite a good dancer and singer. I had danced with him several times and found his dancing easy to follow and quite exciting. Imagine my surprise last night when he, after being asked to sing and receiving an encore request, announced: ‘Now, if my favorite dancing partner will do me the favor, I would like to dance my encore.’ And then he came to me. Jim insisted I accept, and we danced before the whole crowd — several hundred people! It was quite an experience, I can tell you.” (Jim was not – yet – a dancer.)

“There is a surprisingly large number of children on board. They make me miss our own three sweet ones. I look at your pictures and think of you every day. We miss you but know you are happy and having a good time, as we are. We seem far away from America and yet very close to our family and dear friends in Greenwood. Thank you and everyone for helping to make this trip possible. Love to all — Grace (Jim, too).”

June 16, 1951, Waldorf Hotel, Aldwych, London: “London is the most interesting place I’ve ever seen. The British Museum alone is so staggering that it leaves you wondering for hours about the long history of civilization. They have dug all over the world and preserved things from almost all civilizations known. And the concerts, ballet and plays! We saw Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier in the Festival production of ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ and tomorrow we hear the Royal Philharmonic with Sir Thomas Beecham. Monday we see ‘Parsifal’ with Kirsten Flagstad. And we saw Danilova dance Thursday.

Note to Big and Little O’s: “In London there are so many things to remind us of you. We saw London Bridge and the Tower of London yesterday. We saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and Whitehall — a most colorful ceremony with men on black horses, the men all dressed in red uniforms with polished breastplates and waving plumes. Daddy said he meant to tell you that the pennies here are as big as our half dollars! It costs three pennies (threepence, they say) to ride the bus (coach, they say), and the subway (tube, they call it) costs the same except for long distances. Some day you all can come here and marvel at it all.” (Imagine if she could have known then that her son would spend a postdoc year here.)

“You are having a good time. Please mind Grandmommy and Granddaddy so they will find things easier. We are grateful to them for helping us make this trip by taking care of you 3 little hullabaloos. Mother loves you all three so much. Wish I could hug you right now.”

July 5, 1951, Hotel Oxford & Cambridge, rue d’Alger, Paris (a 10-minute walk from where I was to live a quarter century later, where our older daughter, Laura Grace, was born — one of many grandchildren whom she would never know). “Paris — ah! It is indescribably beautiful. The buildings, the statues, the parks, trees, flowers, symmetry and again lack of it in boulevards and ‘places’– all of it is equal to all you read. We’re glad we chose to stay here 2 weeks. We have gone constantly, day and night, for 4 days and have just touched the surface. We are just at the Tuileries Gardens, and our Métro (subway) station is at this garden. It is hard not to understand French. But we can read it all right. Jim is out now exploring the Sorbonne and will end up at the Seine bookstalls. Yesterday we spent in the Louvre. I’ll go back again at 2 because I didn’t see all I wished. The Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Winged Victory are all there — not to mention other art treasures. Tonight we go to the Casino de Paris — a Folies Bergère type of musical revue, and tomorrow we have tickets for a gala night at the opera to see an Italian ballet corps and Naples Orchestra in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Giselle.’

“The French women strolling on the Champs Elysées Sunday afternoon were indeed the most fashionably dressed I’ve ever seen. They have a definite flair and a chic all their own. This goes down to much less wealthy areas. The materials are most beautiful. I’d love to buy a lot of clothes from them. Ah! for a lot of money!

“We’re pleased you 3 little lambs are doing so well. Love and kisses to all of you in our dear families, Grace and Jim.”

Bastille Day: ”You should see how we devour your letters — while we sit at a sidewalk café and drink citron pressé (lemonade) or at a restaurant table where we eat delicious fish, grilled meats, cold melons, fresh fraises (strawberries), gateaux (cakes) or wonderful patisseries (French pastries). Once we went to the Tuileries Gardens which are right across the Rue de Rivoli from us and ate cheese and crusty bread and cakes and read our mail.

“We leave Monday for Germany and then Switzerland. Tonight we shall go out to see the Bastille Day celebrations, dancing in the streets, lights, fireworks, etc. Tomorrow we shall go to services at another reformed church and then to see the Versailles Palace in the afternoon. There are museums of every kind and we’ve seen 4 different art museums alone. We saw ballet at the magnificent Opéra, which must be the most beautiful building inside in the world. And a Bach Organ Concert at St. Eustache Church was outstanding.

“We love you all and are more grateful every day for your making this trip possible for us. You are all wonderful!“

This is the last letter from Europe in the file; their travels continued through Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, with postcards from each. In Naples, in late August, Grace boarded the Saturnia for New York City. The trip home was a downer.

Grace would not see Europe again.

Grace Notes 11: Back to Reality — and to Work

Grace sailed into New York harbor on the unlovable Saturnia — one of three ships arriving that day, bearing some 3,000 passengers from Europe, her customs agent said. He also told her the Ohio State Ltd, leaving at 4 p.m., would bypass Cleveland and thus be the fastest way to get to Springfield. She headed to Grand Central Terminal.

Grace collected her children from her no-doubt-relieved in-laws and drove us to her mother’s apartment in Dallas. We would live with Grandmother until Jim returned — a date not set. What would happen after that, nobody knew. Meanwhile, Grace would enroll the older two in school, I’d stay with Grandmother and Grace would go to work. Assuming she could find a job.

Her letters to Jim blend the routine with notes of tenderness and, toward the end, unsettlement.

A September 22, 1951, letter to a shipboard friend encloses photos that “bring back our good times on that terrible boat. All I have to do to get away from the pressing demands of buying school supplies and new shoes, cooking and washing, is to look at these pictures and go floating back to our ship and smell the good air, watch the sea (calm and blue) and recall all the pleasant, diverting experiences with my boat friends. I thank you most sincerely for being so kind to me, especially for making my surroundings more enjoyable by ‘moving me up in life’ from that hot little hole down below.

“I am looking for a job now and will have to find something soon since my money is running out. The children are settled in school, but each day it seems I have to buy further supplies or new shoes or such like. But we love Dallas and are glad Mother moved here from Houston.”

October 1951 letter to Jim: “You certainly have been wonderful about writing. It does me so much good to find that what you are doing is interesting and rewarding.” She reports that “there were around 40,000 people in the Cotton Bowl last night to hear Dr. Norman V. Peale. His address was lukewarmly challenging but rather trite. I’d much rather have heard Pierre Van Paassen who preached at the 1st Unitarian church yesterday morning. I couldn’t think of any way to take the children and Mother to Sunday School and then go myself clear across the city and come back for them to boot, so I didn’t go.

“Last night as we walked out of the Cotton Bowl amid the throngs of people, into the bright lights of the state fair with the hamburger and candy floss smell, I wished very much that you were there. Then, I knew, we wouldn’t have gone immediately to catch the trolley but would have turned instead to the bright lights of the Midway and walked its long length, stopping whenever anything of interest caught our eyes.

“It’s ten to eleven now; over there it’s nearly 3. It’s hard to move across that much time, isn’t it? Have you had any good chocolate yet? And tell me in some detail about Dr. Jaspers and Karl Barth. We love you and miss you but we are glad you are doing what you want to do.”

November 1951 letter to Jim: “I know you are curious to know what I do in a firm named Nationwide Pictures. The ad appeared in the Dallas Morning News asking for a ‘Mature woman, 30–40, to manage office of motion picture production firm; typing necessary. Knowledge of books, art, music, radio, TV, etc. helpful.’” Her new boss, Mr. Carrington, “is the cameraman for Warner Bros. and Universal Newsreel for this area. He has recently bought a trailer service which makes movie advertising trailers, and this business has started in earnest with the Christmas merchants’ trailers which are being pushed right now. We are getting out around 2000 letters to theater managers all over the south.

“So I have a job partly routine, partly creative, and I like it. He paid me $35 a week to start, when I persuaded him he needed help to clear his desk of some of the pile of work which he had accumulated. At the end of that time he told me he was ‘used to me, liked my work, I was lovely to have around, so stay!’ He will now pay me $50 a week, with possible increases if this Trailer Co. proves a good thing.

“I work from 9 to 5, Saturdays to 12. I like the interest, the difference and the money. I am glad I am doing this instead of the Presbyterian Bookstore because I was rather tired of the same thing. This will satisfy the wicked streak in me for something exciting and different and pleasure-loving, maybe! The movie business is certainly different from the cloistered world of religious books, I can say that.” Hmmm…

December 1951: Dearest Jaimi, “I have gotten steadily deeper and deeper in the business. I like the work in almost every way and as far as the salary is concerned, they’ve raised it twice already and will do more, I really believe, as soon as the business warrants. I feel responsibility to it now that they have been so nice and even though I will have to leave sometime, still I can help them get the thing on its feet and going.” On the streetcar, she thinks about contributions she can make. “For example, some Special Trailers are rather rude sounding and say things like ‘The Manager insists that you be QUIET.’ Why not do it more diplomatically, I thought, and so I’ve been writing jingles, which we will illustrate with sound and animation effects.”

Then this momentous shift of topic: “Your nice long letter awaited me when I got home after the conference at First Church. I like everything in it and am so glad you don’t feel as hopeless as you did several places in Europe. I certainly agree that it’s not just on your side — I know mine has caused a lot. But heretofore, unless my memory has failed me utterly, you’ve never even admitted that it was anyone BUT me! I know the children can help us somewhat; but I really hope our own relationship can be better basically.”

March 1952, letter to Jim’s parents: “Since he’s left Basel, we may not get any more letters until he lets us know when he’s coming, as I hope he will. I don’t want the children to miss the thrill of meeting him somewhere, however he plans to come to Dallas. Doesn’t it seem wonderfully immediate to think he’s ‘on the way home’ even if it is still a matter of weeks? We are all so excited at times we can hardly be nicely calm.”

A few days later, on the back of a Nationwide Pictures flier, she typed the kind of note-to-self she used to do more often:

Self-Conscious

Being easily annoyed, or insulted or embarrassed is usually an indication of self-consciousness.

After all, nothing which occurs in the course of a day’s work need be taken ‘personally.’

Every unpleasant occurrence is only part of our regular ‘day’s work’ — to be glossed over pleasantly, and promptly cast from our memory.

There, let us not have our ‘feelings’ too prominently evident.

The next letter is dated six months later and comes from Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Jim is now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. The file has no record of when and where Jim arrived for us to greet him, or what transpired during what Grace later called the period “while we were sitting out our time in Dallas.”

Grace Notes 12: The Best of Times…

When my brother and sister and I talk of our childhood, it’s our years in Hot Springs we call the happiest. Why were they, I wonder. Had the shared pleasure of our parents’ travel in Europe somehow carried over? Did the prominence of Jim’s church, bolstered by the wealthy northerners who “wintered” there, temporarily relieve his professional itchiness? (No less a figure than Bill Clinton, in his memoirs, spoke of “Reverend Overholser…a remarkable man, who produced two remarkable daughters.”) Or was it Hot Springs itself, an unpindownable place, offering whatever you happened to hanker for. If by chance you think “slow lane” when you hear “moved to Arkansas,” read David Mariness’s delicious portrait of this singular town. That’ll cure you.

 As Maraniss says, “Hot Springs gets you somewhere.” What it got us, Grace’s letters show, was many good times and very busy lives:

November 17, 1952, letter to her mother: “The leaves are fast fading now. Yesterday we came back from church over the mountain and saw only a few reds with dull browns. But we can see more of the city now as we ride along above it, and that is interesting, We took the children for a hike to one of the highest points here last Thursday. We went to the Mason’s Pancake shop first for out-of-this-world pancakes for breakfast. The views from the hike later were outstanding, too, and our whole day proved a memorable one. I started picking grasses in various shades and the others became interested so that now we have an arrangement of dried things on our black coffee table in shades of brown, red and yellow, set off by a moss-encrusted branch in a different shape and several beautiful rocks. It looks like fall has come to our room, the children say.

“Our basement is now fixed up in to a sort of playroom-den and we even served enchiladas to the Earl Greens down there Saturday night. He had come over to help fix our sink and we asked them to stay. It was a lot of fun. I got the tortillas canned here and also the enchilada sauce, Ashley’s from El Paso. Not as good as fresh, but better than no Mexican food at all. (Remember, she was a Texan.)

“Yesterday we had Marie Thomas from Blytheville who is here getting the arthritis cures and treatments. I cooked a pork loin roast Saturday and then Sunday morning fixed sweet potatoes and hominy puff and put the automatic control on in the oven. When we got home at 12:40, the dinner was done except for cooking the limas and making gravy.”

April 1953: “Jim is heart, soul, mind and strength buried in the formation of this new church in South Hot Springs. It is an outstanding piece of work which he has done in organizing it. We are giving 48 fine people, every one an outstanding leader and citizen, and there are 20 other charter members gained from that section of town.

“I am one of a team of 5 who will teach 4 Vacation Church School Institutes on four consecutive days. Jim and the children will manage, he insists, so I accepted. You can see how much Jim is doing when you know that not only did he insist that I go but he also volunteered our car. I’m thankful he has bought three tires — not new, but very good, he says.

“Today he is in Anderson for Presbytery meeting. Friday he preaches at the Synagogue. Thursday we see our star perform [N is the lead in her junior-high play]. Saturday we are invited to the lake home of one of our members to spend the day away from a telephone; she feels Jim has been working too hard. Monday I go with the Cub Scouts for a picnic at the Gorge, then to the Civic Music Supper meeting at 5:30. Tuesday is luncheon meeting of Women of the Church; that night Jim teaches the Scouts in our basement. And of course Wednesday night prayer service and choir practice and…need I go on?!”

September 1953: “With which shall I begin of the O’s? Perhaps the smallest. Geneva started to kindergarten September 8. She goes at 8:30 each morning and we are in a car pool. Jim picks her up and brings her home for our lunch. Yesterday, she said to me in utter seriousness when I went in to help her find a book to rest, ‘Mother, I believe kindergarten is really worth it; I believe it is.’ Last week on Saturday N had four people in the back yard playing badminton; A and 7 boys were in the side yard playing football; Geneva and 3 little girls were in the play house cleaning it out and playing ‘house.’”

Money remained a worry. Jim was considering trading in their car for a newer used one, but the deal fell through. Grace wrote: “The Lord was looking after us all right. The car had already been sold while Jim was polishing up ours. When we found out the next day how much N’s dental work was going to cost ($600), we knew we couldn’t have paid $25 for the piano, $27.50 for the refrigerator, $27.50 for N’s dentist, $13.50 for Geneva’s kindergarten and $18 for N’s music, and had anything left to make car payments. So — we hope this thing holds together until three years are up (and N’s dental work is finished). And by that time she will be ready for college practically!

“Jim leaves this Saturday for a week’s special services in Monroe, La. The invitation itself is indicative of their attitude toward his preaching since it was in Monroe that he preached twice while we were ‘sitting out our time in Dallas.’ It will be a stimulating experience for him and then, he realistically points out, it will enable us to pay some of the first-of-the-month items! Jim has gotten to be quite a favorite invocation speaker for conventions. Last week it was the State Telephone Convention; today it was the Arkansas Automobile Association; and then he’ll have the teachers to pray for.”

In 1955, Grace and Jim flew to Grosse Pointe to be wined and dined by Ralph and Teena Wilson (one of those wealthy couples who came for the baths each winter). Grace had the time of her life. Jim couldn’t quit thinking about how many pounds of bacon, pairs of shoes or income tax payments could have been bought by all the lavish spending.

In 1955, Grace was elected president of the local YWCA and sent as its delegate to the national convention in New York. The Y’s resources were scant, but friends and relatives pitched in — including the Wilsons. Ralph sent “show money.” Teena sent high-fashion hand-me-downs: The likes of “a pink and black silk linen suit trimmed with black velvet by Milgrim, a Hattie Carnegie black raw shantung.” Grace’s flight out was “bumpy but fast.” She left Hot Springs at 8:34 AM and arrived at LGA at 5:30: Hot Springs to Little Rock to Memphis, change of planes, then Nashville, Knoxville, Washington and New York. (Fast?!) Sporting Teena’s fancy duds, Grace lit up the town. She attended Y events at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Radio City Music Hall and the UN. On her own, she saw a Steichen exhibit at MoMA and a Japanese film “that had taken Cannes by storm.” She ate at the Stage Door Deli and went to Bus Stop, Pajama Game, Teahouse of the August Moon and (courtesy of some ticket taker who let her in to standing room only at the very last minute) topped it off with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with the original cast starring Burl Ives as Big Daddy.

Back in Hot Springs, Grace was starring in a community theater production. After her first performance, she wrote to her mother: “ I wish, wish you had been here. I believe I can say that I have never done anything I had more real satisfaction in doing, and I received far more compliments than for anything I ever tried to do.”

She was already looking forward to her next role, in Anastasia. But the good times in Hot Springs would end soon.

Grace Notes 13: Things Fall Apart

Hot Springs set a high bar; the Memphis years fell far short. Grace missed Hot Springs — its beauty, its diverse community offerings and her starring roles in them. Jim was growing steadily unhappier — with his work, with his life, with his wife. Grace struggled to find her way in the marriage, resentment melding with efforts to understand. Her determined hopefulness helped. So did increasing success in her work.

In February 1958, she writes to her friend Mary Louise that the family’s upcoming move to Memphis was “rather sudden,” but that Jim had been “so anxious to move, feeling for about a year that it would be best to make a change.” In a letter to my sister, now a college freshman, Grace regrets that N. won’t be able to come home to Hot Springs again. “I am sorry, and I ache inside for you and A. and for myself, too, because I love this place and my life here, except for the misery your father has gone through. He seems to think he will be happier and looks forward to ‘a new start,’ and I hope it will work out as he imagines.”

Two months after the move, Grace writes to a Hot Springs friend: “To the unspoken question between us about how things are, I can only say, somewhat better, somewhat worse, sometimes the same. Enigma? Well, that’s what my life was there, wasn’t it? However, I have become more and more convinced that the Lord will work things out.”

As for Jim’s new church — Shady Grove Presbyterian, “At the installation service the minister who gave the charge to Jim avoided the usual clichés and admonished Jim to ‘do something which we all have to do and remember: whenever the going gets rough, whenever a committee or session or diaconate committee or any kind of meeting seems to go in a different direction from what you think is right; whenever people are disagreeing about building or equipping or running the church — at these and countless other times, don’t lose your temper.’”

Grace adds, “His mother was here and she told him the next morning that he should ‘do as that preacher told you to do — don’t get mad so quickly.’”

In a November 1958 letter to Grandmother, Grace writes about some changes she has gone through: “I believe the most important difference now is that I am no longer on the defensive. I can enjoy and appreciate Jim when he is normal and himself; when he is possessed by these demons and tormented by self-doubt and misery, he is not himself. Although I am no angel, I assure you, I have been helped to be far more objective.”

Grace hears a speaker at a downtown event and notes to herself that he helped her “in getting my feelings straightened out. I know how I feel about some fundamental positions in life, but some of them have been buffeted and torn and ridiculed until I had more or less lost my props. Now I can recapture them, but with a difference — a maturity, I hope, born through experience. And no need to apologize or equivocate. They are right for me. No reason to be unyielding or show a lack of understanding for a difference, but just to hold on fast to what I believe.”

She visits my sister at Wellesley, stopping on the way home to see a friend in New York. They went to the Frick and took in “Wild Strawberries.” On Broadway, she saw “Raisin in the Sun” with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and “J.B.” with Christopher Plummer and Basil Rathbone. On the subway, she “admired the clothes and makeup of many attractive people, intermingled with workingmen, sales clerks, newsboys and people-people.” It was, she wrote, “a real New York time.”

Back home, she writes the two grandmothers: “All the kids made all As this past semester except for a B in conduct from Geneva, our thoroughly normal child.” (Now there’s a dubious honor — one that Grace repeatedly confers on me.)

That “great god and worry — money” shadows them. Her letters are full of buying new retreads, repairing punctures, mufflers about to fall off. As for Jim, “He has been more depressed and low than usual and has threatened more often to leave, saying he couldn’t stand it any longer. It’s always ‘if you will change and do better — or rather now it is ‘if you had changed and done better and been willing to submit and be a wife several years ago, we could have made it.’” Men who are not as smart as he have done better, the same men he went to school with have bigger churches. He has difficulties with the session. He says, “Well, if it happens again, I’m just going to resign and you’ll have to take over yourself. I thought of running away but I’ve decided I’ll at least resign; I’ll do it because of my health and I’ll move the furniture anywhere you want it and then you’re on your own.”

She says since her trip that fall she has faced the situation with less emotionalism, tried to quit running away from “conversations in which he indicts me. Either I listen with some sympathy or else try to point out something he has overlooked. “

In October 1960, Mother is offered $4500 to write a series of primary grade church-school books and teachers’ guides. (Jim is making $6,000 a year.) She accepts. Subsequent letters are full of news of this project, how it consumes and engages her.

She offers Dad the money she’d be making from the first unit “to sit down and write something every day” and to buy a ticket to New York and Boston and go to father-daughter day at Wellesley. He says he has “nothing to write, I’m drained, a few years ago I could have, you have ruined anything I could have done.”

May 1960: Grace writes that Jim “has applied to teach in Baghdad, and is now writing to colleges in CA and to Trinity in San Antonio, wanting to teach philosophy. Although I can hardly face another move and feel sick at heart at what may be taking place, I realize that it may be best for him to get out of the ministry because he has never been more miserable.”

April 1961: “Jim’s trip to Ohio was tiring and he came back with a cold and a discontent which has accompanied him all week. He preached a wonderful lecture-sermon today on ‘The Authority of the Holy Scriptures.’ Sometimes when he feels the worst he comes out with the most thoughtful and deepest sermons.”

July 1961: Jim has written 50 schools and colleges and is now talking with one in San Jose about a temporary one-year job. He wants to go by himself. He insists Grace stay there or wherever she wants to go and get a job and “do your writing too of course.” (She says he thinks she can do that after dinner.) “I think it unwise to begin looking for anything until after he has something signed and sealed and I hope and feel I can take and face whatever emerges. He feels he must get away from this church and family responsibilities and from me. I am faced with an impenetrable wall whenever I try to get through to him because he is convinced that I am responsible for almost all of his misery and unhappiness.

”This summer for me has been a most unusual one. I have had more happiness and more unhappiness during these months than at any time I can remember. I find myself searching for deep meanings, going out to meet situations, staying sensitive to what is happening and have a great awareness of life itself and of my own part and responsibility in it than I have heretofore had. Life is so full of many things, life calls to us to live, and I believe that this is part of the meaning of life under the Lordship of Christ — abundant living, fully tragic, happy, deep, searching, moving out.”

The 50 colleges said no. Jim wished he could retire, wished he had money to get away, wished he could get a job in Europe, wished the world recognized his ability and fine mind. He spoke with church officers who talked him out of resigning until my sister had left for Oxford and my brother for Vanderbilt — their “respective fall beginnings.” In August 1961, Grace writes, Jim is “feeling lower than a worm,” but preaching fine sermons. “He is preaching his own search.”

The following year, Jim moves to Jamestown, North Dakota. Grace would not be going.

Grace Notes 14: On the Move Again

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 a 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.

Grace Notes 15: The Calm Before

My siblings, their spouses, Grace, Jim and his mother, and me

We remaining three Overholsers moved to Laurinburg, North Carolina, in the late summer of 1964. Dad had taken a job teaching philosophy at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. I was a junior in high school. Grace was able to go back to her previous work, instructing Sunday School teachers in the region.

Grace writes from Laurinburg that all the family gathered for Christmas 1964. She especially loved the caroling: “I enjoy this part of our family life more than almost any other. It is so GOOD to hear someone playing the piano and different voices singing.” While North Dakota’s Christmas dinner had been pheasant and wild duck, North Carolina’s was rock lobster tails and shrimp-stuffed crab. Friends and colleagues came over to meet their family, and Grace speaks of her pride and delight afterward upon hearing compliments about their children.

In March 1965, Grace reports that she has taken a job at Laurinburg High School, teaching advanced English to 80 students, grades 9–12. (I’m one of them.) The teacher who had planned this new program was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Grace was brought in as her replacement. She describes the teaching as “absorbing, challenging, exciting — and something that never stops! So far I have done nothing much except work constantly, only stopping to sleep. For days our breakfast dishes go unwashed. We eat out at night. Geneva cleans the house and does all her ironing.”

In a letter to her wealthy benefactor-friends in Grosse Point, Michigan, she writes: “ Our lives here are busy and full of education, mainly. Jim is making a good teacher, just as he did in Jamestown — though he hates the every-morning 8 o’clock classes and committee meetings and paper grading. I don’t believe he will ever unpack and live life where he is at the moment, but he certainly does contribute a lot to others in spite of his own inability to accept his life and himself and what he has.”

In April 1965 Grace goes to Washington to “assemble with other U of Texas journalism graduates to tour the White House and be with our fellow-student Lady Bird.” The first lady was at the ranch and LBJ was off viewing terrible flood conditions. But “that loss didn’t dampen my enthusiasm” because what she wanted most was to see her former journalism professor “and renew acquaintance with newspaper people who are doing interesting things and whom I knew at school.” Liz Carpenter, then Lady Bird’s press secretary, hosted. “We went through the White House in a way I’d never dreamed of doing.”

Grace sat on Lincoln’s bed, enjoyed the superb views of Washington and relished the “huge Texas shrimp.’ After dinner, they adjourned to the library to hear their professor, DeWitt Reddick, “talk about the writing most people are doing.” He was kind enough to introduce Grace, “tying in her church curriculum writing with her former responsibility as Church Editor of the Daily Texan.” Then it was on to the National Press Club for a drink. Grace chatted with “an editor of Time, two writers from the National Observer, a top advertising man from New York, a correspondent for the New York Times and DeWitt. Sigh.”

Another letter to Teena Wilson in Grosse Pointe: Grace will soon send her a copy of Jim’s newly published book, “A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion.” While the subject is challenging, “he writes easily and clearly and I think you will get a lot of it since you are interested in the very things he deals with. He tried to show that religion must have meaning for our whole lives and that modern Christianity must recognize the values given us by music, art, philosophy, drama, other literary forms, psychology and similar contributions of mankind. We must not remain an isolated church, isolated from where man is, where he lives, where he is in this century.”

Grace writes to A., who is to be married the following summer, to say that he should buy his fiancée a ring (with the money she and Jim are giving him as a graduation gift). “She is thoughtful to agree with you about the WISDOM of saving money, but I can say with passion that she will wear your ring with feelings far deeper than mere wisdom.”

Next, a report that I am in Cuernavaca that summer of 1965, living with a local family and studying Spanish, Mexican art and history, archaeology and guitar. I had traveled by bus with Dad, by way of New Orleans, switching to the Azteca train at Nuevo Laredo. I would be flying from Mexico City to Memphis for A’s wedding in mid-August at Dad’s former church. The preacher who succeeded him had generously invited our family to move back into the manse for the occasion.

In the fall of 1965, Grace reports that they are “finally replacing the Black Chariot” — the ’55 Chrysler that had carried our family on trips to Mexico, Florida and the Keys, and throughout the West and New England. They bought a used Plymouth. Mom put “all the last of my writing money into it as down payment, $550.”

Grace is teaching again this school year and “I like it better than anything I have ever done except the writing.” Her seniors had each chosen a country whose literature they were “to read extensively in, including examples of all literary types.” One student wrote that he had dreaded the idea of this intensive study, some of the reading was hard, and he had had to make himself keep on. “But now I have an entirely different understanding of people I had known nothing about and of literature I didn’t know existed. I intend to read in other areas now.”

Spring comes, and N. is expecting Grace’s first grandchild, due in early summer. Grace faces a scheduling dilemma. She is now pursuing a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina and hoping to attend two summer sessions in Chapel Hill. She also wanted to be in New Haven with N. and the new baby, but snow days have extended the teaching year. And, at the end of the summer, she “should belatedly behave as a proper mother” and help Geneva get ready for college. Grace concludes: “I am too busy, but I love learning and I’m enjoying life and I hope you will all forgive me for neglecting each one of you.”

Neglected or not, I set off for my camp-counselor job in the mountains near Asheville — with only a slight premonition of how dramatically our lives would change that summer.

Grace Notes 16: The End of the Marriage

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.

Grace Notes 17: Possibilities Abound

After Grace and Jim separated and I left for college, she continued to teach her Advanced English classes at the local high school and to work on her masters during the summer. But new paths were opening quickly. In the next few years, Grace would change jobs, buy a house and avidly pursue her interest in Black literature. If this new life had its challenges, it was filled with the personal satisfactions she had hoped for.

In December 1966 Grace writes of a visit to her mother in Dallas and then attendance at a convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Houston. The Astrodome wowed her: “There never was such a place! It looks like the world would look if you could see it all at once.” In a February 1967 letter to a friend she says that she hopes to get a fellowship to complete her masters the next summer. In closing, she dwells on her delight in being a grandmother: “Isn’t it fun to have a grandson? Stephan is a doll. Wish you could see how long and how bright he is!”

In May, Graces writes of a professional conundrum. She has told her principal that she can’t live on her current salary but found the response less than encouraging. Meanwhile, a new community college is being established in Wilkesboro and they have interviewed her for a position there “in the area of humanities, which I want to move into, providing it is literature-based.” The salary is nearly twice what she is making. While she is considering this, St. Andrews, the local college where Jim had taught, offers her “a dual position, assistant dean of student life, and a chance to help plan and teach in a new humanities course.” Then, at last, the high school principal weighs in with a raise.

“Now — what do I do? I have tried to just live each day and yet all of these things have suddenly come my way. I am still strongly Presbyterian-oriented enough to ask: Why, and what does this mean in my life?”

Grace took the St. Andrews job. She hated to leave the classroom teaching she’d so loved, but the salary remained inadequate. To mark her departure, Grace’s students pooled their resources and bought her a Steuben Glass whale. Her junior class had chosen to read the unabridged version of Moby Dick. Some were waylaid by Melville at first, “but soon everyone was as excited about the book as I am. And now I have a beautiful, perfect crystal whale to remind me of our exhilarating learning experience and of my generous, affectionate 78 Special English students.”

In September 1967, she writes that “the new work is so different that I am not able to tell you whether I like or am just doing it. Perhaps the best sign will come tomorrow when I get my first salary check and see that I am finally making enough to live on.” She is spending the great bulk of her time not on teaching but on “deaning,” which she enjoys far less. On the other hand, she has gotten to see her grandson twice in two months. “He is strong and active and altogether delightful to be around. I can feel him and want to hug him right now.”

In the fall of 1967, she buys a house. She writes a friend: “At first I was horrified at the prospect, but finally after talking with two wise and able business men and friends, I realized that buying a certain type of house was an investment as well as actually cheaper than paying the exorbitant rent I was paying.’ (Jim and Grace, having spent most of their married lives in church-provided homes, had never owned a house.)

She has a rich and compelling network of friends and colleagues in Chapel Hill — including Reynolds Price and longtime journalism professor Walter Spearman — and she writes to a friend that she has been invited to “two cocktail parties with the journalism, radio, theater, motion-picture, television crowd.” In August of 1968, Grace is awarded her master of arts in teaching degree from the University of North Carolina. She feels proud of her very high grades, and welcomes my calling her, in a letter from my summer job at Glacier National Park, “my scholar-mother.”

Over the next several years, the letters grow sparse. Surely she is talking with all of us by phone more now than before. Also, she is devotedly pursuing her longtime interest in African-American studies. She creates and teaches a new course at St. Andrews: English 203, Black American Literature. The 25-item booklist is a treasure, and I have folders full of her lecture notes on Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin, Jean Toomer, Alex Haley, Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, June Jordan, Ralph Ellison and more. But it was the work of Richard Wright that particularly compelled her. It was a thrilling moment when Grace was invited to a University of Iowa Afro-American Institute summer seminar in July 1971: “Richard Wright: His work, his world and his influence.” Ralph Ellison gave the introductory lecture.

Earlier in 1971, while I was in graduate school at Northwestern, Grace had come up to research Wright’s years in Chicago. Subsequently, she went with my sister-in-law to gather information on the years Wright spent in Memphis. This research culminated in a journal article that is cited online as still “the best piece of first-hand research” on Wright’s years in Memphis. “Richard Wright’s Memphis” was published in the 1972 Wright issue of “New Letters.”

Reading the article’s ending, it is easy to see why Grace felt so drawn to Wright: “However limiting and hostile [his roots in Delta soil] had been, because he felt deeply enough and was conscious of his own possibilities, he was ‘full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others could not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.’”

Grace Notes 18: “I Want to Do So Many Things”

If Grace’s life in these years was full of remarkable developments — buying a house, completing her masters, changing jobs — she was soon to add another. On May 28, 1971, she married again. William D. “Dub” White was a longtime friend and faculty colleague at St. Andrews. Grace wore the blue chiffon gown I’d worn to my brother’s wedding. Dub wore a tux his sister had given him, first owned by her late husband, Jim Reeves — the velvet-voiced Gentleman Jim.

In July, fresh off their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, Grace flew to Iowa City for the much-anticipated seminar on Richard Wright, whose work so compelled her and whose life she was researching.

Then, in August, another development: Grace was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy.

Woven through the coming months would be the medical challenges and the work she was determined to do despite them. Grace would write to us that she was feeling better; then something would appear in her hip. She’d say she’d been walking with a stylish cane but no longer needed it. Then a lesion would show up in her shoulder.

In September, she wrote a friend: “I am teaching two classes but doing very little counseling until I feel stronger. Each day, almost, I see an improvement, but it seems slow when I want to do so many things and all I feel like doing is lying down after my classes.”

Later that month, a letter from the academic press at the University of Missouri about her proposed article on Richard Wright brought stirring news: “What you describe — the entire route of it — sounds most exciting. In fact, your ‘Retracing Wright’s Footsteps in Memphis’ is perhaps our most exciting possibility to date (and most original). And I think that you are surely gallant, in view of your illness, to push on with the project.”

In letter after letter that fall, Grace did indeed push on, searching out people who had known Wright in Memphis, pinning down addresses where he’d lived, determining where he had worked. Then, in an October 1971 letter to the National Council of Teachers of English, she asked with great regret to be relieved of her responsibility as a discussion leader on curricular innovation at their upcoming convention in Las Vegas. She was due back at Duke for treatment.

In January of 1972 for “winter term” she and Dub went to Nashville. Grace was doing research at Fisk University for a possible textbook on African-American writers. I came from my cub-reporting job in Colorado Springs to join them, bearing clippings. She wrote to a friend, “You would be really proud of G’s newspaper work — by the quality of her writing, by her beat (City Hall) and by her special features.”

In a March 1972 letter to me, Grace writes that she is very much looking forward to seeing my sister and her family during spring break. Afterward, Dub and she will take the train to New York. “Classes resume April 4. That week on Friday I return to Duke and again the following Wed-Fri. By that time maybe changes of some kind will be observable.”

A letter to a colleague reports that “I have not walked on crutches since I returned to teach the spring term. But my shoulder developed a small lesion and I had to go back every day for a week to take cobalt in that area. I return to Duke this week. The shoulder trouble has evidently not cleared up but seems to have spread under the arm and in certain spots across my back. Now the possibility of cancer appearing looms larger in my mind than it once did. I will be relieved to find out something definitive this week.”

Later in the spring, she wrote to a friend: “I am getting along very well although I take 5 lethal anti-cancer drugs daily and/or weekly. You would be interested to know that these are drugs developed during World War II for use in chemical warfare. Isn’t there an ironic poetic justice in this? Of course they are a shot in the dark and whether they will contain my cancer is knowable only through time.”

She adds that they plan to leave St. Andrews right after commencement for Nashville, where she has a grant to pursue more research at Fisk for her proposed textbook. They expect to be in England in July for a meeting Dub is to be part of.

Next in the letters file appears one of those periodic reflections Grace wrote to herself over the years — a rather curious one. It must have been written shortly after her marriage to Dub, though it’s not dated: “As I look at myself today, I find I can gain perspective by looking at the four men who have influenced what I now am. My father, a large, warm, much-liked, outspoken native Texan gave me a sense of pride in who I am and a challenge as to what I might become… My former husband, father of my three children, was brought up in a home conditioned to ‘the woman’s place is…’. My son: Our relationship is a very good one — warm, honest reaching-out, open. For many years it was tense. I am thankful he had the strength to stand up for who he was and that I was able finally to see that I was hurting our relationship because of my own lack of clarity about his needs and my expectations… My present husband, who accepts my abilities, and we share all aspects of achievements.

“As I think of my future life, I do so now in a freer way — free from the restrictions imposed by society or from my own interpretation of them. I understand now that my own self-concepts were both positively and negatively affected by men, and that I have both lost and gained myself.”

In her last letter to me, Grace proudly enclosed what she called “THE article” — her deeply researched piece on Richard Wright’s Memphis years. “If you can find time, take 15 minutes to snap out a critical response. I’m interested in your evaluation because I respect your knowledge and skill, and also because I think this is written as a journalist rather than as a literary scholar.”

“My thoughts go out to you often, hoping you are finding your way through the things we talked about. I am happy that you have such a productive job; that is one of the most important things in life, I know.“

By early summer, changes had indeed become observable, and not for the better. After a long hospital stay, Grace asked the good doctors at Duke to send her home — along with a great deal of pain medication.

She died on Sunday evening, July 16, 1972. We were all at her bedside.

Her funeral, at Laurinburg Presbyterian Church, brought the little North Carolina town together — high school and college, black and white, young and old. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” followed upon “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” The minister ended his remarks by saying, “When grief is done, and we are freer than we are today, have a party, and invite people you might not usually think to invite. Make them welcome, and give them a chance to experience the grace inherent in such an act and the love which transcends lifestyle, appearance, age, politics, race, education and station in life. That will honor, and that would have pleased, Grace.”

She was 58 years old. She’d had just six years of that new life she’d struggled to reach — along with the rich, complicated years before.

On the eve of her marriage to Jim, Grace had written a long list of goals she had set for herself, concluding: “These are the things I want in my life. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

Damned if she hadn’t done it.

Grace Notes 19: Jim

Grace Notes is, evidently enough, a compilation of Grace’s writings about her life. It says a lot about Jim — from her point of view. Its truth stands — their marriage failed each of them rather miserably — but the Jim it gives us is sorely incomplete. He was an engaging, wise and loving man, and I am eager to share a richer picture of him.

It’s true that our father was restless and unhappy for much of his adulthood; perhaps he was indeed depressed. Certainly he felt unfulfilled and underappreciated. He grew up poor in a tiny Middle Tennessee town with parents of limited emotional scope. He seemed unable to feel at peace in his work or in his marriage. He was always questing for something else, something different.

And yet — he brought countless gifts to his three children. He gave us a hunger for learning, a yen for adventure, a love of music. Every trip we’ve taken, every book we’ve read, each time we’ve hiked or camped, gone to a symphony or an opera, we have followed his lead.

He made us think about ourselves in a wider world: “Think of this,” he’d say, out of the blue. “You are a contemporary of Arturo Toscanini!” His was a questioning spirit but also a deeply faithful one. After one trip to Europe, he wrote me: “When I looked up at the spires of great, 1000-year-old churches, I had the feeling that there is a profound and eternal essence of Christianity and somehow it will appear in a new and better form. You two, go to church some Sunday and pray that you may be given a little glimpse of something noble and strengthening.”

Also: He was funny. He made ridiculous puns, often based on a twist of some place name. Returning one Sunday from preaching in Latta, S.C., he told Mother and me that he’d been sharing the Word with the Latta day saints. He would laugh at these absurdities himself so hard that his fair skin turned pink and his blue eyes watered.

Surely his “demons,” as Grace called them, made him at least as unhappy as they made her, perhaps more so. Yet, even amidst the darkness and struggle, he preached fine, thought-provoking sermons and wrote beautiful, moving prayers. He married and buried, and visited the sick, with loving pastoral care.

And here is a wonderful thing: Jim lived another 14 years after our parents’ separation, and those 14 years were filled with happiness. HE was happy. Not long after the marriage ended, Jim went courting. Margaret was a lovely girl he’d known in college. A widow. They married. She had means. The two of them put those means to good use. He retired. They bought nice homes, took cruises, traveled the world. She taught him to dance and to savor a good wine. She handled him with whimsy and humor.

Jim cared deeply for his children and for his nine grandchildren, all of whom he was lucky enough to know — or at least to hold (his youngest, our Nell, loudly inquired at his funeral: “Why did they put Granddaddy in that box?!”). He wrote wonderful letters to all of us, his script running up one side of the sheet rather than requiring another. The two of them visited us all regularly, in our moves across the country and abroad.

At the end of my 2½ years in Africa and traveling through Europe, he met me in a Munich hotel on my birthday — the first familiar person I’d seen in all that time. He’d bought a little potted plant to put on the breakfast table.

In the end, he and Margaret moved to a home at the base of North Mountain in Hot Springs. They joined the church he’d led so many years before. He raised tomatoes and collard greens and envied us the rich soil of our Iowa garden. (One Christmas, we brought him some as a gift.) He read history and biography, wrote a novel (unpublished), kept up his supply ministry, listened to the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera and walked, most days, on North Mountain.

On the night he died, at age 75, we were all with him.

Years afterward, Margaret came to our home in D.C. for Thanksgiving, as she often did. She had remarried and brought her new husband. At some point during dinner, when David and I were in the kitchen, she slipped away from the table to join us. It was clear she had something to say. This was it: “Geneva, your daddy was the love of my life.”

I can surely understand why.

Grace Notes addendum

Over the years, evidence of Grace’s impact on others has  come my way. Here are a few examples:

On Grace’s teaching:

A former student of Grace’s at Laurinburg High School, Susan Parker King, published a piece in Nashville’s Tennessean on Oct. 27, 1994, describing Grace as someone who “knew how to cultivate the broader mind in us.”

“The day our class read the chapter of Moby Dick entitled ‘Clam Chowder,’ we walked into our classroom to the aroma of steaming clam chowder, and we not only read but also experienced Melville’s description of this hearty concoction.  She had a genuine gift for making literature come alive to the student.”

Noting that “Mrs. O” added to their classroom experience by taking advantage of the resources of the local college, King writes: “After a field trip there to view an art exhibit, we wrote essay interpretations of the paintings we found most intriguing.

“We were encouraged (but not required) to attend an informational ‘teach-in’ on Vietnam when the war there was beginning to escalate, and a seminar on civil rights the year our school was integrated.  We dabbled in James Baldwin and Norman Mailer and John Updike, untrod territory in our community.

“In current events, she opened the door in our middle-class minds to view inner-city rage and despair and the poverty of third-world countries.

“For me personally, she nurtured a budding sense of social consciousness and the seeds of independent thinking that would set my course in life. She never preached, but her faith was one lived out in actions, in a gentle acceptance of all peoples and in fostering our responsibility towards one another, how alike, or how different.”

King writes of Grace’s children and their accomplishments, and then adds: “Lesser known are the rest of her ‘children,’ each of us that she taught in those three years.  We are the social workers, teachers, and doctors of today, many of us now spread out far from our little North Carolina town.  We are the seeds sown from her hands.

“My greatest regret is my failure to tell her how much I loved her and how grateful I’ll always be for her presence in my life. She died shortly after I graduated from college, but I hope that somehow she reads this and knows.”

Another of her former high-school students, John Bullard, emailed me in 2006:  “I just want you to know what an impact your mother had on me. She really pushed me to become a better writer, to explore literature, and to not be so reserved. I absolutely loved her class…I attended her funeral, sitting by myself and really missing her.”

On her Sunday School books:

In a delightful online tribute https://www.graceiseverywhere.net/2013/10/02/the-story-of-gods-love/ a blogger writes of one of Grace’s Sunday School publications: “This is my favorite Sunday School book of all time.  I liked it so much, I took it home and read it over and over again. I’ve hung onto it for over 40 years. It begins like this:

‘Did you know that the Bible is one story–the story of God’s love for people like you and me?

The stories in this book are from the Bible and are a part of that wonderful story. They are about people of long ago who knew God’s love and answered his call to come into his family and belong to him.’

“I’m not sure why I loved this book so much. I had other Bible story books at home–and I read them too–but they did not occupy the same place in my affections as The Story of God’s Love.

“When I read it again as an adult, I recognize Grace McSpadden Overholser’s talent for writing dramatic narrative and conversation which captured my imagination. I’m sure Polly Bolian’s illustrations were important too because they conveyed character and emotion. (Bolian is a well-known illustrator of Nancy Drew books which I was also reading about this time.)”

On her work on African-American literature:

From the book, “The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright,” by Michel Fabre, translated from the French by Isabel Barzun, comes this affirmation of her work: “On Wright’s Memphis years, the best piece of first-hand research remains ‘Richard Wright’s Memphis’ by Grace McSpadden White.  It was originally published in the 1972 Wright issue of ‘New Letters,’ edited by Robert Farnsworth and David Ray.”

My sister funded a seminar room and archival fellow in Grace’s name at the University of North Carolina, which Grace had so enjoyed attending in pursuing her masters degree. A collection of her papers, including those in preparation for her Richard Wright essay, is available for researchers there. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/05424/