By way of introduction:
My maiden name is Mary Susan Warley. My grandmother for whom I was named was Susie Sledge Douglass. She married Edwin Warley Jr. and they lived on the Warley Farms until my father was old enough for Old Shell Road School whereupon they moved to Gladys Avenue and little Edwin Warley III became a Mobile resident. He loved this town, for the most part, but something happened to make it a distant memory in the 1930's. The man who was named for Grandpoppa Warley, who was proclaimed in the New York Times the Cabbage King of America, became a man so destitute he had moved his family to Columbia, Mississippi to operate a canning plant for the wealthier family members, Proal Dorgan and Hiram Taylor among them.
For a time it was good to be in Mississippi, even though Edwin was working too hard and stubbornly refused to heed his doctors warnings. His death in May 1941 was the turning point for my once proud grandmother who then became for all time the widow Susie Warley. That she survived on social security and lived on that plus an income from the American Red Cross is the stuff of legend. She was a force in my life and the daily life of Columbia, Mississippi. She arrived like clockwork to Mrs. Rawls Round Table at 11:00 and twice a week drove to the local coca-cola bottling plant to pick up a case of coke to keep in the door of her refrigerator. She had a lilting laugh and a charming smile, and she flirted with all the men as if it was nothing at all. And it probably was nothing at all to her, because her elitist upbringing meant that she would never marry a Mississippi man and never did marry again.
She had lived a life in Mobile that was more high society than not. Her father, Robert Leroy Douglass, was a prominent member of all the most important society groups in Mobile, and had married a woman who was much younger and a cousin. The complications therein were not the only twists in my grandmother's life, however. She had the good fortune to be delivered by Dr. Sledge on his birthday, giving her the awkward middle name of Sledge. I would never have understood any of this had I not had the privilidge of meeting John Sledge very early in my return to the bay area. By then his book Cities of Slience became a road map to the family plots and stories contained there which still fascinate me to this day.
My father had a younger sister named Barbara, who grew taller than he by more than four inches. Barbara was an imposing figure to anyone but to my father she was just kid sis. He related stories to her while shaving that she would turn into papers and English assignments and their lively banter back and forth continued throughout their lives. My grandmother, like many in her day, insisted on daily letters from her sons and daughters as well as her grandchildren. The upshot of that is that I have a legacy of letters that is probably not equalled in any family anywhere. As it happened, they were almost all saved for me and I've become the scribe of the family history.
Which brings me to the wonderful family that is Christ Church. My grandmother and all her siblings were marched into their pew every Sunday without fail. Stairsteps they were. Brother was oldest, then Albert, then Harry, after which came Amelie, Susie, and Evelyn. Bringing up the rear a full ten years after that was Charles Hervey Douglass, who bested them all by becoming a priest in the Episcopal church. I've always heard people say that I see the world thorough rose colored glasses, and I know now where that comes from. Anyone who has ever stood in the Chapel of Christ Church will know that the windows on the side are rose tinted glass and that must be one of the most comforting places in my world. I sense my grandmother's faith, misguided though it was, and I wonder about her childhood. Her tutelage under music teachers, priests and others here in Mobile. She was staunchly anti-catholic, which was profoundly confusing to me, and resulted in one of the most distasteful utterances of my life when on November 22, 1963 my classmate informed me that the president had been shot, and I said, simply, "good". I will never understand how that sentiment began nor how anyone could feel that they are both Christian and hatemongers, but I find it instructive that there were these two forces at work. And I find it still happening. All over the place. Everywhere I turn.
I didn't live in this area for a very long time because of the tragedy of my mother's death in my senior year in high school. By the time I did come back a second tunnel had supplanted my grandmother's childhood home at 258 1/2 St. Emmanuel Street, and she'd been living with my aunt in California for years. She wanted to show me where her home was, but there was no way to find it then, and I know it was horrifying to her to have that last vestige of her childhood ripped off the map. She had to do something about it for my sake, so that I could understand her and help my own children understand who she was. So at my request she began to write her memories, not in the binder I gave her for that purpose, but on little snippets of paper and the backs of envelopes. I paid dearly to have it typed up and turned it into a book that was printed and bound up for those who attended her funeral and my father's funeral years later.
It was much later before I began to see myself as a writer, however. I had seen a book called Doublygifted, which featured the art of famous writers, and it suddenly dawned on me that my father would have been a writer had he not gone to war. He was a natural storyteller, and had a flair about him that was infectious, a funloving approach to life by a man who looked like a young Frank Sinatra and could sing bass with mother harmonizing tunes like Harvest Moon and kkkKatie, Beautiful Katie. My father did write poetry much later in his life, when he had become a drifter after mother's death, and had been dealt the ultimate financial blow after her extensive and expensive illness, my own abortion paid for who knows how, and other unfortunate trip wires that left him face down in the Baldwin County he loved more often than not.
His story is not the one I will ever write as it's too large for me. And there are too many people who were affected by his life. The most I can do is share the perspective I have gained from knowing my grandmother, losing my mother at such an early age, and leaving this area for more than three decades while I tried to find another place where I could be happy.
I use the moniker Doublygifted all the time on AL.com. I used to find it bragging almost, but I don't anymore. It suits me. I am both a writer and a visual artist. I'm comfortable with that. I am also a blogger. AlabamaLiberal is the name I chose to use on DailyKos, and that one is much more difficult to handle. I chose it for that reason. I like oxymorons. They keep people guessing.
The book I write eventually will be titled Ne'er do Well. And it will not be about my father, nor even my grandfather although that would have been how my grandmother might have seen it, but about myself. I am indeed a ne'er do well according to most people. I have never learned how one earns a living using my talents. I've never thought it necessary to beg someone to pay me for my work. I've often given away artwork, and almost always my writing, in order to be understood. It's an essential component of my mental health that I be understood.
My grandmother spent the bulk of her working life as the Red Cross Volunteer in Columbia, Mississippi. I recall her dialing western union in the middle of the night to notify a soldier that his mother had become ill or his wife had a baby or some other horror that I couldn't even imagine. And this was done day and night from her very modest WWII built home in Columbia. The tiny home had been the only place i'd ever known her to live and I loved visiting her during the summers where I met and befriended many of the families my father had known during his middle and high school days in Columbia. Most of those were extraordinarily wealthy doctors and businessmen, including my godfather, Earl D. McLean. Uncle Buddy was not born wealthy, however, he had married it.
The daughter of the man who created Bill's Dollar Stores was as down to earth as anyone I've ever known. And yet fabulously wealthy. It was a contrast I would never forget. My grandmother, who turned the sheets to keep them from wearing out, had a friend whose sheets were so luxurious even an eight year old noticed.
Nor would I ever forget the contrast of tenement shacks and women stirring washpots in Columbia, women as dark ebony as the ivory on my piano keyboard. Women so bony it seemed incredible that they could ever stir that hot boiling water at all much less man the sad irons that pressed the clothes and linens that were brought back to dress the holiday tables and suit up the proud woman that was my grandmother. She was from Mobile, never forget. And she prided herself in one good dress each year, often bought at Lampton's where they had those pneumatic tubes that would send the ticket from one part of the store to the other.
She had an office up the stairs over one of the shops downtown and I loved to climb up there and watch her click her fingers over the typewriter and sit while the oscillating fan blew a breeze that was never cool enough for my hot body running up and down the hallways, in and out of trouble always. I understood a bit about the fund raising she did as I got older, but the work she did in the field I never saw. There was no place for a precocious grandchild when there was a flood, or a hurricane, or tornado. That meant that I saw the world through mostly rose colored glasses. As I do to this day.
So it's with a bit of shock that I opened the binder on the Red Cross Scrapbook I was fortunate to acquire a week or so ago. I had not really known of all these storms and floods and tornados and earthquakes featured in this huge volume of Red Cross activities. I'd heard of polio, of course, and Cerebral Palsy, and it seemed natural enough that those things would be worthy of fund raising efforts. But what I really discovered in this binder were the people who manned these drives, the civil servants and public figures who dedicated their lives and their money to making other people's lives better.
And there is one entity that is featured throughout the book that no longer exists. That entity is Brookley Field. When it was in full operation, the fundraising it brought to the American Red Cross was astounding. Under one or another Brigadeer General it resulted in millions compared to thousands in most years. And this is just part of what losing Brookley Field did to the area. I've always known that closing Brookley brought to a screeching halt most of the progress and growth of the Baldwin County area where my mother and father so desperately hoped to make a good life better, and that my father's real estate business was among the first to suffer. But what I never realized was how important Brookley was to the cultural health of the area. To the vision the city had of the rest of the world. The perspective that came with having a large military base brought with it the knowledge of other peoples and other places. The people that came into this area via the bustling facility both before and after the wars were vital to the health of the community of Mobile Bay and that area is more divided than ever because of the loss of the plant and it's employees.
In the coming weeks I'd love to share with readers some of what I've seen from the view point of the scrapbook I found, and why it might be important to see this as a viewer might who never knew this area. I think that the most healthy thing that has happened in the past decade to this area is certainly the revitalization of the port city, and the community is stronger than it ever could be. But we know very little about one another. We still see too many tribal connections and too few common concerns, too many team loyalties and too few ways in which we share the bay with one another. And I would like to change that. So indulge me a bit of perspective. As AlabamaLiberal. As DoublyGifted. As one whose legacy is studded with odd juxtapositions, poverty and immense wealth, talent and dysfunctional family and much more. Thanks.
Susan W. Hales aka Mary Susan Warley.