If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  Martha and her friends found the entire process terribly disruptive. “My French class had two black girls in it,” she says. “This was second-year French. These girls had had first-year French, but they might as well have had only three weeks of French. They didn’t have the slightest notion of what was going on. It was sad, because they were obviously going to fail. And they were slowing down the progress of the classroom, which I and the rest of us resented.”

  A lot of people felt that way—Billie and Ruth among them.

  While Martha was trying to concentrate on her senior year, Pat was a ninth grader at Pulaski Heights Junior High. It was nice, for a change, not being in the shadow of her sister. Pat had developed a full social life of her own, and in junior high she had talked with her parents about even going to sock hops. Ruth and Billie responded in an amazing way: They volunteered as chaperones.

  This was probably Ruth’s influence, combined with the coming of age of a second child. Over time, parents learn to choose their battles. Still, for a Baptist deacon and member of the censor board and his wife, this was a revolutionary leap. Second Baptist, the church they attended, was very strict: no mixed bathing, no movies on Sunday, and, certainly, no dancing.

  One day when Ruth was at home, the phone rang. It was the Baptist preacher, and he wasn’t pleased one bit. He’d heard that the Murphrees allowed their daughter to go to sock hops, and he was calling Ruth on the carpet about it. ‘Unfortunately for him, word about Ruth’s moods hadn’t made it to the parsonage.

  At the beginning, Ruth tried to be reasonable. She told him yes, she did let her daughter go to sock hops—that she’d rather Pat be at the school dancing, where Ruth knew what she was doing, than in the backseat of a car parked in the dark. The preacher didn’t see it that way. “I’m going to church you,” he told Ruth, meaning he intended to run her out of the congregation. “Do you hear me? I’m going to church you.”

  And that’s when, as Ruth remembers it, she “told him how the cow ate the cabbage.” That’s an old Arkansas expression meaning she verbally crucified him. One thing she said was, “Well, if you’re going to call the rules, I’ll just join the Catholic church, where I can have someone to pray for me.”

  The next phone call rang in Billie’s office at the VA. It was the preacher telling Billie that his wife had committed the unpardonable sin of disagreeing with the head of their church. The call made Billie angry, though he maintained his composure. But before he hung up, Billie gave the preacher a word of advice. “When you tangle with her,” he said, “you’re tangling with someone who can really hand it back at you.”

  The preacher didn’t take the hint. Instead, he began preaching about the abomination of allowing children to go to sock hops. Ruth never heard a word of it, though. She quit Second Baptist immediately, and took her three daughters with her. Billie, because of his position in the church, felt he had to stay. Ruth and Billie never had another conversation about it.

  For a while, Sunday at the Murphrees’ was a day of unrest. On those mornings, as Billie hummed his hymns and clutched his duct-taped Bible for the drive downtown, Ruth and the girls would walk the three blocks to Pulaski Heights Baptist Church. The rift lasted a year, at which time Billie left downtown and “moved his letter,” as the Baptists say, to the Heights closer, in so many ways, to home.

  My mother used to sing me a sad song about two brothers, Tobias and Cachunky. Tobias won their sibling competition at every turn. When the brothers grew up, they went off to war. I used to feel a terrible ache in my heart whenever she sang this verse, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”:

  These two boys to the army went,

  And both high places filled—

  Tobias was a brigadier,

  Cachunky, he got killed.

  Martha got through high school, dashing across the finish line in her baby blue Ford convertible just before the red flag fell. She was accepted into a good out-of-state school, Mississippi State College for Women, where girls from prominent Southern families had gone for generations. In the fall of 1958, she packed up her stylish clothes and her new records, and her Band-Aid box full of Kents, and she drove off to a bright future—deliriously happy, too, to be out of her mother’s house at last.

  Standing in the driveway waving, little sister Pat must’ve felt that life wasn’t very fair.

  When the first year of integration was over, Governor Faubus called a special session of the Arkansas legislature. The legislators granted him the power to close public schools being integrated by force. Faubus wanted a delay in the order to integrate, but when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow that, the governor played his stunning new trump card: He announced that he was shutting down the city’s high schools for the 1958-1959 school year.

  Suddenly, Pat had nowhere to go. Staying home was out of the question. That was the year of the fire, and there were workmen around constantly, laboring under Ruth’s watchful eye. The kitchen and back porch had to be redone again. Also, Ruth had finally decided to remove the wall and French doors between the living and dining rooms and to replace the casement windows with picture windows in each of those rooms. Picture windows were the style now. They were what the new houses had. The carpenters put up a massive support beam where the wall and French doors had been. On the casement windows, after they had puttied in the giant panes of glass, the real trick was patching the sills and window frames so that the transformation wouldn’t be so obvious. If you wanted to make a house look modern, you couldn’t leave a lot of reminders around that it really wasn’t.

  There’s a photograph of Pat taken at the War Memorial Park swimming pool in July 1958, the summer before the lost year at school. She’s fifteen. She and a friend are sitting in their one-piece bathing suits at a picnic table on the hot concrete, eating Dream-sides. On the table in front of them are their impossibly thick billfolds, the kind teenage girls have carried since time immemorial. In the background, showing through the cyclone fence, are the cars of teens lucky enough to have real wheels. For the others, there are bicycles parked in a row. Pat no longer looks like a child in this photograph. She’s at that awkward age: too young for cars, too old for bikes—an age when the tensions build up tighter than your wallet.

  One of the things that doesn’t show in this photograph is that Pat now had a steady boyfriend.1Iis name was Larry Sparks, and he was in the same school situation she was in. Maybe his was even worse—Larry was two years older, so he was losing his senior year. All around them, their friends were trying to figure out what to do. A segregationist group had arranged for the opening of a private school, for white students only. Some kids went there. Others were tutored in the basement of one boy’s grandmother’s house. One girl’s parents were so eager for her to get a good education that they allowed her to be legally adopted by relatives in Texas so she could qualify for the resident requirements and go to school there.

  Billie and Ruth at the height of hostilities in their household.

  For the entire month of September, Pat was at loose ends. There was a lot of anger in the house—Ruth and Billie were upset because of the Negro problem that had started this whole series of events, and Pat was bored, frustrated, and cut off from her friends, who had been scattered to the winds. One day, Pat and a couple of girls were in the music room listening to records. Suddenly, Ruth burst in and snatched the record off the turntable and broke it into pieces, right in front of Pat and the other girls. “You know your father doesn’t approve of that music,” Ruth said. Nearly four decades later, Pat remembers that the song said something about “I want you, I need you, I love you” —-it was Elvis, of course, that other dark force in the modern world. Ruth doesn’t recall the incident at all.

  In October, Pat began attending a school out in rural Pulaski County. One of Pat’s aunts, Billie’s sister, taught there and had finagled spots for Pat and one of her cousins. For a city girl such as Pat a girl from Pulaski Heights—this was an awful comedown. The county school was a wood-
frame building, with individual stoves in each classroom. Compared with what Pat had been used to at Pulaski Heights, this was like going to a pioneer schoolhouse.

  Her boyfriend, Larry, was taking courses at another county school. Meanwhile, Pat was so bored that she couldn’t even make herself go to el-ass. She made straight A’s anyway. The only activity was girl’s basketball, but her parents wouldn’t let her play: In Little Rock, nice girls didn’t play basketball. So she spent most of her time in the study hail, trying to figure out what to do to keep from going crazy. She asked if she could take advanced courses, and the administrators said fine. Between October and April, she took arid passed several eleventh-grade classes while making straight A’s in the classes she was supposed to be attending. At that school, if you made straight A’s, you could get out in April, six weeks early. It had been an awful school year, but she had survived.

  Martha, meanwhile, had stolen the spotlight again. In the middle of the year, she’d announced that she and. Jerry, now a medical school student, were getting married in June. At 501 Holly; this news had brightened Ruth’s days. Not only was it going to be nice to have a doctor in the family but it had given her something to plan for, to buy for, to get the house in shape for. She was a ball of energy There was a flurry of letters and phone calls between Ruth in Little Rock and Martha at school in Mississippi. There were details to work out about invitations. There were showers to go to, teas to attend.

  On May Day, Pat turned sixteen. It was a far different experience from that on her sister’s big birthday three years before. Pat had access to a car—an old Oldsmobile that all the girls had learned to drive on—but no car of her own. At least summer was almost here. Even though Billie would insist on summer school, she could go out with Larry at night and spend lazy afternoons at the swimming pool.

  In June, Martha and Jerry married at Pulaski Baptist, followed by a reception in the basement of the church. Almost everyone involved was a nervous wreck. Billie woke up the day of the wedding with a fever blister on his lip. Martha had her eyebrows dyed, and they turned out way too dark. Ruth, wanting her side of the family to look as nice as the Murphrees’, had sent money to her mother to help her get a nice dress, and it had hurt Mrs. Taylor’s feelings. Pat, the maid of honor, and the bridesmaids—looking striking in bouffant hairdos and pink knit full-skirt dresses that they would never wear again—had to stand in spike heels until their feet cramped. It occurred to Pat that she didn’t want to ever go through anything like this again. At one point, Billie joked to Pat that when the time came for her to get married, he’d pay her five hundred dollars to elope.

  That summer, Pat dutifully went to school in North Little Rock, trying her best to pay attention to the teacher, who kept droning on about long-dead poets and dull-as-dust novels. It was the summer of “Lonely Boy” by Paul Anka, of “Lipstick on Your Collar” by Connie Francis, of “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters. The name Drifters must’ve seemed ironic to Pat every time she heard it on the radio, and it was on the radio a lot that summer. She felt that she was drifting. She started adding up all the extra courses she’d taken, and she figured out something alarming: Even if the schools opened in the fall, she was now so far ahead of her friends that she wouldn’t even be in the same class with them. What was the point?

  On the morning of August 17, Pat told Ruth that she needed to go to the shopping center after summer school that day,. There was nothing unusual about Pat’s story. This was a new shopping center that had just opened a mile or so west of Holly Street. The downtown merchants were already feeling the pinch as the city moved steadily westward—a trend that had begun with the development of Pulaski Heights—and shoppers responded to the novelty of the new centers. Pat would be home late, she said, but not to worry.

  Late that afternoon, Billie happened to be upstairs in the attic playroom when the phone rang. Joyce was there with him. Billie answered, and it was Pat. He talked with her for a few minutes, his voice sounding strained.

  When he hung up, his face was pale. He went downstairs to find Ruth.

  Many nights, I lie awake studying the shadows in my bedroom. Beth and I sleep in the middle room downstairs. On those nights when I can’t doze off, I drift back to all that’s happened inside these very walls, the walls within the walls of the house itself. Once I get started, it’s not hard to summon up the characters and then to lie there watching them unobserved, like Scrooge in those heartbreaking visits to his Christmases past:

  Charlie Armour opens the doors to his wardrobe and carefully hangs up his suit. Jessie, still talking, crawls under the covers of the sleigh bed across the room. Suddenly, the person in bed becomes Grandma Jackson, who died with her head in that very spot. Charlie stands holding a coffee cup. Then the bed is replaced by easy chairs. A new air conditioner hums in the middle window as Ruth reads by lamplight. Billie comes in and says something to her. She begins to weep. This room is the precise spot where Ruth Murphree’s heart was broken.

  She was sitting in the den, reading. I can imagine Billie taking a deep breath and telling himself he had to approach her very calmly, and then going in with that forced calmness that immediately unnerves anyone who encounters it. “That was Pat on the phone,” Billie said. “She and Larry got married today.” Thirty-five years later, Ruth marks August 17, 1959, as the day that “broke our hearts.”

  Billie didn’t show it as much as Ruth did. Ruth shrieked and sobbed and paced the floor of the den while Billie sat in his black recliner in front of the air conditioner, trying to calm her: “Now, Mommy…” Pat had called from Texarkana, Texas. Pat and Larry had driven there to get married by a justice of the peace. Billie had told them to come on home, that they would all make the best of it.

  On the three-hour drive from Texarkana, Pat and Larry were nervous over what they’d done. “I wished it was twenty years later,” Pat says, remembering that trip back to Little Rock. She knew she had hurt her parents, but she felt that things would work out all right—if she could just avoid this homecoming at 501 Holly.

  Ruth was on the phone, calling Larry’s parents, calling Martha. Martha recalls that Ruth was in tears. Through the sobbing, she managed to get out what Pat had done. Martha and Jerry had only one car, and Ruth urged her and Jerry to come over the minute Jerry got home from medical school. Martha says when she and Jerry got to Holly Street, “Mother was hysterical. Daddy was very, very stressed and hurt.” Billie was sitting in his chair, and Ruth was pacing and screaming: “We’ve got to get an annulment; that’s all we can do! We’ve got to get this thing annulled! What’ll the neighbors think!”

  For the Murphrees, it was the culminating moment of the postwar years, years in which old ideals had steadily given way to new realities. This situation, a middle-class sixteen-year-old girl running away from a life that had gone off track, running off to marry an eighteen-year-old boy—well, it was the pushiness of the Negroes and the rebelliousness of Elvis all wrapped up in one. It was sex—was Pat pregnant? Pat denied it then and does today, but everybody assumed she was. Those assumptions finally put the kibosh on Ruth’s talk about annulment. The only thing more humiliating than a married sixteen-year-old daughter was a pregnant, unmarried sixteen-year-old daughter. Besides, Billie felt strongly that if you’d had sex, you needed to be married. And if you were married, you should stay arried.

  They were all on the cusp of a new era, the 1960s, and this was just a little taste of it. In two years, the censor board would be gone. In four years, U. S. Presidents would no longer be safe on the nation’s streets. In six years, women’s skirts would be scandalously short and men’s hair outrageously long. There would be a divisive war. There would be rebellious young people living together in communes, smoking more than cigarettes. God forbid, but there would soon come a time when Elvis Presley would look tame.

  They knew none of that, of course, that night as Ruth wailed her heartsick cry and Billie suffered in silence, in that middle room of the home they’d worked so hard
to keep airtight against all manner of rising tides. The home as sanctuary—what a laugh. In the end, the ultimate flood came from the inside—from their own tears.

  Jerry had sedatives with him. He gave some to Ruth and put her to bed.

  PART TWO

  Quarrel

  and

  Pilgrimage

  Mark, Scott, and Lori Grimes. Their family ushered in a new era, one in which change became a more frequent visitor.

  By the late sixties, 501 Holly was feeling its age. And so was Billie Murphree, who told Ruth the Lee Street hill had become too steep to mow.

  Chapter Eight

  White Walls

  1960 1966

  I’m happy to report that, for the Murphrees, there was life beyond that terrible August night in the den. The following spring, they welcomed two grandchildren—Martha’s son and Pat’s daughter into the rowdy mix of the Murphree clan. They bought a place on Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs, where they and their sprawling extended family began spending vacations and parts of weekends, commuting the hour to the lake after Sunday-morning church, and then, after an afternoon of swimming and boating and water skiing, driving back to Little Rock in time for BTU and the evening sermon. They watched Joyce, their own baby, grow into a responsible teenager (though not without her own conflicts with her mother), and they watched Martha and Pat settle into marriage and motherhood (though not without Billie’s occasional reprimands because their skirts were too short). They, especially Ruth, continued to work on the house. She had the front casement windows in the music room replaced by a picture window like those in the living and dining rooms. She also decided, after contending with years of dust and noise, to install wall-to-wall carpeting downstairs. She chose a beige wool with the very latest sculpted design.