Two Days in July

The Comfort Inn, Lexington, NC

July 2012

Sam woke up to stringent light pouring through cheap curtains, and flicked his swollen tongue along the roof of his parched mouth. Too much booze last night, not enough food or water to soak it up.

He dressed carefully, almost tenderly, and took himself to the breakfast room where he helped himself to fried chicken, bacon and French toast. It had been great food twenty minutes ago, before it sat under the lights, but now it was just good food. Good food and great coffee.

A few diners looked him up and down, waved and nodded. He’d been telling his stories in the bar last night, the ones he could tell. Years of journalism and ghostwriting had embedded an immovable sense of discretion within him. Like a mosquito trapped in amber, his secrets went nowhere, drunk or sober.

He'd been merely entertaining, and nothing worse.

He poured another coffee and took it outside, watching the traffic on Cotton Grove Road.

*****

In a place intriguingly called Swearing Creek, 14 miles south-east of Lexington, an eighty-year-old woman called Jean Gerhardt was touching up her thin hair and dusting her wrinkled cheeks with powder. She dresses in pantsuits these days because nobody wants to see her legs anymore. Fair enough. If you can’t wear old age with grace you may as well jump off a rock.

Making herself a coffee, which was also good and strong, she flicked through the information she had on Sam Clancy, who was a fine-looking man if the photos were any judge. A journalist, mostly human interest stories and miscarriages of justice, although she doesn’t get the sense he’s an all-out bleeding-heart liberal. More intriguingly, he’s a ghostwriter. The blurb doesn’t name names because that’s all part of the deal: non-disclosures, lips sealed in exchange for someone else taking the credit for your craft. There is no fiction on his resume. He’s a fact-hound and she respects that, because for too many of her years, the facts were hard to come by.

This is the first and last interview she will ever give. The first and only words from the baby at the centre of a storm.

Working Notes

Sam Clancy, 7/9/12

On July 17 1932, a Sunday, a couple of South Carolina cops pulled over a speeding Ford roadster. It’s the height of Prohibition and the couple inside the vehicle were known alcohol runners. There was some later debate about whether the car was actually speeding, or whether it was an excuse to search the interior. In addition to those illegal activities, the couple, Clyde and Beatrice Rogers, had jailbird form for a host of other crimes and misdemeanours, many of them violent in nature. Modern terminology; frequent flyers. The sort of people cops routinely stop.

Whatever the circumstances behind the stop, Clyde could not produce a driver’s license, (didn’t have one), and so Officer Harris attempted an arrest. At the scene was another officer called Kenyon Young, who was later called as an eye-witness.

Bare bones: Clyde put up a struggle, and Beatrice grabbed Harris’s gun from his holster and shot him four times, twice in the legs, once in the chest, and one right in middle of his forehead. The couple fled the scene in the police car. Not bright.

An hour or so later, Beatrice turns herself over to the police - (where was Clyde?) and she is indicted for the murder of Officer Harris.

Sam checked his watch and got himself another coffee. There was plenty of time.

There’s more information to add, but I question the wisdom of going too hard at the details. Bare bones, bare bones, because the meat is elsewhere?

Early December the case goes to trial. In the courtroom is Beatrice’s seven-year-old son and the four young children of Officer Harris. (Explore the hardship of losing the breadwinner in the Great Depression, and why his wife and kids are never mentioned in ongoing analyses).

At the time of the shooting, Beatrice was three months pregnant. Not showing. By the time of the trial she was eight months pregnant and cut a more sympathetic figure in the dock. She said ‘she feared for her life,’ which is why she did what she did. Said ‘pregnancy bends you out of shape.’ Sympathy ruse the jury didn’t buy. She was sentenced to die by electric chair, the first woman in South Carolina to do so.

There was another casualty that day, a guy called Lewis Potts, a close friend of the downed officer. (What was he doing at the scene)? He got on his motorbike to go tell Mrs Harris that she was a widow, when, distracted, he rode it straight into the back of another vehicle and died instantly. Not integral to the story, but evidence of the bad moon rising on that July day.

*****

Sam checked his watch again, shook himself down and drove himself to Swearing Creek.

Jean Gerhardt’s place was a low-built lakeside dwelling, compact inside but with a long, slow garden which led to a view. After introductions were made, she limped along its length and, incongruously, took a swing that was roped to an oak tree. ‘When you get to my age, Sam,’ she said, ‘every bone aches. Not enough to ruin the parade, but enough to make you want to leave early. Swinging takes my mind off it.’

Sam looked out across the water. ‘What are those red flags for?’ he asked.

‘Markers,’ she said. ‘These waters are treacherous. You get stuck in a sandbank and you won’t ever get out unless you’re winched out. So everyone has to go between the flags.’

‘Do you ever go out on the water?’

She shook her head. ‘Can’t swim. Didn’t exactly have the all-American upbringing.’

He fished a recording device from his bag. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Can’t imagine you at shorthand school.’

‘So, what made you agree to see me?’ he started out.

‘I think I know,’ she said. ‘I think I know, but let’s see how all this goes. I might want your help at the end of this.’

‘I’d be happy to oblige,’ Sam said.

‘You don’t know what it is yet … So, where are you at with it all?’

‘I’ve pretty much got everything there is to find in print. There’s a lot of conflicting versions, but I’m not so interested in the fine details. I want to know why women get away with things that men don’t.’

‘Well, that’s blunt,’ she laughed. ‘I like that. And before we start, I may as well tell you that I’m .. what’s the word? - ambiguous about it myself. But this is such an old story ..’

‘It’s still topical,’ said Sam. ‘The world is getting messier, but this story still has definition.’

‘Whatever you say,’ the old girl said. ‘More of a musician myself.’

‘Well, let’s make a song, eh?’

A home-help interrupted them, brought Jean a sweet tea and Sam a bottle of cold beer. It was early, but he needed the hair of that old dog. When she was gone, Sam started where he’d left off in the hotel. The trial and the aftermath.

‘Two things went in her favour,’ he said. 'One, she was clearly pregnant. Of course, there was no talk of you dying along with her, but it was agreed that she would give birth to you in a hospital, and then she would die. Secondly, and I think this carries the same weight, we have to look at the times. Prohibition was widely unpopular, so there was sympathy there for the runners. Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, they were all seen as rebels against authority. Romantic figures, not the murderers they were. People said that when they didn’t find any booze in the car, the police should have let them go on their way. Which kind of implies that plenty thought Officer Harris deserved to be shot.’

Jean carried on swinging.

‘So a lot of people started to question the death sentence. People offered their life in exchange for hers, terrible poems were written, heartstrings were plucked. Your mother was just another victim of the system. Then the press started running winsome pictures of Clyde Jr in his aunt’s house, his little face staring out. Christmas that year, the kid got hundreds of presents from well-wishers, the poor kid without a mother over the festive season, and soon to lose her altogether to the chair.

Jean interrupted. ‘My brother was always in his aunt’s home more than his mother’s. They lost custody of him plenty of times due to inadequate parenting - and like you say, Sam, those were hard times. You had to be a pretty bad parent to have them taken away, unless the nuns were up for selling them.’

‘Umm. Agreed. Well, on appeal they started talking about her pregnancy and how that can affect a woman, like they’re not in full control of their senses. I know that can happen, but I don’t think that’s true in your mother’s case. She was already negligent with one child, and a convicted criminal to boot.’

‘They lost another child a month before the shooting,’ Jean said. ‘A seven-month-old who died under their watch. They called her Ivy.’

Sam didn’t know that. It had never been mentioned in anything he’d read.

‘So, in January 1933, just days before she gave birth to you, they commuted her sentence to life. Your brother, quickly forgotten, was sent to a boys’ home and you were adopted by your aunt. What I really need now is for you to fill in the rest.’

A wind whipped up, sudden and vicious. Sam helped her off the swing and they went back to the house. The parlour was over-stuffed, but clean as a pin. The home-help whistled in the kitchen, comfortable, appreciated. On the walls was a picture book of framed photos of Jeans’s children and countless grandchildren. They sat next to each other on a well-used settee and Sam pulled the coffee table closer so the recorder could pick up her ageing voice.

‘My mother gave birth to me in the hospital, and we were allowed to stay there a while, until I was plump and healthy. The photograph of her returning to the state pen with me in her arms is widely accessible. My mother was never a looker. A man in a cloche hat, hands like a lumberjack. And she’s glaring at the photographer while I’m all wrapped up in some kind of corduroy. It’s the only photo of me as a baby or even as a child.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Sam. ‘You were a bonnie lass.’

‘I was,’ she agreed, ‘and God knows how. There are times when two ugly folk make a looker. What can I say? Anyhow, I stayed with her, in the prison, for seven months, same age as my sister when they say she died, and then I was formally adopted by the same aunt who used to look after Clyde Jr. He was gone by then, sent to that boys’ home. I later heard they mistreated him there, made him work harder than the other kids because his mom was a cop killer. But at the time, I never even knew he existed. I never knew my mother existed. I just assumed my aunt was my mother, and no one told me otherwise.’

‘How does that make you feel?’ asked Sam.

‘Angry. I had to work hard in my life to let that feeling go.’

‘They changed my name from Frances to Jean and I took on the surname of my aunt Hyacinth. And of course, I didn’t know it, but there had been petitions going on all over the world, putting pressure on Governor Blackwood to commute the death sentence, and in the end he buckled under the pressure. If you can believe this, Jean Harlow and Greta Garbo reportedly offered to adopt me. I was Baby Rogers, and I was just about as newsworthy as that poor Lindbergh baby. People donated money - not for my mother - she never got a penny, but for me. The baby who saved her mother from the electric chair.’

‘There were cousins I got along with, but Hyacinth’s husband was hardly ever around. I wasn’t let out much, and it was a dreary life for a long, long time. No telephone, no electricity until I was sixteen or so, and definitely no newspapers. And they were a highly dysfunctional family, all sorts of things going on. I look back on those days and wonder where I got to strength to find a loving husband and a good, long life.’

‘But it wasn’t enough just to have her death sentence commuted. The public wanted more. Appeal after appeal until she ended up serving just twelve years. They let her out Easter 1945. And in all that time, nobody, none of those do-gooding types, ever once enquired about the dead policeman’s family. Seems to me that some things haven’t changed.’

‘One day, a teenage kid came to stay at the farm. I had no idea who he was, but he called me ‘sis.’ I figured out he was Clyde Jr much later. Turns out everyone in that community knew my story except me. I’ll never understand that ’til the day I die. Not a single kid taunted me in the school yard. I just don’t get it at all. Anyways, Clyde Jr joined the Navy later on, and I never saw him again.’

‘And then one day this ugly woman turns up and after a while she tells me she’s my mother. Says she’s not supposed to tell me that, but she couldn’t help herself. I have a birthmark on my stomach that she told me about, so I knew she was telling the truth. She tried to make out it was my father who shot Harris, which was a big fat lie. Things went back and forth for a bit until she went to live with a man in Charlotte and only came back once, after an argument. In 1980 she had a stroke and I spent the night in hospital with her when she was dying. Felt no love for her, felt nothing, but I figured it might bug me if I didn’t. And I saw my father just once, after I got married and had my first child. He just turned up on my doorstep with my birth certificate. I let him in, but we had nothing to say to each other. In ’61, he killed himself.’

Sam saw the tiredness in her and made to leave. She was just at that age, like a child, for an afternoon nap.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ she said at the door. ‘Are you going to write it up?’

‘Honestly Jean, I don’t know. I don’t like your mother, not one bit. She shot a cop in cold blood. She wasn’t panicked, she wasn’t scared. After she shot him, when he was bleeding on the ground, she pointed the gun at the other cop, right at his head, and asked for the keys to the patrol car. My mother had ten kids, lost of couple of them, and I can’t ever see her behaving like that.’

‘And I agree,’ said Jean. ‘But your trouble, if you write this, is that people are going to go against you. To plenty of people, a pregnant woman can never be guilty of anything. It could hurt your career.’

‘Umm.’

He looked at her old, stoic frame. ‘What was that thing you thought you might want from me?’

And her old chest deflated, because it felt like shame. ‘One of my grandsons has got a lame leg. Nothing that can’t be fixed with the right finance. I was thinking about all that money that poured in when Baby Jean was big news. Greta Garbo, no less. I don’t know where it went .. I never saw it.'

‘Then you’d better thank your useless Daddy,’ said Sam, ‘for giving you your birth certificate. This is how the story is written, Jean. You getting your money and your grandson walking straight.’

‘Think we can do that?’ she asked.

‘I know we can.’

‘And Sam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Clancy your pen name?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what’s your real one?’

‘Harris. My father was the four-month-old sitting on his mother’s lap at your mother’s trial.’

‘There’s the ambiguity,’ she smiled.

‘And there it is, Jean. There it is. But we got our story, our angle. I lay out the facts and the public can fight over them all they want. It's what writers do. And when the puff of smoke clears, you'll have a grandson who will walk unaided to his own graduation.'

'But what about your family,' she said. 'Don't they deserve it more?'

'We did OK in the end, Jean.'

He stroked her cheek, filled with an extraordinary affection for Baby Jean. ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow at ten. You and me are going to kick some ass.’