In Pieces(4)

Her name was Joy and that’s what I called her. Never Grandma or Grammy or Newnee, just Joy. Which is ironic, actually, because I don’t think I ever saw an ounce of it in her. Well, maybe tiny glimpses of glee, never joy. Like years later, when we’d come to visit and she’d be waiting on the sofa, watching out the window. Then she’d quickly move to the backyard as our car came up the driveway, ready for us to scramble out. When I’d say a simple “Hi, Joy,” she’d fling her hand over her face as if to hide the smidgen of delight seeping out. The only reason I knew she was smiling was because her big puffy cheeks elevated her glasses, the cheeks that got handed down to me, along with a smaller version of her cow eyes with long lashes—spider-leg lashes, I called them.

Other than that, it was hard to read what was going on inside my grandmother. One time she caught Ricky and me playing in her “nasty, bug-infested” garage after she told us not to, and I don’t know if she was mad that we had disobeyed or scared that we’d get hurt, but for whatever reason, she chased us around the lemon tree with a switch, a switch she must have had waiting somewhere, ’cause there she was, instantly armed, red in the face and at a gallop. It was the only time in my life I saw tears rolling down my grandmother’s face, which was the most upsetting part of that whole event—those tears. Emotions, in general, were not encouraged, and if I got angry as a child, Joy would pucker her face and say, “Don’t be ugly.” So when she came at us in a blaze of fury and flowing tears, Ricky and I were totally befuddled, not knowing whether she was mad or sad, or what the hell was going on. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the day trying to make her laugh.

All of the women in Joy’s house, even Perle (whom I knew the least), were linked together like they were playing a lifelong game of “Red Rover,” except they never called anyone else to come over. They’d cluster in the backyard, just the sisters and their mama, sharing the task of turning the crank on the wooden ice-cream maker filled with cream and peaches from Joy’s tree, while we all waited for my mother to come home from her day at the studio. I would lie on the quilt one of them had spread out over the grass and dreamily listen to that bubbling chatter, punctuated by the occasional slam of the screen door as Joy moved in and out of the kitchen. Taking turns, one would talk and then another as they pleasantly gabbed on about what needed to be fixed, or what to cook for Thanksgiving, or whether the cream had set, but never about themselves, never about their past, or even their present. I never learned anything about them from eavesdropping or any other way, and for some reason I never asked. It seemed as if there was nothing I needed to know. And clearly my mother had never asked, because these women had been the backbone of her life, and yet she didn’t know any more about them than I did. And I knew nothing.

Many years later, long after Mimmie had passed away, just as all the sisters were heading toward the end of their lives, Joy slowly began to talk, revealing the memories that had been hidden for so long. It is Joy’s history, handed to her by Mimmie, her mother, but somehow a thread of that history got woven into my mother’s history and then into mine. I have always felt that, always thought that Joy’s story is somehow an important piece of this puzzle, the puzzle of me and my mother. Even though I’ve never really known why.


Born in Alabama in the late 1800s, Joy came from a long line of farming folk on both her mother’s and father’s sides. They were not the landowners, but worked on the land and were, for the most part, uneducated. When Joy’s father, Grover Bickley, suddenly died of malaria, her mother, Mimmie, was left penniless, with no means of support and four little girls to care for, my eight-year-old grandmother being the oldest. Immediately, Joy’s sisters Mae, age three, and Perle, not quite two, were sent to live in South Carolina on a farm with one of their father’s brothers, while Joy and five-year-old Gladys were sent to live nearby in the Epworth Children’s Home, where they stayed for almost ten years.

What shadowy information Joy gave us about the children’s home was all very Dickensian: It was cold, many little children died, the education was all hellfire and damnation, men are the devil and sex is evil. She told us about picking bugs—weevils, I presume, and God knows what else—out of the oatmeal, and that Gladys was sickly, refusing to eat. Joy had to force food into her. Maybe she dramatized some of the details but, bless her heart, she lived there for a good chunk of her childhood, years that no doubt shaped who she was. So if there was some creative accounting on her part, that’s fine with me.

Long after my grandmother had passed away, I began to research her life, eventually stumbling upon the 1910 U.S. Federal Census report for Columbia, South Carolina. I just sat there, staring at my computer. There they were, Joy and Gladys Bickley recorded as “inmates,” along with a list of other children. That same day, hours later, I found Mimmie, whose legal name was Redonia Ethel, living alone in a hotel located in another town. Her occupation was listed as “housekeeper,” which fits the story that Joy had told us: Her mother had worked cleaning houses during the day and as a seamstress at night, saving everything she could in an effort to reunite with her daughters.

Nine and a half years after the sisters had entered Epworth, Mimmie somehow arranged to have fourteen-year-old Gladys, who had become deathly ill, moved to the farm where her two younger sisters had been living. But while Gladys was being welcomed by Mae and Perle, seventeen-year-old Joy was being sent to Texas to live with another one of her father’s brothers, where it seems she immediately lost her voice. She simply lost the ability to speak. And who could blame her? She was now separated not only from her mother but from her sister as well. One afternoon, while sitting on the front porch with a young man who’d come to call—conversation being pretty sparse, since she was still without her voice—a letter arrived with a check to cover the cost of a train trip to Chicago, requesting she arrive as soon as possible. It was signed, James L. Bynum, Your Father.