Necessary Lies (43 page)

“That was your dream,” I remembered.

She nodded. “Our
real
dream was Monterey, but we didn’t make it as far as the coast. We found an olive grove where they needed help, and—”

“An olive grove!” I said.

“Far cry from tobacco, huh?” She smiled. “We worked for the owners for years. They gave us a little house on their property.” Now she laughed. “That probably sounds familiar—like the Gardiner farm, right? But believe me, it was nothing like it. Indoor plumbing for one thing. Two bedrooms. We couldn’t get married till I turned eighteen, but the family that owned the grove didn’t care. They were happy to have hard workers.”

“Who spoke English,” Rose added.

“True,” Ivy said, “though we both picked up Spanish pretty quick. Then Henry Allen went to night school to learn more about the business, and the boys were born.”

“Boys?” I asked.

“Here.” Rose handed her mother a phone, and Ivy touched the screen and leaned over to show me.

“They’re holding down the fort while me and Rose are here,” Ivy said.

I looked at the photograph of Ivy’s three children—Rose flanked by two brown-haired men who appeared to be in their early forties. Brenna and Gavin, who’d been sitting on the other side of the room, crowded close to peer at the phone.

“That’s Henry Allen junior on the left and Steven on the right,” Ivy said.

“How wonderful,” I said. “We have two sons and a daughter, too.” I smiled at Brenna.

I didn’t think Ivy heard me. She was lost in the picture of her children. She raised her gaze to mine. “I wouldn’t have the boys—and my three grandkids—if it wasn’t for you,” she said. “I think about that all the time, Jane. About what you did for me. I can’t imagine life without my boys.”

I pressed my fist to my mouth, overwhelmed by the stark truth in her words.

“What did you mean, ‘they’re holding down the fort’?” Gavin asked, as Brenna pulled her chair and his closer to ours so that we formed a tight little circle. “What’s the fort?”

“The grove,” Rose said. “We all work there.”

“And the tasting room,” Ivy added. “This is tourist season.”

“Tasting room?” Brenna asked. “Wine?”

“No, no. Olive oil.” Ivy smiled. “To make a long story short, we kept working on that farm and the couple who owned it treated us like their kids, since they had none of their own. When they retired, they sold the farm to us. I was about … oh, I guess forty then.”

I sat back in the chair and shook my head in wonder. “I never pictured this future for you,” I said. “Ivy, I searched and searched. I looked for Ivy Hart. Ivy Gardiner. If you owned a farm … a grove … wouldn’t your name have shown up somewhere?”

“Henry Allen died twenty years ago,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “He was way too young, but we had thirty great years together,” she said. “A few years later, I got married again. A good man. I’m Ivy Lopez now. That’s why I didn’t show up in your searches.”

I looked at my daughter. “How did
you
ever find her?”

Brenna let out her breath as if she’d run a mile. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “It took a private detective and a long conversation with a retired—and really distrustful—Wilmington cop named Eli Jordan.”

“Oh!” I looked at Ivy. “Eli!” I said.

Ivy nodded. “We stayed in touch with him,” she said. “Him and Lita looked after Nonnie until she died.”

The Jordan family came back to me in a rush. “How are the Jordans?” I asked. “I guess Lita is…” I let my voice trail off.

“She’s still alive,” Ivy said. “She lives with Eli and his family.”

“She was such an interesting woman, wasn’t she?” I asked. “And how about the boys? Devil and Avery and—”

“Devil lived up to his name,” Ivy said with a shake of her head. “He’s been in prison a long time, I don’t even remember what for. All I know is it broke Lita’s heart.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “And Avery?” I remembered our drives to the Braille teacher, filled with his nonstop chatter.

“He taught at a school for the blind in Raleigh,” Ivy said. “He’s retired now.”

“Really!” I loved that he’d become a teacher. “Did he ever have the surgery?” I almost whispered the question, as though I weren’t sure I wanted the answer.

“He has kids,” Ivy said, “and I believe they’re his.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful to hear!” I said.

Ivy nodded. “Sheena was a teacher, too, but she died a couple of years ago.”

“I remember you wanted to teach,” I said.

“The closest I got to that was volunteering in my kids’ classrooms,” she said.

Rose groaned. “My friends loved her, but my brothers and I hated having her there,” she said. “We couldn’t get away with anything.”

“That was my plan.” Ivy smiled. “Little Rodney … do you remember him?” she asked me.

I nodded, picturing the little boy the first time I saw him, running through the Jordans’ house wearing a cardboard carton decked out as a car.

“He’s a cop, too,” Ivy said.

“Probation officer,” Rose corrected.

“Close enough.” Ivy shrugged.

My mind had shifted to the other little boy on the Gardiners’ farm. “Do you know whatever became of William?” I asked. “He was so darling, and I never stopped feeling terrible about that night in the emergency room when I—”

“You did what you had to do,” Ivy said firmly. She touched my knee. “Jane, I never blamed you for anything. Maybe a little back then, but the more I grew up, the more I could see why you had to do it. It turns out William got adopted out of the residential school he was in.”

“Adopted!”

“They couldn’t tell me who adopted him. It’s not like today, when all that’s so open and everything, so we never were able to track him down.”

“That’s a goal of mine,” Rose said. “He’s my cousin. Maybe he’d like to know who his family is.”

“It’s good he was adopted, though,” I said. “I’d pictured the worst for him.” I turned to Brenna. “Why didn’t you tell me you found her?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to fail,” she said. “We only connected a few days ago, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

I looked at Rose. “How did Ivy and Henry Allen … your parents … find you?” I asked.

“They just never gave up,” Rose said.

“We always talked about finding Mary,” Ivy said. “She was our daughter. How could we not look for her? But we knew we didn’t stand a chance of getting her until we got married. Then we told Dan—the owner of the olive grove—everything. He hired a lawyer who tracked down Rose and helped us to get her. He’s the one who found out about William, too. Rose had been shuffled from foster home to foster home.”

“I don’t remember much about that time at all,” Rose said. “I’ve blocked it, I guess. My earliest memory is running around in the grove with my little brothers. They were annoying, but all in all, it was a pretty cool childhood.”

I smiled. Watching this mother and daughter who both seemed so content with their lives, I thought of how you could look at people and never know what had come before. What trials. What horrors. You couldn’t see Ivy’s impoverished roots, or how close she’d come to having no family at all. You couldn’t see the loss of her sister—a loss that would haunt both of us forever. The wounds were deep, and yet they didn’t show. It was hard to imagine that in a few minutes, we’d be reopening those wounds, revisiting one of the worst times in either of our lives. I felt like saying, “Forget the hearing! Let’s all go out for a nice brunch instead.” But we needed to do this, if not for ourselves, then for Mary Ella and thousands of others like her.

“Mom,” Brenna asked, “can I show them the picture?” She held up the manila folder.

I hesitated, feeling protective of Ivy. I didn’t want to introduce more pain into her life when she’d worked hard to put that pain behind her. And yet she was here, wasn’t she, facing the past head-on. “If she wants to see it,” I said.

“A picture of what?” Ivy asked.

“I went to Mom’s old house today,” Brenna said. “I took a picture of the bedroom closet where you hid when the police came.”

Ivy’s hand rushed to her throat and her eyes widened. “That closet! Why would you take a picture of—”

“The names are still there,” I said. “The names you carved into the wall.”

“They are?” she whispered.

“What names?” Rose asked.

Brenna handed Ivy the folder. She hesitated a moment before opening it, and I watched as tears filled her eyes.

“You wrote that?” Rose leaned close, touching the corner of the photograph.

Ivy nodded. “I carved it with a fork while the police were coming for us. I wanted to write our names so deep in the wall they’d never be erased.” A look of anger flashed across her face, but only for a second. “I never dreamed … all these years later…” She looked at me, one tear falling over her lower lashes. “I wish I could talk to that girl in the closet right now,” she said. “I wish I could tell her everything would work out all right. She was so scared.”

“She
made
everything work out all right.” I put my hand on hers. “You were so strong, Ivy,” I said. “That day the police drove me away while you stood all alone in my front yard … that image of you will be in my mind forever and I—” My voice broke and Ivy turned her hand to link tightly with mine.

“I survived it,” she reassured me quietly, and I nodded, unable to trust my voice.

“Ladies,” Gavin said, ever so gently, “I think we’d better get going.”

I looked at Ivy as she let go of my hand to brush a tear from her cheek. “Are you certain you want to do this?” I asked. I thought I’d be able to get through my testimony today dry-eyed; now I wasn’t so sure. I could only imagine what this would be like for her.

Ivy looked at the picture in her lap once more, then closed the folder. “More sure than ever,” she said.

“All right then.” I got to my feet with a sense of determination, then held my hand out to her. “Let’s go tell our story.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Although the characters in
Necessary Lies
are fictional (as is Grace County), the Eugenics Sterilization Program was not. From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens. The program targeted the “mentally defective,” the “feebleminded,” inmates in mental institutions and training schools, those suffering with epilepsy, and others whose sterilization was considered “for the public good.”

While other states had similar programs, most of them stopped performing state-mandated sterilizations after World War II, uncomfortable over comparisons to the eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany. North Carolina, however, actually increased its rate of sterilizations after the war.

In the early years of the program, the focus was on institutionalized individuals, but in the fifties, it shifted to women on welfare. Around the same time, the Human Betterment League, an organization founded by hosiery magnate James Hanes and Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble dynasty, spread sterilization propaganda to the public through pamphlets and articles, such as the ones Jane discovers in her office. Sterilization of “morons” was touted as both a way to improve the population, prevent the conception of children who would live “wasted lives,” and make life easier for the “mental defectives” who would have to raise those children.

North Carolina was the only state to give social workers the power to petition for the sterilization of individuals—in all other states, eugenic sterilization was limited to institutional populations. As a former social worker myself (although I was never a welfare worker), I can’t imagine having that much control over my clients’ lives. I believe the vast majority of social workers had their clients’ best interests at heart, and in a time when there were very few choices in contraception, many women—like Lita Jordan—were desperate for help. I’m sure many social workers viewed their ability to recommend sterilization for their clients as something of a blessing, yet that power could easily be abused. A misunderstanding of genetics, moral judgments about sexual behavior, and concern about the burgeoning welfare rolls led to many unnecessary and unwanted sterilizations.

In later years of the program, more African Americans than Caucasians were sterilized, but the program did not set out to target a specific race. In the thirties and forties, only 23 percent of those sterilized under the program were African American, but this is almost certainly due to the fact that they were excluded from the welfare rolls during that time. In the late fifties, 59 percent of those sterilized were African American and the number grew to 64 percent in the mid-sixties.

The last sterilization took place in 1974. The records of the Eugenics Board were sealed until 1996, when researcher Dr. Johanna Schoen, currently an associate professor at Rutgers University, was given access to the board’s redacted records. Her research inspired a series of articles titled “Against Their Will” in the
Winston-Salem Journal,
bringing the Eugenics Program back into public awareness. The values of the past suddenly collided with those of the present.

While many of the victims had died by that time, as many as two thousand were still living, prompting a public apology from then governor Mike Easley. An apology, however, was not enough, and when Governor Bev Perdue took office in 2008, she created the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, which on June 22, 2011, held a hearing where victims or their loved ones could tell their stories. It’s at this hearing that Ivy and Jane are preparing to testify in the final chapter of
Necessary Lies.
You can watch the actual hearing on the Internet at
http://www.wral.com/news/video/9755940/#/vid9755940
.

After the hearing, the foundation recommended compensation of fifty thousand dollars per living victim. Governor Perdue announced she would put $10.3 million in her proposed budget to fund this compensation and the other work of the foundation, stating: “We cannot change the terrible things that happened to so many of our most vulnerable citizens, but we can take responsibility for our state’s mistakes and show that we do not tolerate violations of basic human rights. We must provide meaningful assistance to victims, so I am including this funding in my budget.” The bill providing for compensation was easily approved by the North Carolina House, but the Senate refused to support the plan. At the time of this writing, plans for compensation remain in limbo.