Ancestor Trouble, page 17
Robert, their first child, was born in December 1907. In my imaginings, he loved his mother but chafed at all the church and the praying. He tried Rindia’s patience with his willfulness. And he idolized Charley, a tall, strong, charming man whom women were always swooning over, marveling at the likeness between father and son. The family lived outside Grand Prairie, a town at the edge of a prairie that extended into West Texas. By 1909, according to the official history online, the town, despite the “ever-present mud,” had some amenities, everything from a cotton gin to a barbershop, post office, hardware store, millinery shop, and short-order stand. A trolley trip from the town into downtown Dallas ran a mere ninety minutes, but the trip by wagon for a farmer like Charley took a full day there and another back, a long haul in the Texas heat.
The Bruces’ tiny rental shack sat next door to the (as I envision it) falling-down shotgun house where Rindia’s mom, stepdad, and siblings lived, down the road from Rindia’s granddad and his family. Up before dawn most days, Charley worked the fields. Rindia often toiled at his side, but she also cared for Robert, kept the house, milked the cow, fed the pigs and chickens, and took in sewing for extra money. Everywhere Robert looked, everywhere he went, he would have seen Rindia’s people, praying and praising God. While Charley came from devout people, too, I imagine his relationship with God was less steady and all-consuming and that he started to drink too much after testifying in the trial that got his best friend, George, locked up. Maybe all the hallelujahs tried Charley’s nerves and, in sympathy, exasperated young Robert, too.
Maybe when Rindia wasn’t around, Charley told his son funny stories about George, pranks they’d pulled as bachelors new to Dallas, fishing trips they’d taken later, a night they’d tromped out onto the prairie after a goat of Charley’s and found its carcass being devoured by a mountain lion. But Robert would have heard whisperings from Rindia’s folks, too—how, when Robert was a baby, George tried to hurt his own stepdaughter. The girl, Bessie, had turned up at their family compound, trembling and bruised, after it happened. She stayed the night with Rindia’s grandpa and step-grandma, or so I infer from a court opinion on the assault-to-rape case, which mentions her seeking refuge with a Mrs. Haddock.
And then George got out of jail, swore revenge, and attacked Charley while he was unloading the wagon. Charley fended George off with the hay hook, catching him in the stomach by accident, he told his son. The small wound quietly festered into sepsis and death. As I picture it, Charley had been drinking and blaming himself for a couple of days before the police knocked on the door that night with a warrant for his arrest. “Take care of your mama and the girls, now, son,” Charley might have told Robert, as the sheriff closed the cuffs around his wrists.
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I imagine that day as the worst of my grandfather’s life. Then eight years old, Robert would have stood with Rindia and his little sisters, Mamie and May, crying but trying not to. May was five years old and Mamie was three. Maybe they hid in Rindia’s skirts. Their mother’s belly would have been starting to swell. Six months later, three days before Christmas, their baby brother would arrive. As the men rode off, Rindia fell to her knees and prayed, or something like that. Maybe it seemed to Robert, no fan of religion in his later life, that God was what got Charley into this mess.
Even in early-twentieth-century Texas, not exactly a bastion of law-abidingness, the case caused a stir. A blurb about the death by hay hook, one farmer killing another, appeared in newspapers around the state. But the neighbors came forward, and the grand jury declined to prosecute. Four days after his arrest, Charley was back home, freed of blame.
Not even a decade passed between the day the grand jury set him free and the day he was committed to the mental hospital, and while the exact form of his decline is lost to history, it’s clear the accusation haunted him. Still, Charley and Rindia had three more sons during those years. In Robert’s telling, this in-between time before his father succumbed to manic exhaustion didn’t warrant mentioning. Nor did the near-rape of George’s stepdaughter register as a major plot point. Robert drew a line from his father’s grief over an ex-friend’s death to Charley’s own demise. Charley “lost his mind,” my mom remembers Robert telling her, because he accidentally killed his best friend. I wondered if Robert’s version of the story was a clue to his life. Did he come to see caring too much about someone as something to avoid?
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In the summer of 1925, at the age of seventeen, Robert married Nettie Mae Mason, his neighbor. Nettie was also seventeen and a farmer’s child. Like the Bruces, the Masons were poor. The families had lived near each other since at least 1920, when they appeared on the same page in the census.
Nettie was working by about age fourteen. She appears in the 1922 Dallas City Directory as a garment operator at Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan Co., a clothing manufacturer where Robert later worked. Was it just hormones and proximity that drew the two of them to each other, or something beyond that? I imagine Nettie was stylish and sophisticated by comparison to the other people Robert knew. Like all the women he married whom I’ve seen in photographs, she had dark hair and a pretty face. “Your grandfather had a type,” a friend of mine said once, when I shared photos of Robert with various women, and it’s true: chestnut hair, high cheekbones, intelligent eyes.
What else? Maybe Nettie inspired Robert’s own transition into the garment trade; maybe she taught him what she knew. By 1930, one of Robert’s sisters also worked as a seamstress. My mom recalls that his mom and other sister were also talented at sewing. Working with clothes may not have been a novelty for Robert, but industrial machines and a corporate employer would have been. Dallas clothing manufacturers depended on skilled garment workers but paid notoriously low wages to their mostly female employees, who toiled for long hours in poor conditions. Still, factory sweatshops probably paid better, and more reliably, than farming did. And a man working as a marker and cutter may have made more than the women and been treated with more respect.
Robert and Nettie might also have bonded over family troubles. When they wed, Nettie’s mom was already sick with the tuberculosis that would take her life in 1929. Charley was struggling with bipolar disorder. I imagine that Robert hoped the marriage would somehow bolster his father, but Charley entered the mental institution two months after the wedding.
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Nettie gave birth to a daughter, Bonnie Katharine, in May 1926, nine months and three days after they married. The baby must have been named for Nettie’s mom, Bonnie Bell, who was suffering from consumption. When I found Bonnie’s birth listed in the official state index, a chill ran up my neck. A baby girl! Robert had lied about so many things, I didn’t know what to think. What if my mom’s half-sister was still alive? Within an hour or two, I’d learned that Bonnie really had died young and also that Robert’s representation of her life was misleading. She didn’t die as an infant but lived to be five years old.
In the years leading up to this discovery, I’d emailed my mom endless questions about Robert and his family. No, as a girl she’d never known anything about Charley, not even his name, she said. She hadn’t seen much of Rindia growing up, especially not after Granny remarried. But she took pains to emphasize that “my daddy loved children”:
He played with them everywhere he met them. He loved me, too, except I guess since he and Granny were divorced and I was not in his line of vision, so to speak, he didn’t contact me often. Or, it could be that Granny made it difficult to see me. I really don’t know. I don’t remember ever missing him or asking to see him, but I did threaten Granny many times when I didn’t get my way that I would go and live with my daddy if she didn’t do what I wanted.
But then there was that line in the letter Robert sent Granny when she left him. “Tell Sandy Daddy loves her and will take her to the zoo if she comes home at once and if not she may never see me again.”
The “come back now or else I’m going to abandon our child” approach doesn’t suggest the most devoted of fathers. Now I’d found another child. How involved was Robert in her short life?
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Charley died of manic exhaustion in the mental hospital not long after Bonnie’s first birthday. Judging from Robert’s grief when he told my mom the story more than four decades later, his father’s demise hit him hard. If Robert wasn’t a drinker before then, I suspect that’s when he started. Maybe it’s when he started smacking women around, too, if he didn’t already.
Robert and Nettie seem to have stayed in Grand Prairie, close to family. In 1928, Robert was working for Nettie’s former employer, Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan Co., as a garment cutter. In 1929, he was a garment cutter for a different company, Vaughan Hinckley Co. He divorced Nettie in a Dallas court that July, a couple of months after her mother died. Nettie didn’t appear for the proceedings but was awarded custody of their daughter. In October, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. By the 1930 census, three-year-old Bonnie was a “boarder,” living without either parent or (seemingly) any relatives, in the Arcadia Park section of Oak Cliff, in Dallas. It’s unclear who was caring for her or paying her room and board. Robert may have visited, but he didn’t exactly live around the block. I can’t find anything about Nettie’s whereabouts that year.
How did Robert feel about all this? In 1930, he appears alone in the city directory, as a “marker” at Darling Dress Manufacturing Co. A marriage certificate attests that he married his second wife, a pattern designer, Clara Mae Brantley, in Oklahoma on April 19. It seems likely that Robert and his new bride met through work. Given his ambition, I suspect Robert wanted to advance in the clothing industry and was drawn to her at least partly because her knowledge and expertise surpassed his. I imagine the two of them debating the placement of seams, and how to economize on fabric, over drinks.
By 1931, Clara wasn’t working, but Robert still had his job with Darling Dress as a marker. Their place was just south of what is now the Bishop Arts section of Oak Cliff, about a fifteen-minute drive to the place where Bonnie was living the year before. Bonnie died the following year, 1932, at five years and eight months old, in Roanoke, a small town northwest of Dallas. According to her death certificate, the cause was diphtheria, known then as “the deadly scourge of childhood.” An aggressive vaccination campaign was under way, but maybe it took a while for word to spread, or traveling for the shot was too cumbersome or securing it too costly. If Bonnie was still a boarder, the people housing her may not have had the energy to care about someone else’s little girl. The informant on Bonnie’s death certificate wasn’t a parent, grandparent, or known relative but a doctor.
Seventy-seven years after the fact, learning of my mom’s half-sister’s death hit me hard. Mindful of how rarely Robert was around for my mom after he and Granny divorced, I felt an elevator-sinking dread. Bonnie’s fate could easily have been my mom’s if she hadn’t had Granny.
Chapter 17
CHASING THE DREAM
In October 2019, a decade after I learned about Bonnie, I was combing through databases and found a newly digitized obituary, diphtheria fatal to roanoke child, which was published in the Denton Record-Chronicle on February 3, 1932. Coming upon the text without knowing more, you would believe Bonnie lived with her parents: “Bonnie Katherine Bruce, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bruce of Roanoke, died of diphtheria in the home Wednesday morning at five o’clock. Funeral services were to be held Wednesday afternoon at four o’clock in the home, followed by burial in the Roanoke cemetery.”
I probably rolled my eyes. Of course Robert wanted to put the best possible face on his abandoned child’s death. But then I wondered: Could the obituary be a true representation of Bonnie’s living situation? I hadn’t found Robert and Clara in the 1932 city directory. Had they rescued Bonnie from the boardinghouse and moved north? Were they the “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bruce” of the obituary? In marrying Clara, had Robert established a stable home for his daughter? My mom had said that Robert loved children, but, as with Charley and the hay-hook killing, I’d looked at the facts through the lens of blame and decided I knew better.
No sooner had I begun reimagining Robert’s relationship with Bonnie at the end of her life than I checked the 1932 Dallas City Directory again and realized that Robert and Clara were listed under “C Robt Bruce” rather than the usual “Robt C Bruce.” Clara’s name was alongside his, in parentheses. No occupation was given for either. They lived far from the town where Bonnie died.
Still, having imagined an alternate reality, I found it difficult to return to my earlier mindset of utter condemnation. I couldn’t fathom being a parent who left their child in a boardinghouse. Then again, I’d never had to support a family while working long hours for low wages. I had observed my mom’s misery over the demands of mothering and, realizing I would feel the same way, resolved never to have a baby. Most divorced fathers working long hours during the Great Depression didn’t take care of their children, who were often abandoned, apprenticed, or boarded as servants. When I knew her, Granny had the most finely tuned bullshit detector of anyone I’ve known, and (by my mom’s account) she believed Robert was bereft over the death of his child. As an experiment, I decided to proceed as if I believed that, too.
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Skilled dress cutters like Robert made about ten to fifteen dollars per week in Dallas, compared to fifty dollars in other cities. Hours were long, typically fifty-four per week and often more; the factories were poorly ventilated and given to extreme temperatures. Black workers fared considerably worse than their white counterparts, toiling even longer for less.
As labor organized, newspapers like The Dallas Morning News caricatured the workers, depicting women who labored in the factories as coarse and unladylike. The major dailies “condoned brutal tactics” of the police and “frequently stirred racial antagonisms and anti-Semitism.” As a white man, Robert was probably paid more than most but not fairly. The job required making precision cuts with heavy machinery for ten or more hours a day. Like Granny, Robert had dropped out of high school. There was no family help if he fell on hard times. And given his father’s history and Robert’s erratic relationships and employment, I’m certain that he was bipolar. Sometimes he rode manic energy to glorious success, but more often he tried to self-regulate with alcohol. He lost jobs and destroyed marriages.
Robert was only twenty-five when Bonnie died in 1932. The city directory for that year suggests that neither he nor Clara was employed. Their marriage continued for a few years. In 1933, Robert worked as a superintendent for Darling Dress Manufacturing Co. I’m not sure what became of them for the next two years. In 1936, they were living together in an Oak Cliff apartment, with no occupation given for either. They divorced that June, six years and two months after they wed.
The following summer, July 1937, Robert married a younger woman, Rose Marie Camiani, in Rockwall, a town outside Dallas. Rose Marie was twenty-two years old to Robert’s twenty-nine. She doesn’t seem to have had a connection to the garment industry, and, as far as I can tell, neither she nor Robert was working in Dallas that year. Robert was again employed as a pattern drafter the following year. In March 1939, Rose Marie obtained an injunction against Robert, barring him from her premises, and an alimony award of ten dollars per week. They officially divorced in May, after less than two years.
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By then Robert had worked for more than a decade in the clothing industry. His third marriage had failed. He would soon be thirty-two years old. While he doesn’t seem to have been prone to introspection, Robert must have taken stock and resolved to do things differently. By all accounts, he was a canny businessman. He was also an opportunist. Shortly before or after the split from Rose Marie, he started working for Justin McCarty, a Dallas designer. Granny was McCarty’s office manager.
McCarty, a major player in the booming Dallas garment industry, considered Robert a natural talent, his best designer and pattern drafter, whose future was dulled only by his drinking. My mom remembers Robert bringing home chic blouses and dresses for Granny, who didn’t like to wear them. “He always dressed well,” my mom said, “and wanted his women dressed well, too.” Decades later, my mom experienced his expert eye in action. She made her own clothes sometimes, beautifully, just as she would later make dresses and ball gowns for my friends and me. Because my mom was a small, short young woman, she could buy fabric remnants cheaply and convert them into stylish outfits that other people admired. Robert noticed her shortcuts. “That skirt would be prettier if you’d cut it with the grain instead of across it,” he said once.
My guess is that Robert courted Granny more as a strategic move than a romantic one. She was his boss’s trusted assistant. She may also have been, and I use the term with no small irony, the wealthiest woman Robert had managed to woo by that point. Having squirreled away most of her wages from nearly two decades of stenography and bookkeeping, she owned the house where her parents lived. She cared for her mother and father, and she paid her own way. Granny was smart, self-made, and, for a working-class woman, successful. She was thirty-four, older than Robert by two years, and she was pretty. And then she got pregnant.
I imagine Robert moved toward marriage with excitement over being a father again, with some optimism that he and Granny would be a good match, and most of all with the expectation that he would be able to dominate her and her savings. I picture Granny proceeding with some mixture of hope, embarrassment, and sour trepidation. I’ve already been over the ultimately dismal trajectory of their marriage, but they wed in October 1939 and my mom was born the following June.
