Bitter Blood (14 page)

She looked constantly for ways to cut costs, reminding her children to stop dripping faucets, flick off lights, close doors to retain heat. “We can’t help Daddy make a living,” she said. “The only way we can help is by saving.”

She had little social life outside the home except for attending meetings with her husband and school activities for her children. She was grade mother for all of her children’s classes and an active member of the PTA. “I had so many in school at one time that at PTA meetings I stood so much at room count that I became a laughingstock,” she told an interviewer on being named Reidsville’s Mother of the Year.

To avoid conflict with Grandma Sharp, the family belonged to no church. Grandma Sharp believed there was only one way to Heaven and that was the Primitive Baptist way, which did not condone frills such as Sunday school. Her daughter-in-law, reared a Methodist, wouldn’t accept that. She wanted her children to attend Sunday school and took them every week to Main Street Methodist Church. The children knew to make no mention of it when they went on regular Sunday afternoon visits to Grandma’s house in the country. James Sharp raised no objections and even sometimes attended services at the Methodist church with his wife, although he usually picked apart the sermons at the Sunday dinner table. He couldn’t completely accept the Primitive Baptist doctrine, but he faithfully attended the monthly meetings of Reidsville’s small Primitive Baptist church and, ever the devoted son, regularly took his mother to her overnight associational meetings. “Your grandma would just curl up and die if she didn’t get to go to association,” Annie Britt told her children.

It was Mama who taught the children social graces, saw that they attended to their chores and studies, insisted that they get musical training, read to them from such works as Uncle Remus and the poetry of Edgar Guest, her favorite (when he came to lecture in nearby Greensboro, her husband took her to hear him, creating great excitement in the family). It was Mama who sang to them in the porch swing on summer afternoons, songs such as “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and “Froggy Went a Courtin’,” sometimes sad love songs that always made Louise run into the house in tears. It was Mama, too, who was the disciplinarian, a firm believer in “Dr. Switch.” James Sharp never raised a hand to any of his children. A simple inflection of his voice was all he needed to instill quiet and obedience.

Quiet was not a customary condition in the big house with its echo-producing, high-ceilinged rooms. “Chatter-box,” Mama called the house, because it was always alive with children’s voices, not only those of her own but of their friends as well. The house was a community gathering spot for ice-cream churnings and watermelon cuttings, candy pullings and popcorn poppings.

The Sharp children were taught honesty above all virtues. Industry and family pride were close behind. They knew that much was expected of them, and all became achievers and such proud defenders of integrity and family that some would consider them haughty. There was never any question that they would attend college. Both parents were determined that all of their children would get the higher education they had been denied, and that all, male and female, would go forth trained for careers, prepared to make their own ways.

Susie, the substitute mother, the one to whom the other children always turned for decisions, was perhaps most studious of all. Scrap, she was called in her younger days, because of her love for brightly colored bits of cloth. Susie-Boosie-Stix-Stax-Stoosie, her sisters called her when Susie turned her scathing sarcasm on them. She wanted to be her father’s stenographer long before she could pronounce the word. In high school she tried out for the girl’s basketball team, failed, and turned to the debating team, which was coached by Judge Allen Gwyn, who had won the judgeship her father coveted. “He praised me to the skies, and I worked like a dog,” Susie remembered. She became a star on the debating team, and her father often drove her and the other team members to their matches in his second Nash touring car. So great were her skills that many people told her she should become a lawyer, like her father. “After a while,” she recalled, “I just went along with it.” She graduated as salutatorian of the Reidsville High School Class of 1924 and entered the Woman’s College of North Carolina, twenty-five miles away in Greensboro, taking courses designed to lead her to law school. At that time, no undergraduate degree was required to enter law school, and her plan was to spend two years at WC, as Woman’s College was called, before transferring to law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The next child, Sallie, was five years behind her, and Susie knew that her parents couldn’t afford to have more than one child in college at a time. Susie was the only female in her law school class of sixty, only the fourth in the history of the school. An honor student, an editor of the
Law Review,
she passed the bar exam and was granted her license to practice a year before she got her degree in 1929. She joined her father in his work, becoming the first female lawyer in the history of Rockingham County. Her reception by the townspeople was wary. For years, the family would tell the story of the old black man who came to James Sharp’s office shortly after Susie joined his practice. “Are you that lady lawyer?” he asked. “Indeed, I am,” she said, thinking he might be a client. “What can I do for you?” “Nothing, ma’am,” he replied. “I just wanted to see what you looked like.”

Sallie, the musical one, the prettiest of all the Sharp girls, entered WC in the fall of 1929 with dreams of becoming a professional violinist. In June 1934, she became the first of the Sharp brood to marry, wedding Lawrence A. Taylor, who had come to Reidsville to manage the Montgomery Ward store. Soon the young couple moved away to Michigan.

Annie Hill, called Higgy by her family, the one who most resembled her mother, became a guard on the Reidsville High girl’s basketball team, and, like her sister Susie, was salutatorian of her graduating class. She would fulfill one of her mother’s dreams. Annie Britt had wanted to be a nurse, but her father said no. She had spoken often of her failed dream, spoken highly of nursing as a profession, and Annie Hill became the first of her children to be influenced by it. She went off to Durham to study nursing at the Duke University Medical School, and became only the second female to receive a bachelor of science degree there. While working on the wards, she met a tall young medical student named Frederick Klenner, who had fallen ill. She helped nurse him back to health, and romance blossomed. Her family was aghast when they learned about it. Not only was this young man from the state where bluecoats had permanently implanted rifle balls in Grandpa Sharp, he also was Catholic, and in the rural and small-town South of that time, Catholics were regarded with even more fear and suspicion than Yankees. Annie Britt was distraught to discover that her daughter had secretly joined the Catholic Church. Grandma Sharp would have an absolute fit, certain that her granddaughter had bought a spot in hell. Both mother and eldest sister tried desperately to talk Annie Hill out of marrying the young man, but she was strong-headed and in love and nothing could deter her. The young couple settled in Winston-Salem, where Dr. Klenner was completing his residency at the North Carolina Tuberculosis Sanitarium, and there Annie Hill joined the nursing staff.

While Annie Hill was graduating from Duke, her younger brother, Thomas, perhaps the most brilliant of the Sharp children, was receiving a degree in chemical engineering at the University of North Carolina. He moved to New Jersey to take a job with Du Pont.

Like two of her sisters before her, Louise—Pokey to the family, because of the deliberate pace at which she moved—went to WC in Greensboro. Like her sisters Susie and Annie Hill and her brother Tommy, she, too, was salutatorian of her graduating class at Reidsville High. She majored in elementary education, received her degree in 1939, and began her teaching career with a seventh grade class at Caesar Cone School in Greensboro.

Two years after Louise entered WC, she was joined by her sister Florence, who had been nicknamed Punkin, Pandy Poo, and finally, Flukie, a name she carried into college. Bright, but the least academic of all the Sharp children, Florence was the gay one, the carefree one, one of the most popular girls at Reidsville High. Laughter followed wherever she went. She would receive her degree in secretarial administration in 1941 and embark on a teaching career.

By 1939, only one Sharp child remained at Reidsville High School. That was James Vance, the baby, called Kits. Only Jimmy and his eldest sister, Susie, now a distinguished lawyer, still lived in the big family house on Lindsey Street. The Sharps were proud of all of their children and proud that they had been able to educate them in the midst of the Great Depression.

Reidsville had not suffered as much from the Depression as had many other areas. United Bank and Trust Company had closed in 1931, reopened, then failed in 1933. The new Annie Penn Memorial Hospital, named for the wife of the founder of F. R. Penn Tobacco Company, opened in 1930, was forced to close after a year, then reopened in 1932. But the American Tobacco Company not only kept operating but increased its business, protecting the town, and Reidsville was emerging from the Depression relatively unscathed.

The Sharp family suffered only minor setbacks. Mr. Jim and Miss Susie, as the father-daughter partnership came to be known around town, lost clients early in the Depression, forcing Susie to take a temporary job in Chapel Hill as secretary to the dean of the law school. Mr. Jim had to accept some fees in chickens and farm produce and allow other clients to work out law bills on his farm in the years ahead, but by 1939 better days seemed on the way.

Only one problem nagged the family—Annie Hill’s marriage. Although the family had been hurt by Annie Hill’s decision, and acceptance was difficult, once she had made it, the family tried to heal the rift—blood, after all, was binding—and went out of their way to make her husband feel welcome. The strain, however, was evident to all.

In the summer of 1939, Dr. Klenner finished his internship at the sanitarium and decided to begin his practice in his wife’s hometown. Anticipating that patients would be slow in coming, Annie Hill took a job at Duke Hospital until her husband could get established. Her family invited their son-in-law to live with them, and Mr. Jim even helped him set up an office on the same floor as his in the Whitsett Building.

In the weeks ahead, though, the Sharps would become more troubled over what they learned about this young doctor their daughter had brought home. For one thing he suffered frequent and severe migraine headaches that caused him to act, as Annie Britt said, “as crazy as a moon-eyed horse.” Even when he wasn’t under the influence of pain, they found his actions more alien and unacceptable than they had imagined, and they were relieved when his practice burgeoned quicker than expected, allowing Annie Hill to return from Durham and the two of them to move into a small house of their own.

12

In the spring of 1985, the ring of children’s voices was but a distant memory in the big house at 529 Lindsey Street that Annie Britt Sharp once dubbed the Chatterbox. Little about the house itself had changed in the six decades that had passed since the Sharp children were growing up in it. The front porch was much as it had been when Mr. Jim took his ease there on warm evenings, his feet propped on the rail, his hat tilted over his eyes. The big wood range, never used anymore, still stood in the kitchen, a monument to Annie Britt’s revered cooking. Grass grew now in the tiny front yard, no longer kept bare by the batterings of children’s feet, and the iron picket fence that Mr. Jim had built to keep his children out of the street now guarded the yard from intrusion. The post oak that once had shaded half the yard had died and been cut down, but the white oak on the other side survived, a marvel of gargantuanism. The holly sprigs that Annie Britt planted on both sides of the sidewalk near the gate had grown into handsome trees, offering shade of their own.

The house was home now to only one Sharp, the fourth daughter, Louise, who never married, but it remained a shrine to family. Family photographs decorated walls and furniture in almost every room, and the house was a repository for cherished photo albums, family heirlooms, and the big family Bible with its carefully kept records of every family member.

Annie Britt Sharp had been the keeper of that Bible. In it, she had entered the marriages of her children, the births of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Deaths had been added, too. In August of 1952, in sorrowful hand, Annie Britt wrote the last entry on her husband, James Merritt Sharp, who died from uremic poisoning at age seventy-two. He practiced law and farmed until he fell ill three weeks before his death. The following year, she recorded the sudden death from an embolism of her second daughter, Sallie, the violinist, mother of two sons, dead at forty-one. The two losses, within thirteen months of each other, were almost more than Annie Britt could bear.

“I hope I’m the next person to die in this family,” she said in her grief.

The words were prophecy, though not for nearly two decades. For several years, Annie Britt lived alone in the big house, checked regularly by family members and others. “I’m fine,” she inevitably replied to anybody who inquired of her well-being, prompting her daughter Florence to write a poem about her by that title. But in 1968 she got pneumonia, and although she recovered, she was never quite herself again. She lived with Florence until Louise could return home to care for her and eventually to record in the Bible her mother’s death from heart congestion at age eighty-seven on April 9, 1971. Louise became the keeper of the family Bible and the family home, touchstones for the entire family and symbols of their unity.