her and went to her home where the body was placed for viewing. Walking in, I could not help but notice a white woman with striking silver-white hair and electric blue eyes standing by the casket, weeping. A little Black boy was holding her hand and a young White girl was standing beside her. All three soon left together and I asked Nellie about them.
“The lady and her husband owned a farm outside of Lexington,” she said. “When the little boy was born the doctors told his mother, Eva Marie, that she had given birth to a Black child, even though he looked as pale-skinned as any of the other White babies. They tried to convince her to leave the baby at the hospital to let him be adopted, but she refused. Eva Marie thought she could pass him off for White and she wanted to keep him. She named him William and called him Billy. Of course, as Billy grew older, his Blackness began to show; he had curly hair and his skin began to darken.
“When the woman’s husband became suspicious, he confronted her; she admitted that a farmhand had fathered Billy. Her husband ranted and raved but then agreed that she could keep the boy, not as their child, just as a farmhand. This arrangement continued during Billy’s preschool years. He was fed and turned out into the fields alone to talk to the animals and the trees. However, word spread around Lexington that his mother had had a Black child. It was considered a scandal and when visitors came to the house, Billy was locked in his room.
“When Billy was six, his mother had to find a school for him. Kentucky schools were segregated and Billy couldn’t go to the neighborhood school with his older sister. Eva Marie sent him to live in Lexington where he could go to a Black school during the week and come home on weekends.
“My mother,” Nellie continued, “had been keeping Billy in Lexington and sending him to school, but now other arrangements will have to be made for him.”
Soon after I returned home from the funeral, Nellie called me.
“Would you be interested in adopting Billy?” she asked.
I was taken by surprise. Even though I knew I couldn’t have children, Nicky and I had not considered adopting a child.
“I’ll have to think about it and talk to my husband,” I replied.
Nicky and I talked about it for a week. The more we talked, the more we felt we wanted Billy. I had always wanted a child, and even though we had been married eleven years and had become accustomed to thinking only of ourselves, we believed we could adjust and become good parents. We went to Lexington to talk to Billy’s mother. Eva Marie told us the story of Billy’s conception and birth, crying the whole time. She said she had become close to Billy’s father because her husband was away a lot. She came to depend on him.
“He was always there when I needed anything. After a while, he was so good to me that I came to love him.”
She had agonized over her decision to give Billy up, trying to find any other solution.
“I’ve tried to find an integrated boarding school I could afford and I’ve also considered leaving my husband and going to New York. I’ve had to reject both of these plans because I don’t have any money of my own.”
“We really want Billy,” Nicky and I told her and we arranged to pick him up at Nellie’s. That morning, he carried a little suitcase in which, besides his clothes, he had several cans of tuna fish, his favorite food, and a picture of his mother.
We enrolled Billy in Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School in the fall. When Christmas came, we spent as much as we could afford to make it a happy one for him, buying him winter clothes and nice toys.
In the beginning, he seemed to enjoy being with us, but after a while he became withdrawn. He lost his appetite and would sit at the table picking at his food. One day, tired of waiting for him to finish, I got up and started washing the dishes. I turned around and saw him holding his plate below the table where our collie, Shep, was. I hid my smile.
“Good, Billy. You’ve eaten all your food, I see.” I didn’t let on that I had seen him feeding it to his constant companion, Shep.
Nicky and I grew to love Billy. He called us “Mom” and “Dad” as we asked him to, but we couldn’t seem to get as close to him as we wanted. He was reserved, quiet, and spent a lot of time looking out the window in the front room. It wasn’t until much later I found out that Billy had not been told the truth about where he was going and why. His mother had told him he was going to Louisville on a vacation after which she would come and get him. To save herself the pain of telling him the truth, she had set him up for the incredible disappointment and lifelong pain of wondering why his mother never came. Billy was in high school before he gave up hope that his real mother and dad would come back and get him. He, of course, believed that his mother’s husband was his biological father. I wanted so much to be a good mother to Billy and I couldn’t understand why it was impossible to bridge the distance between us in those early years. I understand it now.
It is one of the regrets of my life that I didn’t seek counseling for Billy to get to the root of the problem while he was still a young child. However, professional counseling was not a part of ordinary peoples’ thinking in those days; even if we had known about it, we wouldn’t have had the money to pay.
With my new home and Billy to take care of, my life seemed settled. Inwardly, however, I was in turmoil. I knew I had to do something about Jim Powers. Our affair had gone on for three years. Even though I had stopped seeing Jim at that point, I knew I would start again and it was just a matter of time before Nicky found out. Not long before, Nicky had met Jim at a party and talked about how much he liked him. This made me even more nervous. Moreover, Jim was making our relationship increasingly difficult and dangerous for me. He told me he’d never give me up. He was drinking heavily because he felt trapped in his marriage and in his job as a waiter.
Once, in the middle of the night when Nicky and I were asleep in bed together, the phone rang. I answered it.
“I just had to hear your voice before I went in,” I heard Jim say.
“You must have the wrong number,” I said, and hung up quickly.
The next time we spoke, I begged him not to ever call my house again, but if he was drinking, he did. Even to me, my excuses to Nicky began to sound like lies.
Questions ran through my head all day, every day. What am I going to do? Jim is not going to leave his wife and their three children. We’re never going to be together legally. I have to get him out of my system, I decided. The only way I could foresee ending the relationship was to put miles between us. Nicky and I would have to leave Louisville and make a life somewhere else.
I decided that we would go to California, where my cousin Frances lived. It was not hard to convince Nicky to leave since he didn’t like Louisville. I called Frances in Los Angeles, put our building on the market, and made plans to move to California. I didn’t dare tell Jim about my plans. He was still saying, “I will not give you up.”
I decided I’d write him after I got to California. We sold our building for three thousand dollars. Afterward, Nicky, Billy, and I left for California in a 1949 Ford convertible with only our clothes, a little cash, the check for three thousand dollars, and Shep the dog. It took us four days to drive there.
There was no such thing as electronic banking at that time, but it had not occurred to us that we wouldn’t be able to cash our check right away. We couldn’t, of course, and it took ten days for the check to clear. Meanwhile, we ran out of money and lived on the fruit basket hotel management had placed in our room. Finally, we had to tell Cousin Frances about our situation and borrow some money
