Carrie said of her years with the Dobbs, “I had good days and I had bad days,” even as a small child she had been aware they were not her real parents. She referred to them only as “the Dobbs,” never mother or father. The so-called adoption, of which they spoke afterward, was probably not a legal one, but an informal arrangement or “an act of kindness,” as they so often put it.
And when, by chance, they met Carrie’s natural mother in town, or heard some idle gossip from their neighbors about Emma’s “loose ways,” it was to this same “act of kindness” that they attributed the fact that Carrie too, despite her “bad blood,” was not living on the streets as her mother and her younger half-sister, Doris, and half-brother Roy did.
It was in these few chance meetings that Carrie began to develop strong feelings for her mother. They were feelings of protectiveness, of caring that would endure over a lifetime—a lifetime in which they were often separated by the hardships and misfortunes that plagued both their lives—but which also served to forge a strong bond between mother and daughter, and even between Carrie and her half-sister, Doris, and her half-brother, Roy, whom she was only to know in the few moments they crossed each other’s paths on the streets of Charlottesville.
Perhaps the only really happy days of her childhood had been those she spent in school. Although it was later to be reported that she had been a dull child who had spent her time writing “notes to the boys in her class,” the records of the McGuffey School in Charlottesville and the Midway School, the schools Carrie attended from 1913 to 1918, tell a much different story, one closer to Carrie’s own memories of her school days.
School records indicate that Carrie was a very normal child. She attended classes for five years until the Dobbs withdrew her “to help with the chores at home.” During that time, she progressed in proper sequence from grade to grade. Her last teacher recorded her assessment of Carrie as “very good—deportment and lessons”—and recommended her for promotion.
Through the years, she always remembered how much she had “liked going to school” even though she admitted, chuckling, that she had “played hooky too often.” But life in the Dobbs’ home consisted of much hard work and sometimes Carrie also did housework for other families in the neighborhood.
Taking a day off now and then to be with other classmates, or just to walk around town, seemed fun. Clean fun, for she “hadn’t been into boys,” she always insisted. “I didn’t run around; I wasn’t allowed to.” Though the Dobbs “mostly treated me nicely” there was little frivolity, nor even the sense of encouraging normal boy-girl activities they accorded to their own daughter, who was about Carrie’s age.
ILLUSTRATION 1: Charlottesville in the 1900’s. Holsinger Studio Collection, University of Virginia Library.
Carrie moved in a different plain; always suspect because of her mother’s reputation, and always beholden because of her own inferior position in the household.
And, as she grew into a teenager, docile Carrie quietly accepted this status of caretaker for those about her as she would care for many others in her later years.
“Not that she hadn’t liked boys,” but for Carrie, shy, awkward and gangly, boys had been friends with whom to sneak down to the river and fish in her rare free hours or climb hills with—things other girls didn’t like to do. She had not been wild like her half-sister, Doris, who was always running off with this boy or that. Carrie “had not been into that sort of stuff.” She was, as she herself put it, “a good girl.”
So that when the Dobbs family insisted she had to get out of their home because she was pregnant, Carrie was bereft. According to Carrie, a member of their own family, their nephew, someone she had known and trusted, had raped her. She had told them the truth, but they preferred not to believe her and had begun to circulate stories that she was “having seizures” and was “morally delinquent.” Carrie swore that none of it was true.
The nephew had raped her in the Dobbs’ own home, acting as though Carrie had no rights except to submit to his will, and, because of it, she was to be turned out. The blame for the family’s embarrassment caused by the pregnancy became Carrie’s fault.
And they had found both a method and a route to rid themselves of her as quickly as possible. They would bring her case before the local court, having her certified as feeble-minded. It would be easy with her background and her relatives. And J. T. Dobbs knew exactly how the procedure worked. After all, he was a town peace officer, charged to deal with criminals and vagrants and the shiftless mentally retarded. He himself would file the necessary papers and deliver Carrie to the courthouse, just as he had delivered her mother three years previously on April 1, 1920.
Emma’s Inquisition—April 1,1920
The dark-haired, swarthy-looking woman who stared around the court room was unkempt, overweight and shabbily dressed. But she had an unmistakable odor of sensuality about her that made the commission, assembled to decide whether to commit her to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, distinctly uneasy.
C. D. Shackelford, justice of the peace and judge for the proceedings, motioned for her to be seated.
But she did not immediately obey. Instead, she stood fidgeting, silently scanning the austere, high ceilings of the room with its scarred benches and dark wooden floor. It was the first of April, but the musty, cold room still felt like winter.
The examining physician, Dr. Davis, came forward to begin “the inquisition and interrogatories.”
He cleared his throat and stared into her dark, defiant eyes. The woman stared right back.
“Be seated,” Shackelford announced. Slowly she sat down in the chair provided.
Again the physician cleared his throat. “Name?” he began, his voice hesitant, uncertain.
“Emma Buck,” she said, cocking her head to one side and running a sickly, white-coated tongue, which he later declared hypertrophic, over her reddened lips.
“When were you born?” he continued, his voice taking on a cutting edge.
She narrowed her eyes, “November 1872.”
“And the day?”
She shrugged.
“You don’t know the day?” he said, exasperated.
Again she shrugged.
“Can you tell me where you were born?”
“Albemarle,” she said, opening her mouth wide to form the vowel sound, almost as though it were the opening word of a familiar song. He noted the poor condition of her teeth.
“Where do you live now?” he asked.
“Charlottesville.” Again she drew out
