Annie’s song — a mother’s struggle to raise her family

The seven Greenard children came home this weekend.

Came home to feast on fish at an old-fashioned fish fry, to talk and laugh and catch up on what’s happening where.

Came home to pray together, to remember growing up poor in Fairview Heights and to marvel over how far they’ve come from that hill across Town Creek where they raised themselves in an unpainted house on an unpaved street with no parents and no money.

But, oh, they had something better, says Ruby Greenard Beaty, the second of those seven children. “We had a smart gene. We’re all college educated.”

And with their college education they’ve spread out from Salisbury to Washington to Houston, Texas, and points in between.

But they’re home this weekend because this year Ruby is the hostess for their every-other-year reunion. And she’s gathering them in, six sisters and one brother and their families, for their first ever reunion in Salisbury.

So they went to see what Fairview Heights looks like now and discovered, of course, that it’s still a neighborhood, just off the Old Concord Road after you cross the bridge.

The only thing left they can recognize, though, is the old Fairview Heights Baptist Church.

Myron and Harrell streets — nobody called them by street names then — are paved now and lined with neat, nicely painted homes with well-manicured lawns and children’s play equipment in the yards and an abundance of cars in the driveways.

Not at all like the Fairview Heights of memory.

When they lived there — first with their parents and then without them — the ramshackle houses had no paint and no indoor plumbing. They all had outhouses and outside water spigots supplemented by a couple of community wells that froze up in bad winters so they had to haul water from Goodman Lumber Co.

And most of them had chickens and pigs in the backyard and gardens full of good fresh vegetables in the summertime —and unlocked doors.

The kind of trust that an unlocked door demands probably wasn’t always warranted, but the Greenard kids, after their father died and their mother went to New York for better work than she could get here, needed to trust their neighbors. They were alone.

Their father, Henry Greenard, worked for Southern Railway.

“And while he was alive,” Ruby says, “it wasn’t bad. We were one household, but he had a drinking problem, and he was on a first name basis with Sheriff Arthur Shuping.”

That, she’s implying, made drinking easier.

But not for long.

“He died in 1953 when he was 33 or 34 years old,” leaving his wife, Annie, and four daughters. Shirley, who was called Shelly, was 11; Ruby, 10; Betty, 9; and Norma, 7. “And two years later my mother went to work in New York.”

She’d ironed for a woman on Horah Street for a while and worked for the chicken poultry plant in east Salisbury and cooked some at Arey’s boarding house and worked part-time at the VA hospital.

In the late afternoons, Ruby says, “we could see the bus stop or see my mom walking home with groceries.”

But she had to leave the children alone when she worked, and none of those jobs paid enough to support them.

“And she never asked for welfare,” Ruby says. “She never thought of asking for welfare. She was at the VA in the kitchen,” when she decided she had to make a move.

“During that time, a lot of people were migrating from the South for work in the North.”

And one day she told them that’s what she had to do.

“We didn’t have any immediate relatives here in Salisbury,” Ruby says. “She left us to take care of ourselves, and from that time we never had any parental supervision.”

It was 1955. Shelly was 13; Ruby, 12; Betty, 11; and Norma, 9.

Shelly remembers she trusted that Mama was making the best decision. Betty was angry. Norma was shocked.

“But I wasn’t upset about it,” Ruby says. “I just went with the flow. Shelly — Shelly’s still a very strong person — was head of our family.”

In New York her mother got a job as a domestic, but wound up at the VA up there.

“We saw her every year for 15 years,” Ruby says. “We traveled to see her, and she sent money home. We would even call her when one would misbehave.”

Or when they had an argument.

Plaiting hair could bring on a telephone call.

“Betty was the only one who could plait,” Ruby remembers, “and Norma needed her hair plaited, but Betty would act out. She would say, ‘She’s not my child!’ She was really angry with my mother for leaving, and she and Shelly, who was the oldest and in charge, would fight. Betty wouldn’t be cooperative. She wouldn’t wash the dishes or cook, so we would call Mama and tell her. We had to go across the street to call her and tell her.”

And sometimes they had to call Mama over who was wearing what.

“I used to sneak and wear Shelly’s clothes. I would be angry because I thought she had better clothes than I had, and when I’d come home from school, she’d see me with her clothes on, and I’d say, ‘You said I could wear it,’ but I asked her permission while she was asleep. Sometimes she believed me.

“But most of the time, if we had to call Mama, it would be more serious than that.

“We had assignments, days to cook, wash dishes, get up and make the fire. Everybody did what they were supposed to do, but Betty. She was recalcitrant, and they would fight. Fisticuffs. Mom sent the money, and we went to the grocery store. We were a regular family.

“Nobody questioned us about anything. We went to church. My mom didn’t go herself, but she sent us to Fairview Baptist Church, and we continued to go when she left.

“We had no help, but we were normal. In the seventh grade each of my sisters won the history cup.”

But when Ruby came out of the seventh grade, she was 13 years old and pregnant.

“They wouldn’t allow me to go back to school. I was going to Shuford School at Granite Quarry.

“My classmates stopped speaking to me, and I had no high school.”

Her baby was born in 1957, “and I was home, so I did the cleaning, kept house, while they were going to school, and I took care of my baby, and the next year Mama came home and had a baby in Salisbury. She left when she able to go and left Terri with us.

“Nobody bothered us. Nobody ever reported us to the Department of Social Services. All of us have stories of our men neighbors trying to lure us, but we fended for ourselves.”

And for more children as they came.

“The man who got me pregnant married me to keep from going to jail because I was so young.

“In 1959, I had another baby, my oldest sister had one, and my mother had another one, Henry. And in 1962 my mother had Rita. She kept bringing her babies home to us.

“Terri was 6 years old before she knew I was not her mom.

“As I got older, I knew it was unusual. We all recognize it now as something incredible that we did it, but as we went along, we were just surviving. I learned to sew as a kid. By the time Betty and Norma got to college, I made their evening gowns.”

Finally, in 1971, their mother came back to Salisbury, bought a house in Hawkinstown,and the three younger children went to live with her. But she died less than a year later.

By that time her first four children were grown, and their lives were taking shape.

Shelly married her junior year in high school and didn’t go on to college, but years later her husband was killed in an automobile accident, and she went to Livingstone for a social work degree and then to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, for a law degree, practiced law and was assistant attorney general there and is now a lawyer in Houston, Texas.

Betty got a degree in history from Livingstone and a masters in New York and taught there — and was named teacher of the year.

Norma graduated in education from Fayetteville State, got a masters from the University of California, became a military wife and is now a high school counselor in Hampton, Va.

Terri graduated from Catawba in accounting; Henry, from Georgia Tech in electrical engineering with a masters from the University of Florida; Rita, from Winston-Salem State with an education degree and works with children with learning disabilities.

And Ruby, who dropped out of school when she had her first baby in 1957 and finally married his father and got pregnant again on her wedding night?
"It was not a marriage made in heaven," she says. "It lasted six years."

She married again at 21, had her third son - and went to Rowan-Cabarrus Community College for a high school equivalency diploma and the practical nurse program, studying while she mothered and worked at Fiber Industries, now Kosa, and later at the VA hospital.  

That marriage wasn¹t good either, she says.
"I was terrified to leave him, but I wasn¹t happy. I knew we¹ve got a gene in our blood that we¹re academically smart. And I knew I was still not educated."

So in 1977 she went to Livingstone College and told Doris Jones, the registrar,"I want to go to college, but I can¹t pass an entrance exam. I know I can¹t. But there¹s nothing you teach here that I can¹t learn."
"Oh, we can let you in," Doris Jones told her, "but it will be up to you to stay. We¹ll teach you, but it¹s up to you to learn."

She stayed, beginning as a 35-year-old freshman working 40 hours a week, for 3 1/2 years when she got a degree in English - cum laude. By the end of ¹82, she was  public health advisor at the Centers for Disease Control, and during the next 16 years she worked in Louisville, Atlanta, Houston and Pensacola.

When she finished 30 years of federal service in ¹99, she came back to Salisbury, back to the house in Hawkinstown that she had paid for after her mother died.

With her fourth son.

"I have an 11-year-old that I had out of wedlock when I was 46 years old - and I was so excited my feet didn¹t touch the ground. I had gone from one extreme to the other. I had babies when I was too young and too old.

"I couldn¹t tell my mother about my first pregnancy, but as far as the community was concerned, I don¹t think I suffered the shame. And then when I was 45, I would tell anybody who would listen, 'I¹m going to have a baby!' The first person I told was a cashier in a restaurant."

His daddy?

She didn¹t marry him, "but he¹s very much a part of my son¹s life."

So she wrote a book about it, about being a 55-year-old Little League Mom and having to go to the PTA and taking a child on amusement rides and to parades.

"He¹s just a spoiled 11-year-old," she says, "like an only child, but he¹s got three doting older brothers."  
The book hasn¹t found a publisher yet. "I¹ve got it wrapped up over here and so many rejection letters."

But the family reunions started before she came back to Salisbury or wrote the book. The seven children, she says, "were never apart from each other. We always come for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and we¹d travel miles for graduations. Shelly came from Houston recently for two graduations. If anybody needed help with a baby or anything else, Shelly was there.'"

And nobody doubts that those family events will continue.

"We¹ll get together the day after Thanksgiving. And Shelly will be 60 in January, and we¹re going on a cruise to the Bahamas to celebrate that and ... "
But about 1989 they began their every-other-year reunions, like the one they¹re having now, and Ruby knows this one¹s special.

"My mother¹s dead now," she says. "I wouldn¹t think about putting all this in the paper if she weren¹t, but I¹m so proud of us. I¹m so proud of my family that started with nothing, and now they¹re all college graduates and five have graduate degrees."

And she¹s so proud of her mother.

"Over the years when we were faced with difficulties, my mother¹s work ethic was always strong in our performances, deeply rooted in all of us. When I was having difficulties, it never occurred to me that I could get public assistance because she was never bowed.
"The theme of the reunion is 'She raised us all.'"

And maybe there¹s a book in that.

Its title, she says laughing, would have to be "From the Outhouse to Whatever."

But that¹s not what its title has to be.

The title of her book - and there will be a book - will have to be "Annie¹s Song."