Death Sentence (4 page)

At school she encountered children from families more well off than hers. Some regularly got new shoes and wore bright, pretty clothes from department stores in Fayetteville. Velma could not suppress her envy. She got new shoes when school started—sturdy, clunky shoes, never anything pretty—and they had to last until school began anew the next year. Her mother made her clothes and she thought them shabby and shameful.

All students had to bring midday meals to school. Some brought sandwiches made on sliced bread bought at the grocery store—“light bread,” country people called it, and it was considered a luxury. These children often had store-bought cookies and other treats. Velma’s meal sack usually contained a biscuit, or a hunk of cornbread with a slice of fried side meat or sausage in it. Other students sometimes made fun of her meals and she began slipping off to the woods to eat alone.

A small store across the street from the school was a constant lure to students with its displays of candies and other goodies, but few could afford its enticements. Velma saw the store as a means of paying back her tormentors. She began stealing coins from the pockets of her daddy’s overalls and used them to buy candy at the store, making certain to eat it in front of those who made fun of her.

Velma’s success at petty theft gave her bolder ambitions. When an old man who lived on the other side of the river reported that $80 had been stolen from his tiny cabin, Velma, who had been visiting relatives nearby, was discovered with part of the money. She claimed the old man had asked her to keep it for him, but a session with her daddy’s strap caused her to recant, apparently ending her budding career as a thief, for no more such incidents were ever reported.

By the second grade, Velma began complaining of headaches and stomachaches, both to keep from having to go to school and to relieve her of chores. She loved the attention that her ailments brought, but when the increasing frequency of her complaints convinced her father that she was malingering, prompting him to order that she go to school and do her chores sick or not, the number of complaints diminished drastically.

Even though school had its drawbacks, it still offered one great advantage in Velma’s eyes: welcome relief from her father. She left for school soon after he got up, didn’t return until he’d gone to work. By the time he got home, she was in bed. Still, Velma walked the quarter mile home from the spot where the bus dropped her off each day filled with dread because she abhorred the chores that awaited her.

All the Bullard children were assigned specific chores from the time they were old enough to perform them. In the beginning, Velma’s were sweeping the sandy yard, which was kept free of all growth, feeding the chickens and bringing in wood for the kitchen range. But her duties increased as she grew older.

All the children had to work on the farm. As soon as the boys were old enough, they were taught to handle the mules, to plow and set rows. Velma had to work in the fields, too, planting, hoeing, and harvesting. Murphy grew less than an acre of tobacco, but to Velma it seemed much more. The plants were as tall as her head, and she had to pick worms from them and snap off the pungent blossoms when they flowered. She had to strip the huge, sticky leaves from the stalks—priming, this was called—and tie them to sticks so that they could be hung in her uncle Jim’s tobacco barn and cured with wood fires. Late in summer, Murphy hauled the crop to the markets in Fairmont and Dunn.

After the tobacco was in, the cotton harvest began. Murphy grew six acres of cotton. Velma hated picking it, but she was good at it. Her speed was motivated by two factors: she wanted it to be over with, and Murphy never let Velma and Olive start school until the cotton had been picked. School began in September, but it sometimes was November before Velma and her brother got to classes.

Murphy also tried to make extra money by growing corn, cucumbers, butter beans and field peas, which he sold to grocery stores in Fayetteville. But it was the children who got the extra work of weeding, picking and grading.

Velma was the only girl in the family for more than nine years—she would be grown before Arlene was old enough to take on chores—and as she grew older, her household responsibilities grew with her. She had to tend the younger children, help with the housecleaning, the washing, ironing and mending. She had to milk the cow and churn the butter, assist with the cooking and wash the dishes.

Lillie suffered incapacitating headaches that sometimes put her to bed for days, leaving all the household responsibilities to Velma, keeping her out of school.

While Velma begrudged her chores, she performed ably and with minimal protest—to do otherwise would provoke her father. But from an early age, she was convinced that the only reason her parents wanted her was to work. “I felt like I was just a slave,” she would say years later.

Despite her unhappiness, Velma still had joyful times.

Murphy loved baseball and, on warm Sunday afternoons, he sometimes organized baseball games in a nearby field. At such times he seemed like another person to Velma, fun instead of fearsome. The games often went on until dark. Velma played shortstop, the only girl on the field, and she loved it.

On some hot summer Sundays, Murphy would take the children on outings to the nearby mill pond, where he had taught all of them to swim at early ages by tossing them into the deep water and letting them make for shore on their own.

On other Sundays, Velma found refuge at the home of an aunt and uncle, her father’s eldest brother, Alex, and his wife, Betsy, who lived a few miles away, across the river in Sampson County. Aunt Betsy was a woman of such good cheer that Velma wanted to grow up to be just like her. She was always teasing and telling stories, and she disdained distress and worry—“All it’ll get you is a bad headache,” she’d say, and Velma need only look at her mother to see that. Velma could not help but laugh around Aunt Betsy and Uncle Alex, and she always dreaded having to return to her own house, where the atmosphere was so different.

By the time Velma was ten, her father was calling her “Sugar” and “Honey.” Now and then he would take her into his lap, hug her, even tease her good-naturedly. At those moments Velma realized how deeply she craved his affection. She loved the feelings of closeness, warmth and security it stirred in her.

About this time her father gave her the happiest moment of her childhood. She went with him to Fayetteville one Saturday. While he was off on business, she browsed along the sidewalk, looking in store windows. At a department store, she spotted a mannequin wearing the most beautiful dress she’d ever seen. The fabric was adorned with pink flowers. A wide ruffle hid the hem. She couldn’t allow herself even to dream of owning anything so gorgeous. Still, she wanted her father to see it, and when he returned, she dragged him to the window. To her amazement, he marched into the store, checked the price, took out his wallet, and counted the money for it.

She would never forget the thrill of anticipation as she took the dress to show her mother. But like so much that she allowed herself to look forward to in life, it was a letdown. “That ruffle is going to be awfully hard to iron,” was all her mother had to say.

But Velma refused to allow anything to stifle her joy. The pride and the power she got from wearing that dress was the greatest she’d ever known, and she would treasure the memory by making pink her favorite color.

Murphy was only thirty when World War II started. Most of the younger men around the countryside, and many of Murphy’s age and older, went off to military service. But he stayed behind, working at the mill. Too many children were dependent on him.

In 1945, Murphy sold his farm to Albert Pope and bought the adjoining land, eighty acres, that his brothers Huey and Jesse Martin had received from their father. Jesse Martin had built a small white house near the old homeplace, and Murphy moved his family into the more modern quarters. He was tired of mill work, and with eighty acres and crop prices climbing he thought that he could make farming pay. He increased his acreage of tobacco and cotton and began hauling his vegetables to the farmers’ market in Raleigh. But two seasons was all it took to prove that he couldn’t provide for his family by farming, and late in 1946 he went back to the mill.

Early the next year, Murphy quit Puritan Weaving and took a job at another textile plant in Red Springs, thirty miles south of Fayetteville, making his daily drive back and forth to work more than ninety miles. A coworker told him about a house for rent just north of Parkton, sixteen miles south of Fayetteville, and Murphy moved his family there after school was out that spring.

Once a tenant house on a large farm, this house was more primitive than the one his family had lived in for the past two years. Although Velma had dreamed of leaving South River, she now felt uprooted. She had grown up surrounded by family, giving her security and people to turn to in times of need, but here she knew no one, had no place to go. She had longed to live in a town with stores filled with wondrous goods, cafes to eat in, and lots of activities available. But all she got was Parkton, a sleepy little farm town, where nothing seemed to happen and there was nothing at all to do. Even that was a couple of miles away from this tiny, ugly, tin-roofed house where she quickly came to feel herself a prisoner.

Before the move, Olive had dropped out of school to work full-time on the farm. Now he went to work at the mill with his father. That fall Velma started the ninth grade at Parkton Public School, two months before she turned fifteen. Her grades had been falling for a couple of years, and they would get no better as she struggled to fit in and make new friends.

She soon discovered an activity, though, that brought her both pleasure and attention: basketball. She was good at it. Parkton had a girls’ basketball team, and the coach saw her playing and encouraged her to try out. To her surprise she made the team. But she had to stay after school to practice, and before the season was well under way, her mother, who had just given birth to the twins, Ray and Faye, insisted that she drop out because she needed her at home. Velma’s disappointment and the deepened drudgery she faced only strengthened her resentment of her mother.

But she soon developed another interest. Thomas Burke, the son of the Bullards’ next-door neighbors, lived just a quarter mile away in a white house with French doors and a big front porch. The house was much nicer than the Bullards’. It was set far back from the road behind two long rows of pecan trees.

A year ahead of Velma in school, Thomas was tall and lean with shiny black hair, jug ears, and an impish grin. He wasn’t the best-looking boy Velma had ever taken note of, but he was the first to pay attention to her. Velma was surprised. She had thought she never would be able to interest any boy. Although others thought her pretty, she felt unattractive, aware only of her defects.

In the fourth grade, she had run head-on into a boy on the playground at school and was briefly knocked unconscious. A big contusion grew on her forehead. In time it receded but not completely, leaving her with a small, permanent knot about which she was extremely sensitive (playmates who dared call her “Knothead” never did it but once). She never could quite devise a hairstyle to hide the hardly noticeable disfigurement adequately.

Velma thought her teeth were ugly, too. She had a gap that she thought far too wide between the two in front. And her legs were far too short in her mind—she stood only five feet three—and she worried that they were bowed. She also felt overweight and fretted about it constantly.

Thomas, who towered over her, seemed unaware of any flaws, however. She enjoyed his easygoing ways, and she loved that he made her laugh.

Murphy noticed his daughter’s new interest and quickly developed a strong dislike for Thomas. He didn’t want him hanging around.

Murphy had ruled that Velma could not date until she was sixteen, and she dared not question his edict. But when her sixteenth birthday came, he still wouldn’t allow it. Thomas was persistent, however, and Velma pleaded with her mother to intervene. Eventually, her father conceded, but with reluctance—and firm restrictions.

Their first dates were to church and school events, usually double dates. Later, Thomas would come for her in his daddy’s car, and they would go to Fayetteville to a movie or to hang out at the Skyview, a drive-in restaurant with a radio station studio that broadcast popular music.

But Velma’s good times were lessened by constant worry about not getting home on time. She couldn’t stay out past ten. One minute late and her father would be riding the roads searching for her. And when she did get home, not only did she have to face a tirade, her restrictions would be long and severe.

In the fall of 1949, soon after Velma had started the eleventh grade, tension over her dating and household responsibilities grew so great that as she departed for school one morning she left a note saying that she had had all she could take; she was leaving and would not be back. She made a point that it was not because of the extra duties that came with caring for Ray and Faye, who were just eighteen months old. She dropped by the classroom of her brother John to tell him what she had done. She would be staying with Olive’s fiancee, she said, until she could figure out a way to make it on her own.

Lillie found the note that morning. Murphy had returned to Puritan Weaving once again by this time. He worked third shift and slept during the day. Lillie didn’t wake him to tell him about the note. She knew what his reaction would be.

Enraged, Murphy took Lillie into town to search for Velma. They found her quickly. Lillie was almost as upset as Murphy. She couldn’t understand how Velma could do such a thing. Cursing and threatening, Murphy told Velma to get into the car and she obeyed. Her father had not whipped her in some time and, surprisingly, he didn’t when they got home. Instead, Lillie took the strap to her. Afterward, Velma was restricted for a month and told that she was not to see Thomas again.