“Should be Monday,” he said, then smiled. “The summer of ’55 will be a worryfree summer.”
I began unloading the groceries from the bag on the table. “Do you ever think about all those kids we treated?” I asked.
“Often,” he said, leaning back against the sink as he sipped the water.
“It’s hard to believe they’re all ten years older than when we knew them.” I added a few oranges to the fruit bowl on the table. “Some of them are probably married with kids of their own by now,” I said. “Jilly Johnson is fourteen. Amy Pryor’s baby is ten.” I shook my head. “I hope they’re all leading wonderful lives.”
Vincent put his glass in the sink, then smiled at me. “You’re a romantic, do you know that?” he asked.
I barely heard him. For the second time that day, I was lost back in memories of 1944. “Hickory changed me for the better,” I said soberly. “I was falling apart when I got there and it slowly made me whole again.”
Vincent was loosening his tie, heading for the hallway and the stairs, but he stopped walking to look at me.
“You always say that, Tess,” he said. “But have you ever stopped to think about how you changed Hickory?”
I stared at him, puzzled.
“Look what you did for Henry and Honor and Jilly, not to mention for the hundreds of patients at the hospital, some of whose lives you literally saved. I can personally testify to that.” He walked over to me. Kissed me on the lips. “Hickory’s the better for you having been there, sweetheart,” he said.
I watched him turn and walk down the hallway. Heard him climb the stairs. I felt a little choked up. I looked down at the postcard and the intricate floral designs on the skull. I smiled, remembering Reverend Sam and his crazy anteroom and his skeleton. I remembered the day he told me I was kind. No one else had ever asked him if his gift left him tired, he’d said. I remembered Adora telling me I’d saved Henry from “something terrible.” I remembered endlessly tucking hot wool around the thin, useless legs of frightened children, and breathing life into Amy Pryor’s baby. And I would never forget the journey across country, the nine days that turned into two treacherous weeks, and the very real dangers faced by a little girl and her anxious mother.
I stood next to the table, my hand pressed to my cheek and my eyes stinging. No, I hadn’t thought about how I changed Hickory, but from now on, I would. I’d remember how, during that year so long ago, Hickory changed forever.
And I was a part of it.
AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Yes, it really happened. The people of Hickory built, outfitted and staffed a polio hospital in fifty-four hours. Ultimately consisting of thirteen wards, the hospital evaluated six hundred and sixty-three patients over its nine months in existence. The hospital is long gone now, only existing in our imaginations.
I heard about Hickory and its polio hospital when I moved to North Carolina twelve years ago and I’m glad I had this opportunity to write about it. Although the hospital itself did exist, the patients and their situations described in The Stolen Marriage are purely products of my imagination. As is always the case when writing about an actual event, I needed to come up with a way to fictionalize the real-life story. That’s when Tess and her devastating personal situation came into existence. Like many of us, Tess begins her story with a crisis and self-doubt and grows stronger through adversity. I wish that for all of us!
As you can imagine, The Stolen Marriage was a research-heavy book. I began my research with a visit to the Catawba County Museum of History, where I spent a day reading old copies of the Hickory Daily Record. After eight hours immersed in 1944, it was a strange experience to walk outside and discover it was still 2016! On that initial research trip, I realized that, while Hickory is a charming town to visit, I was seeing it through a modern-day lens and had no idea what it had been like during the war years. To complicate matters, the town is impossible to navigate by map, having street names like “44th Avenue Court NE.” To make matters even worse, as I tried to learn what the town was like in 1944, I discovered that the street names were different back then. The joke is that the town government changed the names during the war in case of invasion—the enemies would never be able to find their way around. The reality is that the street names were changed in the fifties, apparently because they were even more confusing prior to that time. Whatever the reason, I knew as I drove around that I was going to need some help in discovering Hickory during the war years.
I found that help in Peggy Mainess. Peggy is the genealogy assistant at the Hickory Public Library and an enthusiastic expert on the history of the area. For several hours, she and I drove around Hickory as she helped me see it through 1944 eyes. I’m grateful to Peggy for taking the time out of her schedule and for sharing her wealth of knowledge with me.
There is a good deal of information online about Hickory and the polio hospital. One of the problems I had as I sorted through site after site was the discovery of contradictory information. When exactly did the ward for the African American patients open? Was there a meeting in the high school or wasn’t there? I did my best with the information I had. I altered a few of the dates and events slightly to mesh better with my story, but for the most part, I stuck to the facts as I discovered them.
My “bible” as I researched the story was Alice Sink’s book The Grit Behind the Miracle. Ms. Sink has written an extraordinary account of the hospital, informed by her interviews and exchanges with former patients.
Joyce Moyer, the author of the award-winning children’s novel, Blue, shared some of her research with me early on. She whetted my appetite to learn more, and I’m grateful for her generosity.
Not only did I need to research the polio hospital and life in Hickory during the war, I also needed to educate myself to North Carolina laws regarding marriage in the forties. Interracial marriage was prohibited and punishable by up to ten years in prison, and getting out of a marriage was close to impossible, as Tess discovers.