Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir Read online

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  Copyright © 2014 by Wendy Davis

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  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following: William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1998 by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Wendy, 1963–

  Forgetting to be afraid : a memoir / Wendy Davis.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15918-1

  1. Davis, Wendy, 1963– 2. Legislators—Texas—Biography. 3. Women legislators—Texas—Biography. 4. Texas. Legislature. Senate—Biography. 5. Texas—Politics and government—1951– 6. Political candidates—Texas—Biography. 7. Women political candidates—Texas—Biography. 8. Governors—Texas—Election. I. Title.

  F391.4.D48A3 2014 2014025482

  328.764'092—dc23

  [B]

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For my daughters, Amber and Dru and Tate,

  who taught me a love deeper than I believed was possible.

  For my mom,

  who taught me the blessing of service above self.

  And for my dad,

  who taught me to be awake . . . while still dreaming.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.

  —LADY BIRD JOHNSON

  INTRODUCTION

  I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

  —2 CORINTHIANS 12:7–10

  WHEN I WAS A YOUNG GIRL, we moved quite a bit, crisscrossing the country twice before we settled in Texas for good when I was ten. Mostly we moved to follow my father—where his job took him, it took us, too—but wherever we lived, we tried to spend as much time as we could with my grandparents. We never had a lot, but what we had was what mattered most: family.

  My mother’s parents still lived in the panhandle of Texas in the small town of Muleshoe. My grandfather, Nealy Stovall, made his living for most of his life as a tenant farmer, and when he was in his mid-sixties, he suffered a massive stroke. From that moment forward, he lived the rest of his life in a nursing home. He was partially paralyzed, and as a result he had a very difficult time forming words.

  When my mom and my siblings and I would pile into my mom’s old Volkswagen hatchback to visit him in Muleshoe, we would pick him up at the nursing home and take him to be with us in his real home for the weekend, the home he had shared with my grandmother. On several of those occasions, my grandfather would beckon me into the kitchen and I would sit with him at their old Formica table—the kind with the silver band that goes all the way around. He would bring out a piece of paper, point very determinedly at it, and I knew my task—he wanted to “dictate” a letter to me so he could communicate with a friend.

  As you can imagine, him sitting there in his wheelchair and me with my skinny legs stuck to the plastic chairs in their kitchen on a hot summer day—it was a lot of hard work. Those hours with a pencil and paper, decoding and deciphering the words he was trying to say, were slow and difficult and challenging, not just for him but for me as well. Nothing could have been more important than the task he’d entrusted me with. So much was riding on my getting it right; so much depended on both of us working hard to do what needed to be done. Watching him struggle made me even more determined. If my grandfather had the fortitude to try to speak despite the broken pathways in his brain . . . well, then I could certainly do my part.

  Invariably on those occasions, he would start crying, which meant that I would start crying, too. It’s a very hard lesson for a ten-year-old to witness the despair on her grandfather’s face. One of my favorite photos of the two of us was taken on one of those bittersweet weekends. He’s in his wheelchair with his right arm in the gray sling he always wore after his stroke, and I’m leaning in to him on the edge of his chair with my little arm around his big shoulder. I’m smiling, and he is, too, if only just with his eyes.

  Of all the memories that have stuck with me, and formed me, and made me who I am, the ones from spending time with my grandfather are among my most cherished, because the experience drove home such a powerful point to me: the importance of having a voice, how painful it is to lose it, and how important it is to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, and to be true to what they would say if they could.

  —

  I couldn’t possibly have known then that years later I would be leading a historic nearly thirteen-hour filibuster in the Texas state senate to defeat an anti-abortion bill, giving voice to thousands and thousands of women pleading to preserve their access to lifesaving health care and reproductive rights. As much as was written about that day—the sneakers I wore, the battle over the rules of order, the dramatic closing of the capitol building in Austin that night because it was filled to capacity with people in opposition to SB 5—and as much as I will add to that account later in this book, the true power of that day transcended anything I could have expected.

  June 25, 2013, was an awakening. It was an awakening that went beyond reproductive rights. It was a
n awakening for a group of citizens, all over the state of Texas, and all across the country, who understood that night that when people do stand up and when they do cry out, they can be heard and they can make a difference. And even though that bill passed just a few days later when a second special session was called, people were empowered by what they had been able to accomplish that day. They saw that we cannot continue to cede our values simply because we may not win every time we speak out.

  It was also an awakening for me.

  As I was finishing my third hour on the floor, I began to read another letter aloud—one of thousands and thousands of letters that had poured into my office via e-mail from women all across Texas who wanted to share their deeply personal testimony in the hopes of stopping the bill. This particular letter, from a woman named Carole, described how she learned twenty weeks into her pregnancy that the precious little girl she was carrying was dying in her womb of a rare and fatal prenatal condition, and it shared the unfathomable decision she and her husband then faced: wait and deliver their daughter as a stillborn, or take measures to terminate the pregnancy in order to spare themselves the agony of waiting for nature to run its inevitable, but unendurable, course.

  It was a heartbreaking letter, so raw and honest and painfully sad that I could barely get through the reading of it. Each paragraph and detail of Carole’s tragic story and her eloquent plea to consider the emotional well-being of parents facing such devastating choices and losses as well as the humanity of the unborn baby, undid me, and I had to stop several times to wipe my eyes and to regain my composure. And each time I did, I felt something deep inside me loosen. Giving voice to the human stories behind the bill we were fighting had emboldened and empowered me to push on through all those hours on the senate floor; it had made me realize fully how the passage or failure of that bill would affect the lives of women and their families all across our great state.

  But reading Carole’s letter touched me profoundly and connected me to the moment, and to the issue, in a way I see now I hadn’t expected and that I had, whether consciously or unconsciously, tried to ignore. It made me understand why I was there and how all the paths in my life had led me to be in that place, at that exact moment in time, to fight that particular fight. Giving voice to the truths of so many women made me see that I needed to give voice to my own truths, the truths that had made me who I am and had brought me to stand there that day, and not yield until my job was done.

  I had a story to tell, too.

  A story I had never told before.

  And it was finally time to tell it.

  ONE

  All God’s angels come to us disguised.

  —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

  MY DEEPEST ROOTS grew in Texas, but my story starts in Rhode Island, where my father was raised, where my parents met and married, and where my brothers and I were born, one after the other, after the other.

  It’s where my parents fell in love. It’s also where my father broke my mother’s heart for the first time.

  There are Texas ranches the size of the state of Rhode Island, where my dad, Gerald “Jerry” Russell, grew up. He was born in 1936, an only child, and lived just outside Providence in West Warwick, a once-thriving center of the water-powered textile industry. Stone and red-brick mills, some with castle-like clock towers, twisted up and around the hills surrounding the Pawtuxet River, mills with faded-glory histories and names like Royal, Riverpoint, and Valley Queen. It’s where Fruit of the Loom started, where some of the world’s best velvet and lace and corduroy were made, and where generations of Irish Catholics and immigrants from Canada and Europe worked the looms side by side in sweatshops.

  My father’s ancestors were among those immigrants who came to work in the textile mills. My dad’s grandfather, Pepé, had emigrated to West Warwick from Quebec. He spoke only French but was determined to raise his family in the ways of their new country, speaking only English. Like many French-Canadian immigrants, Pepé worked in the textile mills. Eventually he opened a barbershop, and after my father graduated from high school and spent a short time in the United States Air Force, he became a barber, too. My dad’s father eventually joined the barbershop, but not before devoting much of his adult life to working in the textile mills as well. As my mother tells it, my grandpa lacked the skill at haircutting that his father and son possessed. Perhaps it skipped a generation. Nonetheless, news articles from the West Warwick paper saved by my grandmother stand as evidence of the “Three Generations of Barbers” that were my dad, my grandpa, and Pepé.

  Whatever my grandfather lacked in barbering skills, he more than made up for in warmth and physical affection, which was lucky for all of us, especially my dad, since his mother, Doris Friar Russell, was very much the opposite. She seemed to temper every gregarious gesture of Grandpa’s through her own more tepid, quiet manner and tone. Both her parents were English, and while she was loving and thoughtful in her own way, she was much more reserved. She was careful in her manner, and though she carried herself on the most beautiful legs I have ever seen, her style of dress reflected that reserve. Given her measured nature, I always marveled at how outgoing and confident my dad was. He was warm and physically affectionate, particularly with his own children. He was, in all ways, his father’s son.

  Biology doesn’t always trump environment, though. Our deep childhood hunger becomes our destiny. Often, we spend the rest of our lives answering to the combination of who we were “born” to be mixed with the environment that played a role in shaping that fate. My father grew up with a sense of confidence generated from both of these influences. He was an only child of two parents who loved him dearly. He was their center, their pride, even if my grandmother wasn’t as generous in her ability to demonstrate that. He was well liked by his peers and seemed, though not classically handsome—he had an oversize nose and an unruly mane—to attract all manner of people into his fold. His laugh, his energy, the way he owned a conversation without seeming overbearing, were, I’m sure, all traits that eventually attracted my mother to him.

  These traits also kept her deeply drawn to him, even when he hurt her. Even when he deeply hurt her. His was a bravado that allowed him the ability to disengage from that, from what he left in his wake. And along the way, he would leave several women in his wake. But there was something magical about him, too. Something incalculably endearing, for he always managed a reconnection, even if only through friendship, with the women he loved. Perhaps it was because his true passion was always something beyond and outside what his amorous connections could fulfill. Was it ambition? In a sense. More accurately it was a hunger to live the one thing that overrode his passion for all else—performing on a stage.

  In 1922 my mother’s mother, Lela Agnes Crandell, met my grandfather, Nealy Stovall, in Scipio, Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Wills Point, Texas, but had moved to Scipio not long before meeting my grandma. She was thirteen and he was eighteen, and because her parents wouldn’t give her permission to get married, they eloped on stolen horses to Fort Smith, Arkansas. When they returned to Scipio in a covered wagon three years later, they brought with them their firstborn, my Uncle Will, to whom my grandmother had given birth when she was only fifteen.

  To illustrate the immaturity that my grandmother brought to the early task of parenting, my mother loves to tell the story of her parents’ return trip to Oklahoma. Traveling by horse-drawn wagon, her young parents camped outside at night along the way. One night a group of Gypsies set up camp near them. My grandmother was absolutely terrified of Gypsies, mostly because she’d heard rumors that they were in the habit of stealing children. Only a teenager herself, my grandmother worried that she would be stolen, consequently deciding to place my infant Uncle Will outside the buggy in his sleeping basket. If they were going to steal a child, they could steal him instead. Telling this story on herself to my mother years later, my grandmother couldn’t help but see the black humor in ho
w ill equipped she was to be a mother at such a young age. But her penchant for hard work, the responsibility she showed in clothing and feeding the brood of children that she was eventually to bear—these were the characteristics that came to truly define her as a mother.

  My grandmother was half Native American, descended from the Cree tribe. For a long time, until one of my cousins began an ancestral search just a few years ago, we didn’t know even that because that piece of her heritage was something she refused to acknowledge or discuss. When asked about her dark complexion, she would offer only that her father was “Black Dutch” and no more. Such was a reflection of the time in which she lived, because discrimination against Native Americans, especially in Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas, made it more favorable to be viewed as Black Dutch than Native American. Later my grandmother would privately admit that her mother was Native American, but she would offer no more information than that. My grandmother was private, part of a generation that preferred leaving the past in the past—she preferred to talk about almost anything besides herself.

  My granddad—“Pop,” as his children called him—was the child of an Irish mother and a Dutch father. Their family history isn’t one that my mother recalls with any clarity, only that her pop was one of six children, five boys and one girl, and that his father worked in a sawmill in Oklahoma. His coloring was clearly influenced by his mother’s heritage—red hair and fair, ruddy skin. And his temper matched the stereotype—easy to flash, quick to forgive. He and my grandmother were prone to arguing in a way that was rather dramatic. My mother recalls heated screaming debates in which it wasn’t uncommon for my grandmother to chase him out of the house with her cast-iron skillet in hand, but they loved each other and were devoted to the familial responsibilities that bound them.

  —