Poor Ol’ Mary Tate

Her face was pretty and young with a porcelain complexion, yet flat and emotionless. Her mouth rested in a straight line, and her eyes — large and hollow — revealed an emptiness behind the facade. If she could speak, she wouldn’t. There was nothing left to say. Only the internal dialogue, the flurry of chaos that others spoke of, made sense to her.

The silence around me in that moment was deafening. I was isolated in a dreamlike state when suddenly Grandma’s voice echoed from the kitchen.

“You’re awfully quiet. Are you plundering again?”

I could hear the clanking of a spoon against the pot of greens simmering on the stove.  Photograph in hand, I made my way to the kitchen.

“Grandma, who is this?” I asked, handing her the photograph. “It says Mary Murphy on the back. You’re Mary Murphy. Is that you?”

“No, honey,” she said. “That’s poor ol’ Mary Tate. My sister-in-law. She was married to Glen’s brother Will.”

I would later come to realize that nearly everyone who knew Mary Tate referred to her as “poor ol’ Mary,” a sentiment hovering somewhere between sympathy and sorrow. As I grew older, the story of her life revealed itself piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle — though never fully coming into focus.

Most who knew her intimately would quietly say, “She had problems.” Others were less kind, simply saying she was crazy as a bedbug.

What I did know was that she had spent much of her life in and out of Chattahoochee, the infamous mental hospital in north Florida.

From time to time, more stories surfaced.

Her old house sat around the corner from what Grandma Murphy called “the ol’ homeplace,” tucked back at the corner of Highway 301 and Palmetto Street, near the foot of the Alafia River bridge, behind the Baptist church. The lot was overgrown with live oaks draped in Spanish moss and thick palmetto underbrush. By the time I came along, the house stood there in silence, ravaged by the elements. The dark unfinished walls were board-and-batten. The tin roof had weathered into patches of rust and green patina. Wild Florida had begun reclaiming the place through tangles of potato vine and creeping overgrowth.

Mama and Uncle Glenn remembered living there in the 1950s as a strange mixture of fascination and eeriness. They would sit along Highway 301 counting cars, naming each one by make and model — and more often than not, naming the drivers too.

They both told stories about the darkness inside the old house. The unpainted walls and lack of lighting gave each room a shadowy stillness, with nothing but a single bare bulb hanging from a cord overhead.

But it was the kitchen they remembered most.

Mounted against the wall was a circular piece of old linoleum covering holes cut into the wood. One was large — where the stove pipe once exited the house. The other, just above it, was a tiny peep hole no bigger than a fifty-cent piece.

“They always told us Mary Tate would sit there spying through that hole with her shotgun,” Mama said. “She kept the barrel stuck through the stove-pipe hole, watching for intruders.”

As children, it gave them the heebie-jeebies, though they were fascinated by it at the same time.

“When we were bad,” Uncle Glenn laughed, “they’d tell us to behave because Mary might’ve been released from Chattahoochee.”

As I pressed for more information, additional tidbits surfaced over the years.

In 1921, Mary lost a baby at birth. The following year, she lost her beloved William to tuberculosis, a cloud that hung over the family for years, eventually claiming others as well.

“The baby’s safe in the arms of Jesus,” the old ones would say.

But when William died, something inside Mary cracked.

Losing the baby had shattered her into pieces. Losing William scattered those pieces to the wind. From that point on, she could never quite put herself back together again.

Those who knew her would lower their eyes and softly shake their heads.

“She just lost her mind in the end.”

She laid both her husband and child to rest together in the same grave.

Whenever I visit our large family plot, I find myself standing at the foot of that grave thinking about poor ol’ Mary Tate. The inscription reads:

“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me.”

And as the old ones always said, the baby was indeed safe in the arms of Jesus.

Years later, I inherited all of my grandmother’s photographs. One of the first images I pulled from the stack was the old picture of Mary Tate, instantly carrying me back to that bedroom floor at the old homeplace. The photograph gripped me just as powerfully then as it had in childhood. It still does.

The curiosity had never really left me.

Eventually, I somehow located a grandniece, hoping perhaps to uncover a few more clues. She didn’t remember Aunt Mary herself, but she offered me an old wooden box filled with what remained of a troubled life.

Inside were a handful of photographs, a scrapbook, the AKA certification papers for her German Shepherd Rex, and two books — one containing a story Mary herself had written and published.

After reading it, my mother and I quietly wondered if Mary possessed gifts the rest of the family never understood. Perhaps sensitivities mistaken for madness in another time and place.

The final item in the box was a memorial booklet from her funeral.

As I thumbed through its pages, I recognized the names of the four or five attendees who had come to pay their respects. Among them were the Sharp sisters—Margaret Lavender, Theresa Powell, and Roberta Moody. Loyal childhood friends. People who remembered Mary before grief and illness overtook her mind.

She was laid to rest beside her beloved William and child in an unmarked grave.

Even sadness followed her there.

And yet, I still find myself praying that somewhere beyond all the suffering and confusion, poor ol’ Mary Tate is finally whole again… and that she too is safe in the arms of Jesus.