The Broken Road by Peggy Wallace Kennedy

Author:Peggy Wallace Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

For the first five months of her term, Mama was engaged with the duties and obligations of her governorship. She passed a bond issue to improve mental health services and create the Alabama state parks system. But it was her character and purpose, her caring for the down and forgotten and the thousands of middle-class families, both whites and African Americans, who saw their own hopes and dreams in her life’s story, that laid claim to the legacy she would leave behind.

The broken road touches history, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1967.

“When your mother was governor, every Sunday after church my parents would ride my sister and me by the Governor’s Mansion. Daddy would pull over for a minute or two,” a friend of Mark’s told me many years later. “My mother wanted my sister to know that Miss Lurleen lived there and that one day she could be a governor too.”

Then, in June 1967, Mama’s cancer returned. Hopeful and optimistic outlooks from her physicians and her friends encouraged her to fight on for her benefit and for ours. But in the early morning hours of May 7, 1968, just two weeks before I graduated from high school, Mama died at the age of forty-one. She had served as governor for only fifteen months.

Later that same day, her body was returned to the mansion. Her open casket was placed in the sitting room between the pair of floor-to-ceiling pier mirrors that faced each other. They were the same mirrors I stood between after Daddy’s inaugural ball in 1963, only five years before, when I said to myself that a carefree, magical life was mine.

I stepped through my second-floor bedroom door and walked to the balcony rail. I saw Mama’s reflection falling back on itself again and again.

“There was never any magic in this place at all,” I thought to myself. I felt heartbroken and very much alone.

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