Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (17 page)

P.C. left that day, and Emma returned to the house in his absence. When he came back later, he was trailed by a deputy sheriff
or justice of the peace. Some family members believe that P.C.’s friend, Armster Kingery, who held political clout in the region, pulled some strings to have Emma arrested. Whatever the case, P.C. parked his truck, climbed out, and walked purposefully toward the house, the lawman tagging behind. When he jerked open the front door, his wife was waiting with a five-pound sack of flour, which she heaved in his direction. The flour connected squarely with her husband’s face and exploded into a cloud of white.

The four witnesses disagree about minor details, such as whether the flour incident occurred in the presence of the officer or preceded his arrival, but they collectively recall that Lucy and Louise were in a state of consternation. As the lawman walked their mother to his car, Louise ran inside to fetch her pocketbook. Lucy clung to her mother until the officer pulled her away.

The deputy placed Emma into his car and drove her to the neighboring town of Milton, West Virginia, where she was booked on unknown charges and locked inside a jail cell. She had held her own, come what may.

Her shoes were wet. Her socks were wet. Her dungarees were wet. Her shirt was wet. Her sack was wet. When she left the Bromley shelter early the morning of August 13, rain was still falling.

Hurricane Connie had dumped record amounts of water on its course along the coast, the giant outer bands of its counterclockwise rotation dragging water from the Atlantic onto the land, and now it was moving toward the Great Lakes region. At 10:00
AM
, the storm crossed the southeastern border of Pennsylvania, sideswiping New England and slashing a diagonal track across the Keystone State, the calm eye passing Harrisburg, over Pittsburgh and slightly northeast of Erie, before moving over Lake Erie and toward Ontario
in Canada. The winds had slowed to fifty-five miles per hour, and weathermen had begun referring to Connie as a storm rather than a hurricane.

Still, the rain came.

In two days, the storm had dumped more than nine inches of rain on New York City, bringing train traffic at Grand Central Terminal to a halt for hours. Much of Connecticut got eight inches. Power and telephone service was out for many in the region. The northern Appalachian Mountains, the Whites, Greens, Taconics, and Alleghenies were all saturated, and their streams were running wild, sending incredible amounts of water rushing downhill into the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania, the Delaware and Ramapo Rivers in New Jersey, the Delaware and Neversink Rivers in New York, the Potomac River in Virginia and Maryland, the Westfield River in Massachusetts, and the Naugatuck and Mad Rivers in Connecticut. Many of them were close to the flood stage, and there was another erratic storm a few days behind and headed north.

On the Appalachian Trail through Green Mountain National Forest, Emma was not walking so much as wading, and atop the ridges the wind—remnants of the hurricane—was blowing strong. She steeled herself against the elements and trudged onward. For nine miles she sloshed through water, strong winds, and driving rain. She ducked out of the deluge at a little shelter near Mad Tom Notch and had a soggy lunch from her sack. She hiked on through the afternoon at a much slower pace than she would have liked until she came to another shelter, at Griffith Lake, a small pond near Peru Peak. The shelter was occupied by a group of young black men and two slightly older white leaders from a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem. The men explained that they’d come up for a wilderness trip and had found themselves stuck inside because of the storm.

Emma enjoyed their company, though she was surprised to see them on the trail. She read the newspapers every day, so she was
well aware of the tension between the races in 1955, when one in ten US citizens was black.

The previous May, the Supreme Court had outlawed separation of the races in public schools and launched a period of protest. It would be four months before the name Rosa Parks would enter the national conversation, but sparks of rebellion had begun to flare all over America as the federal government started to act in favor of equality. The Federal Trade Commission ruled that segregation in depot waiting rooms and on trains engaged in interstate transportation was illegal. A federal appeals court in Georgia, where the
former governor wrote that “God advocates segregation,” demanded Atlanta open its public golf courses to black golfers. A court in Richmond, Virginia, barred segregation on city buses.

In many places, the advancements implemented by the government strengthened the resolve of whites to maintain the upper hand. In South Carolina, a Negro Little League baseball team won its way to the state championship, then found that fifty-five competing white teams had withdrawn. In Arkansas, a Baptist congregation fired a pastor who preached against segregation. In Miami, a group of politically prominent African Americans was thrown out of a hotel after it had arrived, by invitation, to an Abraham Lincoln birthday dinner held by local Republicans. And White Citizens’ Councils, a less secretive and less violent version of the Ku Klux Klan, sprouted across the South to put political and social pressure on blacks who tried to assert their new rights.

Emma talked to the young men a while, telling them of her trip, and decided to press on since staying the night would have made the eight-by-twenty-foot shelter a little too crowded. She walked down an embankment and came to a rushing creek near Little Mond Pond. She couldn’t cross there, so she hiked up into the woods until she found a log stretched across the flowing water. She balanced carefully and made it across without falling. She walked down the trail a bit more and found that a flooded brook had joined the trail at a flat, narrow stretch. The water was running a mill race straight down the path. She stepped into the flow, but the water came all the way to her knee on the very first step, so she backed out. The shelter with the group from Harlem would have to do.

Emma came from a place that was nearly all white and completely segregated, but she did not discriminate. She taught her children to respect others, no matter their skin color or stage in life. She would not allow them to utter racial epithets and taught them to treat people as they wished to be treated themselves. One
experience on the trail defined this attitude: An African American couple invited her to dinner, and when she was seated and served, they withdrew. She refused to eat unless they joined her, and she seemed embarrassed by their treatment.

Emma found the boys baking two pones of cornbread. They had fashioned a little stove and were cooking over hot ashes from a fire. When they finished, they ate one cake and saved the other to eat on the trail the next day.

When it was time for bed, Emma squeezed herself into one corner and ducked under her blanket as the rain plinked off the roof. Before she dozed off, the young man next to her, apparently asleep, slung his arm across her body. She moved his limp appendage back. He did it again. She moved it back. He did it again.

Six days before, the Reverend G. W. Lee, a respected minister and local official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was killed by an unknown assailant in Belzoni, Mississippi. Seven days later, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting family in Money, Mississippi, would be kidnapped and murdered and dumped in the Tallahatchie River after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. That very same day, August 13, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot to death in broad daylight within sight of the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and police wouldn’t be able to find a single witness to testify against the white men charged in his death.

And on the Appalachian Trail, inside a crowded little shelter in the Green Mountains of Vermont, an old white woman fell asleep under the arm of a young black man from Harlem.

AUGUST 14–15, 1955

Her sons were strong swimmers, and when they’d finished working in the tobacco fields, they’d race off toward the Ohio River and plunge into the cool water, washing away the day’s dust and sweat. It was a good distance to the opposite bank, but when they were up to the challenge they could tear across the river and reach the other side, as if they were born with gills.

Their mother could not swim. She’d never learned how. If you dropped her into the Ohio, she could probably keep her head above water for a few moments out of sheer grit and determination, but she lacked the fundamentals of buoyancy.

She never spoke to her family of the months she spent preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail, but they’d later learn from friends and acquaintances in southern Ohio that Emma was often seen in
the woods in advance of her journey. Her children would learn that she secretly made overnight expeditions to the wilderness to determine what equipment was completely necessary, what foods were lightweight and would help her maintain energy, and what first-aid supplies she might need in an emergency.

Despite those hours spent in forethought, she had never picked up the skill that would have proved mildly comforting at least on August 14, as the creeks and streams in the Green Mountains continued to rise.

Emma set out at about 8:00
AM
with the young men from Harlem and their leaders, and they waded through water to their knees for much of the trail that morning, coming eventually to a fast-moving creek that was fifteen feet wide. They gradually stepped into the water, which came above Emma’s knees. They slowly worked their way across, the leaders keeping a close eye on the young men. They used walking sticks to brace themselves against the swift current until they’d each made it to safety.

A short time later, they came to Ten Kilns Brook, which intersected the trail, and this stream was swollen as well, twenty feet from bank to bank. In the middle was a large rock, and the water between them and the rock wasn’t flowing as rapidly as it was beyond the rock. The leaders went first, carefully maneuvering to the other side. Then the boys started, walking first to the rock then grabbing hold of a pole held by one of the leaders and inching the rest of the way across against the heavy flow.

Emma was last. She baby-stepped through the calmer water to the rock, then heaved her pack across to one leader and gripped the pole for the rough stretch. When she stepped into the swift water, it nearly took her feet from under her. She held tight to the pole and kept moving, feeling the creek bottom with her feet, trying to keep her balance, until she reached the other side.

The rain stopped that morning. The sun burned down. Emma’s soaked clothes began to dry, and gradually things seemed a little better. The group stopped at Old Job Shelter for lunch, and the boys laughed as they pelted green apples off a nearby tree. A few hours of hiking later, their clothes had dried completely, and they walked across a rustic wooden bridge to a shelter on a little island. It was a beautiful spot where the mirrored waters of Little Rocky Pond, stocked full with rainbow trout, reflected mountains covered by evergreens.