Read It Takes a Village for Free Online Page B

her passion for learning, and for the joy that knowledge brings.
    After high school, my mother moved back to Chicago and took a series of secretarial jobs. At one of them, she met and began dating my father. While my father was in the navy, my mother continued working. When the war ended, my father started his own business. My mother helped him with his work and raised the three of us.
    I found myself thinking about my mother’s story when I first met my husband at law school, in 1971. Like her, Bill had grown up in circumstances that were less than ideal. His mother, the late Virginia Kelley, one of the great originals of our time, grew up in Hope, Arkansas, as an only child. After high school, she studied nursing, and during the war she met Bill’s father, William Blythe of Texas. They were married in September 1943, just before he left for the battlefields of Europe.
    When he got back, in 1945, he and Virginia moved to Chicago. I’ve often wondered whether Virginia Kelley and my mother might have crossed paths there, perhaps while standing in line at Marshall Field’s big department store downtown.
    Virginia became pregnant and went back to Hope to be among family and friends for her baby’s birth. Her husband planned to join her as soon as he got their new apartment ready. He left Chicago to drive to Arkansas, and on the dark, rainy night of May 17, 1946, he had a fatal car crash outside Sikeston, Missouri.
    Virginia, although devastated by the loss of her husband, was determined to do her best to provide for her baby. William Jefferson Blythe arrived three months later, on August 19, the birthday of Virginia’s father, James Eldridge Cassidy. Virginia and he went home from the hospital to live with her parents, who shared responsibility for raising him during his first six years. Despite their differences, Virginia and her strong-willed mother, Edith Valeria Grisham Cassidy, were united in one thing—their devotion to Bill.
    Wanting to provide a better life for her child, Virginia left Hope to attend a program in New Orleans that would grant her a nurse-anesthetist’s degree. That meant leaving Bill in the care of her parents for a year. Virginia often said that being away from her son almost killed her. One of Bill’s earliest memories was taking the train with his grandmother to visit Virginia for the weekend. As they were leaving on Sunday, he remembers seeing his mother drop to her knees, crying, by the side of the tracks.
    Bill’s family were people of modest means, but they understood how important a child’s early years were for his development—intellectually, socially, and emotionally. His grandmother, who had earned a degree in nursing by taking correspondence courses, quizzed him on his numbers, using playing cards taped around his high chair. She read aloud to him every day and encouraged him to learn to read before he started kindergarten.
    His grandfather, who had only finished grade school, spent lots of time with Bill, taking him along on errands and to the little grocery store he ran, always stopping to visit with friends along the way. Bill surely owes much of his gregarious nature to those early days of chatting his way through town.
    Although I never met Bill’s grandparents, I know that their profound and engaging love for him helped to fill the hole left by the father he never knew and to protect against the pain he would later face.
    Bill’s life changed dramatically when he was four. Virginia married Roger Clinton, a local car dealer, and they moved into their own small house in Hope. Almost from the beginning, the marriage was anything but hopeful. Roger had a tendency to drink too much, becoming a mean and bullying drunk. The story of the abuse and violence Virginia suffered at his hands is told in her warm and funny autobiography, Leading with My Heart.
    I asked Virginia once why she stayed married to Roger. She explained that she was