Where the Light Fell: A Memoir
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About this ebook
“Searing, heartrending . . . This stunning tale reminds us that the only way to keep living is to ask God for the impossible: love, forgiveness, and hope.”—Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason
Raised by an impoverished widow who earned room and board as a Bible teacher in 1950s Atlanta, Philip Yancey and his brother, Marshall, found ways to venture out beyond the confines of their eight-foot-wide trailer. But when Yancey was in college, he uncovered a shocking secret about his father’s death—a secret that began to illuminate the motivations that drove his mother to extreme, often hostile religious convictions and a belief that her sons had been ordained for a divine cause.
Searching for answers, Yancey dives into his family origins, taking us on an evocative journey from the backwoods of the Bible Belt to the bustling streets of Philadelphia; from trailer parks to church sanctuaries; from family oddballs to fire-and-brimstone preachers and childhood awakenings through nature, music, and literature. In time, the weight of religious and family pressure sent both sons on opposite paths—one toward healing from the impact of what he calls a “toxic faith,” the other into a self-destructive spiral.
Where the Light Fell is a gripping family narrative set against a turbulent time in post–World War II America, shaped by the collision of Southern fundamentalism with the mounting pressures of the civil rights movement and Sixties-era forces of social change. In piecing together his fragmented personal history and his search for redemption, Yancey gives testament to the enduring power of our hunger for truth and the possibility of faith rooted in grace instead of fear.
“I truly believe this is the one book I was put on earth to write,” says Yancey. “So many of the strands from my childhood—racial hostility, political division, culture wars—have resurfaced in modern form. Looking back points me forward.”
Philip Yancey
Philip Yancey es periodista, autor de varios éxitos de librería y conferencista. Sus más de veinte libros son conocidos por su honestidad, profundas búsquedas en torno a la fe cristiana, especialmente en lo que concierne a interrogantes y dilemas personales. Millones de ávidos lectores lo consideran como un compañero confiable en la búsqueda de una fe que importe. Philip y su esposa Janet viven en Colorado.
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Reviews for Where the Light Fell
37 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I heartily recommend Yancey’s memoir. He and his brother’s life stories are one of tragedy but also great victory through faith. An excellent book, although very tough to get through at times.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Where the Light Fell by Philip Yancey
Years ago my mentor led a church book study on What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey. I was struck by the concise, direct, but gentle writing. Yancey tackles difficult theological questions, particularly ones hurting people may struggle with. He takes difficult concepts and explains them in a practical way everyone can understand. I wondered how does one learn to write, think, and care about people like this? Where the Light Fell: A Memoir answers that question.
Beginnings
Yancey begins his memoir with his father’s tragic death, which haunts his family and leaves them in perpetual poverty. His father and mother had dreamed of being missionaries, and his father’s death leaves his mother asking God why. She never remarries and in a dramatic graveside proclamation places the weight of living up to that dream on her young sons.
Yancey may write the memoir from his perspective, but it is as much a story about his brother Marshall as it is about Philip. Their mother raised them in a southern, strict fundamentalist home in the turbulent 1960s outside of Atlanta. He recounts in vivid detail what that was like in home, church, and school.
“An upbringing under a wrathful God does not easily fade away.”
He and Marshall both faced all the issues of that highly volatile cultural moment. Add to that their mother’s fundamentalism and bitterness, and you get what Yancey calls “toxicity.” He recounts his first realization that he has been raised racist and his first realization that he’s what others call “white trash.” He ponders what their fundamentalist church has been preaching.
Marshall bears the brunt of his mother’s demands and exceptions. Both boys are exceptionally bright, but Marshall is a borderline genius and a musical prodigy. It’s not until they both are in a Christian college with some separation from their mother that the wounds really begin to fester, and the search for meaning begins. The two boys find very different ways to move forward and attempt to heal.
“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
Where the Light Fell is a page turner. Yancey’s writing is like sitting in the backyard around a fire listening to a friend tell stories. There’s just something simple and beautiful about it. Yancey calls Where the Light Fell a kind of prequel to his other books.If you’ve ever read Yancey’s books, this memoir explains so much about the suffering and grace he makes his themes. If you haven’t read his books, this memoir will make you want to. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed reading his memoir. He wasn't preaching or trying to convert anyone. He was revisiting his childhood, and his faith. I thought it was a good book. I received this book through LT for my honest review.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Philip Yancey's previous books have captured my attention and made me think carefully about my faith and how I communicate it to others. "The Jesus I Never Knew" and "Finding God in Unexpected Places" were refreshing reminders that God will never be contained within the limits of human understanding: He's big and He's good and He loves in ways we'll never grasp this side of Heaven.
While "Where the Light Fell" is a memoir rather than a thematic nonfiction work, it was a challenge to find much light. It's an engaging page-turner. I was glued to the account of a single mom bringing up two boys in the South in the 50's and 60's under the influence of unfriendly and unyielding churches that valued good behavior over grace. Reviews and publicity compare it to "Educated," and the two accounts are similar in many ways.
Late in the book, we discover how the heavy and hurtful events that split his family eventually led Philip to genuine faith, forgiveness, and healing. Even so, I'm afraid the accounts of overbearing churches and their overzealous members will discourage faith-seekers to explore what it means to be part of a healthy (albeit imperfect) local church.
We know from his other books that Philip discovered joy and peace through a genuine relationship with Jesus. If you'd like to help an unbelieving friend to discover it for himself, I'd suggest loaning him one of those.
Book preview
Where the Light Fell - Philip Yancey
PART ONE
THE FAMILY PLOT
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
CHAPTER 1
THE SECRET
Not until college do I discover the secret of my father’s death.
My girlfriend, who will later become my wife, is making her first visit to my home city of Atlanta, in early 1968. The two of us stop by my grandparents’ house with my mother, have a snack, and retire to the living room. My grandparents sit in matching recliners across from the upholstered couch where Janet and I are seated. A television plays softly in the background, tuned to the ever-boring Lawrence Welk Show.
Normally my eighty-year-old grandfather snores through the program, waking just in time to pronounce, Swellest show I ever saw!
Tonight, though, everyone is wide-awake, fixing their attention on Janet. Philip’s never brought a girl over—this must be serious.
Conversation proceeds awkwardly until Janet says, Tell me something about the Yancey family. I’m so sorry I’ll never get to meet Philip’s father.
Thrilled by her interest, my grandmother rummages in a closet to fetch some photo albums and family scrapbooks. As pages turn, Janet tries to keep straight all the names and faces flashing before her. This ancestor fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. That distant cousin died of a black widow spider bite. Her father succumbed to the Spanish flu.
Suddenly a folded clipping from The Atlanta Constitution flutters from the album to the floor, newsprint yellowed with age. When I lean forward to retrieve it, a photo that I’ve never seen catches my eye.
A man lies on his back in a hospital bed, his body pitifully withered, his head propped up on pillows. Beside him, a smiling woman bends over to feed him with a spoon. Right away I recognize her as a slimmer, youthful version of my mother: the same prominent nose, the same mass of dark, curly hair, an early trace of the worry lines that now crease her forehead.
The photo caption stops me cold: Polio Victim and Wife Spurn ‘Iron Lung.’
I hold the paper closer and block out the buzz of family chitchat. The printed words seem to enlarge as I read.
A 23-year-old Baptist minister, who was stricken with polio two months ago, has left the iron lung
in which he was placed at Grady Hospital because, as he put it, I believe the Lord wanted me to.
The Rev. Marshall Yancey, of 436 Poole Creek Rd., Hapeville, said about 5,000 people from Georgia to California were praying for his recovery and he was confident he would be well before too long.
He signed his own release from Grady against medical advice.
Those three words, against medical advice, send a chill through my body, as though someone has poured ice water down my spine. Sensing the change, Janet looks at me quizzically, her left eyebrow arched so high that it touches her bangs. I slide the clipping over so that she, too, can read it.
The newspaper reporter quotes a Grady Memorial Hospital doctor, who warns that removal from the respirator might do serious harm,
followed by a chiropractor who claims the patient is definitely improving
and may begin walking in six weeks if he continues their course of treatment.
Then the article turns to my mother:
Mrs. Yancey, the minister’s young, blue-eyed wife, explained why her husband left Grady:
We felt like he should be out of that iron lung. Lots of people who believe in faith healing are praying for him. We believe in doctors, but we believe God will answer our prayers and he will get well.
I glance at the newspaper’s date: December 6, 1950. Nine days before my father’s death. I flush red.
Janet has finished reading. Why didn’t you tell me about this? she asks with her eyes. I mime surprise: Because I didn’t know!
Dozens, scores of times I have heard the saga of my father’s death, how a cruel disease struck down a talented young preacher in his prime, leaving a penniless widow with the noble task of wresting some meaning from the tragedy. My growing-up years were dominated, even straitjacketed, by a vow she made—that my brother and I would redeem that tragedy by taking on the mantle of our father’s life.
Never, though, have I heard the backstory of what led to his death. When I replace the clipping in the scrapbook, I find on the facing page a similar account from my mother’s hometown newspaper The Philadelphia Bulletin. Quite by accident I am discovering that this man whom I never knew, a saintly giant looming over me all these years, was a sort of holy fool. He convinced himself that God would heal him, and then gambled everything—his career, his wife, his two sons, his life—and lost.
I feel like one of Noah’s sons confronting his father’s nakedness. The faith that exalted my father and gained him thousands of supporters, I now grasp, also killed him.
As I lie in bed that night, memories and anecdotes from childhood flash before me, now appearing in a different light. A young widow lying on her husband’s grave, sobbing as she offers her two sons to God. That same widow, my mother, pausing to pray, Lord, go ahead and take them unless…
before seeking help as her sons thrash convulsively on the floor. Her rage that erupts when my brother and I seem to stray from our appointed destiny.
An awful new realization hits me. My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief. No wonder our mother has such strange notions of parenting, and such fierce resistance to letting us go. We alone can justify our father’s death.
—
After chancing upon the newspaper article, I have many conversations with Mother. That was no life for him—paralyzed, in that machine,
she says. Imagine a grown man who can’t even swat a fly off his nose. He desperately wanted out of Grady Hospital. He begged me not to let anyone take him back there.
Her reasoning is sound, though unsatisfying.
I get that,
I protest, "but why was I never told about the faith healing? The most important fact of my father’s death I learned by chance, from a scrapbook. You invited a reporter into the room, and a photographer. You told them the truth, but not my brother and me!"
Once exposed, the mystery of my father’s death acquires a new, compulsive power. When I start asking around, a family friend confides in me, So many of us were dismayed at their decision, moving your father from a well-equipped hospital to a chiropractic center.
I feel as if someone has twisted the kaleidoscope of our family myth, scattering the shards to form a wholly new design. I share the news with my renegade brother, who has incurred Mother’s wrath by joining Atlanta’s hippie counterculture. He immediately jumps to the conclusion that she deprived us of a father by pulling the plug
on her own husband. A chasm opens in our little family that likely will never be bridged.
I don’t know what to think. I know only that I have been misled. The secret is now out, and I determine to investigate and write it down someday, as truthfully as I can.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
CHAPTER 2
THE GAMBLE
You would need to have lived in the middle of the twentieth century to appreciate the fear that polio once stirred up—the same degree of fear that pandemics such as HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 would later arouse. No one knew how polio spread. By air or water? Contaminated food? Paper money? Across the country, swimming pools closed as a precaution. When a rumor surfaced that cats might be carriers, New Yorkers killed seventy-two thousand of them.
To add to the terror, polio targeted mostly children. Parents used it as the ultimate threat—to keep their kids from playing too hard, using a public phone, getting dirty, or hanging out with the wrong crowd: Do you want to spend the rest of your life in an iron lung?!
Newspapers ran daily tallies of the dead, along with photos of breathing machines lined up in rows, like giant sausage rolls with little heads poking out one end.
Not all victims were children. The world’s most famous polio patient, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, contracted the disease at age thirty-nine.
My father fell ill earlier, at twenty-three. His symptoms mimicked the flu at first: a sore throat, headache, mild nausea, general weakness in his muscles. But on October 7, 1950, he awoke to find his legs paralyzed. Unable to move, even to get out of bed, he feared the worst.
When the ambulance came, Mother asked a neighbor to keep three-year-old Marshall Jr. away from the window, but my brother cried so hard that the neighbor gave in to his tears and let him watch. For weeks he had recurring nightmares of his father being carried out of the house, helpless and unmoving.
The ambulance sped to Georgia Baptist Hospital. Doctors gave the patient a quick exam, then abruptly sent him outside in a wheelchair, wearing only a hospital gown. It’s polio,
they told my mother. Get him over to Grady. They’re the only hospital around here equipped to treat polios.
Sometime that week, Mother wrote an urgent letter to her home church in Philadelphia and the other congregations that had agreed to support them as missionaries. Her message was simple and direct: Please pray!
—
A sprawling landmark in downtown Atlanta, Grady Memorial was a charity hospital that accepted anybody. In 1950 locals referred to it as the Gradies
because, like most hospitals in the South, Grady segregated the races, with a tunnel beneath the street joining the separate facilities for whites and Coloreds.
Patients joked that Grady gave equal treatment to all races—equally bad treatment. No matter your race, you could sit for hours in the lobby waiting for your number to be called. Not if you had polio, though: orderlies immediately whisked my father down the hallways to an isolation ward.
We were living in Blair Village at the time, a government housing project built for veterans of World War II. Four or five concrete-block apartments, resembling army barracks, formed a horseshoe shape around a cul-de-sac. When my father got sick, a public health nurse posted a quarantine sign on our door, temporarily barring any visitors.
For the next two months my mother followed the same daily routine: Feed the kids breakfast, pack up their diapers and toys, and bundle them off to whichever neighbor had agreed to babysit that day. Then, because she had not yet learned to drive, she rode the public bus, with its dozens of stops, into the city. Often she was the only white passenger on a bus full of workers, sitting alone in the front section reserved for whites. At Grady she stayed by her husband’s side until dark, when she caught a bus home.
The nurses told her that only one in seventy-five adults with polio experienced paralysis. My father was the unlucky one. And because his paralysis included the diaphragm, Grady consigned him to the dreaded iron lung.
A large metal cylinder painted mustard yellow, the apparatus engulfed my father’s body except for his head, which rested on a cushioned table. A tight rubber collar around his neck prevented air from escaping. By pumping in air and then sucking it out to form a vacuum, the machine forced his lungs to expand and contract, something they could not do on their own. My father complained that the noise kept him from sleeping: the bellows made rhythmic whooshing sounds and metallic squeaks, like worn wiper blades scraping across a car windshield.
Few hospitals had TV sets then, and my father could not turn the pages of a book. All day and all night he lay still on his back. He stared at the ceiling, passing time by studying the pattern of holes in the acoustic tiles. By shifting his eyes, he could look in a mirror angled toward the doorway and see faces moving past a small window in the door.
From his vantage, anyone who approached him towered like a giant. A masked orderly would shove a spoonful of food in his direction and he would flinch. Access ports lined the side of the machine, and hospital staff reached through the portholes with gloved hands to insert a needle or replace a bedpan. They addressed his head, the only body part outside the machine, as if it led a separate existence from the parts inside.
He lost control over basic functions: going to the bathroom, sleeping, feeding himself. He couldn’t even choose when to take a breath; the artificial lung did that for him. The world shrank. Five years before, he had been sailing home on a warship, with all of life awaiting him. Now the iron lung defined his range. It became a kind of exoskeleton, like a cramped shell around a stuck crab.
Grady had strict rules about visitors. When my aunt Doris, a nurse at another hospital, showed up in uniform for a visit, the charge nurse at Grady decided she lacked the proper training for polio. Honey, you don’t want to see how bad he is anyhow,
she said.
A few times his mother, my grandmother Yancey, appeared at the window with a mask on and waved. Only once did his father show up, with my brother and me in tow. A blacksmith, this strong man hoisted us onto his shoulders and held us at the window, so that my father could see his own sons, our images reversed in the mirror bolted to the machine.
The only visitor who braved the risk, the only person who touched him other than clinically, was my mother, his emotional lifeline. She read books to him, softly sang hymns, pestered the nurses and orderlies for better treatment, and offered what little encouragement she could—even as her own world collapsed around her.
She kept from him her inner fears, but recorded them in a diary: Suffering terribly—out of mind most of the time. I asked God to take him home if he had to suffer so.
—
During the hour-long bus rides to and from Grady, and the occasions when her husband napped inside the iron lung, Mother had much time to review the whirlwind of the five years she had known him.
She met him in April 1945, when a group of sailors on weekend leave traveled to Philadelphia from their navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, hoping to see the city’s sights. He chose to spend Sunday morning at church, where a middle-aged couple responded to the pastor’s request to invite a serviceman home for lunch.
There he first encountered Mildred Diem, my mother, who was staying with the couple as she recovered from a medical procedure.
The adventuresome sailor from Atlanta fell madly in love with timid, sheltered Milly, three years his senior. She had never had a boyfriend, and was charmed by his Southern accent and his gentlemanly style. She also marveled at his carefree spirit, exactly the opposite of her own repressed nature.
As they swapped stories about their upbringings, she learned that the young Marshall Yancey had a wild streak. He was something of a gambler, a kid who took risks. With no warning, at age fourteen Marshall ran away from home. His mother worried herself sick until, four days later, he called collect from St. Louis, Missouri. I heard they had a great zoo, one of the best,
he explained. So I came up to see it.
Proud of his son’s brash independence, his father wired him the money to take a train home. That boy has a mind of his own!
he bragged.
Next, Marshall heard about a Whiz Kids program run by the University of Chicago, which let bright high school students take courses in philosophy. One day, after a family argument, he ran away again. Now sixteen, he hitchhiked to Chicago and talked the university into admitting him into the program. For a few months he flourished, until a bout of strep throat did him in. Rather sheepishly, he called his parents again and asked for help getting home. His father smiled. My son has guts. He’ll try anything.
After sampling the advanced courses in Chicago, Marshall had no desire to enroll again in Atlanta schools. World War II, winding down in Europe, was still raging on the Pacific front; like every American boy of the time, my father wanted to do his part. When he turned seventeen, he got parental permission to enlist as an underage recruit. Choose the navy,
his father advised. That way you’ll always have a bed to sleep in, not like those army foxholes.
Three weeks into basic training at Naval Station Great Lakes, north of Chicago, Marshall made one more call to Atlanta. I made a mistake, Dad. Please, get me out of this place! It’s terrible. I have a sinus infection, I hate the North, and the instructors are tyrants.
His father contacted a congressman on his behalf, but to quit the military in wartime is no easy task. For the first time in his life, my father was trapped.
Snow fell early that year, and chunks of ice floated on Lake Michigan. Christmas arrived, his loneliest Christmas ever. One frosty day as he walked along the shoreline, gazing at a fogbank rolling in, it struck him that his entire future was a fog. He lacked even a high school diploma and soon would ship out to war, unsure if he would ever return.
At a friend’s suggestion, he caught a ride into downtown Chicago to visit the Pacific Garden Mission, which he knew about from its popular program, Unshackled. The longest running radio drama in history,
it mostly told stories of bums and addicts converted to faith at a homeless shelter founded by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody. The stories all had the same plot, and the organ music and sound effects seemed corny—yet there was that promise of the secret of a new life.
In uniform, Marshall felt reasonably safe walking through Chicago’s worst slum, though several times he had to step around men lying on heating grates to keep warm. To his surprise, the volunteer host who greeted him at the mission had read some of his favorite philosophers. They raise a lot of good questions,
the volunteer granted. But I haven’t yet found a philosopher who tells you how to get rid of guilt. Only God can do that. I sense God is after you, Marshall.
After a long conversation, having nowhere else to turn, my father prayed to become a Christian that day in late 1944.
Over the next few months, and especially after meeting Milly, he devoted his spare time to studying the Bible, trying to figure out this new life.
Then in June he embarked for war aboard the USS Chloris, an aircraft repair ship. On the way to Hawaii, a sensational news report reached them: The United States had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, which led to an unconditional surrender. The war was over.
—
The rest of my father’s naval career consisted of biding time in Norfolk, waiting for his discharge so he could propose to Milly. Letters flew back and forth, and every free weekend he took his leave in Philadelphia.
One roadblock stood in the way of the romance. Mildred had promised God to serve as a missionary in Africa. That continent of snakes, lions, tropical diseases, and political unrest posed a true test of faith for a Christian of the time, and for that very reason it appealed to my mother’s idealism. When she heard others talk about the dark continent,
she had a strong sense that God wanted her there. No prospect of marriage could weaken her resolve.
In the summer, as the couple sat together on a bench by Keswick Lake in New Jersey, Marshall asked nonchalantly, Would you consider letting me go to Africa with you as your husband?
She made him wait a couple of days before giving an answer, but there was never any doubt. In September, a scant five months after their first meeting, they got married in her home church. Maranatha Tabernacle sponsored many foreign missionaries, and with the church’s help the young couple cultivated a mailing list of potential supporters.
My parents spent the next three years in Philadelphia, enrolled in college. My father earned a diploma, but the arrival of Marshall Jr. just after their first anniversary put a halt to my mother’s studies. My father decided on further training at a seminary in Indiana. He bought a 1927 Model T Ford for twenty-five dollars. The Ford had only one seat, so he found a cast-off dining-room chair, shortened the legs, and bolted it to the floor. Mildred rode to Indiana in style, holding her eight-month-old baby—my brother—in her lap.
To their dismay, that plan came to nothing. Marshall Jr. developed severe allergies, and a doctor advised them, If that was my baby, I’d drop everything and move to Arizona.
So they headed west, my mother bouncing along in that dining-room chair while nursing a coughing, sputtering infant.
None of my father’s hoped-for church jobs materialized, and after a few discouraging months in Arizona, they gave up and made the long road trip to Atlanta. Once again an adventure had soured for my father. He taught for a while at Carver Bible Institute, a Colored school
located in central Atlanta. The school paid no salary but provided housing, which turned out to be two army cots in an upstairs classroom, with a public bathroom down the hall. My mother insisted that they find better accommodations after I was born, in November 1949.
At last, as a new year began, prospects brightened. My father found work at a home for juvenile delinquents. He drew a modest salary and qualified for veterans’ housing in Blair Village. Now the two could plan the next big move—to the mission field. All this while, Mother had been faithfully writing prayer letters
to people interested in sponsoring young missionaries, a list that had grown into the thousands. Their dream of service in Africa was about to come true.
Instead came polio, two months in an iron lung, a daring leap of faith, and the countdown to death.
—
In the polio ward at night, sleepless, my father tried to envision life as an invalid. Increasingly he saw himself as an albatross around the neck of his wife, who already had two young children to care for. I guess you’re sorry you married me now,
he told her one afternoon. You got no bargain.
No!
she protested. When I vowed ‘for better, for worse, in sickness and in health,’ I meant it.
Alone that night she prayed more fervently, God, don’t take him away from me!
They had a faint flicker of hope when a doctor told them about some new state-of-the-art treatment techniques at Warm Springs. It’s a therapy center south of Atlanta funded by President Roosevelt, who claimed it helped him,
the doctor said. But it’s very hard to get accepted.
To qualify for Warm Springs was like winning the lottery. The Grady nurses favored a handsome young teenager. They did his hair, pampered him, flirted with him. He thought he had won the polio lottery, but died in the ambulance halfway to the destination. One by one, others in the ward passed away.
Early one morning an aide at Grady called my mother at home. Ma’am, I could get fired for this,
she said, but I know your man’s a preacher and I want to hep out. Your husband, why, he died last night. His heart done give out, and they had to bring him back with shots. And when he come back, his first words were ‘Why’d you bring me back?’
Desperate, my mother pleaded with her husband not to give up. Think of all those people praying for you,
she reminded him. Together, they decided to stake everything on a miracle, their only chance. Didn’t they believe in a God who had the power to heal? Why not put their faith in his hands? Why would God take
a man so committed to a lifetime of service?
Newly energized, my father settled on two ambitious goals: to get out of the iron lung and to get out of Grady. Although he trusted God for healing, he wanted to do his part, so he pressed the doctor to allow him a few minutes each day outside the hated apparatus. How else can I gain strength?
he argued.
The first few days he panted and wheezed as his atrophied lungs struggled to regain function. Mother stood guard, ready to dash for help. Day by day, he breathed a little longer on his own: ten minutes, fifteen minutes, then half an hour. Every moment outside the machine risked catastrophe, for nurses did not always respond to a summons. Without prompt attention he could simply stop breathing, or choke to death.
With the help of a portable respirator, he extended his stays to several hours. He celebrated Thanksgiving by managing eight hours free of the iron lung, still lying flat, unmoving. The miracle was happening, albeit gradually, in stages.
On December 2, Mother recorded a watershed event in her diary: Moved Marshall to Stanford Chiropractic Center. He begged me to remove him from Grady if I loved him. I believe the Lord gave him that one last desire.
It was a giant step of faith, made in the face of disapproving doctors. Grady required them to sign a form stating that the patient was leaving against medical advice.
As the ambulance transported him down Peachtree Street, my father had his first glimpse of sunshine in almost two months and took his first breaths of fresh air. At once he felt weak and anxious, but also free and full of hope.
For the first time since her husband’s hospitalization, Mother was allowed to stay through the night. She sat in a chair by his bedside, fearful that he would die that first night. Instead, he slept soundly, away from the noise and bright lights of the polio ward.
He had achieved both goals, escaping at last from the iron lung and from Grady. God the miracle worker was answering their prayers.
Each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face…
—Shakespeare, Macbeth
CHAPTER 3
DEMISE
As my father planned his move to the chiropractic center, Mother had been working on a better child-care arrangement for Marshall and me. Her sister Violet in Philadelphia offered to travel to Atlanta and stay with us, which seemed the ideal solution—until my grandmother Diem got wind of it. Not on your life. Mildred’s the one who left home and married that Southern preacher. Let her stew in her own juices for a while.
My Philadelphia grandmother was a hard woman.
My grandfather Diem, who had lost his own father at age twelve, had more sympathy. Let me work on it,
he said. We can fly the boys up here, if we can just get permission from the airlines.
No unaccompanied child under the age of five could fly without special authorization, so he wrote a letter of appeal and addressed it to Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker, President, Eastern Air Lines, New York, New York.
Somehow the letter reached Rickenbacker, who agreed at once. The permission letter arrived the day my father was moved from Grady to the chiropractic center.
On his first full day at the chiropractic center, after two months of isolation, my father was allowed to see and touch his sons. Show him what you can do, Philip,
Mother said, and for the first time he saw me walk—something he could no longer do. Next, he called Marshall over to his bedside and gave him a pep talk about helping out at home. As we left the room with our Yancey grandparents, Mother kissed us both goodbye.
The next morning, my grandparents brought us to the Atlanta airport, driving out on the tarmac to the steps of the DC-3 airplane. Marshall Jr. carried on board a bag of hard dinner rolls, which he loved to chew. All during the four-hour flight, a stewardess in her smart uniform fussed over us both. She tried to feed us sweet potatoes, but Marshall refused to eat anything except his dinner rolls. A wealthy passenger had offered to look after me. For years afterward, I would brag to schoolmates about my first trip on an airplane, at thirteen months old, when I drooled on a millionaire.
For almost two weeks Marshall and I stayed with our Philadelphia grandparents, doted on by my mother’s two younger sisters. On the fateful day of December 15, the entire family gathered around a radio to listen to a national address by President Harry Truman. The United States was being routed on the battlefields of Korea, and that night President Truman declared a state of emergency. In dire terms he described the threat posed by Communists in the Soviet Union and China.
In the midst of Truman’s radio address, the phone rang and the operator announced those rare words, Long-distance call.
My grandfather was holding me against his shoulder as he accepted the charges. He listened in silence and mumbled a