THE ENORMOUS MOTHER

Reflections on Susan Smith

In 1995 a young woman named Susan Smith, from Union, South Carolina, was convicted of murdering her two sons, Michael 3, and Alex, 14 months. Now, after spending 30 years in prison, she will be eligible for parole next month.

I wrote two pieces about the Smith case in 1995, the first for the Village Voice, the second for the Oxford American. I was a natural choice to examine the Smith case for the Voice since I’d already written about South Carolina for them a number of times.* Smith’s trial would not happen till July and it was May, so we needed a narrative frame. I suggested to my editor that I fly to South Carolina and spend Mother’s Day with my mother at the lake where Susan Smith drowned her children. Below is the resulting story, re-edited, and next Monday I’ll post the Oxford American piece about attending Smith’s trial.

*My book The Redneck Way of Knowledge, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, was a collection of pieces written for the Village Voice. Many were about South Carolina.

     THE ENORMOUS MOTHER: Reflections on Susan Smith

It is Mother's Day, 1995, and my mother and I are driving through the South Carolina Upcountry toward a little town named Union. We are going to the lake where, one night in October, a 23-year-old woman named Susan Smith let her car roll down a boat ramp into the water with her two children still strapped inside their safety seats. This event was not known for nine days, because, while her car sank quietly into the dark lake, Susan Smith ran screaming back to the road and to the nearest house. A black man, she sobbed, had hijacked her car with her children still inside.

Union, South Carolina, was a placid small town in 1995, it’s Main Street like the set of a '50s movie. There was a florist, a jeweler, a drugstore, a realtor, a newsstand, a radio station, and a courthouse. Out on the highway was one grimy motel, and tucked into downtown was an elegant bed and breakfast with five guest rooms.

Killings in Union were rare and personal, and crimes of anonymity were the stuff of tabloids, the North, nightmares. Susan Smith's tale was believed because it was so wild, and because the alternative seemed inconceivable: that this ordinary young woman who had been voted "friendliest" in her senior class, this honor student who had never shown any hint of a capacity to hurt her children, was somehow responsible for their disappearance. And Susan's story, like her crime, was archetypal: a black man, the bogeyman, did it. Her tale tapped directly into racism and fear, and the search for the missing boys became a national psychodrama, with Smith pleading tearfully into television cameras for the kidnapper to please, please return Michael and Alex unharmed.

As we drive toward Union, my mother offers the view that Susan Smith should be strapped into her car and drowned in the same lake in a gruesome public execution. Then, in a moment of weakness, she says, “You know, I support the death penalty, but if I were on that jury, I probably wouldn’t vote to electrocute that girl.”

The electric chair for Susan Smith had become a possibility. Tommy Pope, who at 32 was the youngest prosecutor ever elected in South Carolina at that time, had been known to use terms like “fry’em.” Pope believed the state could prove “aggravated circumstances” against Smith and that the jury would recommend the first use of the electric chair for a woman since 1947.

So, while my mother and I were coasting past Columbia, the state capital, Susan Smith waited nearby in the Women’s Correctional Center for her trial, scheduled to be held in Union in July. Susan, sources reported, was suicidally depressed. She was under 24 hours a day surveillance so the state could decide whether to kill her.

My mother was 76 years old in 1995, I was nearing 50, and, after many years of fighting, we had achieved an exhausted peace. She was not surprised that I wanted to take her to Union, though she did profess amazement at the ‘mother’s ring’ I offered from my sister and me, since we rarely managed gifts that she liked. “Make sure you give Momma something you want back,” Patty said, “because she’s going to return it to you as soon as she gracefully can.” But this ring that Patty and I had conjured featured the birthstones of Momma’s three children along a central axis with the stones of her two grandchildren on either side. “I love it,” my mother kept saying, and I was astonished by this enthusiasm.

In Whitmire, a dozen miles before Union, we pass a country church with a marquee that reads: A Mother’s Love, Like God’s Love, Is Forever.  Neither of us comments. We talk instead about the fact that the air conditioner in her old Mercedes is conking out, but she doesn’t want to crack the windows because the noise bothers her ears and musses her hair. The day is gray and overcast, and soon we are being thumped by a fat, lukewarm rain.

Keeping the windshield unfogged becomes nearly impossible, so, when we get to Union, we stop at the one restaurant we have been assured will be open: Quincy’s. Steakhouse chains like Quincy’s are popular because of their low prices and “food bars,” whopping tributes to the notion that more is better.

Most of Union's residents seem to be in line at Quincy's, which means we have plenty of time to get acquainted with the lady in front of us. She still says she’s from Rhode Island, though she and her husband have been in South Carolina for 25 years. Her husband is waiting at a table while she stands in line; he's got an artificial leg, and he’s not used to it yet. He's already had triple bypass surgery, and now his neck arteries are blocked. My mother offers sympathy: At our age, she says, the warranty runs out on the car.

I note with pleasure what would have been ferociously impossible here during the '50s and '60s: whites and African Americans are standing in line with each other, appreciating Mother's Day finery and the charms of their children in dress-up clothes.

At the food bar (called "The Sideboard" at Quincy's) nearly everything is dripping and oozing with cholesterol. This is fast food haute cuisine: chop suey, chicken wings, spaghetti with perfectly round meatballs, nachos, and what I think is stroganoff but turns out to be cubes of mystery meat in brown gravy. Something white and clotted is on the Sideboard, an awful pudding or potato soup, and, of course, there is the dessert bar: cookies and cakes and ice cream and yogurt and every kind of topping.

A woman in a tentlike dress who must weigh over 400 pounds sits morosely nearby with someone we assume is her mother, a trim, grim, carefully dressed woman with beauty parlor hair. My mother and I graze idly around our laden trays. We have assembled bites of nearly everything. "People that fat," I say, signaling with my eyes, "can't wipe when they go to the bathroom. They can't reach their butts. I saw it on Oprah."

"So, what do they do?"

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't watch the rest of the show."

Southerners are unnervingly relaxed about their body functions. When Elvis died, Northern papers reported that he was found on the floor of his bathroom. The Charleston paper, however, reported that he was found on his bathroom floor with his pants around his ankles, and a sidebar analyzed bowel movements as a cause of death. Straining apparently causes blood pressure to spike. My sister sent me the clips.

My mother has not let the casual cruelty of my observation pass. She glances at the fat woman's table again. "Her mother," she says, "must grieve and grieve."

I stare openly now, trying to see the sorrow my mother discerns in this older woman's masklike face.

After lunch, the Rhode Island lady and her husband with the artificial leg are kind enough to direct us to the road that leads to the lake where Susan Smith drowned her children.

 The rain has stopped, the sun has emerged, and steam is rising off the pavement. We crack the windows a bit and follow the two-lane blacktop some 10 miles out of town.

John D. Long Lake lies about a hundred yards down a paved entrance road. There is a small parking lot, several picnic tables arranged on a patch of grass, and a sign that regulates fishing. The lake is small and peaceful, a quarter mile across, perhaps half a mile long, and its surface is mirrorlike, reflecting the whitish sky and dark, surrounding trees.

A gravel and asphalt boat ramp slopes into the water. At the top of the ramp and to the side is a collection of tributes and remembrances for Michael Smith and his brother Alex. There are toys and poems, and plaques with rhyming verse. One reads: God Bless Your Souls/ Up in the sky/ It's too bad/ you had/ to die. On the word up an arrow upward has been drawn from the letter p.

"This is ghastly," I say to my mother. I do not mean the sight of the lake, which leaves me curiously unmoved. I mean a deflated mylar bunny balloon hanging upside down that says Happy Easter; a plastic police car with 911 on its side and this inscription: May God Be With You! We Love You! We'll keep you in our hearts forever; two bridelike dolls staring blankly outward; a packet of crayons still in its wrapper; an orange plastic plane; a Barney; and many other stuffed animals. Everything looks water-soaked, bedraggled, and the dozens of plastic flower arrangements make the word graveyard unavoidable.

But this is not a graveyard, it is a popular public lake where the fishing for bream and catfish and largemouth bass has always been quite good. Now, one of the worrisome questions for residents is whether to fish here or not. Bream, hand-sized panfish, seem a different issue from catfish, which are scavengers. The boys, of course. are not buried in the lake, but for more than a week it contained their remains. No one wants to think about the weeping divers who found the car, or the tow truck that pulled it from 18 feet of water, but the notion of fishing in the lake has become a bit sickening.

We stay lakeside for several hours, shying away from the constant trickle of pilgrims standing reverently in front of the makeshift altar. There are old people and young couples with children, whites and people of color. While observing, we talk with a reporter from a national magazine. He tells us that last Sunday he kept a running count, and almost 500 folks had visited the site. He expects a similar number for Mother's Day.

I don't know how to explain why I'm at the lake with my mother, so I point up the road toward the highway and say to this reporter, "So that's where Susan ran screaming up the road? Do you know which house she went to?"

"Maybe she skipped,” he says.

"What?"

"How do you know she ran screaming? Maybe she was skipping."

I am so confused by his response that I ask him to take our picture. My mother and I pose in front of the boat ramp, near the altar.

Most murders are mysteries, and the only witness to what happened the night of October 25 is Susan Smith. Having lied successfully to the entire nation for nine days, she has no credibility. Her confession followed convincing emotional appeals to the kidnapper to return her children, and, despite two failed lie detector tests, dogged private insistence that she was telling the truth. Sheriff Howard Wells, who happened to be the godfather of Smith's brother's children, only broke her denial with a deception. There had been a drug stakeout, he claimed, at the traffic light where she said she’d been hijacked, so it couldn't have happened the way she'd been telling them.

The handwriting in Susan Smith's confession is touchingly childish. She writes a line like, "I didn't want to live anymore!" and finds the exclamation point necessary. She draws pictures of hearts rather than writing the word. "I love my children with all my heart, and I have prayed to them for forgiveness! I never meant to hurt them!!"
The initial rage and grief that her confession elicited are easy to account for, since she had conned her family, her neighbors, and, through the press, almost everyone else. There were reporters in Union who cried when she confessed. But the widespread demonization of her that followed is more difficult to illuminate.

Everything surrounding Susan Smith has the charm and horror of diminution. She looks little, her children were little, and Union is a little town. The lake looks small, her Mazda was small, yet the tale that emerged looms large. Who since Medea chanted love for her infants while murdering them? Only the protagonist of Beloved, the slave in Toni Morrison’s novel, who, like Susan, could not complete her own suicide.

A tabloid producer who covered the Smith case from the beginning told me he does not believe Susan Smith ever intended to kill herself. He believed that she was cynical, selfish, and sexually manipulative, and that she murdered her children because she wanted to be rid of them.

My friend who is a shrink at Yale offered this view: "The demonization of Smith maybe to some degree culturally necessary: It's too threatening to think that Susan Smith might just have had a very bad day."

In his short story "The Enormous Radio," John Cheever tells of an average couple whose only eccentricity is a passion for music. They buy a large new radio, but what they hear through it are the sounds and conversations in the other apartments in their building. Their own conflicts are amplified by this new knowledge, and their relationship is destroyed. Susan Smith became the enormous radio through which one of our deepest fears was touched.

Susan Smith was, by all accounts, a warm, careful, doting mother. Her children, like all children, were helpless, and she had protected and cared for them consistently. How could this primary relationship of dependence and trust become, in a moment, murderous? Become, in a word, monstrous?

When I was a teenager, my family summered near a woman who was chosen by an important civic organization to be "South Carolina Mother of the Year." Marie (not her real name) was my first celebrity, and I studied her, trying to learn what made her style of mothering so special.

A few months later, a picture of her appeared on the front page of the Charleston newspaper with this caption: "Mother of Year Tries To Kill Children." Marie had hit each of her four children on the head with a hammer. None of them died, although one now has a plastic spot in his skull. Marie stayed in the state mental hospital for a number of months, and, as my mother was fond of saying, "Her husband stood right by her!" The next summer, they were all back at the beach. My sister and I commemorated this extraordinary turn of events by wrapping up a hammer as a present for our mother. (It was her own hammer so she didn’t have to give it back.)

If Susan Smith had run up the road from John D. Long Lake shouting, “I tried to kill myself and my children went into the water!" she might have received psychiatric treatment, and though she might also have been criminally prosecuted, she probably would not be awaiting trial for aggravated murder. Susan Smith became a candidate for the electric chair, not because she drowned her children, but because she lied about it.

When Susan Vaughan Smith was six years old, her father, Harry Ray Vaughan, committed suicide. Despondent over the disintegration of his marriage, Vaughan shot himself. A year later, Susan's mother, Linda, married Beverly Russell, a prosperous Union businessman. Susan and her two older brothers moved with their mother from their modest home into Beverly Russell's more generous one. Susan's oldest brother, Michael, who has been termed "emotionally disabled," was 33 years old and lived at home. Susan's other brother, Scotty, 32, was married and has two children. Scotty emerged as the stable, articulate voice for the family; after Susan's confession, he issued a statement apologizing to the black community for the immense trouble his sister's lies had caused.

 Susan made her first suicide attempt at 13, with an over-the-counter medication. No clear account of what triggered this first attempt has been given, but, when Susan was 15, sexual contact with her stepfather had begun. At 16 she confided the situation to a school counselor, who notified the Department of Social Services. According to court documents, DSS determined that: "Beverly Russell did physically abuse and/or neglect his stepchild by fondling the breasts of the minor child, by the stepfather and child participating in open mouth kissing and by the stepfather putting the minor's hand on him in and about his genital area."

DSS ordered Russell to move out of the home and all parties to undergo therapy, but Susan's mother apparently convinced Susan to withdraw her complaint. Linda Russell believed that the situation was being overdramatized, and that the family should be unified and preserved.

At 17, Susan tried to hurt herself again. Upset about an affair with an older man, she took an overdose of aspirin and was hospitalized for more than a week. At 19 she got pregnant and married David Smith, an assistant manager at the Winn-Dixie grocery store. Despite some storybook wedding pictures, the marriage quickly became unstable. There were mutual accusations of adultery, a separation, and a reconciliation in which Susan found herself pregnant again. By the time her second child was a few months old, Susan and David were pursuing divorce.

Susan’s affair with a man named Tom Findlay became the fulcrum of her disintegration. Tom was the son of the owner of Conso Products, one of the largest decorative trim manufacturing companies in the world. Susan worked at Conso as an administrative assistant to Carey Findlay; she danced with his son Tom at the office Christmas party, and by January they were sleeping together.

The week before Susan's deadly trip to the lake, Tom had written a letter to her ending their relationship. In her confession Susan wrote, "I had never felt so lonely and so sad in my entire life. I was in love with someone very much, but he didn't love me and never would.”

Early reports indicated that Findlay broke off the affair because he did not want a ready-made family, but Susan's confession hinted at more complex, aggressive behavior on her part: "I had hurt him very much and I could see why he could never love me." According to The Charlotte Observer, Findlay, in his letter, called Susan "boy crazy" and was upset that she had kissed and fondled the husband of another Conso employee when he and several others were nude in Findlay's hot tub. "To be a nice girl you must act like a nice girl,” Findlay wrote, “and that doesn't include sleeping with married men."

The day of the drownings, Susan confessed to Tom Findlay that she had slept with his father. Later that afternoon, she tried to withdraw this assertion and then, a few hours later, found herself sitting in her car on that boat ramp in the dark.

A scene videotaped during the media frenzy while the children were still missing demonstrates a stunning tableau of denial: the family members are all holding hands during a prayer vigil; Beverly Russell, in blue jeans, is sitting on the arm of a sofa, holding Susan's hand and asking God to "touch that man's heart who took the children." Perhaps the kidnapper was a shadow figure who ran straight out of Susan’s unconscious.

Ironically, Russell's prayer worked. Not only did Susan confess, but he admitted to authorities that his sexual abuse of his stepdaughter had not ended when she was 16; in fact, they'd had relations as recently as six months before Michael and Alex drowned. Through his attorney, Russell released this brief statement to The Charlotte Observer. "I’m responsible for, and ashamed of, what happened. I appreciate the fact that some of my friends and family have tried to speak up in my defense. But they don't know what I did. I am finally getting the professional help that I need."

Hypocrisy is an expensive teacher. How much easier it must have been for Beverly Russell to condemn the behavior of others (The Advocate reported that he often spoke out against gay rights) than to look, literally, to his own house. Now the pillars of his life fell rapidly around him. He withdrew from official positions in Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and in the Republican Party.

The entanglement of Christianity with sexual proscriptions has always been probIematic for the devout. Basic good ideas like forgiveness and "do unto others" are difficult to separate from all those finger-wagging edicts. This is especially true in places like the South Carolina Upcountry, in the heart of the Bible Belt. In the Bible Belt, I had been warned as a child, playing cards was a sin, drinking liquor was a sin, and dancing was a sin. By contrast, in Charleston, the jewel of the Lowcountry, hard liquor had been served to me in a bar when I was 14. But sin can start to look attractive under any conditions, and in the Bible Belt, even the smallest pleasures get served with delicious dollops of guilt. Bev Russell, a man who attempted to live by the stiff moralistic code called "family values," would have construed his behavior as sin, and legal or psychological words like statutory rape and incest might have fallen quickly out of his mind. In the world of sin, where guilt is a powerful defense, remorse can feel like complete atonement. In her confession, Susan wrote, "I am sorry for what has happened, and I know that I need some help." She underlined the word sorry three times. Perhaps remorse was Russell's ticket to continue.

Susan Smith's sexual activities demonstrate, for the psychologically knowledgeable, a pattern of acting out with older men that is the result of her stepfather's seduction and her father's suicide. But Susan, like Beverly Russell, is religious, and in her heart and mind she may have construed her behavior only as shameful promiscuity.

A sign on a grocery store in Union said "The devil fears a praying mind,”  yet prayer did not prevent Susan Smith from rolling her Mazda down the boat ramp. And if parents teach by example, Beverly Russell, with Susan's mother's complicity, gave Smith this fundamental lesson: when something terrible happens to a child, lie about it.

Linda Russell's role in her daughter's disastrous life is difficult to decipher. In print and television interviews, she does not come across as weak or naive, though she does exhibit a tendency to minimize. On one of her weekly visits with Susan in the Women's Correctional Center, Linda brought along the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. A friend of Linda Russell's defended her to me. She said Linda's decision, when Susan was in high school, to discourage prosecution of Beverly is easy to second-guess. "She made a mistake," this friend said fiercely, and offered the familiar line that motherhood doesn't come with a set of directions.

Susan's lie, in retrospect, seems so inept. A black man hijacked her car, made her drive 10 miles, and, when he forced her out of the car, said he did not have time to let her unfasten her children from their car seats. Even after 30 years of mandated integration, it was impossible to imagine an African American man in the South foolish enough to think that kidnapping white kids would help him get away from anything.

But maybe he was some crack-crazed gang member from New York? Maybe there were circumstances that were unimaginable? In that case, after 8 days, the car should have turned up, the kids should have turned up. And the traffic light where she said she was attacked turned red only when another car approached. Why would the hijacker drive 10 miles into the countryside, then stop where there were houses near?

The answers lay in the lake.

Susan ran to the home of Shirley and Rick McCloud for help, and the lake was the first place where McCloud and his son looked. In the next few days, the sheriff would twice send divers into the water. They didn't find the car because it was more than 100 feet out from shore.

But how did the car get that far out? The prosecutor required authorities to stage a"reenactment" of Susan's Mazda rolling into the water. Sandbags played the part of the children strapped into the car seats, and an underwater camera revealed what they would have seen, if it had not been pitch dark when the original event occurred.

An officer rolled the car about halfway down the ramp, stopped, jumped out, and slammed the door shut. The car rolled fast, then crashed into the water. It sagged front end first, turned over slowly, and sank in about six minutes, some 15 feet short of where Susan's car had been found.

They tried another car. Similar scenario. Despite official assertions to the contrary, how Susan's car ended up so far out into the center of the lake remained a mystery. It seems less mysterious to me. When I was not much older than Susan Smith, I made a suicide attempt as half-hearted as hers. A smart shrink warned me that playing chicken with suicide might lead to tragedy, since I was not actually trying to die.

Susan Smith saw her children as an extension of herself. “I felt I couldn't be a good mom anymore but I didn't want my children to grow up without a mom,” she wrote in her confession. She didn't want her children to suffer through a parent's suicide, the way she had. “I felt I had to end our lives to protect us from any grief or harm.”

 One reason suicide can be difficult to accomplish is that, no matter what the mind wants, the body tries to live. Even the most rational decision to end one's life may require assistance. I once met someone who had tried to shoot herself in the head but ducked, and who now had a visible groove, as if she had parted her skull instead of her hair. Even if Susan Smith had gone into the water in the car with her children, her body might have tried to swim back out.

I decided to stage my own reenactment.

After I took my mother back to Charleston on Mother's Day night, I borrowed my sister's car and drove back to Union the next morning. Later that afternoon, I went back to the lake and, during a deserted half hour, rolled my sister's car down the ramp over and over. A copy of Susan's confession lay on the seat beside me. I wanted to end my life so bad and was in my car ready to go down that ramp into the water and I did go part way, but I stopped.

I let my sister’s car roll halfway down, then pushed the brakes.

I went again and stopped.

I let the car go further and braked. I was now some 10 or 12 feet from the water. The ramp was less precipitous this close, the water more intimate, less frightening.

I then got out of the car and stood by the car a nervous wreck.

I could not make myself get out of my sister's car in my reenactment, but it was clear to me that the only way to do that safely was to pull the emergency brake. So, could I assume Susan put on the brake and got out of her car?

I dropped to the lowest when I allowed my children to go down that ramp into the water without me.

There is something skipped here, of course. Had she put on the brake? Did she reach into the car and release it? Did she get back into the car and, when it started to roll, jump back out? Did she close the car door, or did the water do that? In any case, if the car were released only 10 or 12 feet from the water's edge, it would have glided into the water, not banged into the surface the way it did in the reenactment. Water does not compress, which is why a belly flop feels different from a dive. With a more gentle entry, the car might well have traveled farther out into the lake.

The brutality of the prosecutor's staging demonstrates the extent to which Susan's confession was not believed. He was trying to dramatize the cruelty of the event and feed speculation that the car floated long enough for Susan to have gotten help. Not surprisingly, rumors have circulated that Susan stood on the shore watching the pitiful children cry and struggle to escape. One night I went out to the lake to check this hypothesis. The only way Susan could have seen anything significant would have been with powerful portable lights.

Perhaps Susan Smith wouldn’t stand trial at all. The results of a psychiatric evaluation, sealed by order of the judge, had been leaked to the press: Susan was found sane but severely depressed. Depression, it could be argued, would constitute a mitigating factor. It seemed clear to me that her lawyer would either plead Susan not guilty by reason of insanity, or guilty but mentally ill. Sources reported that he offered to accept life imprisonment, if the prosecutor would simply back down about the death penalty.

A trial of this importance would be very expensive, and, even if the prosecutor were to receive a change of venue, many people doubted whether he would find 12 jurors willing to send Smith to the electric chair. Despite the early fury of public response, especially in Union, many people had begun to feel sorry for Susan Smith. "Susan's already been punished," one of her relatives said to me.

 That Mother's Day night, while I was driving my mother back to her home in Charleston, I asked her if she'd ever had the impulse to kill my sister or brother or me.

"No," she said, and began a riff so familiar that my sister and I used to joke it was the reason neither of us had children. "When you have a child," my mother said, "you're hooked for life. You're never your own person again. And it doesn't matter if she's 50 years old or not, you feel the same. I remember when a bee lit on your brother's forehead, while he was a baby, how I felt. I would have done anything.”

We’d seen a sign for Piggie Park barbecue, and, as we passed back through Columbia, I asked if we could stop for dinner. After we were seated at a small table in Piggie Park, I said, “Mom, do you remember that woman who was South Carolina Mother of the Year?”

“Honey, please don’t use her in your story. She might get upset again.”

Maybe it was because night had fallen or maybe I was just tired, but I got to thinking about Susan Smith over there in the Correctional Center trying to endure still being alive, feeling each involuntary breath burning through her chest. In her confession she wrote, I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive myself for what I have done. Then I started thinking about the children floating into the darkness, turning slowly over, strapped upside down in their safety seats. They would have waked up in the pitch dark, crying in terror. I took off running and screaming, “Oh God! Oh God, no! What have I done?

My mother’s new ring glittered as she piled the remains of her barbecue onto my plate. “I can’t eat all of this.” Then she looked at my face. “What’s the matter?”

An awful song was playing in the restaurant. Smile for a while and let’s be jolly, love shouldn’t be so melancholy.

“Nothing, but it will be a long drive back to Union tomorrow.”

“You’ll make it,” she said, “but you won’t have me for your navigator.”