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3 THE TRAIN TO WINONA Not long after Anna Keirsey Rosamond celebrated her fourth birthday, in the summer of 1910, her father took her to the bustling Calhoun Street Station in Memphis, Tennessee, and put her on a train to visit her aunt. He fastened a tag around his daughter’s neck that said, “Winona, Mississippi,” as if she were a parcel. He made sure the conductor knew his daughter’s destination, got her settled in a coach seat, and kissed her. He waved goodbye from the platform as the train began to move.Anna Keirsey traveled alone. Winona is about 125 miles south of Memphis, and it was a long, frightening ride for any four-year-old, but especially for Anna Keirsey, who was a timid child. The Illinois Central Railroad day coach where she sat so quietly was hot, smoky, and filled with chattering strangers. The train first stopped in Sardis, Mississippi, then in Grenada, Mississippi, and then Winona on its long trek down the middle of Mississippi, into Louisiana, finally ending in New Orleans. As the train slowed and stopped at the barnlike Winona station, Anna Keirsey finally relaxed and even smiled as she looked out the window and saw her aunt on the platform, waiting to meet her. The problem wasAnna Keirsey’s mother,Ione.She was a sickly,self-centered woman who never fully recovered from the birth of her only child in 1906 and spent much of her time and family’s money traveling to places that offered cures she hoped would restore her health. She did not take her daughter. Anna Keirsey ’s father, Eugene, a Memphis pediatrician, traveled with his wife when he could but more often stayed at home to tend to his patients. When her mother was away,Anna Keirsey was routinely sent to stay with a female relative—to her mother’s sister in Winona or to her father’s sister in El Dorado,Arkansas. Winona was best. Anna Keirsey’s aunt and uncle, Maude and Walter Witty, had a large, comfortable house on Summit Street, where they lived with their two daughters. Summit was an unpaved, tree-lined street that Anna Keirsey thought was almost magical. It was the street with Winona’s best houses and its 1 4 The Train to Winona most prominent residents—founding families like the Hawkinses and Purnells, mercantile families like the Fraziers and Wittys, along with the lawyers, doctors, and landowners. It was a generally subdued street except for the usual sounds of a car chugging by or a mule-pulled wagon creaking along or a train passing through town. Most of the neighborhood tumult came from the two-story house next door that was filled with a large, loud, rambunctious, argumentative family named McLean. Anna Keirsey ignored them, then forgot about them until the next time she visited. Five of the six McLean children lived in that house with their father, who was a judge and a landowner, and his second wife. The family was not known for reticence. Especially during the hot Mississippi summers, with the windows wide open, their loud singing and boisterous arguments drifted through the neighborhood. The older McLean children tended to tease the younger ones, and the youngest child, George, was by far the most tempting target. Unlike his older siblings,who,like their father,were tall and forceful,George was small and quiet, like his mother. He was born at home on Saturday, July 30, 1904, and, the family story goes, was so puny and sickly looking that everyone was certain he would not survive more than a few days.He was put in a wooden box while the doctor attended to his mother.His father,who had always refused to name a son after himself, changed his mind out of sympathy for his wife when he saw this scrawny newborn who probably wouldn’t make it. The baby was named George Alonzo McLean Jr. But he did survive, nourished by a black nursemaid, and gradually learned to take care of himself in that active house.When he was three, George’s adolescent sister Sarah, showing off for the boys she was dating, regularly humiliated him by dragging him into the parlor and forcing him to stand and recite in his high-pitched, lisping voice the only rhyme he knew:“There was a little bird and he was so theeen [thin] that you could theee [see] his bones right through his skeeen [skin].” They...

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