Wincie was the fifth of Cleve and Daisy Johnson's seven children, the third daughter. Her name was chosen by her father out of the newspaper accounts of weddings and debutant balls. As was typical in the Johnson family, she was known by her middle name. She was the only one of her seven siblings to remain unmarried. Wincie was a gentle, family-centered person, a quiet lady who was, throughout her life, notable for her dependency.
Wincie completed the Macon, Georgia public schools and attended Woman's College of Georgia in Milledgeville, earning a degree in secretarial science. By the time she graduated, her family had moved from Macon to the nearby small railroad town of Fort Valley, Georgia, a center for peach farming and peach packing sheds that shipped out peaches to market via rail. Wincie returned to her family home and went to work for her father in Johnson's Store, a popular-price clothing store. World War II had begun. Business was booming. The area was booming, thanks in part to the training of airmen at nearby Warner Robins Air Force Base.
A reasonable expectation was for Wincie to meet a nice eligible man and to marry. For a while she dated a promising local young man, Guffy Garrett who co-owned a garage with his brother; but Guffy and Wincie's courtship went nowhere. Based on what I saw and heard, Wincie was too retiring and rather too dependent on her parents for bonding to occur.
Twice later in life there were windows of opportunity for Wincie to marry that also never got off the launch pad. One time my grandfather tried to matchmake her with Dr. Rainer, his physician in New Orleans who treated him after he fell in a hotel shower and was severely scalded. Dr. Rainer was polite but not interested in pursuing it. Then Joe Brodecki started visiting my grandparents' home in Fort Valley after his wife Sue, a cousin, died of cancer. Granddaddy realized Joe was eyeing Wincie as a possible replacement. Granddaddy discouraged this and managed to chase Joe away.
As for career, Wincie was a store clerk who waited on customers, showed them merchandise, filled in stock, operated the cash register, dressed windows, and was my very authoritarian grandfather's "go-for".
I remember Wincie during that time as a pleasant person who seemed content. She enjoyed family visits, cook-outs, special outings, and loved to laugh at a good joke. She liked watching television, going to movies, and reading movie magazines and horoscope magazines --nothing very growth-oriented. She was a career woman, not particularly domestic, making no effort to compete with her sisters for the recognition of being a good cook, which they (exponentially!) were.
Wincie had the front bedroom immediately adjoining the livingroom. She decorated it --a blonde wooden twin bed bedroom suite and luxurious icy peach-colored satin bedspreads. (Years later when she re-decorated, she was kind enough to hand-me-down those bedspreads to me because I admired them. I used them all through college until the cloth rotted and tore.) Wincie allowed me to retreat to her bedroom, to read her movie magazines and to use her "WoodHue by Fabrege" perfume. When I became a teenager, she gave me my own bottle of "WoodHue by Fabrege" perfume at a gift-giving occasion, which was very thoughtful of her. Though she never had children of her own, she was close to her nieces and nephews. In retrospect I am sad to realize how much better she was to me than I was to her: I took her for granted.
Then, crisis and change. In the fall when I was in the fifth grade, my Grandmama Johnson was diagnosed as having advanced cancer of the uterus. It had spread. She went into the hospital and never came home. It took her six horrible weeks to die. She swoll so much from fluid that a hole was punched into her abdomen and she was turned over several times each day to drain. Her children surrounded her in the hospital, visiting constantly. It was the saddest holiday season ever. In our store, the Thanksgiving through Christmas holiday business determined the profit margin. My father and Wincie were so bereft that they didn't even care. Their mother's bedside was their first priority. Daisy Burnette Johnson died January 4.
Then it was just my aging grandfather and Wincie in that big house. Wincie at age 35 did not make the adjustment well. The maid Helen who helped my grandmother was hired fulltime to cook and keep house. Uncle Jack and his family lived next door. Aunt JoAnn and her family lived four blocks down the same street. My father drove his family the 15 miles from Perry over to Fort Valley every Wednesday afternoon and Sunday afternoon to visit and help his father and sister. Wincie's and Granddaddy's home remained the hub of an very involved family network.
One Wednesday afternoon a few months after Grandmama's death my family pulled into the parking area in front of Granddaddy's garage in their backyard. Aunt Wincie was outside beside the climbing rosebushes waiting to talk to Daddy. She told him about disturbing experiences she was having, messages she was getting, a "plot" that was making her fearful --and it was too weird to be real: something was bad wrong. Daddy arranged for her to go to Aunt Sudie's and Uncle Paul's home in Douglas, Georgia for a visit, to get rested and to counsel with Uncle Paul who's a Presbyterian minister. Within a day or so Sudie telephoned Daddy to say she and Paul agreed that Wincie was very obviously in bad shape, had had a break with reality. The family rallied, trying to determine what was best to do. Aunt Wincie was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, halfway across the state. Her doctor was the most famous (supposedly that means the best) psychiatrist in the state, Dr. Corbett Thigpen who was the Eve's doctor (The Three Faces of Eve). Dr. Thigpen diagnosed Wincie as having paranoid schizophrenia.
There was no insurance. Wincie was hospitalized more than a month. She had shock treatments. Daddy said the store would cover her medical expenses. After the hospitalization, she went back to Aunt Sudie's for recuperation. She had been fearful of living in the big mansion my grandfather had built, so her return to a lifestyle there was be gradual and was to remain sheltered, with relatives checking on them.
The former Wincie never returned to us. This new schizophrenic Wincie was impaired. I was told that she would seem different. She definitely was! She giggled a lot, for no reason. The shock treatments (instead of her disease) were credited with the damage to her memory. She started smoking in the hospital so now took lots of smoke breaks. There was a childishness about her. All of us had to be protective about stress around her. She had a LOT of difficulty making up her mind and needed help with decision-making. Ongoing support to her about taking her psychiatric medication was needed and was heartbreakingly difficult. She didn't want to take her prescribed medication and, initially, my father hated for her to have to take "that dope" as he called it; BUT without it she kept having relapses that were disruptive hardships in every respect. Whereas the family quickly grasped that she needed the medicine, Wincie never recognized how much she needed it. Wincie ended up living in our home and Granddaddy ended up in a nearby brand new, very beautiful nursing home.
Every situation has good and bad. Wincie's illness was filtered through her core personality, so she remained quiet, pleasant, family-centered, and dependent. She came to be even closer to her nieces. The negatives, however, outweighed the positives. My mother's frustration over trying to give Wincie her medication coupled with Wincie's refusal and game-playing to avoid taking the medication caused life to be hell in my home.
My mother is a bully. Her parenting style is to bully and to punish. When Aunt Wincie basically invaded our household, Wincie was functionally a dependent adult with a disabling illness, and my tyrant mother became a primary caregiver. There was an painful evening ritual that's burned into my memory: my mother would come into the livingroom where we would be watching TV and she'd say rather self-righteously using "The Voice of Authority", "Wincie, you need to take your medicine," holding it there in her hand, ready to watch it be swallowed. (Remember: when Wincie didn't take the medication, she'd get sick, and her resulting expensive hospitalization in Augusta was a disruptive hardship, and it happened again and again and again.) Wincie's part of thie evening medication ritual would be to reply to my mother, "I'll take it later." Wincie refused to be intimidated by Mama. Indeed all of us learned how to undercut Mama's oppressive dynamic with unbudgable passive aggressiveness. The environment in our household came to have so much stress that I found it nearly unbearable. I no longer wanted to live in that mess.
To this add my aunt's active symptoms. She was sure that the FBI was tracking her. She was hearing voices that she explained by saying she was overhearing FBI messages. She thought the FBI had a stake-out in the attic of our house. Once in a panic she made me run outside with her and hit the dirt for safety because she had "overheard" an FBI plan to bomb us. She was trying to save us from being in the explosion. Combine this with the Cuban missile crisis, the newspaper printing instructions on how to build a bombshelter in your backyard, plus all the household stress, and two of us grandchildren, my cousin David (Sudie's youngest) and me, also ended up so upset that we were hauled in to see a psychiatrist, not a good experience whatsoever.
Counterpoint: no situation is ever so bad that some good doesn't come from it. The adults decided Wincie needed more leisure interests. How to support that?
Wincie liked going to movies. My mother, with her strict orphanage upbringing, had opinions about the propriety of movies and would only allow my sister and me to attend movies on religious topics. (Aside #1 --and you would be surprised how Hollywood managed to turn Grade-B and C Biblical movies into soft-porn! I remember a few that I was shocked Mama let us see! Aside #2 how ironic that Mama's nose turned blue regarding movies. There was a movie theater in Macon that held a special showing every Saturday morning for all the orphanages. Macon was called "the City of Orphanages"; there were five there. My mother looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed those Saturday morning movies which fed her genuine need for fantasy and escape during a harsh Depression-era childhood. Her lifelong favorite was "Daddy-Long-Legs", a 100% secular romance.) Wincie liked Marilyn Monroe. Mama did not approve of Marilyn Monroe. My father wanted Wincie to have a companion to go with her on her outings, and I was eager to volunteer. SO, I got to see and enjoy all the Marilyn Monroe movies that were originally forbidden to me. Aunt Wincie and I really liked David Niven comedies, too. Bless her for actually enjoying my companionship, too. We had good times together.
My mother, who is frankly an oppressive prude and who's into "controlling", also forbid me access to make-up "at least until age 16". When I entered seventh grade the norm for my peers became "pink lipstick on Sunday", one little step into coming adulthood that meant so much. My lot was not only to be left out, but actually to be the noticeably different one, the weirdo. Aunt Wincie, in a brilliant coup which may have been unintended, managed to save me from that bad fate. We had an outing to Macon to buy Christmas gifts. She took me to the big Davidson's on Cherry Street in the middle of downtown Macon. She had me sit at the Merle Norman Cosmetic counter with her while she got something --and it turned out to be for me. I had a make-over and Aunt Wincie bought me my Christmas gift, the start-up basics. The cosmetician blended the face powder to my own specific skin color. It was so special, one of the memorable good moments in not just my childhood but in my entire life. I told Aunt Wincie that Mama wouldn't let me have it, to save her money. Wincie said that she wanted to do that for me and that she would talk to my father about it. I received the Merle Norman gift package under the tree that Christmas morning. Daddy said it was mine and that I could use it. Mama was offended and huffy about it, but Daddy's say-so carried the day that time. I bless my dear Aunt Wincie every time I recall this, and I still treat myself to Merle Norman thanks to her. My mother was stridently unfeminine; Aunt Wincie helped me get in touch with the fact that I am feminine and that I would like to enjoy being feminine --no small gift!
After I went off to college, my cousin Jill, Jack's middle daughter, became Aunt Wincie's good-time companion. Jill seemed to have the same reaction to that role as I did --to treasure it. Jill married Mitch, her high-school sweetheart, when she was 16 because he had joined the Army and got homesick. A year later motherhood, so her childhood was over. Many years later I returned back to the mansion that my grandfather built in Fort Valley, to attend Uncle Jack's funeral. Jack's family now lived in there. Jill's husband, still in the Army, had just received orders to move to North Dakota to guard missiles. Jill and her children were temporarily living with her parents during transition, and Jill was planning the move. I heard her ask her mother to please keep the hand-painted ceramic cannister set (to store flour, sugar, coffee and tea) that she had made with Aunt Wincie in the ceramics class they took together. Jill said that she did not want it to be broken in her moves. "It is too valuable, a keepsake that I want preserved for my own home when Mitch retires," Jill said.
When I went to the University of Georgia for graduate school, I met John, and after only two weeks of courtship we decided that we wanted to get married. John came home to Perry with me for Thanksgiving holidays so my parents could get to know him better and so he could ask my father for my hand in marriage. Wincie was living with my parents. I can't help but observe that of course John was in graduate school studying for his Ph.D. in psychology --I could not have brought anyone else but a psychologist home with me to that situation.
John stayed in the little apartment over the garage in our backyard. The first morning in Perry, he woke up early before anyone else was stirring. He came into the main house hunting breakfast but, finding a sleeping household, decided instead to get the morning newspaper to read. He was walking to the front door and almost stepped on Wincie. She was curled up sleeping on the floor in front of the door with her arms wrapped around the telephone. John told me later that he could tell that she thought she was protecting us, that something horrible would be coming in the door during the night and that she could telephone for help.
Wincie died in the spring of 1974 during the height of the first oil embargo and gasoline shortage. My father called me to come, that Wincie was dying. It was a Sunday. I didn't have enough gas in my car and very likely would have been stranded on the road between South Carolina and Georgia. My father was so upset. After we hung up he told my sister that I needed to come for his sake, to help him bear it, if not to be there for Wincie. My sister called me back and tried to shame me, but John was scared for us to try traveling. I regret that I was not there. She experienced a horrible passage. Wincie had lung cancer (she who had never smoked until her psychiatric hospitalization at age 35). Her lungs ruptured and she drowned in her own blood and body fluid. The last time I saw her she was very ill, on total bed rest in my grandfather's mansion in Fort Valley, and she was being thankful to be able to watch the Master's golf tournament on television, something she had always wanted to be able to do but, because of having to be at work, couldn't. At the end, before going comatose, she was peaceful and recognizing positives, bless her.