Memoir reveals author’s secret past in American south

Carol Heffernan never told those closest to her about the torment she endured growing up.

Her immediate family never knew the extent of the trauma she experienced at the hands of her alcoholic and abusive father until she wrote it all down.

Three years ago, Heffernan was travelling from Toronto to her native St. Simon’s Island, an American island in Georgia, when she met a woman at the airport.

Their flights having been delayed, Heffernan chatted with Lorraine O’Donnell Williams about a memoir she had published.

Heffernan confided that she had a story to tell and had twice tried to get it down on paper.

The woman encouraged Heffernan to try again.

“I told her I would need a psychiatrist,” said Heffernan.

It turns out O’Donnell Williams did work in the field and told Heffernan she would help her through the process of writing. She told Heffernan to get a stack of paper and start writing, without thinking too much about it.

“I was there writing, crying my eyes out. I couldn’t even see what I was writing,” said Heffernan. “I did talk with Lorraine on many occasions. She was a mentor to me and encouraged me to keep going.”

She wrote all about her handsome daddy, a coon-hunting binge drinker, and growing up dirt poor in the American south.

Now 70 years old, Heffernan is telling all in her story in her new self-published memoir Monkey Titty Babies.

Heffernan, who has authored the book in her maiden name of Hamby, comes full circle in the telling of this story.

Her father’s alcoholism causes him to lose his job and the family is uprooted several times but they always end up back on St. Simon’s Island.

Heffernan said the whole family, including her three siblings, felt the scorn of their neighbours who thought of them as white trash.

“My life was a struggle,” she said. “People say, ‘We didn’t know we were poor.’ I knew I was poor. I went to bed hungry. My father’s boozing used up all of the money.”

She said she almost used Cold Grits as the title of the book.

“Because you know you are poor when you have to heat up cold grits for breakfast,” said Heffernan.

The chosen title, Monkey Titty Babies, refers to little dolls that she made out of coconuts with her beloved nanny Eliza who took care of the children while her mother suffered a long illness.

Eliza, who lived in the slave cabin at one of the plantations on the island, was nurturing and comforting to Heffernan, the youngest of four children. The family had very little money to pay Eliza, but she did receive fish and homegrown preserved vegetables.

Heffernan said because her father’s drinking got progressively worse over the years, she and her brother saw him at his worst because the two eldest daughters had married and left home.

One night after Heffernan went on a date, her father attacked her in the middle of the night as he accused her of being a whore. Her mother was stabbed while trying to protect her daughter and they fled the house.

Her mother recovered but, desperate to get away from her father, Heffernan married a man she did not love, who turned out to be too much like her father in some ways. The couple had two children together.

Heffernan’s daughter died in July but not before reading her mother’s book.

She said the relationship changed for the better after her daughter knew what had happened to her. She had never told her daughter anything about her past.

Heffernan’s third husband, with whom she came to Canada, died in 2012. He too had no knowledge of his wife’s troubled past until he read the manuscript.

Now the story is going out to the general public.

“I am a little nervous about how people are going to react,” said Heffernan. “The book addresses a lot of heavy themes.”

She said faith has helped her through, and a very supportive mother. She said if her story helps just one person, she will be happy.

“I want to let them know that they can have a great life,” said Heffernan. “I am a strong and determined person but I wasn’t always that way.”

She urges people to deal with their past.

“It just robs you. Those bad memories can take the joy out of life.”

Monkey Titty Babies is available at Curiosity House Books in Creemore, at Crow’s Nest Books in Collingwood and online through Amazon.