Egad!
EGAD!
ELLA JOY GADDY
What a beautiful little… bonnet.
—A GADDY FRIEND UPON SEEING BABY ELLA
1959–1967
Ella Joy Gaddy grew up the second daughter of Boo and Eve Lynn Knox Gaddy, a wealthy conservative Southern family with strong beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, black and white.
Her father, Boo Gaddy, a raucous good ole boy, ran the third largest distillery south of the Mason-Dixon, which kept the family well-oiled, enabling him to dabble in his true love: betting the horses. Their farm, two hundred acres in the rolling hills just outside Lexington, Kentucky, had been, like the business, passed down for generations. Boo ran the farm and the distillery but happily ceded all household duties, including the rearing of their three children, to his wife, who had a definite opinion on both. As a celebrated ex-debutante from Savannah, Eve Lynn Knox Gaddy was firmly dedicated to upholding the gloved standards of the Old South, where manners and decorum came first.
And where separate was equal.
She met her husband at a debutante ball thrown by her father, Clayton Knox. “We need a party,” Clayton had said, “where the women look like women again.” Believing that society had turned upside down during the Second World War, Knox belonged to a circle of like-minded individuals who wanted their women in the kitchens, looking pretty. He didn’t understand a world where girls grew muscles, attitude, and a sense of entitlement that they could do a man’s job, and he raised Eve Lynn, being his only daughter, to understand her role and her place, so that when she married and had children, they would understand theirs.
But Eve Lynn’s second daughter Ella never understood. An anomaly in both appearance and disposition, Ella was the youngest of three children. The eldest, Alice Lee, five years Ella’s senior, was a miniature blond replica of her mother. A dainty debutante in training, she shadowed her mother to charity luncheons and dance recitals wearing her ruffles and her gloves like declarations of her pedigree. Knox Gaddy, the male heir, two and a half years older than Ella, was also blond, quiet, and obedient, never challenging or questioning the rules in place.
Ella, different in both looks and manner, was a freckled redhead with long legs and a short temper. Bawdy and bodacious, she lived out loud with a wildness and a stubborn streak that, much like her unruly and curly hair, could not be tamed.
“She is far more comfortable with the farmhands than the delicate ones,” Eve Lynn observed at a Fourth of July picnic when Ella, not yet seven, showed an affinity for off-color jokes and Gaddy bourbon.
“She’ll grow out of it,” Boo had told her. But what happened was actually quite the opposite.
“Mother, I swear she’s going to be a little slut,” said Alice Lee, fourteen, to an alarmed Eve Lynn, who had tasked Ella’s older sibling with supervising her younger sister while she and Boo were out of town.
Specifically, Alice Lee had been charged with bringing Ella to two engagements. The first, a picnic at the lake with her fifth-grade class, turned into a naked free-for-all led by Ella, who stripped off her clothes and insisted that everyone go skinny-dipping.
“There were boys there,” Alice Lee later said to her mother, as if she needed more of a mental picture.
“I hope you didn’t tell the teachers it was Ella’s idea,” Eve Lynn worried.
“I didn’t need to,” said Alice Lee, explaining that they had all tried to stop her.
Eve Lynn nodded in a sort of daze.
The other engagement, a birthday party for Sue Anne Peabody, the daughter of one of the South’s oldest and most conservative families, had also been a bust.
“Was there nudity?” Eve Lynn asked Alice Lee, her voice barely above a whisper.
Her daughter shook her head. “She left ten minutes after I dropped her off,” Alice Lee said, explaining that Ella had feigned sickness, gone home, and spent the entire day with Harlan and his cousin Darnell on the lake. Harlan was the son of Essie and James, the cook and groundskeeper, and Darnell was their eighteen-year-old nephew who had lost both his parents and would often spend summers and holidays on the Gaddy farm.
Still, there was no reason for alarm until Alice Lee created one: “There’s gossip that Ella likes to play doctor, or should I say patient , with all the boys,” she said, adding in a whisper, “And that Darnell is pre-med at Howard University, so you do the math, Mother.”