Secret keeper

Tree limbs hang like a veil overhead, and she knows: This is where girls like her disappear.

The year is 1967, and as the car inches forward, Carol asks herself a question that has plagued her for months: What have I done to my family?

Carol’s mother, Edith Nichols, parks the car. She’s impeccably dressed and maintains her composure, as usual. But Carol knows her mother’s outward appearance belies so much inward turmoil.

This isn’t an ideal situation, says her mother, but it is what we have to do under the circumstances.

Mother and daughter walk side-by-side to the front door. Edith Nichols rings the doorbell. Carol knows what is expected of her: hide away for a few months, forget what transpires, move on with her life.

But Carol will never forget. Haunted by shame and guilt, she will guard her secret for decades until she can’t keep quiet another day.

2

Sexual liberation

Carol was a striking teenager, with a slim build, shoulder-length sandy blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She loved physical activity and took ballet lessons for several years before becoming a cheerleader at East Rome High School.

“She was everything in high school,” said her older sister, Nancy Glenn, of Atlanta. “She was so pretty, popular, beauty queen. But she was still very shy and didn’t gain the confidence you might think she would gain from all of that.”

The 1960s was a time of change for young women like Carol. Premarital sex was not a new phenomenon, but it seemed to be increasingly more common — or at least more openly discussed. The sexual revolution was underway, but access to birth control and sex education lagged woefully behind in Rome in 1966. By the time she finished high school and was taking classes at nearby Shorter College, Carol thought she was likely the only 18-year-old virgin in town. She had waited long enough. After a movie one fall evening, she and her steady boyfriend parked the car in a quiet spot and she discovered what all the fuss was about.

One month later, Carol can still recall the moment when she stepped over a heating vent in her nightgown and felt a rush of heat just as the realization hit: Her menstrual cycle was late.

Three months passed as Carol toggled between denial and panic.

Moping around the house, she feverishly tried to act as normal as possible and clung to the hope her cycle was just late. But her mother noticed her daughter’s thin frame filling out, and she made an appointment with the family doctor. He confirmed their fears; Carol was about four months pregnant.

One evening soon after, Carol brushed her hair, gently patted her growing tummy and approached her father’s study with trepidation.

Carol's father, H.E. Nichols, was a formidable man. A longtime judge on the Court of Appeals, he had recently been appointed to the State Supreme Court and would serve as chief justice for several years. Not only a prominent figure in the legal world, he was also a classically trained musician with movie-star
looks who belted out songs from Broadway musicals around the house. "I Could Have Danced All Night" from "My Fair Lady" was a favorite.

But not on this night. On this evening, he seemed at a loss for words. Carol could see the strain in his face.

She sat on the sofa next to him, and he asked if she wanted to marry the father of the child.

No, she wasn’t ready for marriage, she said. Besides, she thought to herself, her boyfriend hadn’t asked — but then, he didn’t even know she was pregnant.

I’ll do whatever you want me to do, she said, eager to make things right.

He stood up, rubbed his hands together and took a deep breath. He appeared relieved.

We will get through this, he said.

For the next couple of months, Carol went into hiding in her own home. Forbidden to leave or receive guests, she was essentially under house arrest. Only once did her mother allow friends to visit. Even then, she paced around looking out the windows as if they were bootleggers expecting a raid by the Feds, not a visit from Carol’s friends.

3

The power of shame

The last two months of Carol’s pregnancy were spent exiled from her family in that red brick Colonial house shrouded by trees and hedges in Chamblee. The Atlanta Florence Crittenton Home was the last stop for unwed mothers expected to deliver their babies in secret before returning to their previous lives as though nothing had happened.

The Florence Crittenton Home was established in New York City in 1883 by a wealthy businessman who named it after his daughter, who died of scarlet fever at age 4. The Atlanta Florence Crittenton Home opened in 1892 through the efforts of Dr. Kate Waller Barrett, who helped expand the network of homes throughout the country. As many as 68 women lived in the home at a time, and there was often a waiting list to get in.

During her stay in the home, Carol remained in hiding, using the false name of Elizabeth Nash. To keep up the ruse that she was away at summer camp working as a counselor, she would write letters home but forward them to North Carolina, where they would be postmarked and mailed to family in Rome. Her mother warned her to keep to herself and not get close to any of the other girls. Soon this would all be behind her and she wouldn’t want any friendships to linger, her mother said.

Carol recalls her time there fondly, considering the circumstances. The day she arrived was the Fourth of July, and the patio was strung with red, white and blue streamers. A pregnant teenage girl greeted her with a silver tray, offering a glass of lemonade and a homemade sugar cookie served on a lace doily. Inside the common area, pregnant girls watched TV and others played cards; one resident was giving another one a manicure. Typical teenage activities, Carol thought. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

Sharing a bedroom with a girl from Hawaii, Carol brought a few things to remind her of home: a picture of her fluffy white dog, Princess, a stack of books and a stuffed tiger her father got her at a county fair.

She quickly settled into a routine, getting up by 8 a.m. and checking the bulletin board to see what her weekly chores were and whether she had a doctor’s appointment — an eagerly anticipated opportunity to leave the compound. She took a ceramics class and practiced typing every day. And she walked up and down the driveway, marking the beginning of what would be a life-long compulsion to exercise. Four treks back and forth equaled a mile, and even on the warmest days she lumbered up and down the driveway.

Carol's mother visited most Sundays. Getting up at 5 a.m., she would prepare a feast from scratch — fried chicken,
green beans, squash casserole, yeast rolls and brownies. She would pack it all in a cooler and set off for Florence Crittenton where she'd pick up Carol promptly at 11 a.m. The two of them would drive to an empty parking lot and eat their lunch inside the car, where no one they knew might see them.

One evening in late August
while doing her chores — dusting, an easy one and a sure sign she was nearing her due date — Carol began having contractions. She was sent to Crawford Long Hospital in a taxi with another girl also in labor, and an anesthesiologist administered a drug to render her unconscious.

When Carol’s eyes fluttered open in the recovery room, she threw back the sheet and looked down at her stomach, now caved in and squishy. She remained in the hospital for three days, but didn’t see her baby boy until the morning before she was discharged.

It will be easier, she thought, if I see him just once.

Dressed in a blue cotton maternity dress and wearing pink lipstick, Carol opened her arms to the tiny, 6-pound bundle. She held him tightly, taking in every feature of his face. Removing his tiny cap, she discovered a head of fine, black hair. As much as she wanted to be angry at her parents for making this decision for her, she believed they were right: Giving her son up for adoption was the best thing she could do for him.

Still, her heart ached as she whispered the words: I will always love you.

4

Haunted by memories

A few months after Carol returned home, she moved to an apartment with her older sister in Atlanta. She got a job as a secretary and started making plans to go back to college. As her mother advised, she tried to move on.

For the past nine months, her life had been completely out of her control. The pregnancy, the hiding, the secrets.
Now she was living independently and determined to manage every aspect of her life. When it came to her diet,
she took her desire for control too far. Her daily intake dwindled. Pretty soon all she ate every day was a small pastry for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and a plate of vegetables for dinner. Already thin, her weight dropped to 100 pounds. Little was known at the time about eating disorders, but looking back, she realizes she was borderline anorexic.

“I think I was punishing myself,” she says now. She couldn’t stop thinking about the baby. A year later, she wondered: Is he taking his first steps? Is he talking? Her time in the hospital was such a blur, she wasn’t sure if he was born on Aug. 28 or 29, so she spent most of those days every year preoccupied with thoughts of her boy.

Still, Carol did manage to move on with her life. She met Scott Henwood, an attorney with a magnetic personality, and they got married in 1973. She never told him about the baby, those days at Florence Crittenton, the secrecy, the shame. She got used to living the lie, not even telling her doctors when asked about her medical history. Soon two children followed — a son, Scott Jr., and daughter, Cameron — just 16 months apart.

Drifting thoughts about that first baby continued to come and go, so Carol turned to structure and routine to help her cope. Every morning after her children headed to school, she walked four miles in her neighborhood, sometimes completing a second loop hours later.

Occasionally when she was alone, she would allow herself to grieve. She would plop into a wing-back chair in the living room and give herself over to the sorrow: Where is he? What does he look like? I need to tell my husband. He has a right to know. No I can’t ... Sometimes she felt like she was going to lose her mind.

But her husband and her kids saw none of it. They saw a woman who maintained her composure, was always impeccably dressed, calm and in control.

“In hindsight, I can see it,” says Carol’s 36-year-old daughter, Cameron Hicks. “If it were me, I would have told every friend I had. But looking back at that generation and my mom and how private she is, I can see how she did it. She trained herself very well to turn it off and on.”

But eventually Carol’s composure began to crack. Shortly after their 20th wedding anniversary, she decided to tell her husband the truth.

5

The burden lifted

It’s now or never, Carol told herself when her husband came home from work one night in late 1993.

She was suffering from a head cold at the time, coughing, sneezing and clutching a tissue in her hand. She was convinced the strain of keeping her secret was making her physically sick.

They met in the dimly lit den and she told him everything. Stunned, he wrapped his arms around her on the couch and told her everything was going to be OK.

“I was surprised of course, but I wasn’t disappointed,” says Scott, recalling that night. “I just wish she’d told me.”

She told Scott that some day she may try to find the child — a grown man now — but it would be another 10 years before she did anything about it. First she had to wait until her parents were gone, and then she had to wait for the law to change.

Finally in 2003, birth parents were allowed to search for their children and request permission to make contact.

The following year, Carol contacted the Georgia Adoption Reunion Registry and filed a request to contact her son. Three months later, she was at Publix perusing turkeys for Thanksgiving when she got the call.

His name was Dale Musser and he agreed to receive her call.

Carol rushed home, unpacked her groceries and called her husband.

Sitting at the edge of the sleigh bed in her daughter’s bedroom, she dialed the number and stopped twice before dialing the last digit. For 37 years, Carol’s mind had been tormented by concerns and thoughts about this boy, but now: What do I say after so many years? she thought.

Meanwhile, Dale had a few questions of his own. The director of security for a major defense contractor in Washington, D.C., he’d recently undergone surgery for a faulty heart valve. He’d begun to wonder about the medical history of his birth family. And was he part Hispanic? His dark hair and eyes made him wonder.

Here was Dale’s chance to solve the mystery of his unknown past.

And here was Carol’s chance to put an end to her secret.

She took a deep breath and placed the call.

Dale learned he wasn’t Hispanic but part Cherokee, and there was no history of heart problems to Carol’s knowledge. Carol was shocked to learn Dale grew up just 15 miles away from her in Dunwoody. He always knew he was adopted, but growing up, he’d had no interest in finding his birth parents. It was only during recent years, after he married and started a family, that he began to wonder about them.

Eventually he asked the question Carol most anticipated: Why did you give me up for adoption?

You deserved better, she said. You needed a family, a husband and wife, a mom and dad.

Months later, Carol contacted Dale’s biological father and told her secret one last time. He and Dale have been in touch.

When Dale met Carol’s family for the first time in 2005, it was understandably awkward. Everyone was more at ease when Dale visited earlier this year — especially after they realized they shared a passion for college football.

Carol recently met Dale and his mother for dinner at Stone Mountain Park. His mother gave Carol a photo album filled with pictures of Dale. It captured all those moments Carol missed and wondered about — birthday celebrations, family vacations, college graduation.

Today, Carol and Dale keep in touch via occasional emails.

“Over time, we have become very comfortable around each other,” Dale says. “It has become a close friendship.”

6

Freedom in truth

After living in secrecy and shame for almost 40 years, Carol was so overcome with relief to have told her secret that she decided to share her story with others. With her family’s support, she wrote a novel based on her experience called “Our Erring Sisters,” that reveals intimate details about her life as a teenage girl.

"I began to feel empowered," Carol says about writing the book. "I was a young, naive, girl, who was carried
away by the passions of that temporary teenage relationship, and the result was pregnancy. It happened to so many girls of that era, and it was as if I was stepping from darkness into light, by facing my past and revealing the secret I had held for so long."

For Dale, the book provided insight into his birth mother’s life as a young woman. Last February, he attended Carol’s first book signing at the Capital City Club in Brookhaven.

“I understand why Carol did what she did,” says Dale, 47. “I think Carol made the best decisions under the circumstances. If I had a different upbringing or different parents, maybe I would feel differently. But I feel like everything worked out the way it should have.”

Meanwhile, Carol is more relaxed these days, more confident.

“She’s becoming more of her own person,” says daughter Cameron. “For so long she was hiding and in survival mode. But now there is more of this sense that she wants to live her life and be the person she always wanted to be.”

That includes trying new things like hot yoga.

Recently, Carol wanted to return to the Florence Crittenton Home, to see it again through new eyes. Whenever she drove around town and spotted imposing rows of hedges, she would wonder if that was where she was sent to wait out the final days of her pregnancy. Eventually, she found the address and drove to the location. The home is no longer there, the brick building leveled for new development.

The Atlanta Florence Crittenton Home closed in 1981. By then, the need for maternity homes had dwindled. Times had changed. The pill was widely available, abortion was legal and young unmarried girls were more likely to keep their babies than give them up for adoption.

Carol, still slim, still pretty and now 66, sat in her car in a parking lot on a bustling corner of Chamblee and glimpsed pieces of her past still standing — the towering hickories, elms and pine trees that helped obscure the brick Colonial from view. Unlike the last time she was in this spot back in 1967, she felt a sense of peace. She no longer carried the burden of her lifelong secret, and she’d found what she’d longed for most: her first-born child. He was happy, healthy, raised by loving parents. He didn’t hold Carol’s decision to relinquish him against her. And she no longer needed to hold it against herself.

HOW WE GOT THE STORY
I first heard about Carol Henwood from her neighbor, AJC reporter Bill Torpy, who brought a copy of her book, "Our Erring Sisters," to the office. I was fascinated by Henwood's experiences growing up in the 1960s, and how different the times were for young women back then. Henwood generously agreed to share her story with me. In addition to spending several hours with her, I also interviewed several members of her family and spent hours doing research at The Atlanta History Center's Kenan Research Center. Carol's story is an inspiring one about the emotional toll of keeping a secret and the joy of letting it go.

Helena Oliviero
Staff writer
personaljourneys@ajc.com

About the reporter

Helena Oliviero  joined the AJC in 2002 as a features writer.  She previously worked for the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Knight Ridder as a correspondent in Mexico. She was educated at the University of San Francisco. Her previous Personal Journey was "Mondays with Mr. Collins."