(Extra)Ordinary People
Josephine
A woman keeps her husband’s memory alive in an unusual way.
One of my favorite activities while traveling is to go into the local “hangout” of a small town and ask “Isn’t there some eccentric, unusual, weird person who lives in the area?” Immediately, enthusiastically, the locals begin giving me the source of a story! In 1970, in a small town in southern Indiana, I asked coffee shop patrons if knew about a strange person living there. “Josephine!” they all choired in response. All in unison slowly lifting a finger, pointing north of town. Then came a flurry of suspicions and accusations concerning Josephine being “dangerous man-hater”; “a black magic witch”; “belongs to militant lesbian group!” I asked if there are any witnesses to her dangerous, dark acts? “Well, not really…” the waitress answered. I asked, “Then what is all this suspected evil based on?” Again came a simultaneous verbal barrage, mentioning the fact she always dresses in dark men’s clothing, including hat, and wears pinned on suit coat two ribbons of white and black. One patron jumped up, spilling his coffee, shouting, “The black ribbon is pinned over the white ribbon…can only be one thing, EVIL OVER GOOD!”
When frenzy had fallen into an exhausted silence, I asked, “Has anyone ever asked her why she wears men’s clothing, or what is represented by the two pinned together ribbons?” Silence. Though unanimously warned, after hesitant directions to Josephine’s farmhouse, I set out to meet this mysterious woman.
Up the road, I asked a farmer if he knew where a Josephine’s house was located? He smiled slyly and asked, “You mean ‘Joe’s-a-fiend’?” Then he pointed to farmhouse up on the hill. I knocked on the door. It slowly, cautiously opened. There stood an elderly woman in man’s pants and suit coat on the lapel of which was pinned the infamous black and white ribbon! I tell her I’m an author and public speaker who loves meeting interesting people, and locals down at the coffee shop had told me she is an interesting person. She laughed and invited me inside.
The room was full of books and artwork covering the walls. We sat on a couch where she began telling me her story. “I was born in 1889, I’m 81 years old.” She had inherited present homestead farm from her parents and claimed to be satisfied to live out her life there alone. She had thought she would never marry, but befriended a rural mailman, a relationship which soon developed into love affair. They decided to marry and live on the farm together. She had suddenly stood up and began speaking as if transfixed. “After wedding, he had driven into town for provisions, while I changed from my wedding dress and was carrying his wedding suit and pants over to the dresser, when there was a knock on the door…I said to come in!”
As I sat on the couch, I watched Josephine’s hauntingly realistic reenactment of that most fateful moment of her life. Standing with arms out in front of her like a sleepwalker, as if invisibly draped over them her husband’s wedding suit and pants, she turns her head toward the door and asks again for the one who has knocked on the door to come in. “There stood a young man with his hat in his hand. He was so nervous he could not speak. After staring at the floor for a seemingly endless moment, he finally just blurted out ‘I was sent to tell you that your husband’s car was coming across the tracks…and it was hit by the train…your husband is DEAD!’ He backed out the door and hurried off, leaving me standing there…standing here numbed!”
As Josephine continued, she acted out her movements of nearly sixty years before in that very farmhouse parlor. “I resumed in a state of shock my approach to the dresser… stood in front of the dresser, before turning and walking back to the middle of the room, still holding the clothes on my arms out in front of me. I stood in center of room with my tearing eyes closed, then slowly turned back toward the dresser. This time I opened the bottom drawer with my foot.” She actually opened that dresser’s bottom drawer with her foot in a chilling assimilation. “I slowly lowered my arms to lay the coat and pants in the drawer… stopped… stood back up…backed away crying uncontrollably.” The tears running down Josephine’s cheeks, brought tears to my own eyes. “I approached the open dresser drawer again…stooped to put away the clothes…but they would not come off my arms. I stopped crying. I straightened up. I closed the drawer with my foot.” She stood there before me in silence, before as if coming out of a dream, she spoke to me. “Jim, I remember inhaling my beloved husband’s aroma on his clothes, before I slowly, reverently after removing my own clothes, slipped on his pants and then his coat. You see Jim, I knew if I put those clothes away, he would be gone, out of my life… but I was unwilling to give up the love of my life, so I swaddled myself in the loving embrace of his clothing and I have worn them, kept him the rest of my life!”
As I was leaving, at the door I was thinking how much more dramatic, symbolic the truth of Josephine’s story than anything those in the coffee shop could imagine in their paranoid fantasies! Shaking her hand farewell, I suddenly realized I hadn’t asked her about those legendary black and white ribbons pinned to the front of the suit coat? “It’s quite simple Jim. I cut the white strip off my wedding dress and I cut the black strip from my mourning dress and pinned them together on his suit coat over my heart. The white wedding strip and the black mourning strip representing the happiest and the saddest day of my life…both on the same day!”
Upon her death in 1974 at the age of eighty-five, I attended as the one and only mourner, not counting her lawyer and curious local onlookers at a safe distance, Josephine’s funeral. She was buried in those pants and that suit coat, with his hat in her hands over her heart. The lawyer who had contacted me concerning Josephine’s passing away, explained she had left a note with my phone number and address on a sealed envelope which should be sent to me. Inside was an early photo of herself in her husband’s pants, coat, and hat, taken out front of the farmhouse; and those legendary pinned together black and white ribbons!
