I actually wrote a good part of this early in the summer of 2002, as more of a reflection through the eyes of Joey. I thought it might someday be used in an autobiography. Those of you who have read the book can easily pick out the parts I used and embellished for G.I. Joe and Lillie. For the most part, it is a different and somewhat more enlightening view of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, than in the book. I hope you enjoy this little side trip. (JSB)


GI Joe saw all of Lillie’s family on only two occasions when, sometime around 1955 and then again in 1956, they loaded up the family car and drove all the way to Roanoke Rapids for Lillie’s parent’s funerals.

To their young son Joey Junior and his baby sister Nancy the great state of North Carolina might just as well have been the Planet X. However, Joey was fixing to learn more about his sweet mother on these trips than he could ever have imagined. It was all so very exciting to a little boy who, up until this point in time, had seen only one patch of green grass—ever—and that was heavily decorated with doggie diamonds.

GI Joe would learn a lot more about his young wife, as well.

Lillie’s “ma” died first so the only time GI Joe and his children saw Otley Collins was in a casket. Otley was of Irish descent and her long gray hair, still with just a highlight of dark brown, was combed down straight, gently cascading down her thin shoulders. She wore a pink dress. Her body was laid out in a casket right there in the living room of the Collin’s farmhouse.

The whole place was full of people who GI Joe didn’t know at all. He met sister Blanche and all the Collins brothers that day. The brothers had normal names, like Frank, Tom, John, and Sydney. All made quite a fuss over Lillie’s kids and kept a wary eye on the former infantryman who had married their youngest sister.

They talked like they were from another country, a weird accent that sounded almost like black folks. But the cadence was quicker. Their words ran together: “DasLillieMaudesboy.” “WheresLillieMaude?”

When Lillie crossed the time line and spilled back into Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, she became “LillieMaude.” All one word. GI Joe did get a good chuckle out of that.

“OlHenrycaught a catfish bigasahouse.” “ Ohmygoodness!” “Slopdahogs!” Anyhow, you get the picture.

The old house that Lillie grew up in was so very small. It was made of rickety gray wood and had no indoor plumbing. There was only an outside hand pump that, when vigorously manhandled, brought forth the coldest water on the planet. The house was “L” shaped and a porch ran all the way around one half of the “L.”

There were two seats that hung from chains and right between them was an old washer and ringer. At night you could hear everybody breathing. No street sounds like cars driving by. No El train sounds. No loud cursing from two doors down. No broken beer bottles. Just crickets and breathing. It was so scary.

GI Joe slept like he never had before in his whole life. A dark and dreamy sleep filled with visions of battlefields and the smell of burned and rotting flesh. His eyes popped open, and he was glad to see that he had made no noise this time. He watched his pretty wife sleep in the semi-darkness. His son slept beside her, and his daughter was cocooned in a bed made out of a large wicker basket. His heart filled with love for the woman beside him.

He had grown up hard but this may have been worse. How could Lillie have endured it all? Well, perhaps she didn’t.

The bathroom was a dilapidated old outhouse with a double door, split into a top and bottom, that stood in the middle of a fenced field which was shared with a cantankerous old mule. You could sit in there and leave the top door open to the elements—which was also somewhat of a necessity. With both doors closed the smell was a bit overwhelming.

In the middle of the first night they were there, after settling down a bit from his awful dream, GI Joe walked out into the field and entered an outhouse for the very first time in his life. He sat down on the wooden seat to do his business. He settled in, relaxed a bit, lit up a Camel cigarette and pushed open the top door to look up at the full moon.

One can easily reflect upon this scene and than wonder just what GI Joe might have been pondering as that huge mule stuck his head in the opening and grunted. It was a darn good thing that GI Joe was sitting where he was sitting or else he would have surely messed his pants. His screams woke the entire house and Lillie could hear her father laughing from his bed in the front room (a room that he had shared with his wife for close to sixty years).

It was a funny moment for everyone, even GI Joe. He laughed so hard he broke into tears.

It had been a long and grueling drive in the ‘49 Studebaker all the way to North Carolina. Remember, there were no interstate highways back then. You traveled on two lane roads just about all the way from Philadelphia to the front gate of the old Collins farm.

A year later the little family of four would make the same trip in a blue ‘52 Ford to bury Lillie's father. He didn’t make it quite a year after Otley died. On both of those trips Lillie passed out going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which at that time was the longest bridge in the universe—and still may be. Lillie simply hated bridges. She would get sick to her stomach just going over the Tacony Palmyra or the Ben Franklin—and they only reached over to New Jersey.

She was amazing. She rode in airplanes during much of her time in the service without giving it much thought yet she was deathly afraid to cross a body of water in a car. She just knew that the bridge was “gonna give out” and that everyone in the car would end up eaten by fish before they ever reached the Atlantic Ocean.

Lillie used to talk constantly about how the Delaware River, the Schullkyl River, and even Pennypack Park Creek in Philadelphia ended up in the Atlantic Ocean. If you ever fell in and drowned in one of these bodies of water your fate was sealed. They would never, ever, find you again. Lillie really believed that.

Sometimes when GI Joe would take her down to the shore, Atlantic City, New Jersey or Wildwood, it was a different story. That WAS the Atlantic Ocean and if you were to ever venture too far out from the shoreline the “undertow” would grab a hold of you and drag you right on out to sea.

Either way, according to Lillie, the Atlantic was gonna get you!

Between both of those trips GI Joe and the kids indeed learned a lot about Lillie. They watched as she wept like a little girl in front of her mother’s casket. However, she didn’t shed a single tear when her father Kenneth died.

It turned out that LillieMaude was a bit of the black sheep of the clan because she had “run off” when she was just sixteen. She had just gotten tired of all the hard work and being treated like crap “because she was the youngest." It turned out that she had had her mother’s blessings, but her “pa” and the brothers always held it against her. Always!

Her brother Frank eventually took over the Collin’s farm and over the years as each brother died, Lillie seemed a bit indifferent. Her brother Tom was killed in a very strange accident. He had been driving in his car on the interstate and proceeded to pass a flatbed, logging truck. At that very moment a chain gave away and tons of logs just fell off the truck and right on top of poor, unfortunate Uncle Tom, crushing him and the whole car like a bug. It was a closed casket ceremony. (I’ll bet!)

Years later, when her sister Blanche died of diabetes, Lillie grieved a bit and cried a little but there was no family trip to Richmond.

“She never stuck up for me” was all Lillie would ever say about it.

On those two trips, Joey Junior came to realize that there was, indeed, life outside of Philadelphia. His little sister Nancy was way too young to absorb much of this new world but little Joey and his father GI Joe had a pretty good time of it all. They learned about filling a pickup truck with cantaloupes and driving them to town. They fished with brother Henry and talked cotton prices with brother Sydney.

They learned what “sloppin’ the hogs” meant: one poured huge buckets of foul smelling liquid garbage into a trough and the pigs actually got all excited about it. Joey saw his first tractor, a big red one with the words FARMALL on the side. GI Joe sat on the porch just before sundown with sister Blanche and some of the Collins brothers’ wives, who had names like IvaMae and RubyLynn, and learned how to shuck corn and green beans.

The overall attitude of GI Joe is worth noting on those two family trips to Roanoke Rapids. For the most part, the man kept a very low profile while at the Collins place. He didn’t say much at all to anyone. He would take long walks by himself across the fields and along the creek banks. One has to think he really enjoyed being on the farm and away from the factory and the big city. After Normandy and the Hedgerow battles of France, the quiet countryside of eastern North Carolina must have felt like Heaven.

However, he really wasn’t crazy about any of the Collins bunch. Like most everything else, GI Joe kept his feelings about Lillie's family to himself but he had this perceptive feeling that something around here just didn’t set right. His own family was crazy enough, and he had been to war... he could feel things. There was an underlying current, much like that Atlantic undertow, which kept pulling at him.

He also learned that his Lillie had loved her mother with all of her heart but didn’t really give much of a rat’s rear end about her father, brothers, and sister. GI Joe figured that they must have treated her very badly, and he could easily develop a hatred for every single one of them on that account alone.