Granddaddy’s Hereditary Insanity

In the middle of the night in the spring of 1912, on a hardscrabble farm in Colleton Country, SC, my grandmother, Mary Jacques Thackston, arose gasping in the middle of the night and fell dead in her husband’s arms. She was eight months pregnant with her sixth child, The circumstances suggest an amniotic embolism, which is still one of the hazards of pregnancy. My mother, Rosa Jane Thackston, five, was to be haunted by the loss of her mother and all that ensued to the end of her life.

Her father had truly, inconsolably loved his Mary. He was devastated. He neglected his crops, unheard of for him, unheard of for this industrious man, and sat on the front porch, brooding, day after day, eating hardly anything; a little cornbread and some fat back -- fried pork fat -- occasionally. One day one of the children said, “Daddy, your hands are red as a beet, and your face is too.”

“It’s the sun, child.”

“But Daddy, you’ve not been in the sun.”

As time went by, he said rather detachedly, using the country word for diarrhea, he said, “I have the scours.”

His grieving continued, but one day this changed precipitously. He came into the kitchen, his face as bright as if illumined from within, and said, “To God be the Glory! Your Mama’s come back, I just saw her and been talking with her, right there on the porch. Blessed be His Holy Name.”

Word got around. The preacher and the sheriff took note. “I talked to the Doc over in Walterboro,” said the sheriff. “He said this here’s an hereditary insanity. Those children might come down with it any time, too.”

Soon they came for Bill, trussed him in chains and transported him to the state mental hospital in Columbia, SC, a place as dark and dreary then as anything Charles Dickens ever portrayed. The two little girls, my five-year-old mother and her seven-year-old sister, Annie, were placed in an orphanage over on the Georgia Border. Then the sheriff placed the little boys, three little boys who were as good as any children of 4, 8, & 9 could be, in the State Reformatory for Boys. That reformatory was, and is still reported to be, a homemade version of Hell. It is the prep school for the adult penal institutions of SC.

Once their father was gone, the preacher and the sheriff, under the pretense of acting as caretakers, looted Bill’s holdings through outright theft and finally a tax sale, until nothing was left. Nothing!

Granddaddy Bill, languishing in the hospital, somehow regained his strength and color and recovered. He even realized that the visits from his dead wife were not real, a sad thing, in a sense, for they had been a source of great comfort to him in the valley of his despair. But that didn’t matter, because SC’s insane asylum of that era was easier to get into than to get out of. Eventually, though, Granddaddy Bill got a letter from a brother, Dr. Albert Thackston, Dean of the College of Education, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Thackston came right to the point. “I have bought a motorcar. I will come to see you.” Once he arrived, Albert, to his surprise, saw that Bill was quite normal, and after a peculiar series of events which are another story worth the telling, signed him out of the hospital. He also helped him get a new start on a few acres of land in the Piedmont of the state, in Spartanburg County. Granddaddy Bill eventually remarried the teacher from the one-room schoolhouse nearby his new farm. And, in the uneasy way that blended families sometimes do, in spite of all, they endured.

There is additional history that is a significant parallel to this story, one with implications far beyond my family of origin.

Joseph Goldberger was the son of Orthodox Jews. Born on a sheep farm in Hungary, he and his family migrated to New York City when he was nine. He eventually became a physician with the US public Health Service. In the early 1920’s through a series of meticulously made and recorded observations made during travels in SC and elsewhere in the South, Goldberger deduced that Pellagra was not a hereditary insanity as many practitioners and others believed, nor was it infectious, another commonly held theory, but that it occurred because of a dietary deficiency. Many in the medical establishment still demurred. Goldberger, in a series of publications in noted professional journals, also noted that the social institutions in the south; illiteracy, lack of opportunity, and maldistribution of wealth, were important factors in the epidemic of Pellagra.

Southerners were not and are not particularly receptive to New York Yankees coming down to SC and telling us something‘s wrong with our social institutions. This is true even if they married Jefferson Davis’s Grandniece, as had Goldberger. Dr. Goldberger was denounced by the highest authorities in the state, e.g. in SC by Governor Jimmy Byrnes (the same Jimmy Byrnes who eventually became Roosevelt’s Secretary of state).

Goldberger died a short time later of a rare form of kidney cancer. His ashes were spread on the waters of the Potomac as a Rabbi chanted the mournful phrases of Kaddish.

It was Joseph Goldberger though, who during his relatively short life, defined the cause of the disease that precipitated the Diaspora of Bill Thackston’s young family, the malady that very nearly took his life.

Though it was not understood until Goldberger’s work was completed a few years later, Granddaddy Bill Thackston in fact exhibited, in the most classical manner, three of the four “D’s” of a life-threatening nutritional deficiency disease known as Pellagra, a Vitamin B1 or Niacin, deficiency. Pellagra was endemic to the south during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period. Many there grew primarily cotton for economic reasons subsisted on a corn-based, diet and corn is notoriously deficient in B1 and its precursor, Tryptophan. The “4 D’s” of Pellagra are:

Dermatitis – reddening of the skin

Diarrhea – “the scours”

Dementia – the old-fashioned term for mental strangeness.

Death – the fourth “D,” is the one that narrowly missed my grandfather.

In that era around 20,000 people a year in this country, predominantly in the south, were dying from Pellagra. Another 700,000 were sick from it. All considered, though, the fact that my grandfather suffered from Pellagra, a B-1 avitaminosis, is probably the better of the two alternatives.

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume II - Number 2 - February 2005

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