A Full Life

Reflections at Ninety

Jimmy Carter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501115653
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In his major New York Times bestseller, Jimmy Carter looks back from ninety years of age and "reveals private thoughts and recollections over a fascinating career as businessman, politician, evangelist, and humanitarian" ( Booklist ). At ninety, Jimmy Carter reflects on his public and private life with a frankness that is disarming. He adds detail and emotion about his youth in rural Georgia that he described in his magnificent An Hour Before Daylight. He writes about racism and the isolation of the Carters. He describes the brutality of the hazing regimen at Annapolis, and how he nearly lost his life twice serving on submarines and his amazing interview with Admiral Rickover. He describes the profound influence his mother had on him, and how he admired his father even though he didn't emulate him. He admits that he decided to quit the Navy and later enter politics without consulting his wife, Rosalynn, and how appalled he is in retrospect.In his "warm and detailed memoir" ( Los Angeles Times ), Carter tells what he is proud of and what he might do differently. He discusses his regret at losing his re-election, but how he and Rosalynn pushed on and made a new life and second and third rewarding careers. He is frank about the presidents who have succeeded him, world leaders, and his passions for the causes he cares most about, particularly the condition of women and the deprived people of the developing world."Always warm and human…even inspirational" ( Buffalo News ), A Full Life is a wise and moving look back from this remarkable man. Jimmy Carter has lived one of our great American lives—from rural obscurity to world fame, universal respect, and contentment. A Full Life is an extraordinary read from a "force to be reckoned with" ( Christian Science Monitor ).

CHAPTER ONE

Archery and the Race Issue

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My Family

My life has been shaped inevitably by the experiences and decisions of my forefathers, and I have learned a lot about my family history. My mother was Bessie Lillian Gordy, and I knew all her intimate relatives and many of her distant cousins. We would sometimes drive after church services to Richland, her hometown, to have dinner with her close-knit family, where the table conversation often led to an explosion of emotions and angry departures. My father was James Earl Carter, and I never knew even his close cousins who lived in the county seat just nine miles from our home in Plains. It seemed that the Carters were not interested in each other.

During my first year as president, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the White House and presented me with a genealogical study of my Carter family. The information went back thirteen generations, to the early 1600s, and included birth, death, and marriage records, land deeds, and data from some of the early courthouse proceedings that involved legal disputes. I put it all in a big box and sent it to our home in Plains. After leaving the White House I bought my first computer and entered the Mormon research data when I was sent the first edition of a software program called Family Tree Maker. My wife Rosalynn’s family always had three reunions each year (there would have been four if two Smiths hadn’t married each other), so in 1998 I decided to have a reunion of the direct descendants of my great-great-grandfather Wiley Carter, on what would have been his two hundredth birthday. More than 950 people came, and I corrected mistakes in my family records and brought them up to date. More recently, I gave the data to our son Jeffrey, and he has published a much more definitive study, Ancestors of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, focusing on our time in America.

These were rough pioneer days as immigrants struggled for existence or preeminence, and even our more recent family history was, to a surprising degree, shaped by violence. Wiley Carter (1798–1864) was deputized in a sheriff’s posse in Wilkes County when he shot and killed a man named Usry. There was a routine one-day trial, and the sheriff testified, “Usry was evidently preparing to shoot Carter. The two men were cursing each other and both raised their guns about the same time and fired. Usry was killed.” Wiley was found not guilty of murder because the victim was armed and threatening. However, it was known that there had been a long history of ill will between the two men, and after the trial a lot of resentment was stirred up in the community by Usry’s family and friends. After Wiley’s wife, Ann, delivered her eleventh child and died, Wiley remarried and moved to a farm about ten miles north of where the town of Plains is located. He had traded for the land with an original owner, who won it in a lottery that was held in 1833, after Indians had been forced to leave West Georgia in the late 1820s. Wiley’s second wife had another son, who moved to Texas.

Wiley’s fourth son, Littleberry Walker Carter (1829–1873), was my great-grandfather. He served with two of his brothers as artillerymen in the Confederate army. They fought in twenty-one battles and finally left the service in Florida, a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He then bought and operated a farm just west of Americus that later became Souther Field (now Jimmy Carter Regional Airport), where Charles Lindbergh made his first solo flight. He was killed “in an argument over the proceeds of a flying jenny [merry-go-round]” in 1873, as recorded in the county newspaper.

Known as Billy, his son and my grandfather William Archibald Carter (1858–1903) moved in 1888 about fifty miles south to a rural community known as Rowena, where he was a farmer, operated two sawmills and a winery, and owned a cotton gin. He was small but tough. One time when he was harvesting sugarcane, his machete was deflected into his thigh, inflicting a deep gash. Billy used his belt to stop the flow of blood, sent to the house for a needle and thread, sewed up the wound, and resumed work. He was shot and killed in a fight with a man named Will Taliaferro, in an altercation over a desk stolen by Taliaferro from Billy’s cotton gin. After his property was sold, Billy’s family moved back to Plains and purchased a farm in nearby Webster County in 1904, which my father, Earl Carter, became responsible for operating as a teenager. I can only imagine the multiple skills needed to perform all the duties of my ancestors, and it may be that my inclination to pursue new ideas and to design and create things in my woodshop is inherited from them.

My mother, Lillian Gordy, left her job as a postal clerk in Richland and moved eighteen miles to Plains (population about five hundred) in 1920 to become a registered nurse. She married Earl when she finished her training, in 1923. I was born in October 1924, and our family lived in a house on South Bond Street with Edgar and Allie Smith as next-door neighbors. Edgar was the only automobile mechanic in the community, and directly across the street from his shop my father owned and operated a small general store after completing military service as a first lieutenant in World War I. The Smiths’ daughter Rosalynn was born in August 1927, and my mother later told me that I was taken to the house next door and peeked into the cradle to see the newest baby on the street. Our families were very close, and Rosalynn’s younger sister was named for Mama, who nursed Rosalynn’s father during his terminal illness with leukemia. Daddy became a full-time farmer in 1928, when I was four years old. I was raised on a farm he bought about two and a half miles west of Plains in the rural community known as Archery.

Archery

My boyhood home in Archery was a Sears, Roebuck house that had been built six years before our family occupied it. At that time the Sears catalogue offered homes of several sizes, with three basic options: (1) all the components of a complete house and the tools needed to construct it, loaded into a single railroad boxcar with plans and instructions; (2) everything needed for a house except the lumber; and (3) just the plans and instructions, practically free but requiring doors, windows, hardware, and other parts that were sold by Sears. We learned later that our home was one of the second options, since genetic testing showed that its wooden frame and siding had come from trees harvested on the farm.

My boyhood home in Archery was a Sears, Roebuck house that had been built six years before our family occupied it in 1928. There were about two hundred people who lived in the unincorporated community of Archery.

There was no running water, electricity, or insulation, and the only heat sources besides the kitchen stove were some open fireplaces, all fueled by wood and used just when badly needed. We relieved ourselves in “slop jars” during the night and emptied them in an outdoor toilet when it was daylight. It was the only privy on the farm; other families just used the bushes for concealment. We drew water from a well in the backyard until 1935, when Daddy had a windmill installed and ran a pipe from its tank into our kitchen and bathroom. He made a shower bath by punching holes in the bottom of a galvanized bucket hanging over a concrete floor, and the used water ran through a pipe onto the ground outside. It was especially cold in winter, but more convenient than a galvanized bathtub. Electricity reached some farms near us in 1939, and after a year or so Daddy prevailed on the local cooperative to extend the lines to our home.

My room was on the northeast corner, far from any stove or fireplace, so my most vivid and unpleasant memories are of cold weather. I remember shivering at night even under blankets, and my bare toes curling up when I stepped out of bed onto the cold floor and made a dash for my parents’ room and the warmth of some still-glowing embers in their fireplace. Strangely, I don’t really recall the discomfort of the hot summer days of South Georgia. This house and the outbuildings are now owned by the National Park Service, and the historic site is preserved as it was in 1937.

Our family meals when Mama was on nursing duty were prepared by one of the African-American women who lived on the farm, and my two sisters related quite intimately to them. Neither my sisters nor my mother ever did field work. When not in school, I spent every spare moment during workdays around the barn area and in the fields—with my father whenever possible. I was especially close to Jack and Rachel Clark, who lived in the house nearest ours. Jack was in charge of all the livestock, the equipment, and operation of the barn and its environs. He rang the big farm bell every morning at an hour before daylight and was responsible for milking the cows. Jack worked closely with Daddy in assigning different workers to their tasks.

Daddy had multiple talents, and he devoted many of them to becoming as self-sufficient as possible on the farm. He was reluctant to pay anyone else to do jobs that he could learn to do himself, so he became a competent forester, farmer, herdsman, blacksmith, carpenter, and shoemaker. I guess he was still a merchant at heart, and he refined as many of our raw products into retail items as possible. I had to leave home for school sometimes before daybreak, but in the afternoons I helped Jack milk eight cows. We always had plenty of sweet milk, buttermilk, cream, and butter in our house. Some of the excess milk was made into chocolate and vanilla drinks, put in eight-ounce bottles with waxed cardboard tops, and placed in iceboxes in grocery stores and filling stations within a five-mile circle around Plains. Daddy picked up the unsold drinks every Monday and we fed them to our hogs. Other milk was run through a separator on our back porch, and the pure cream was marketed through the Suwanee store in town. We called the remaining skim milk “blue john” and fed it to the hogs. (Now, that’s all we drink.) Wool sheared from our sheep was swapped for blankets that we sold in our farm commissary, and we picked the down from the breasts of about fifty geese and exchanged it for pillows and comforters. The geese also helped by eating worms and other insects from our cotton plants. Each year we converted about twenty-five acres of sugarcane into syrup that Daddy marketed with a “Plains Maid” label, and sometimes he did the same thing with catsup made from homegrown tomatoes. We slaughtered about twenty hogs a few times each year on the coldest days, and Daddy made sausage and rubbed the hams, shoulders, and side meat with preservative spices, then cured the meat in the smokehouse behind our home before selling it in our store.

I was especially close to Jack and Rachel Clark, who lived in the house nearest ours. Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me.

He also believed that everything and everyone on the farm should somehow “earn its keep,” even including my Shetland pony.

Always a Reckoning

There always seemed to be a need

for reckoning in early days.

What came in equaled what went out

like oscillating ocean waves.

On the farm, our wages matched

the work we did in woods and fields,

how many acres plowed and hoed,

how much syrup was distilled,

how many pounds of cotton picked,

how much cordwood cut and stacked.

All things had to balance out.

I had a pony then that lacked

a way to work and pay her way,

except that every year or two

Lady had a colt we sold,

but still for less than what was due

to buy the fodder, hay, and corn

she ate at times she couldn’t be

on pasture. Neither feed nor colts

meant all that much that I could see,

but still there was a thing about

a creature staying on our place

that none of us could eat or plow,

did not give eggs, or even chase

a fox or rabbit, that was sure

to rile my father. We all knew

that Lady’s giving me a ride

paid some on her debt, in lieu

of other ways—but there would be

sometimes I didn’t get around

to riding in my off-work hours.

And I was sure, when Daddy frowned

at some mistake I might’ve made, he

would be asking when he could,

“How long since you rode Lady?”

There were about two hundred people who lived in the unincorporated community of Archery, and except for the Seaboard Airline Railroad section foreman, Mr. Ernest Watson, we were the only white family. The boys with whom I worked or played were African-American, and we learned how to make our own toys. Our favorite was a thick steel hoop from a wooden keg, ten to twelve inches in diameter. We rolled our hoops for miles, even hours at a time, propelling them with a strong, stiff wire that had a loop on one end to provide a handhold and a V-shaped notch on the other to fit behind the hoop. We would have felt undressed without our rubber-banded flips, or slingshots, and a supply of small round rocks in our pockets for ammunition. Other projectiles were also important to us, and they could have been deadly weapons. One of the easiest to make and most enjoyable was a kind of dart made from a large corncob, four or five inches long, with a needle-sharpened nail inserted into the pith of one end and two chicken feathers in the other that were set at precise angles to give the thrown weapon the correct amount of spin before it embedded in a tree or a target on the side of a building.

We used the same sharpened points on dog-fennel spears, and were surprised at how far we could throw them with the help of spear throwers called “atlatls,” which we devised after reading about them in Boys’ Life magazine or one of our Indian books. We haunted Daddy’s shop for days as we improved on our basic design of rubber guns. Afte...