Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [84]
“That’s all right, love. You’re just too tenderhearted where that girl is concerned. I think Betty Raye is happy here.”
Dorothy wiped her eyes. “Really?”
“Yes. I think she’s much happier with us than she was with that family of hers.”
“Do you think so?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, maybe I’m wrong,” she said and blew her nose, adding, “I hope so.”
Another Case of Mistaken Identity
DOROTHY HAD NOT been wrong. Betty Raye was sad. And she had felt lost all of her life but she did not know why. She also felt guilty for not being like the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners and for being such a disappointment to them—for not being outgoing and a good singer like the rest of them were. She loved her family but there were times when she felt as if she had just been dropped down from another planet into a group of strangers. There was no good reason why she felt that way, no good reason why she had always felt so different from all the others. But for as long as she could remember, she’d felt set apart.
Betty Raye did not know it but there was a perfectly good reason she felt so different from the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners. She was different. In fact, she was not even remotely related to them. They were strangers. But nobody knew it. Even Minnie Oatman believed she had given birth to her seventeen years ago, but she had not. The real truth about the matter was stranger than fiction.
In the last month of her pregnancy, Minnie and Ferris and the boys were living in Sand Mountain with Ferris’s mother and daddy and when it was time for the baby to be born they all piled in the car and drove down to Birmingham and checked her into the Hillman Hospital. On November 9, 1931, three babies were born not more than thirty minutes apart. A little boy named Jesse Bates, a little girl named Carolina Lee Sizemore, and Betty Raye Oatman all saw the light of day on the same night. It was unusually busy on the fourth floor and it didn’t help matters much that the entire Oatman and Varner clans all descended on the maternity ward like an invading army, including Floyd and his dummy Chester. Ferris Oatman’s brother Le Roy was still singing with the gospel group at the time and he called a bunch of his hillbilly musician friends in Birmingham who sang on the Country Boy Eddie radio show and invited them to the hospital for a party. And so, combined with the normal everyday chaos of a big-city maternity ward, there was now a hillbilly band playing in the waiting room, the two Oatman boys and all their cousins running and yelling up and down the hall. Besides this commotion, plus being excited at seeing real live hillbilly stars such as Country Boy Eddie and his sidekick Butter Bean in person, was it any wonder that nurse Ethylene Buck was all atwitter that night? She had been nervous to begin with, as this was only her second week working in the maternity ward. And to make matters worse, she had just been handed three babies at once and she had to weigh and clean up and get them ready to go and see their mothers. Not only that—now there was a man standing at the window with a dummy shooting his eyebrows up and down at her, saying “Whoo, whoo, whoo.” Chester banged his wooden head against the window, trying to get her attention. Which, unfortunately, he did. Nurse Buck became so flustered that she put the Sizemores’ baby’s name bracelet on the Oatman baby and the Oatmans’ baby name bracelet on the Sizemore baby.
When Mrs. Kathrine Sizemore, the lovely young blond wife of a prominent Montgomery attorney, was handed her baby, she was surprised to see that her hair was so dark. Just as Minnie had been surprised that her baby had such light hair. She had immediately remarked to Ferris, “She’s a pale little thing, ain’t she. And just look at them tiny little ears!”
If anyone had known about the error Nurse Buck had committed that night, it certainly would have explained why, eighteen years later, a plump large-boned girl with coal black hair and short arms was desperately trying to stuff herself