Roanna Catherine Dews

Certain details have been embellished for the purpose of the story, but the basis of information comes from their true life experiences.

Roanna Catherine Dews—or “Roany” to those who spoke her name—was born on October 27, 1866, in Norfolk, Virginia. On the night she was born, the Civil War had been over for more than a year, but the wounds still bled deep into the soil. The air carried both the bitterness of defeat and the urgency of survival, driving many into hasty marriages built on fragile hopes.

Roany’s father, William Dews, embodied both urgency and destruction. By the time he married Roany’s mother, Polly Gaskins, William was on his third wife. His first wife had died suddenly, leaving six children behind. William remarried within months to a girl who was barely nineteen. She, too, met the fate of an early death only a year later, happening on Christmas Day, and recorded as “unknown causes.” Neighbors whispered, but William moved on without ever answering.

Then the war started, and William enlisted in the Confederate army. He clawed his way from Private to Corporal, only to be captured at the Battle of Franklin and imprisoned in Georgia until the war’s end. Freedom only came when he swore allegiance to the Union—a humiliation he never forgave. When he returned home, stripped of honor and swollen with resentment, he found Polly, herself a widow, and their mutual aches fueled the rush to start over. Within months, Polly bore a child: little Roany. Two years later came another daughter, Othela.

But stability was never William’s gift to give, and sometime after 1870 Polly also died, though no records of her death could be found. Roany’s fragile sense of belonging shattered. She and Othela were handed over to the workhouse, separated from one another, never to meet again. By then, William had all but disappeared into his own ruin. He would be dead by 1878, leaving behind no trace of a father’s protection.

By 1880, fourteen-year-old Roany appeared on the census as a servant in the Norfolk household of Jesse and Martha Key. Her survival came at the cost of obedience: scrubbing floors, changing linens, bending her back to every task that was demanded.

Then, at the age of 17, her master used her life’s position to avoid losing his fortune in a poker game to a man named George Gray.

From Servanthood to Marriage

After George Gray claimed Roany as his wife, he offered her a roof, a name, and the semblance of a household. She had no choice but to step into it, and he, for the first time in his life, felt like a man who couldn’t be left behind. For a while, that was enough. George and Roany spent their early years uncovering common ground to build their life upon, and for a brief season they believed a happy marriage might grow from it. But the shadows couldn’t stay hidden for long.

By the time they began having children, eight in total, George was spending more and more time at the tavern, nursing his restlessness with whiskey and cards. He either came home empty-handed and with fire in his eyes, or with a fistful of coins and a reason to celebrate. Each night, the sound of his boots on the porch was a verdict — would it be rage or revelry? Roany never knew. She bore his storms in silence, stretched scraps of food into meals, continuing to carry the weight of a household on her back.

Even on the nights he won, it laid another heaviness on his wife and children. Winning a big pot of money never led to more stability, or an end to going without. It meant a more obvious display of their father’s erratics followed by their mother’s disapproval, followed by anger and violence that would send George out of the house to drink away the remainder of his earnings.

As Jesse Key grew older in age, he must have wrestled with feeling responsible for Roany’s fate, and he left her some money in his will. Knowing that George would only spend it if he found it, Roany tried to hide the money in a secret place. She would check on it periodically, just to make sure it was still there. Then the day came when she checked and the money was gone. All of it. That night, when George stumbled through the door, incoherent and down-trodden, Roany’s world went dark.

George had not only gambled away her inheritance. In his efforts to get it back he gambled away two more horses, neither belonging to him, but to his friend on the farm. The betrayal struck Roany at her core, cutting open her oldest wounds. And his friend wasn’t happy either.

Eventually, George began to unravel in plain sight. He had borrowed money that he swore he would pay back, only to gamble it away or drown it in whiskey. As empty promises soured, the list of men he owed grew longer than the list of those who would still shake his hand. Even his oldest friend, the one who had given him a place to live all those years, had no other choice but to turn his back. All George had left was a single crop of peanuts, the last echo of his labor. It was that very crop he was hauling the day his final tragedy found him.

In a horse-drawn cart rattling toward state-assisted property, George was struck down by one of the new machines of progress — an automobile. The wagon splintered, George was thrown, his skull cracked against the road. He made it to the hospital, but within 45 minutes he was gone. The driver was initially charged with manslaughter, but after cooperating with authorities, they cleared him of all charges.

Roany remained, widowed and shackled to debts she had never made. She endured the only way she knew how; by accepting her own bargains from lingering hands and offering favors that were bartered in whispers. Roany had to feed her children, and there was simply no other choice.

Her son, John Lee Gray, carried the knowing inside him. He never spoke it, but it burned in his bones: that love could be bought, intimacy could be forced, and survival was up for grabs. The rejection he felt for his mother as a used woman, rather than a cherished one, coiled around his heart, turning into anger that smoldered just beneath the surface.

Three years after George died, pneumonia labored Roany’s last breath. She died on Valentine’s Day, 1926–a bitter irony for a woman whose life had never known free love, dying on the day that was meant for it. For John Lee, the loss was sharp, almost unbearable. In her absence he discovered how much he had yearned for her tenderness, even as he resented it. In his grief, he sealed away his yearning and vowed never to need again.

Instead, he built a life from discipline and hard work, clawing his way toward respectability. He made his money the honest way, built a family name with steadiness instead of chance. He did everything his father had not. But success came at its own price: it was forged in the same fire of shame and survival that had shaped his parents, a fire that burned through him too, leaving its mark on every Gray who came after.