Grace and Grit

D
URING MY
time at Goodyear, I’d discovered many an anonymous note at work, some serious, some not. Once, a guy left a note on my car windshield asking me out. The next thing I knew, as I waited for my bacon-and-cheese biscuit in the drive-through at Hardee’s on my way home, that fool came knocking on my window to see if I’d gotten his message. Another time, someone wrote, “My brother’s married to a white woman. Would you go out with me?” At that time in Alabama—we’re home to more civil rights struggles than anywhere in the country—you didn’t see blacks and whites dating. I was slightly amused by that one. Other times, I found notes like the one warning me about another crew trying to take credit for my crew’s production numbers by changing information in the computer, and the one telling me that excess scrap rubber on the floor was going to be blamed on my shift rather than the shift that actually caused the problem.

Over the span of twenty years at Goodyear, I’d probably gotten a dozen notes. Most of the time I figured they were from workers on the day shift, but I never knew exactly who wrote them. Whoever left the helpful notes, though, made it possible for me to survive situations that could have ended my career. No one else I knew of, neither management nor union workers, received notes like these, at least no one ever said so. I have to believe this was because I stood out in the crowd, to say the least, as one of only a handful of women managers at Goodyear.

T
HE DAY
I discovered the note that changed the course of my life started like any other.

If you’ve never been to Alabama, you probably don’t know that we have the prettiest springs in the world. Late that afternoon the pear trees were in full bloom and the cherry trees were starting to unveil their pink buds. I was driving to work as usual, heading west on the two-lane highway snaking through the rolling hills, only a couple of other cars on the road, probably people like me going to work at one of the plants in Gadsden.

All through my years at Goodyear, the highlight of my day was the ritual of going to work while most people were coming home. I loved seeing the sky’s changing colors as evening fell and the endless headlights streaming toward Jacksonville while I traveled in the opposite direction, my Buick riding quiet and smooth. I always did like to travel my own road.

That afternoon before I left, my husband, Charles, kept following me around the house while I was getting ready, trying to convince me to stay home from work, to give my injured knee some rest—it had been about a week since my coworker had accidentally shut one of the hydraulic gates on me. I had a knot as big as a baseball on my knee, but I only had two more days until my appointment with the orthopedist and I was determined not to miss work.

But Charles was the type of person who borrowed worry. As
he stood behind me in the bathroom while I applied my mascara, he was downright mad, insisting I take his advice. He fussed about the fact I was lifting heavy Hummer tires, telling me I’d ruin my knee for good if I didn’t listen to him. Recently retired from Fort McClellan, where he’d overseen housing on the army base, he was probably hoping I’d stick around to eat dinner with him and keep him company through the evening, watching an episode of his favorite show,
Law & Order
.

Even though Charles was well aware that Goodyear frowned on any absence from work, he just didn’t understand how anxious I’d become lately. Over the previous year, rumors about layoffs and the plant shutting down had been flying around. Several batches of bad tires had gotten out the door, and I’d been blamed for one batch of four hundred that had been scrapped. Everyone, both managers and the union workers, was on edge.

Charles’s haranguing wasn’t helping my nerves, so when I about poked my eye with my mascara wand, I snapped at him to find something else to nitpick about. Then I locked him out of the bathroom to wrestle the support hose onto my good leg in peace. The next thing I knew, Charles hollered at me through the door that he was running down to McDonald’s to buy me a chocolate milk shake for supper. I smiled thinking about him throwing on his jacket and shoes to hustle out the door. Charles was always in motion; he couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it, not even to watch TV (unless
Law & Order
or the Atlanta Braves were on). The minute he got home from work, he’d make a pot of coffee and throw his laundry into the washing machine before he went out to rake some leaves or cut the grass. As long as he was straightening and fixing around the house, he was happy and his blue eyes sparkled.

A little while later I finally got out the door. I kissed Charles good-bye, milk shake in hand. It was impossible to stay mad at him for long. It was then, rushing down the walkway, that I heard the
whippoorwill’s call. Hurried as I was, I stopped still to listen. When I was a girl, if my grandmother Granny Mac heard a whippoorwill, she immediately took to bed. She swore someone was going to die. Standing in the driveway, listening to its haunting song, I tried to shrug off a child’s sense of dread.

By the time I got past Jacksonville onto the old highway, I began to think about the job. I looked forward to this hour when I sorted through most of my problems. Passing churches and junkyards I’d driven by a thousand times, I couldn’t help but think about how much I missed the tire room. Tire building was one of the toughest jobs at the plant. I’d loved the work and the old-timers, now in their fifties and sixties, who’d been building tires since they were teenagers, just like their fathers. I’d recently been transferred to quality control, where I just didn’t feel like I belonged. The fact that my coworker, used to working solo, had slammed a hydraulic gate on my leg because he forgot that I was walking behind him, certainly seemed like a sign. And everybody knew my transfer had been a demotion, retaliation for speaking out about my supervisor’s unfair performance evaluations.

As the miles melted behind me and I got closer to the plant, I remembered how I used to be able to leave behind worries about what was going on with the kids or Charles as I mused over the details that awaited me in the tire room. I’d run through the stock that needed prepping, how many men might not report to work, and the production schedule. By the time I checked in at the gates of the plant, I’d have sealed off my emotions, ready for work.

Now I could feel myself trying to clamp down on my worries about my new department. I knew that once I walked through those steel gates, I needed to carry my shoulders high like Hector, my ballroom dancing teacher, taught me, “reaching them toward my back pocket,” as he put it. I took a deep breath and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel as I hummed my favorite tune, “Bad,
Bad Leroy Brown,” picturing myself on the dance floor. That helped a little.

When I reached the plant that evening I was running late, and my knee throbbed. I stopped by my cubby in the small, empty office area upstairs across from the copying room to check my mail, as I’d done every day at Goodyear. I flipped through the company memos about the upcoming safety-training class and fliers about the next car collectors show being held in the parking lot, almost missing the torn piece of copy paper with black handwriting on it.

I read the scribbled words, and my heart jerked as if an electric jolt had coursed through my body. Though I stood perfectly still, I was churning inside. I quickly stuck the note in my pocket and hurried to the ladies’ room, where I sat on the sofa trying to breathe. I hoped no one in the copy room had noticed me leave in such a hurry.

I’d never in my life gotten a note like this before. Someone had listed my name and those of the three other tire-room managers, with salaries next to each name. My salary was exactly correct, down to the dollar. Over the years, I’d worried about being paid less than the men who were doing the same work I was, but I didn’t have any proof. I was like a wife nursing a nagging suspicion that her husband’s having an affair, with no hard evidence. But now there it was in plain black ink, what I’d always feared: The other managers, all men, had been making more than I was.

A lot more.

Still reeling, I got up and started pacing the bathroom floor, wishing I’d stayed home with Charles, like he’d suggested. Then I stopped and pulled the crumpled paper from my pocket. The paper listed three men who’d started in 1979, the same year I did. The one woman on my original squadron of five was long gone, and over the years the few women who’d been promoted to management hadn’t lasted. Now, in 1998, I was one of a few female area
managers in the entire operation of about fourteen hundred people. I often wondered how the other women managers were making it, although I never got the opportunity to talk to them. The plant was so large, and I never socialized outside of work. It was always clear that I’d never be part of the boys’ club—and that was just as well. It wasn’t a club that I wanted to belong to. So I kept my boundaries clear.