Grace and Grit (12 page)

It didn’t matter that I didn’t respond. He didn’t skip a beat in his harangue.

“I bet the first thing you do when you go to the hotel on the company trips is get in bed with somebody and stay there all weekend. Next trip, I’ll go, and you can take me to bed with you.”

I wanted to say what was really on my mind, but instead I said, “That’s probably not a good idea.”

His eyes narrowed. He swept the clippings into his hand and dropped them into the plastic trash bin. “We’d have a good time together on the trip to New Orleans. I’d be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Finally, my patience worn thin, I said, “I’ll be busy working with the presentations and speakers.”

“That’s not a problem,” he said, examining his hand with the precision of a woman checking her nail polish.

“Well, you can do whatever you want, but you can’t go with me.” I took my clipboard with our schedule and headed to the floor, despite the fact that we hadn’t discussed what we were doing first. He started snipping the fingernails on his left hand with angry snaps of the clipper.

D
ENNIS SOON
became obsessive about trying to get me into bed with him: rubbing up against me, hugging me around the waist, or running his hand up and down my back whenever we ran tire trials together. Frustrated that he was getting nowhere with me, he took on a sharper tone. After he went through his usual litany of sexual escapades, he’d say, “You know, if you don’t start doing more in this department, I’m not sure how much longer you’ll have a job. You think you’re so smart, but you don’t have any credibility, and that’s one thing I can give you if you know what’s good for you. It’s a shame, but a lot of people around here just have to be moved when they can’t perform. And it looks like, to me, you’re not real good at this.”

I didn’t want to make him any angrier, so I tried to keep my voice even, like the automated tone of a seasoned secretary. “You know I’m married, and even if I wasn’t, I don’t get involved with the people at work.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“We’ve got work to do,” I said, starting to feel light-headed. A chocolate milk shake from McDonald’s was all I’d eaten for dinner.

“That’s a shame. I think I’ll get you started and you can run four tire trials today. You haven’t been running as many as the other guys. You haven’t been doing your job right lately, and I’d hate to have to talk to my supervisor about you. You know, he owes me a big favor. That’s why I can get people moved from their jobs when I want.”

Even though I’d already checked the records and knew I was averaging more trials than Dennis each day without any help from him, how did I know he didn’t have something on the supervisor? They’d worked together a long time, and he’d talk about how they hung out together at a strip club called the Fuzzy Duck. He’d already spread the rumor throughout the plant that we were going together. I had no idea what else Dennis was capable of. He reminded me of an assassin bug—an insect that sneaks up behind a boll weevil when it’s eating cotton and stabs it with his stinger, sucking its insides out like soup. Then the assassin bug actually gets inside the boll weevil’s body and waits to ambush another one.

After several months of Dennis’s incessant threats to have me moved, I grew so anxious I could barely eat or drink. I became dehydrated to the point of being hospitalized for several days. That’s when I had to let on to Charles, at least to some extent, the trouble I was having with Dennis. As I suspected, he wanted me to talk to a supervisor if Dennis didn’t stop. I felt that I couldn’t talk to anyone. Andrew was my training manager, and had no say in the operations where I was. Jeff was already furious at me for rebuffing him, and I was still trying to overcome being demoted in the first place. I couldn’t cause trouble when I was already seen as a troublemaker. Since Charles couldn’t fix the situation, he grew more frustrated and unreasonable each time we discussed it. I downplayed the truth of the matter in order to keep him calm.

I
FORGED
ahead, doing my best to be irreproachable, but even though I wore a plain denim shirt, Dennis still commanded me to “turn around and hold up your shoulders so I can see what you’ve got.” While we were catching tires, he’d comment, “You don’t have a bra on, do you? You know I’m partial to women with large breasts. That’s another reason I don’t know why I took up with the redhead, because she never did have much to begin with, before the operation.”

He meant her recent mastectomy.

I withheld even the most innocuous personal information; something as simple as mentioning that I was on a diet turned into a constant refrain not to lose too much weight or “I’d lose my greatest asset.” Listening to him, I was reminded of the shame that snuck up on me sometimes as a teenager when I struggled to adjust to the startling fullness of my changing body. I withered, tucking inward like a leaf after a hard freeze, wishing for the freedom I felt as a child unaware of my sexual identity. I started keeping my hair cut short.

At times, my dread of going to work almost paralyzed me. I couldn’t fix my problem in a logical way, like you could a defective tire. When there’s a tire hold and the machines stop running, you have to figure out where in the process something went wrong. Was there too much rubber, too much of a certain chemical, or the wrong temperature setting? You trace each step in the process, searching for clues until you find the mistake. Then you fix it and start over with the right formula.

I couldn’t fix Dennis.

I’d think about my father, who worked like a dog for thirty-two years, and wonder what he’d endured that he never discussed with my mother or me. I could feel in my bones that fear both my parents
had of sudden hardship that can turn your life upside down in a minute. My mother had lost her own mother so young, and my daddy had lost his father, a foreman for Southern Railroad, when he was fifteen. Not long after that, he and Granny Mac moved to Alabama to live with Aunt Lucille.

Uprooted at such a young age, my father craved stability. His entire life he’d missed only one shift of work that I knew of. That was to get a tooth pulled, and he used a vacation day, afraid that if he didn’t go to work he’d have a blemish on his record and jeopardize his job security. I lived with the same kind of fear of an unexpected disaster, and I took great comfort in the fact that I could take care of myself and the children if something ever happened to Charles. That year running tire trials, I had no choice but to put up with Dennis. I did just that, until the situation became critical—when the redhead moved out of Dennis’s house.

I
T WAS
early May 1982 when I walked by the office and Dennis hollered at me, “If I’m not here, you just sit at your desk all day and do nothing when you need to be running three tire trials instead of two.” He was the one who stayed in his office all day on the phone, talking to women and doing God knows what.

After making a public spectacle, he went onto the floor and started taping loads of tires I’d already run to be run again. When I asked him what presses and tire machines he wanted me to start checking, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close.

“You stick tight by me today and help me because I don’t feel like working. I’m a little down.” He squeezed my hand. “I need you to cheer me up.” He reached over and ran his hand around the top of my blue shirt like he was about to button it up. The second time he did that, I said, “I’ll be happy to button the top button if you want me to,” and I stepped away from him.

Back at the force machine, he kept his hand on my back,
rubbing it in circles. Twice he intentionally touched my breast before he said, “You’re shaking me up. Now what are you going to do about it?”

It was like trying to clean up broken glass; every time you think you’ve gotten up every last shard, you catch another glint waiting for your bare feet. I turned my back to him, my stomach burning with what felt like hot lava churning inside it, and walked to the other side of the machine. He was so angry that I wouldn’t go with him to his empty house that night that nothing I did for the next couple of days was good enough.

Finally one morning, even though I’d checked all the tires, he wanted me to do more. When I balked, he said, “You just don’t want to work. When my boss gets back, he needs to know this, and I’ll have your job.”

I was exhausted from worrying about when he was going to make good on his threats. It was time to get help. The only person I could talk to was Bruce, the union division chairman, who in his position was accustomed to resolving problems. He agreed to go with me to human resources. That very afternoon we met with Eddie, the personnel specialist for the radial division.

In the meeting, the last place I wanted to be, I explained the situation, the last thing on earth I wanted to do. “All I want is for him to keep his hands off me and quit telling me about his sex life,” I said. “Please just make him keep his hands to himself and quit overloading me.”

After a few minutes of listening, Eddie, whose face had flushed to the same deep auburn as his hair, stood up and walked to the door. He changed his mind, sat back down, and looked past me. Seeing his agitation, I was beginning to feel like I was the one who’d done something wrong. He finally picked up the phone, held the receiver as if he’d forgotten the phone number, and called his secretary to page Bo, the division superintendent, and ask him to come into our meeting. When Bo heard what I had to say, he
looked at me skeptically. “With our new company policy, we’ll have to do an internal investigation, which might take a few days,” he said matter-of-factly. That was exactly what I was trying to prevent. I just wanted the situation to be handled and Dennis, who everyone knew had a problem with women, straightened out.

Then Eddie said, “You can go on home now, and we’ll let you know when we’ve finished and what’ve we’ve found.” His face was still flushed.

Overpowered by the bitter, vomitlike smell embedded in my clothes from the plant’s persistent fumes, I felt like I might faint. “But what about Dennis? Is he staying?”

“Yes, there’s no reason for him to go home. He has a good career here and a proven track record, and we’re going to keep him,” Eddie said, looking at Bo, who nodded.

My hands were shaking. I might as well have had six cups of coffee. “I’ll stay.”

“You go on home now. Don’t worry, we’ll pay you,” Bo assured me.

Something stubborn rose up inside me. These guys weren’t going to get away with this. I had as much a right to my job as Dennis had to his. As a little girl sitting in the dark movie theater while my parents shopped at Blackwelder’s grocery store, I’d seen hundreds of westerns starring Gene Autry. A simple lesson had been ingrained in me on those countless Saturday afternoons: The man in the white hat always wins. No matter how many times he might get knocked down and have to dust off his pants, in the end, the good guy prevails.

I slid my hands under my thighs and sat up straighter. “If Dennis stays, I stay.”

A
FTER THAT
meeting, I immediately went to a pay phone and called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in Birmingham. The man I spoke to informed me that I had to file
the charge in person. I explained to him that by the time I made it to Birmingham the following week I’d probably be out of a job. He went ahead and took my information over the phone but made sure I understood that they were backlogged, with too many cases and too few caseworkers. My file was at the bottom of a large stack. Hanging up the phone, I dropped another quarter into the slot and called my doctor.

When he took my blood pressure late that afternoon, it had shot up sky high.

I
WAS
unsure about the EEOC process, and though I knew from working at H&R Block that sex discrimination in the workplace was illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I had no real understanding of the law. I had no idea that it had only been two years since the EEOC had issued guidelines defining sex discrimination, establishing the term
sexual harassment
. I also didn’t know that in 1976 the court had recognized that a male supervisor’s advances toward a female employee were viewed as harassment, or that in 1977 the court had also ruled that retaliation against a woman in the workplace for rejecting the sexual advances of her boss is a violation of Title VII. Like so many women then and now, I’d experienced both of these situations.

When I talked to Charles about contacting an attorney, we agreed that we’d put off making the car payment if necessary. I called Jack, an attorney whom I’d met through the Anniston business club I’d joined at Andrew’s urging. He’d recently opened a private practice. In the meantime the internal investigation was conducted, and Goodyear circled their wagons. Word of the investigation had gotten around the plant, and I heard that people were told that if they were interested in a career at Goodyear, they’d stay out of it.

One woman, Kristie, who’d witnessed the harassment and had
sympathized with me in the break room, had a sudden change of heart. She had previously confided in me that management had skipped over her for a promotion because she was recently married and would probably have kids. She’d even asked me how to deal with that situation. Now she changed her allegiance. She went so far as to grab my arm when I walked by her and berate me for ruining people’s careers by causing such a mess. I was floored—particularly because I knew that Dennis had treated her the same way. After that, she refused to speak to me. Many years later, she admitted to me that she came to regret her actions when she was later harassed in another department.