Grace and Grit (13 page)

A
T THE
beginning of the EEOC’s investigation, I met with Eddie and Bo. They indicated that Dennis had admitted to all my statements, except to having touched my breasts. Then, as if washing his hands of the subject, Bo remarked that Dennis was staying put in his department and I’d be transferred.

I was flabbergasted. Bo came around his desk and sat on the edge of it, leaning toward me in an almost fatherly way. “So far it looks like you have a terrible record. There are a lot of things you need to do differently. You could start by learning how to ride a motorcycle or water-ski on the weekends. If you want to succeed here, that’s my suggestion.”

Did people really say things like this? Did he really expect me to hang out with the guys on the weekends, fishing and drinking, as if downing a few beers with the boys would make everything all right? And what was all this about my “poor” performance? This meeting was supposed to be about Dennis’s behavior, not my evaluation.

“Then why hasn’t anyone told me this before?” I managed to say.

“You know, it’s hard to tell a person when they’re doing a bad
job. Your supervisors actually have been telling you things, but you just haven’t picked up on their right meaning.” He returned to his chair.

“When I came to Goodyear, I had an excellent track record in management with good recommendations,” I reminded him.

“Well, you might not belong in manufacturing, then,” he concluded, opening his drawer to look for something. “And you’ve been moved already, in a very short time here.”

My ears were starting to buzz. “But I’ve always been told I was being cross-trained, and only the people who were going to be promoted were cross-trained. Isn’t that right?”

He closed the drawer, toothpick in hand. “I think you’ve missed something along the way here, but right now, since you’re having a hard time getting ahead, we feel it’s in your best interest to work in quality control. It’s a temporary assignment and you’ll still be a supervisor, but maybe you can earn some credibility there.” He started picking his teeth. There was nothing else for me to say.

A
S THE
EEOC conducted its investigation, I worked alone on the floor in quality control, checking the quality of the tires against the specs by running tread and testing the weight and width of the tires. Throughout the plant, people avoided me. Some people quit talking to me outright, while others continued to criticize me for causing trouble. I couldn’t fault people for wanting to keep their jobs, but those who knew the truth turned a blind eye, and I don’t know how they slept at night.

Laura was the only one willing to speak the truth. A petite woman with an engineering degree from Auburn, Laura worked the computers in final finish. When we’d talked about our jobs in the past, she’d complained that the men worried her to death with all their propositions. She agreed to talk to Jack and tell him her story. It was a huge relief to know that at least one person was willing to stand up with me.

About six months later I won the right to sue, which meant I had permission to file a lawsuit within ninety days. Now I had to choose the next step. Proving Dennis did and said the things he did was a “he said, she said” scenario with no guarantees, Jack explained. He asked me what I really wanted to accomplish. That I knew: I wanted my rightful job back. With this in mind, Jack negotiated an agreement with Goodyear to reinstate me as a supervisor.

The day I met with Eddie and George, one of the department foremen, about my reinstatement, I was a nervous wreck. We were in an office about the size of a cubbyhole when they gave me my job back. Relieved that the madness was finally over, I said, “That’s all I wanted. I don’t mind working hard or even being cussed out. I can put up with a lot, but just don’t let anyone harass me like Dennis did. And don’t lie about my performance,” I added.

Eddie started pacing and cussing and said, “Well, all I know is no goddam government is going to tell me how to run my department.” George quieted him quickly, and they hustled me out of there.

Despite the tone of that conference, I faced my future at Goodyear believing that justice had prevailed, just as it always did in those westerns I loved as a child. I truly thought I’d successfully refused to be bullied out of my job. I believed the strength of the recent federal laws and the support of the decent people I worked with would sustain me. After two hellish years, I was ready to let the memory of my experience fade, just as I’d forgotten the pain of my first childbirth in order to endure a second labor. Refusing to let my doubts outweigh my hopes, I was determined to continue my career and to be treated fairly. I really thought things would change at Goodyear, but as with any twisted romance, I should have known better.

—B
OB
T
HAVES
,
Frank and Ernest

I
CARRIED THE
red velvet cake Edna had baked into the break room. The rule was that whenever you bought something new—a house, a truck, or even a washing machine—you had to bring something homemade to work. I didn’t have time to bake anything, so Edna, who stocked her pantry with a gallon of Watkins vanilla for her weekly baking, whipped up hummingbird or Italian cream cakes for me when I needed something. This evening I wasn’t celebrating a specific occasion, only that I was glad to be back as a supervisor on the late-night shift in final finish after the past year I’d spent isolated in quality control, waiting for the outcome of the EEOC investigation. The cake was heavy. Edna had doubled her recipe as usual, and still it would be gone in an hour. Setting the Tupperware cake carrier on the break-room table, I snapped the cover off and placed a plastic cake cutter next to the cake. I thought I might even cut myself a piece—hands down, no one made a better cake than Edna, and her cakes were the only ones I ate at work. I didn’t trust the guys who, in an attempt to pay
back other pranksters, had managed a time or two to slip pubic hairs into the batter behind their wives’ backs. At least that’s what they said, smirking, after we’d all eaten a piece.

I arranged a stack of colorful paper plates and plastic forks next to the cake, optimistic that I had another opportunity to make things work. I didn’t want to hold a grudge like my mother did. So many times she took any perceived slight from friends or family, held on, and wouldn’t let it go. All the things that had transpired the previous couple of years had been filed away in what Charles liked to call “File 13,” a phrase he’d picked up from the military to refer to the trash. Now I’d officially filed away those events; it was time to move on, time to return to normal.

While I was licking icing off my finger, Pete, who worked the curing presses, walked in. Every week he went around the different departments taking orders for the steaks and baked potatoes he cooked on the scalding-hot twenty-foot-high machine in the middle of the Saturday-night shift. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

“No licking all the icing off the cake.” He laughed and dropped some change into the Coke machine to grab a Mountain Dew. “I’m sure glad to see the cake maker’s been at it again.” All the guys referred to Edna that way.

I started cutting large slices of cake. “Would you like a piece?” I offered.

I handed him the biggest slice. Two tire builders I didn’t recognize came into the room.

“Hey, save a piece for me,” one said.

I gave him a piece. The other guy shook his head, his mouth set tight, when I offered him one. “Tell me, Lilly, why’d you have to go and sue Goodyear?” he asked.

The mood in the room changed from lighthearted to somber as suddenly as if the power had gone out. The heaviness returned to my chest and reached down to the depths of my bowels. Sometimes it felt as real as someone pushing me against a wall with two
hands pressed hard on my sternum. “I didn’t,” I said, wiping up crumbs from the cake’s soft open gash.

“Then how come that’s what everybody says?” he continued, crossing his arms, his legs planted in a wide stance.

No matter how many times I’d already answered this question, I’d never be “true blue and gold,” as the union guys liked to say in reference to their loyalty to Goodyear. “I didn’t sue. I filed a complaint. If I’d sued, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Whatever you did, it’s not right. You’re always causing a whole heap of hurt when we got enough on our hands already.” He looked at me as though I’d turned into a witch about to cast a spell on him. I wondered if he’d had anything to do with the recent rigging of my locker with firecrackers. “In fact, now I think about it, I don’t want to be anywhere near you.” He nodded at his buddy, looking at his plate so he’d hurry up and finish.

“Come on. I can’t stand being in the same room with her.” He turned to leave. Pete and the other guy followed.

I hoped that things wouldn’t turn ugly. When it came to practical jokes or retaliation, you never knew what the guys could come up with. You were lucky if you got away with something harmless like the wet pickle I found in my purse once. Sometimes things could take a dark turn, like the time the guy slipped a syringe full of liquid laxative into his daily honey bun, which kept disappearing from his locker. The unsuspecting prankster landed in the hospital for days. It was hard to find anything funny about that, but it didn’t stop their nonsense.

I couldn’t let them dampen my spirits. I had to make the best of this second chance that I’d fought so hard to gain. The next phase of my career at Goodyear would be different; it had to be better than my rocky start.

I cut myself a piece of Edna’s cake and left the rest for the others.

T
IME HAS
a strange way of slipping up on you when you work in a manufacturing plant on the night shift; you feel like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone, and it takes a while, when you walk outside in the morning, to adjust to the rhythm of the regular world. One morning I’d stopped at Hardee’s for my biscuit and was reading the
Anniston Star
as I enjoyed my breakfast. My eyes focused on the year at the top of the newspaper: 1986. I looked again. Was it really 1986? Disoriented, as if swimming up from the depths of sleep, I felt like I’d been lost inside a dream. I grappled with the date the way you do sometimes with a simple word you know how to spell but that one day, all of a sudden, looks wrong. Where had the last several years gone? When was I going to do something else in life besides work?

Then I noticed an advertisement for ballroom dance lessons at the bottom of the page, four for $10, at a small dance studio in Anniston. I closed my eyes and saw the page that as a little girl I’d torn from
Life
magazine and posted above my bed—a picture of Ginger Rogers, in a glamorous pink gown, waltzing with Fred Astaire. Ever since cheerleading had given me a taste of performing, I’d fantasized about learning how to dance. The reality was, I’d never done more than square-dance in high school gym class. The thought of dancing lessons sparked a sense of excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I blew on my coffee, waiting for it to cool. I couldn’t keep letting time slip away from me. I saved the page to show Charles. I wanted him to join me.

“I don’t have time for that nonsense” was his immediate response.

I pestered him, but he held firm: “I don’t know how to dance.”

“Neither do I. That’s the whole point.”

“Men don’t take ballroom dancing.”

“Sure they do. It takes two people, remember?”

We went back and forth like this a few times because I truly wanted Charles as my partner in my new adventure, but I didn’t want to fight with him about it if he didn’t approve.

I finally told him, “Fine. If you change your mind, you know where to find me,” and signed up by myself.

I immediately fell in love with dancing. A couple of days a week, before my shift, Hector, a slim, flamboyant Texan with a head of slicked-back black hair who had more energy than anyone I’d ever met, taught me how to dance. I lived for my lessons despite Charles’s constant questions about Hector and the other people taking lessons. I’d tell Charles there was nothing to worry about. He tried his best to dislike Hector, but Hector’s charm disarmed even Charles.