Grace and Grit (2 page)

The annoying low buzzing of the fluorescent lights in the ladies’ room filled my ears as I squinted at the numbers. Maybe I was seeing things. Maybe this note was a serious mistake or a bad joke. But I knew in my gut that it wasn’t. If you’ve ever hit an animal driving down the road, you know the sickening recognition the thudding sound sends through your body. I had that feeling in spades.

As I read those numbers again and again, I couldn’t help but think how I’d started at Goodyear. Almost forty at the time, I was far from naïve: I’d known from the get-go that I’d have to work longer and smarter than the men in order to prove myself. But how in the world could I have been paid less all these years? The difference in salaries just didn’t make sense.

I stood frozen, finally raising my eyes to the ceiling. I stared at the spread of brown water stains on the white ceiling tiles. Layers of thick gray dust coated the steel vent, and the outline of a dead roach rested directly above me in its fluorescent grave. I had to close my eyes. That was a mistake. Suddenly, a feeling of dread overwhelmed me, the same feeling I had when I went to sleep these days and dreamed about not being able to find my way out of the plant or about crazy gigantic tires chasing me. This was far worse.

After a few minutes, I knew I had to get it together or I’d really be late. That’s when I felt the shame, the haunting humiliation deep in my bones. As the numbers kept looping through my mind, I couldn’t shake the realization of how stupid I’d been to try so hard and think that it would pay off. I’d wanted so badly to win approval,
and I had done so in the eyes of most of my coworkers, who valued my hard work and loyalty—and who gave it back to me.

But how dumb I’d been to think that this would counter the hostility surrounding me. How arrogant to think that I was the woman who had the strength to win at Goodyear. Those numbers said loud and clear that it didn’t matter how hard I’d worked, how much I’d wanted to succeed and do the right thing: I’d been born the wrong sex, and that was that.

Unable to budge, I glanced at my watch and then stuffed the note into my pocket. I rubbed my face, trying to bury what was now nothing short of a sense of desperation. After I washed my hands, I stared at myself in the large mirror. On the outside, nothing about me had changed. But as surely as if I’d looked out a window and seen the sky turn an uncanny grayish pink and felt that strange stillness right before a funnel cloud forms, my horizon had transformed, my life had shifted, and a storm was headed my way.

—M
ARJORIE
A
INSBOROUGH
D
ECKER
,
The Christian Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes

I
F YOU
grow up in Possum Trot, Alabama, you run across some rough characters from time to time. You might even be related to a few. In truth, the tough guys at Goodyear weren’t a far cry from what I’d seen and heard in the fields picking cotton or in the barn helping milk the cows at Aunt Lucille’s dairy farm.

I’ll never forget the afternoon when my grandfather, Papa, decided he wanted to kill my dog, Buzz. Papa, who claimed to be part Irish, was so pale that he looked part ghost. I’m honestly not sure there was any good in him, but I can also say that he wasn’t all that different from most of the other men around me.

I was only five the day Papa came after Buzz, but my memory of that afternoon is clear as day. I was playing tea party in the front yard, scooping up dirt with a broken teacup Granny Mac had given me, and Buzz was my honored guest. As I set down a cup in front
of Buzz, I heard Papa hollering down the road. I looked back at the house, hoping to see that Mama was still right inside the screen door cooking supper, and that she’d hear the racket in time to come out and protect me and Buzz. She wasn’t. As Papa’s large figure approached us, my stomach clenched. He was carrying something; it looked like a hoe.

I’d never had a pet before, unless you count the rooster who used to follow me around. But one day Buzz had appeared out of nowhere. We immediately took to each other. He was a funny little dog, brown and white and black with one dark spot shaped like a pumpkin seed on the top of his forehead. I used to rub that spot like it was a good-luck penny. I figured his breed was part everything, with his big hound-dog eyes, those large feet he slapped in front of him like clown shoes, and that mismatched coloring pieced together like a crazy quilt.

By the time Papa was close enough for me to make out what he was saying, Buzz had scooted under the house. “Where’s that goddam worthless mutt?” he yelled. “He ain’t worth killing.”

I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t even move. My mouth was as dry as if I’d swallowed the cup of dirt. All I could think about was how Papa would slaughter the pigs in the smokehouse. I always got attached to one of them, so I made a point of being as far away from the smokehouse as possible when killing time came. I wanted no part of wash pots filled with boiling-hot water and the hanging, splitting, and dressing of the meat. But I did show up about the time sausage was frying in the deep black skillet.

“Goddammit, Lilly. You better mind me and get that dog.” Papa’s eyes were moist and almost closed, like they had Vaseline smeared on them. He turned around and around in a circle trying to find Buzz, almost falling. He was drunk, really drunk. He lurched toward me, and I jumped up. Buzz must have thought Papa was going to hurt me because he shot out from under the porch, growling and circling us. Papa lunged at him, slicing the
hoe through the air. I tried to stay between Papa and Buzz, never even thinking that I might get hit.

As we continued to dance around each other, the screen door slapped shut at last, and Mama came out screaming at Papa. His face and large nose flushed red above his white collared shirt buttoned to the top under his overalls. But other than that he didn’t pay Mama a bit of attention as he, Buzz, and I continued to waltz around each other, the hoe thudding hard whenever it hit the ground.

“I mean it, Tot,” she said, using the name everyone (but me) called him. “Don’t make no sense to be scaring Lilly like that. Put it down.”

But he was having none of it. He seemed to get madder and madder, and the hoe seemed closer to Buzz with every swing.

Suddenly Mama flew down the front steps, a long butcher knife in her hand, the same knife she always sharpened on the pedaling wheel before Papa killed the hogs. But not even the knife seemed to sway him. Papa, three times as big as she was, towered above her.

“Go on, Lilly. Get in the house,” Mama said. I could see the look in her eyes, the fear and hatred that made her seem as wild as a rabid dog. I ran up onto the porch and, thankfully, Buzz followed.

Papa’s eyes flashed anger at me as I stared at him through the screen door, my breath coming in quick gasps.

“Go on home and leave that dog alone,” Mama said. She kept that butcher knife raised and pointed at him the whole time, jabbing it a few times in his direction when his temper flared back up. He dropped the hoe at last, and Mama backed him all the way down the steep driveway to the dirt road. And he left, lumbering and swaying his way back home.

As I watched this scene, I felt like I was suffocating, as if someone had stuck a sack of cotton over my head. I’d heard Mama tell my father how Papa had beaten her as a child. When she was little and he got to drinking, one of his buddies would rush to the house
to warn my grandmother that Papa was headed home. She’d hustle the four boys and my mother out of bed to make a run for the barn, hiding in the hay for the rest of the night. Other times, without warning, Papa barged into their bedrooms, hickory stick in hand, and the beatings began.

After that day, I still rode on top of Papa’s wagon and helped him feed the cows and guinea hens, but I never trusted him again. I remember telling myself I’d better be careful about who I let myself love. It was likely they’d turn on you. I also realized it was a good idea to have a knife nearby whenever possible.

Not long after, Buzz disappeared. I figured he just wandered off. Thankfully, it never occurred to me then that Papa might have gotten his way after all.

M
ANY YEARS
later, when I first started working at Goodyear, the union guys liked to tell the women that they were going to “pick” us. That is, they were going to catch us and pick each pubic hair from our bodies. Like so much that happened there, when you put it in words and see it on paper, it sounds too unreal to believe. But they were always up to some prank or another, often making work a dangerous sport.

One day, a woman worker, fed up with the constant haranguing, actually dropped her pants and dared the men to do it. With her pants bunched around her ankles, she stood there in her plain white underwear. The guys backed off her but kept up their nonsense with the rest of us. I knew I’d never do what she did, but I also knew they often made good on their word, one time pinning down one of the new young guys and picking him clean. I went home and found one of Charles’s knives to carry in my pocket, the hard leather sheath resting against my thigh in case they ever decided to test me.

Countless times throughout the years at Goodyear when I needed courage, I remembered how Mama had finally tamed Papa
that summer afternoon. I never doubted my mother would have used the butcher knife that day, and in my moments of fear and anger, I never doubted I’d use my own knife if necessary.

T
HE PLACE
where I grew up during the 1940s is a small bend in the road along the foot of Choccolocco Mountain in northeast Alabama. Just like those pinch-faced gray possums that roamed the pine forests, the people in that small community in the foothills of the Appalachians knew a thing or two about survival. They worked in the cotton or steel mills or scratched a living from the dirt. Some worked in the foundries or the army depot in nearby Anniston or, if they were lucky, had a good-paying job at Goodyear in Gadsden. The folks I knew would walk over broken glass to help a neighbor and just as soon kill you if you did them wrong.

In 1946, I was in second grade when my father came home from the navy and my parents bought land from Papa to build a slightly bigger house across the road from him. Life started looking up for my family then. It took me a while to adjust to the gleam from the naked bulb hanging off the thin cord from the ceiling, since I’d been so used to the soft glow of gaslight. A couple of years later, we got indoor plumbing and things really changed for the better. Gone were the days of tiptoeing through the wet grass in the black of night, wondering if I’d step on a rattlesnake on the way to the outhouse.

Our new house wasn’t much to look at, but we were lucky. We were the only ones in Possum Trot, besides the brick mason, who owned a television. Daddy worked the night shift at the Anniston Army Depot six days a week, where he reworked engines on the battered military tanks sent home from Korea and later from Vietnam and the Middle East. Before we bought the TV, in the evenings when Daddy was gone, Mama and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do—except for Saturday evening, when we turned on the radio, silent all week to save batteries, and listened to the
Grand Ole Opry. But once we got the TV, folks gathered in every corner and doorway of our small house many evenings to watch the nightly news.

During the day, I had to come up with my own entertainment, and I ran wild, disappearing for hours to climb trees and explore the woods. My cousin Louise and I spent entire days searching for caves or hunting for arrowheads in the Indian cemetery. We also loved to mimic the holy dancing we saw at the church campground down the road.

Despite these wistful memories, nearly all of my childhood was spent in endless work. In the misty summer mornings Mama and I picked beans and okra before the sun started blazing down on us. After we headed back to the house to bathe and change, we spent the rest of the day hulling peas, skinning tomatoes, and blanching vegetables to can for the winter. We only stopped canning to sleep. On the weekends we roamed the woods to fill our syrup buckets with huckleberries and blackberries for jam and cobbler, slapping the itchy bites from the invisible chiggers with Listerine to keep them from driving us crazy.

Growing up, I never lacked for essentials, and I certainly never went hungry. I knew we were better off than a good many folks. Of course, I was also painfully aware that we weren’t as well off as some others—like my best friend, Sandra. I’d known her since first grade. While I wore homemade bloomers, Sandra could afford silk panties. Every day she came to school in a coordinated sweater and skirt, never without a perfect strand of pearls. Even the teachers called her “little princess.”

Sandra’s family lived in New Liberty, a neighborhood where no one whitewashed their trees or kept chickens running around the front yard. There, children didn’t have to share a bedroom with their grandmother, like I did. Sitting in front of the large mirror at Sandra’s elegant dressing table, I’d angle her hand mirror every which way to see my reflection, hoping to improve my profile. But
there it always was, clear as day, the bump in the middle of my nose, the same mysterious Indian nose as Granny Mac’s and Daddy’s.