Grace and Grit (3 page)

Every time I came home from Sandra’s, I felt inferior. Just the sight of my dingy white house and dusty dirt yard made me ashamed even though I knew how far we’d come. I dared not say anything about my disappointment. I saw how hard my parents worked. But the older I got, the more transparent the differences in my life and Sandra’s became, and my sense of embarrassment stayed with me, as indelible as a birthmark. I was keenly aware that all this privilege was due to Goodyear, where Sandra’s father worked. New Liberty was where the Goodyear families lived. And it’s where, more than anywhere, I wanted to be.

I used to stare at the Goodyear plant when I passed it on my annual summer Greyhound bus trip to Aunt Mattie Bell and Uncle Hoyt’s small duplex house in Gadsden. Right before you got into town, there was the plant, next to the Coosa River. A giant redbrick building with slits for windows, it sprawled for blocks behind a tall steel fence like a fortress. The huge smokestacks billowed black smoke. Riding past the plant, I dreamed about what it would have been like to ride around in a brand-new Mercury every few years like Sandra. Or I imagined swimming in the Gulf Coast during spring break like she did. I even fantasized about how smooth my hands would be if my daddy worked at Goodyear. Maybe even best of all, if he did, I’d never have to pick cotton again.

A
LL MY
life I’d been surrounded by one continuous cotton field. I started picking cotton there before I entered first grade and had been picking ever since. It was the only job around, and I was in the field every weekend with my cousin Louise making extra money for the family. When I was older, during the summer Louise and I chopped cotton before it matured in order to earn some spending money of our own. We slung our hoes into the ground, attacking the johnsongrass that spread like gossip between the rows,
sputtering complaints to each other that we dared not offer to anyone else. It wasn’t just the cotton. When we picked corn, we bellyached the same way, row after row, as cornstalks slapped our bare necks and scratched our hands.

At the end of the day, two men shouldered a pole between them and hooked our sack of cotton onto the P ring as Papa—all six foot five of him—loomed above me and slid a heavy metal ball across the bar to determine how many pounds we’d plucked from the prickly stalks. It took days to fill our long, skinny sacks. Sometimes it felt like I was trying to fill the sack with clouds.

Each time Papa weighed my sack, I held my breath, willing the ball to move farther. I enjoyed the anticipation of weighing my day’s work. Being paid meant not having to listen to Mama tell me no for the hundredth time. It meant I could save for the ready-made dress that was hanging in the window at Hudson’s department store in town. I was by now darn right sick of the homemade dresses my mother sewed from feed sacks. Yes, clothes were a focus of mine in those days. I was a teenager, after all.

In the fall of my ninth-grade year, I fell in love with the outfit of all outfits. I pined away for one thing more than anything else: a cheerleading outfit. I’d tried out for the squad with Sandra, and I made the cut. I was so thrilled, I actually thought my whole life was going to change for the better, until I realized I had no way to get to the evening basketball games and the outfit would cost a whopping $25.

Mama didn’t drive, but that didn’t really matter because Daddy needed the car to get to work every night anyway. But even that wasn’t the point. Neither of them had ever set foot in school, so there was no reason to think they’d do so now, just because I’d made the cheerleading squad. I finally convinced one of the basketball coaches to pick me up and take me to the games. But when I told my parents at supper that I needed to buy the outfit, Mama about scared me and Daddy to death.

She stopped eating and slapped her hand against the wooden table. “Let me tell you one thing, young lady. My best dress coat didn’t even cost twenty-five dollars! You’re going have to pay for that outfit.”

How could I have forgotten how Mama acted any time I wanted anything? She worried nonstop about whether we had enough money to pay the bills. All her talk made me think we were on the verge of having the lights cut off. If she wasn’t calculating what we needed for next week’s groceries, she was reminiscing about not having any sugar or any paper for the butter during the war rationing. And if it was anybody’s fault, it was Roosevelt’s: Mama blamed him for the Depression and the fact that when Daddy made a dollar a day working in the brickyard, two cents went to Social Security.

That night at supper as I felt the tears fill my eyes, I pictured how the salesman had shown the team the sweaters, how all of us girls fell so hard. We’d never seen anything so glamorous—the dark gold sweater with the purple capital letters
RW
for “Roy Webb” sewn in the middle, the gold silk skirt that flashed purple when you twirled, the delicate beanie to pin in your hair. Until that moment, I’d never wanted anything as much as that cheerleading outfit.

L
ATER, LYING
in bed seething as Granny Mac snored away beside me, I reminded myself that Mama had been through a lot, and my life, cheerleading outfit or not, was roses compared with hers. Of course, being Mama, she rarely talked about her past. That would be a waste of time. I wondered so often what had made her so hard. But the only relic that she’d kept was a tattered Bible with a few funny-spelled names and ghostly dates scribbled in light pencil inside the cover.

It was only Granny Mac, Daddy’s mother, who liked to tell stories about her past. But whenever she’d launch into one about my father’s family, Mama hushed her. All I knew about Granny Mac
herself was that she grew up an orphan in Georgia. I looked over at her sleeping peacefully and wished she were awake to distract me from my anger and my aching want.

She’d found another way to use her storytelling skills, and she loved to do so when it was pitch-dark outside. Her dark Indian eyes would glitter in the bedroom we shared, her long black hair flowing loosely, freed from the braided bun she wore during the day, as she told me ghost story after ghost story. She about kept me from ever going to sleep with all those stories. There was the one about the murdered man whose blood seeped down the walls of the house when it rained. But the worst story was her favorite one, about the pig who dragged a baby under our house and ate it. As I’d slide under my quilt, she’d tell me to be still and listen. Didn’t I hear that baby screaming under our room? It never occurred to me to ask whose baby it was or whether or not anyone ever came looking for it.

I hated that story, maybe in part because it reminded me in some strange way of another family story that was rarely spoken of, this one involving me: how I almost tore Mama in two when I was born and almost died myself. I first heard the story as I lay waiting for sleep on a pallet with the other children on the farm in Alpine, Alabama, where Aunt Lucille had taken us to pick scuppernongs, a type of muscadine grape. Behind the thin bedsheet hanging between the kitchen and the main room, Aunt Lucille told the other women about Mama being in labor for three days, my daddy unable to do anything but smoke and cry in the barn. Even with the help of two doctors and a nurse, we almost didn’t make it. Aunt Lucille said my face was bruised and my body crooked. Many years later, I asked Mama about it. She only said that during labor her bones wouldn’t separate. According to Aunt Lucille, Mama’s body was so torn up, she wasn’t able to have more children. That would explain why I was an only child.

Sometimes when Mama looked at me with that look of sour disapproval—like she did that night at dinner—I thought that
maybe she’d never forgiven me for denying her more babies. I’d also wonder if she ever got over the time I almost burned her up. Mama had grabbed a piece of black coal I’d gotten hold of as a baby, and her skirt brushed against the smoldering coals in the fireplace. Fire blazed up her back. Daddy tried to put it out, but her whole backside burned. They couldn’t afford a doctor, so he just bandaged her up. Whenever I saw the scars, I wanted to peel the scablike skin off her back to reveal the unharmed flesh underneath, which I imagined would be as pure and smooth as the white trunk of a sycamore tree.

On the rare occasion when my mother did talk about her family, it was clear that she’d had to carry too big a burden as a young girl. Her mother, Lillie (my namesake), was part Cherokee, a petite woman with a powerful touch, known for her herbal remedies and giving ease to women in labor with the tea she mixed from the roots of cotton plants. But when she came down with cancer, my grandmother couldn’t heal herself, and died young. This left Mama to care for her four brothers, and for this reason, she never made it past the sixth grade in school.

Although Mama didn’t grumble about what happened to her, she did judge the world with a harsh eye. I can’t tell you how many times I heard Daddy whisper, “Hush now, Edna, that’s not our business,” before he took a cigarette from the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket and lit it.

Mama had the right way to snap beans, the right way to bake a coconut cake, piece a quilt, milk a cow, and break a chicken’s neck. Whenever Granny Mac cooked supper, Mama made a comment: The sweet potatoes were too sweet, the meat too salty. Every night after supper, Granny Mac cleaned up the kitchen. And every night my mother came right behind her and cleaned the kitchen again. No one else could keep the kitchen as spotless as it was supposed to be.

Sweet Granny Mac claimed she was hard of hearing and
pretended not to hear Mama’s put-downs. She went about her business, smiling and accepting things as they were, and never stood up to Mama. Maybe Granny Mac just didn’t want to be orphaned again. (And she never was; years later when Granny Mac was sick and dying, Mama took care of her like she had her own mother, changing her diapers and bathing her from head to toe.)

That night, as I went to sleep still seething with a sense of unfairness and aching for that darn cheerleader’s outfit, I tried to remind myself that Mama had her reasons to be tough. And, hard as it was, I forced myself to remember the times she’d been kind. I thought about when I’d contracted yellow jaundice from the contaminated water at school and been laid up for months, how she’d tended to me. I would get the chills all the time, and Mama seemed to sense when the cold came over me and gently wrapped my feet with a warm blanket she’d heated by the stove each night. Sometimes when she finished, she sat silent for a minute at the foot of my bed, her hand resting on my bundled feet. But I knew I couldn’t expect her to understand what I was feeling now—how badly I wanted to step beyond my life as it was and into a new club where cheers and champions and a beautiful outfit awaited me. Feelings were luxuries for rich people. And the words “I want” were just not in her vocabulary.

S
O THE
next weekend I picked cotton with Louise, trying to earn some money toward the outfit. The strap from the cotton sack might as well have been a snake around my neck. I remember saying to Louise, out of nowhere, “When I grow up, I’ll never pick another piece of cotton again.” Louise laughed, her face red and sweaty in the bright sunlight. I guess I’d said it before, but that fall day, everything felt different. I stood for a minute, looking at the spot where a hawk had been moments before, yearning to fly out of that field with him.

From across the field Mama yelled at me to quit daydreaming. So I picked a boll and stuffed it into my sack, flecks of red from my bleeding hands trailing across it. Louise’s stooped figure moved in the row ahead of me. Behind her, every once in a while a piece of forgotten cotton fluttered above the bare stalks. Bending over, the sun beating on my back, I felt my promise in my bones. I wasn’t going to be like Mama, stuck in the same place I grew up. I wasn’t going to live like this forever. I was going somewhere special. I knew it like you know the wind is blowing even though it’s invisible.

I finally did find a way to finish paying for the cheerleader’s outfit when the squad sponsored a bake sale at the Halloween carnival and we all split the money. Scrounging up a way to keep my dream alive, I realized that whatever I wanted I had to make happen. I also discovered that refusing to take no for an answer can help make the impossible possible.

—S
IR
J
OHN
V
ANBRUGH

T
HE FIRST
time I saw Charles I was in ninth grade. As I boarded the school bus that day, I was struck by the handsome driver with the sharp blue eyes and easy, wide smile. In fact, I was smitten. Now I had a whole new subject to study on the way to and from school. The regular driver, Charles’s father, had found full-time carpentry work, and so Charles, a high school senior, replaced him, driving the bus for the rest of the year. Since my stop was the first on Charles’s route, I was always the first on the bus. Once those doors closed behind me, I wouldn’t even sit down. I’d drape myself over the metal bar next to Charles and start talking. As we bounced over the rocky dirt road in the early morning, I’d often interrupt our conversation with a playful “Watch out for the pothole!”