Grace and Grit (9 page)

When the state auditor who visited our office regularly recommended me for a position at an accounting firm in Gadsden, I took it. After a short stint there—I got tired of my paycheck bouncing—I became the officer manager at a small gynecologists’ office. My most challenging task, besides typing on a broken typewriter, was stocking up on boxes of Zest crackers and gigantic jars of pickles each month.

Hoping to go back full-time when the economy picked up, I also moonlighted at H&R Block. The doctors’ office just wasn’t for me, in more ways than one: I knew I was in the wrong place when they offered to perform a hysterectomy on me. Like the other
women in the office, the doctors told me, I could keep the insurance check when it arrived, pocketing the much-needed few hundred dollars, in exchange for letting them sharpen their surgery skills. I was hard up for cash but not desperate enough to give away a perfectly good uterus.

Before long, I was talking to a friend at church and found out about an opening at Jacksonville State University in the financial aid office. I wasted no time pursuing the job. At the end of the interview, the financial aid director, Larry, a lanky guy with a mustache, told me, “You’ve got my vote. Now my wife and secretary just have to approve.” An easygoing, kind woman, his wife warned me that working with Larry would be like walking on eggshells, since he had low blood sugar. As his assistant, I got along with him just fine. Whenever he’d get really cranky, he’d pull a boiled egg from his coat pocket, or as if he were a magician, a sausage biscuit would appear out of nowhere. Most of the time he just paced the office eating spoonfuls of peanut butter from the largest jar I’d ever seen.

The day I started work, I walked onto campus thinking about what my life would have been like had I gone there, if only my mother had let me earn college credit my senior year. I didn’t dwell on it too much. In my own way, I’d gotten to college after all. Working on campus and helping eager, grateful students in need go to college was something I looked forward to daily.

Unfortunately, without my own college degree, I could only achieve so much financial success at the university. After I’d been working with Larry for three years, H&R Block contacted me, as I’d hoped, to become the district manager for the Anniston office when my old manager left. By then H&R Block had around seven thousand offices and opened a new office seemingly every minute. The pay was double my university salary, and as much as I enjoyed helping students and appreciated the academic setting, I had to move on.

I returned to H&R Block in 1976 and stayed there until 1979,
in the end managing fourteen offices. One busy morning as I was reading
Business Week
, I was struck by an article about Goodyear. Just as the technology behind making tires was changing with the newly constructed radial-tire plant built in 1976, so, too, was management philosophy; it was now emphasizing a team approach.

I thought about the stories I heard growing up, the bloody tales of violence between union men and management. They were legendary, like the well-known local ghost stories. I remembered Aunt Robbie talking about her own uncle, who went into hiding during a strike to keep from being killed. My uncles had often referred to “the reign of terror,” the time before World War II when workers tried to unionize and labor organizers were beaten viciously on the main street in the middle of the day. According to the article, times had changed.

I finished the article and held the magazine in my lap, considering, for the first time, the real possibility of working at Goodyear—the article had also said that women were becoming part of this new management team. I had no idea what went on behind those redbrick walls sprawling for acres next to the Coosa River. How a tire was actually made was beyond my comprehension. I thought about my friend Sandra wearing a different sweater set every day and the beach vacations and shiny Mercurys Goodyear provided her and her family. Maybe working at Goodyear could give me that stability I needed for the rest of my working life. I’d started late, entering the workforce when I was thirty-one, and I’d gone as far as I could at H&R Block without moving to another state.

One of my most pressing concerns was college tuition now that Vickie was almost halfway through college at Jacksonville State University. Seeing both Vickie and Phillip successfully attend college was one of my greatest dreams, and I’d cashed out my retirement each time I’d made a job change to create a college savings plan.

For a while, I’d been worried that Vickie was headed down the
wrong path and wouldn’t even make it as the first person in our family to go to college. She’d been such a well-behaved young girl, but she’d started hanging with a rough crowd about the time she learned how to drive. Her teen years had certainly put a strain on Charles and me. She and her friends would do things like get one friend’s little dog drunk. Thank goodness, by the time she graduated from high school, she’d finally settled down. I couldn’t help but feel that my work-induced absence partly caused her rebellion. Maybe she’d been too responsible too young and wanted freedom from the burden of being such a good and helpful child. Now in her second year of college, she was serious about her studies, and too busy working part-time at the Dairy Dip (and as a receptionist at my office during tax season) to get into too much trouble. I wanted to make sure she would have whatever she needed to keep her life on track.

As I approached forty-one, I was also beginning to realize that life was moving faster than I’d planned. There was only so much time left to accomplish what needed to get done—to establish a greater sense of security for my family. Phillip would be in college soon, and I still needed to build a good retirement. I felt I wouldn’t have many more chances left to achieve a certain degree of professional success. The youthful luxury of imagining I had all the time in the world to get it right was long gone. Facing the last half of my life, I understood how important the choices I made were.

I’d also been taken off guard by Edna’s recent diagnosis of mouth cancer during the summer. Considering that my grandmother Lillie had died young from cancer, Edna was convinced she was also going to die. After the woman behind the Merle Norman counter told her they didn’t have any makeup to cover her sallow complexion, Edna liked to say, “Don’t worry about buying me anything—I won’t be living by the time Christmas comes.”

In light of the fact that she’d had colon cancer ten years earlier, the diagnosis wasn’t surprising. She’d also dipped snuff and smoked
all her life. She never understood why when we’d moved into our new house in town, I made her stand on the front step to smoke; one reason was that I’d had enough of customers blowing smoke in my face all day at the office, but I also hated the stale smell of cigarette smoke clinging to my upholstered furniture.

What didn’t make sense was the idea of burying my mother. In her late fifties, she was too young, and I wasn’t ready to stand at her graveside. As difficult as she could be to deal with, the idea of life without Edna gave me a strange sense of vertigo. Now, as I saw what Edna called “liver spots” beginning to appear on the back of my hands, I felt the inevitable limitations of time constricting me as surely as the small wrinkles punctuating my knuckles like parentheses. My aging alarmed me.

I
PLACED
the magazine on my desk, planning to take it home and show Charles. Just thinking about the fact that Goodyear was hiring female managers for the first time in the history of the company gave me goose bumps. I rubbed my arms and relished what felt like a door opening when I’d thought for sure, at this point in my life, the doors were only closing.

Charles seemed surprised when I informed him of my decision to apply for a position at Goodyear. I took a personal day and put in my application anyway. As I sat in the human resources office filling out the endless forms, I read the plaque that hung on the wall in front of me. I mouthed the Vince Lombardi quotation engraved in gold to myself:
FOOTBALL IS A LOT LIKE LIFE; IT REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE, SELF-DENIAL, HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, DEDICATION, AND RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY
. It made sense to me. If that was what was required to work there, I was ready. A signed picture of coach Bear Bryant hung next to the plaque. I couldn’t wait to tell Charles—when Phillip was born on the same day as “the Bear,” he couldn’t have been more tickled.

After the long interview, I wondered how many other women
had applied. The only women I’d seen so far were secretaries in the front offices where I’d submitted my application, but I knew Aunt Robbie had worked there. One time when I was a little girl, I’d asked her what she did. She laughed at first. Then she said she’d started in shipping, where she “cut the tits off tires,” meaning, she finally explained, that she sliced the thin rubber protrusions off. I thought about her wielding a razor with the same hands she used for knitting and tatting. Aunt Robbie had been hired during World War II, when women manned the plant, making jeep tires, rubber soles for shoes, raincoats, and anything else the military needed. Even after the men returned from war, she managed to stay—refusing, she told me, to accept Goodyear’s offer in 1960 to buy her a brand-new house if she’d take early retirement. By then, she and Uncle Howard had built their own nice house with a swimming pool. She worked at Goodyear for twenty-seven years, until heart problems and a back injury forced her to retire.

Leaving the plant after my interview, I passed photographs of the men from “Mahogany Row” in Akron, Ohio, lining the paneled hallway—the same men whose biographies I had no idea I’d be memorizing soon. I stopped for a minute and took a deep breath, staring at the black-and-white portraits of these men who exuded such a sense of power. I tried to imagine their lives: how it felt to run a corporation, travel the world, and dine at the country club. It was a life about which I could only fantasize. At least I had this chance to make my life better—a chance I’d never believed possible as a child.

On the way home I stopped to check on my mother. Blocking the doorway, she was dressed in her housecoat, her dentures still sitting in their usual spot on her bathroom sink now that her mouth was too sore for her to wear them. I announced that I’d applied to work as a manager at Goodyear. She didn’t offer to let me in but cut her sharp eyes at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be doing what a woman’s supposed to do?”

My shoulders tightened. A familiar feeling of frustration flooded my stomach. No matter how old I was, it always snuck up on me when something Edna said hurt my feelings. Throughout my life there had remained something stuck between us, something as elemental as two charged electrons repelling each other. It wasn’t one particular thing she did or said but the accumulation of all of the small things: the hard look that could stare a hole right through you, the critical tone of voice, the wall she erected between herself and the rest of the world even though she was always doing for others—myself and the children included.

Vickie was the one who got the best of Edna those early years of her childhood when she and Phillip stayed with her on the farm in the summer while I worked at H&R Block. She was so good to Vickie, I’d have to remind her that she had two grandchildren. When the children became more independent, I’d go through phases of distancing myself from Edna, being too busy with work, even when she and my father moved a stone’s throw away after Papa died. I’d often fooled myself into thinking that I no longer cared whether or not I measured up in her eyes, yet here I was again, returning to her doorstep, seeking her recognition.

When Edna finally decided to invite me in, I didn’t stay. I searched for my car keys in my purse and told her to get some rest. She looked tired. It was clear she didn’t feel well. Besides, I was too old for such childish nonsense, and I knew enough to recognize and accept that Edna was doing the best she could, as she always had. Really, how could I fault her if she didn’t know how to love me the way I wanted, if she never once said the words “I love you”? How could I blame her for only knowing how to survive by freezing her feelings, playing dead like a possum? It was the one thing I’d learned to do best, and it’s what would keep me alive during the hard times waiting for me just around the corner at Goodyear.

—C
HARLES
G
OODYEAR

W
HEN
I started training at Goodyear, I joined the stream of workers driving to Gadsden before each shift. A small city on the Coosa River, Gadsden is circled by hills brimming with iron ore, coal, and limestone—the three ingredients necessary for making steel. Generation after generation of families had migrated from the surrounding foothills to find a better way of life at Republic Steel (the heart of this industrial city) and smaller factories, producing everything from wire to stovepipes. When Goodyear opened its doors in 1929, men from small bluffs and hollows named Gnatville and Turkeytown had a new opportunity to earn what seemed like a fortune, compared with their fathers, who had made only pennies a day farming. At that time, President Hoover had actually pushed a button at the White House to raise the American flag at the plant.