by Richard Ford
The act and practice of considering my mother’s life is, of course, an act of love. And my incomplete memory of it, my inadequate relation to the facts, should not be thought incomplete love. I loved my mother the way a happy child does, thoughtlessly and without doubts. And when I became an adult and we were adults who knew one another, we regarded each other highly; could say “I love you” when it seemed necessary to clarify our dealings, but without pausing over it. That seems perfect to me now and did then, too.
My mother’s life I am forced to piece together. We were not a family for whom history had much to offer. This fact must have to do with not being rich, or with being rural, or incompletely educated, or just inadequately aware of many things. For my mother there was simply little to history, no heroics or self-dramatizing— just small business, forgettable residues, some of them mean. The Depression had something to do with it, too. My mother and father were people who lived for each other and for the day. In the thirties, after they were married, they lived, in essence, on the road. They drank some. They had a good time. They felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.
My father’s family came from Ireland and were Protestants. This was in the 1870s, and an ocean divided things. But about my mother’s early life I don’t know much. I don’t know where her father came from, or if he too was Irish, or Polish. He was a carter, and my mother spoke affectionately about him, if elliptically and without a sense of responsibility to tell anything at all. “Oh,” she would say, “my daddy was a good man.” And that was it. He died of cancer in the 1930s, I think, but not before my mother had been left by her mother and had lived with him a time. This was before 1920. My sense is that they lived—daughter and father—in the country, back near where she was born—rural again—and that to her it had been a good time. As good as any. I don’t know what she was enthusiastic for then, what her thoughts were. I cannot hear her voice from that time long ago, though I would like to be able to.
Of her mother there is much to say—a story of a kind. She was from the country, with brothers and sisters. There was Indian blood on that side of the family, though it was never clear what tribe of Indian. I know nothing about her parents, though I have a picture of my great-grandmother and my grandmother with her new, second husband, sitting in an old cartage wagon, and my mother in the back. My great-grandmother is old then, witchy looking; my grandmother, stern and pretty in a long beaver coat; my mother, young, with piercing dark eyes aimed to the camera.
At some point my grandmother had left her husband and taken up with the younger man in the picture—a boxer and roustabout. A pretty boy. Slim and quick and tricky. “Kid Richard” was his ring name. (I, oddly enough, am his namesake.) This was in Fort Smith now. Possibly 1922. My grandmother was older than Kid Richard, whose real name was Bennie Shelley. And to quickly marry him and keep him, she lied about her age, took a smooth eight years off, and began to dislike having her pretty daughter— my mother—around to date her.
And so for a period—everything in her life seemed to happen for a period and never for long—my mother was sent to live at the Convent School of St. Ann’s, also in Fort Smith. It must’ve seemed like a good idea to her father up in the country, because he paid her tuition, and she was taught by nuns. I don’t exactly know what her mother—whose name was Essie or Lessie or just Les—did during that time, maybe three years. She was married to Bennie Shelley, who was from Fayetteville and had family there. He worked as a waiter, and then in the dining-car service on the Rock Island. This meant living in El Reno and as far out the line as Tucumcari, New Mexico. He quit boxing, and my grandmother ruled him as strictly as she could because she felt she could go a long way with him. He was her last and best choice for something. A ticket out. To where, I’m not sure.
My mother often told me that she’d liked the sisters of St. Ann’s. They were strict. Imperious. Self-certain. Dedicated. Humorous. It was there, I think, as a boarding student, that my mother earned what education she ever did—the ninth grade, where she was an average good student and was liked, though she smoked cigarettes and was punished for it. I think if she had never told me about the nuns, if that stamp on her life hadn’t been made, I might never have ordered even this much of things. St. Ann’s cast a shadow into later life. In her heart of hearts my mother was a secret Catholic. A forgiver. A respecter of rituals and protocols. Reverent about the trappings of faith; respecter of inner disciplines. All I think about Catholics I think because of her, who was never one at all, but who lived among them at an early age and seemingly liked what she learned and those who taught her. Later in life, when she had married my father and gone to meet his mother, she would always feel she was thought of as a Catholic and that his family never truly took her in as they might have another girl.
But when her father, for reasons I know nothing about, stopped her tuition, her mother—now demanding they be known as sisters—took her out of St. Ann’s. And that was it for school, forever. She was not a welcome addition to her mother’s life, and I have never known why they took her back. It is just one of those inexplicable acts that mean everything.
They moved around. To K.C. To El Reno again. To Davenport and Des Moines—wherever the railroad took Ben Shelley, who was going forward in the dining-car service and turning himself into a go-getter. In time, he would leave the railroad and go to work as a caterer at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs. And there he put my mother to work in the cigar shop, where a wider world opened an inch. People from far away were here for the baths, Jews from Chicago and New York. Foreigners. Rich people. She met baseball players, became friends with Dizzy Dean and Leo Durocher. And during that time, sometime when she was seventeen, she must’ve met my father.
I, of course, know nothing about their courtship except that it took place—mostly in Little Rock, probably in 1927. My father was twenty-three. He worked as a produce stocker for a grocery concern there. I have a picture of him with two other young clerks in a grocery store. He is wearing a clean, white apron and a tie, and is standing beside a bin of cabbages. I don’t even know where this is. Little Rock. Hot Springs—one of these. It is just a glimpse. What brought him down from the country to Little Rock I’ll never know, nor what he might’ve had on his mind then. He died in 1960, when I was only sixteen. And I had not by then thought to ask.
But I have thought of them as a young couple. My mother, black-haired, dark-eyed, curvaceous. My father, blue-eyed like me, big, gullible, honest, gentle. I can think a thought of them together. I can sense what they each must’ve sensed pretty fast— here was a good person, suddenly. My mother knew things. She had worked in hotels, been to boarding school and out. Lived in cities. Traveled some. But my father was a country boy who quit school in the seventh grade. The baby of three children, all raised by their mother—the sheltered son of a suicide. I can believe my mother wanted a better life than working for her ambitious step-father and contrary mother, at jobs that went no place; that she may have believed she’d not been treated well, and thought of her life as “rough”; that she was tired of being her mother’s sister; that it was a strange life; that she was in danger of losing all expectation; that she was bored. And I can believe my father simply saw my mother and wanted her. Loved her. And that was how that went.
They were married in Morrilton, Arkansas, by a justice of the peace, in 1928, and arrived at my father’s home in Atkins the next morning, newlyweds. I have no correct idea what anyone thought or said about any of that. They acted independently, and my mother never felt the need to comment. Though my guess is they heard disapproval.
I think it is safe to say my parents wanted children. How many they wanted or how soon after they were married I do not know. But it was their modest boast that my father had a job throughout the Depression. And I think there was money enough. They lived in Little Rock, and for a while my father worked as a grocer, and then, in 1932, he was fired, and went to work selling starch for a company out of Kansas City. The Faul
tless Company. Huey Long had worked for them, too. It was a traveling job, and most of the time they just traveled together. New Orleans. Memphis. Texarkana. They lived in hotels, spent their off-hours and off-days back in Little Rock. But mostly they traveled. My father called on groceries, wholesalers, prisons, hospitals, conducted schools for newlyweds on how to starch clothes without boiling the starch. My mother, typically, never characterized that time except to say he and she had “fun” together—that was her word for it—and had begun to think they couldn’t have a child. No children. I do not even know if that mattered so much. It was not their way to fight fate, but to see life as okay. This time lasted fifteen years. An entire life lived then. A loose, pick-up-and-go life. Drinking. Cars. Restaurants. Not paying much attention. There were friends they had in New Orleans, Memphis, in Little Rock, and on the road. They made friends of my grandmother and Bennie, who was not much older than my father—four years, at most. I think they were just caught up in their life, a life in the South, in the thirties, just a kind of swirling thing that didn’t really have a place to go. There must’ve been plenty of lives like that then. It seems a period now to me. A specific time, the Depression. But to them, of course, it was just their life.
Something about that time—to my mother—must’ve seemed unnarratable. Unworthy of or unnecessary for telling. My father, who was not a teller of stories anyway, never got a chance to recall it. And I, who wasn’t trained to want the past filled in—as some boys are—just never asked. It seemed a privacy I shouldn’t invade. And I know that my mother’s only fleeting references to that time, as if the thirties were just a long weekend—drinking too much, wildness, rootlessness—gave me the impression something possibly untidy had gone on, some recklessness of spirit and attitude below the level of evil, but something that a son would be better off not to think about and be worried with. In essence, it had been their time, for their purposes and not mine. And it was over.
But looked at from the time of my birth, 1944, all that life lived childless, unexpectant, must’ve come to seem an odd time to her; a life encapsulatable, possibly even remembered unclearly, pointless, maybe in comparison to the pointedness of a life with a child. Still, an intimacy established between the two of them that they brought forward into more consequential life—a life they had all but abandoned any thought of because no children had come.
All first children, and certainly all only children, date the beginning of their lives as extra-special events. For my parents my arrival came as a surprise and coincident with the end of World War II—the event that finished the thirties in this country. And it came when my mother had been married to my father fifteen years; when, in essence, their young life was over. He was thirty-nine. She was thirty-three. They, by all accounts, were happy to have me. It may have been an event that made their life together seem conventional for once, that settled them, made them think about matters their friends had thought about years ago. Staying put. The future.
They had never owned a house or a car, although my father’s job gave him a company car. They had never had to choose a “home,” a place to be in permanently. But now, they did. They moved from Little Rock down to Mississippi, to Jackson, which was the geographic center of my father’s territory and a place he could return most weekends with ease, since my mother wouldn’t be going with him now. There was going to be a baby.
They knew no one in Jackson except the jobbers my father had called on and a salesman or two he knew off the road. I’m not sure, but I think it was not an easy transition. They rented and then bought a brick duplex next to a school. They joined a church. Found a grocery. A bus stop—though you could walk to the main street in Jackson from 736 North Congress. Also to the library and the capitol building. They had neighbors—older citizens, established families hanging on to nicer, older, larger houses in a neighborhood that was itself in transition. This was life now, for them. My father went off to work Monday morning and came back Friday night. He had never exactly done that before, but he liked it, I think. One of my earliest memories is of him moving around the sunny house on Monday mornings, whistling a tune.
And so what my beginning life was was this. A life spent with my mother—a shadow in a picture of myself. Days. Afternoons. Nights. Walks. Meals. Dressing. Sidewalks. The movies. Home. Radio. And on the weekend, my father. A nice, large, sweet man who visited us. Happy to come home. Happy to leave.
Between them, I don’t know what happened. But given their characters, my best belief is that nothing did. That their life changed radically, that I was there, that the future meant something different, that there was apparently no talk of other children, that they saw far less of each other now—all meant almost nothing to how they felt about each other, or how they registered how they felt. Neither of them was an inquirer. They did not take their pulse much. Psychology was not a science they practiced. They found, if they had not known it before, that they’d signed on for the full trip. They saw life going this way now and not that way. They loved each other. They loved me. Nothing much else mattered.
I don’t think my mother longed for a fulfilling career or a more active public life. I don’t think my father had other women on the road. I don’t think the intrusion of me into their lives was anything they didn’t think of as normal and all right. I know from practice that it is my habit to seek the normal in life, to look for reasons to believe this or that is fine. In part, that is because my parents raised me that way and lived lives that portrayed a world, a private existence, that could be that way. I do not think even now, in the midst of my own life’s concerns, that it is a bad way to see things.
So then, the part of my life that has to do with my mother.
The first eleven years—the Korean War years, Truman and Eisenhower, television, bicycles, one big snowstorm in 1949—we lived on North Congress Street, down a hill from the state capitol and across from the house where Eudora Welty had been a young girl thirty-five years before. Next door to Jefferson Davis School. I remember a neighbor stopping me on the sidewalk and asking me who I was; this was a thing that could happen to you. Maybe I was nine or seven then. But when I said my name—Richard Ford—she said, “Oh, yes. Your mother is the cute little black-headed woman up the street.” And that affected me and still does. I think this was my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered: a cute woman, which she was not. Black-haired, which she was. She was, I know, five feet five inches tall. But I never have known if that is tall or short. I think I must have always believed it was normal. I remember this, though, as a signal moment in my life. Small but important. It alerted me to my mother’s—what?—public side. To the side that other people saw and dealt with and that was there. I do not think I ever thought of her in any other way after that. As Edna Ford, a person who was my mother and also who was someone else. I do not think I ever addressed her after that except with such a knowledge—the way I would anyone I knew.
It is a good lesson to learn. And we risk never knowing our parents if we ignore it. Cute, black-headed, five-five. Some part of her was that, and it didn’t harm me to know it. It may have helped, since one of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents, assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing, and it is physically possible. This is a part of normal life. And the more we see them fully, as the world sees them, the better all our chances are.
About my mother I do not remember more than pieces up until the time I was sixteen: 1960, a galvanizing year for us both— the year my father woke up gasping on a Saturday morning and died before he could get out of bed; me up on the bed with him, busy trying to find something to help. Shake him. Yell in his sleeping face. Breathe in his soft mouth. Turn him over onto his belly, for some reason. Feeling terror and chill. All this while she stood in the doorway to his bedroom in our new house in the suburbs of Jackson, pushing her knuckles into her temples, becoming hysterical. Eventually she just lost her control for a while.
I remember my mother having a hysterectomy and my grandfather, Ben Shelley, joking about it—to her—about what good “barbers” the nuns at St. Dominic’s had been. That made her cry.
I remember once in the front yard on Congress Street something happened, something I said or did—I don’t know what— but my mother began running out across the schoolyard next door. Just running away. I remember that scared me and I yelled at her, “No,” and halfway across she stopped and came back. I’ve never known how serious she was about that, but I have understood from it that there might be reasons to run off. Alone, with a small child, knowing no one. That’s enough.
There were two fights they had that I was present for. One on St. Louis Street, in the French Quarter in New Orleans. It was in front of Antoine’s Restaurant, and I now think they were both drunk, though I didn’t know it, or even know what drunk was. One wanted to go in the restaurant and eat. The other didn’t and wanted to go back to the hotel around the corner. This was in 1955. I think we had tickets to the Sugar Bowl—Navy vs. Ole Miss. They yelled at each other, and I think my father yanked her arm, and they walked back separately. Later we all got in bed together in the Monteleone Hotel and no one stayed mad. In our family no one ever nagged or held grudges or stayed mad, though we could all get mad.