by Sissy Spacek
McDade’s was where we bought our blue jeans. I was so small I stood on a cardboard box to try them on. My brothers got jeans with zippers; I got elastic waists. This was when I first realized that life was not always fair.
My brothers and I were very close growing up spite the fact that I was a girl. All I wanted was to be like Ed and Robbie; I idolized them. After he outgrew it, I inherited Ed’s gray felt cowboy hat and wore it sideways. It ended up so shapeless you couldn’t tell what it was, but I loved it anyway because it was his.
Once, when I was four, we were playing football in the front yard. It was summertime, and we were all hot and sweaty, so we took our T-shirts off. My mother came outside and told me to put my shirt back on.
“Why?” I said.
“Because you’re a girl.”
That double standard did not sit well with me. I did not like wearing frilly dresses. I wasn’t even that interested in dolls; I cut the hair off of the one fancy Madame Alexander doll my mother gave me. We used another one for target practice. I just wanted to do what my brothers were doing.
Then one of my uncles told me if I could kiss my elbow, I’d turn into a boy.
I spent a lot of my childhood trying to kiss my elbow.
For years, until Daddy built an addition to the house, I shared a bedroom with my brothers. I had a lot of friends, but Ed and Robbie wouldn’t allow girls to come over to play very often, especially if they were “sissy” girls. You had to be tough to keep up with my brothers. Of course, sometimes it backfired on me. When I was in grade school, a boy in my class dropped a rock on my head from the top of the tallest slide. I was still seeing stars when the teachers came running and I heard one of them ask the boy, “Now, why in the world would you drop a rock on Sissy’s head?”
“’Cause I like her,” he said.
My brothers and I were inseparable. I tagged along with Robbie, and he tagged along with Ed. When Mother asked us what we wanted for lunch, I’d say, “I don’t know. What’s Ed having?” “I don’t know. What’s Robbie having?” And Robbie would say, “I don’t know. What’s Ed having?” Pretty soon she realized she only needed to ask Ed. Robbie and I weren’t always that much fun for our big brother, but he was a patient, sensitive boy and he took good care of us, in spite of the embarrassment of having his little brother and sister around all the time.
Robbie was a beautiful, sunny child with olive skin, light hair, and a wide-open smile. When he was born, my mother said he looked up into her eyes so deeply that it frightened her. There was always something special about him, but his good nature didn’t keep us from fighting. We’d have some real knock-down, drag-outs. Once my mother caught him hitting me in the stomach. “Robbie, you can’t hit Sissy there!” she said. She pointed to my leg, arm, and backside. “If you want to hit her, hit her here.”
Parents in those days didn’t think their children were too fragile for a few lumps. One morning my mother looked out the window and saw our neighbor Bev Benton’s two-year-old, wearing nothing but diapers and crawling on the roof of their two-story house. Some workers had left a ladder leaning against the siding, and Matt went exploring. Mother was terrified and called her friend right away.
“Bev, Matt’s up on the roof!”
“Oh, thanks, Gin,” said Bev.
Then Mother watched from across the street as Bev calmly put down the phone, leaned her head out the window, and shouted, “Matt, you come down off that roof right now! You’re gonna make it leak!”
I’m sure that story spread all over town before the two women had hung up. In the 1950s, Quitman still had party lines and a central telephone operator named Ganelle Rushing. She was a friendly, portly young woman who worked out of a concrete building next to the dentist’s office. She was command central and knew everything that was going on in town. When I was little, I’d pick up the phone and hear her say, “Number please?”
“Ganelle, do you know where my mama is?”
“Well, Sissy, let me think,” Ganelle might say. “I believe she’s over at Susan’s. Let me check.” And I’d hear her talking on another line, “Miz Merritt? Is Gin over there? Sissy’s looking for her mama…”
Quitman didn’t need a 911 center; we had Ganelle Rushing. Years later, when I played a WW2-era telephone operator in Raggedy Man, Ganelle was my role model, right down to her trilling, “Number please?”
When I was growing up, Gaston Cain was the mayor of Quitman, the fire chief, and the owner of the local insurance company and, with his brother, Zack, the funeral home. He was also the undertaker, and the father of two of my best friends, Pam and Debra. I guess you could say the Cains were the tycoons of our little town, because Zack also had the hardware store, and he and his wife Imogene—pronounced Eyema-jean—owned and operated the town’s only tourist court. It was a one-story, L-shaped motel for the handful of motorist visitors who might be passing through town on the way to somewhere else. All the Cains were hard workers. For years, Imogene cleaned every room of that little motel herself. She also ran a business out back raising chinchillas. Imogene made her own chinchilla collars and jackets and wore them proudly. She was a good friend of my mom’s, and her son, Clifford Zack, was my boyfriend on and off since we were toddlers.
They lived in a big pink brick house on the highway next to the motel. I would play with Cliff or his sister Jeanell if they were around, or I would go outside and visit the chinchillas. They looked like large, furry hamsters with big ears. They were nervous animals that would run around their wire cages and hiss if I got too close. I guess the chinchillas knew what was coming and didn’t see any point in making friends.
One morning my mother and I stopped by for a quick visit on the way back from the store, where she had picked up a whole bunch of hams to cook for the Methodist church supper that evening. Shortly after we arrived, Mother realized she had locked the hams in the trunk of the Buick and dropped the trunk key in there with them. This was an emergency because, it was summertime and that trunk was heating up fast. Without thinking, she hurried off for the car dealership, where they had a big ring of keys that would unlock the trunk—and left me behind.
I saw her pulling away and chased the car for a little while but couldn’t get her attention. I was embarrassed that someone might see me running after my own mother’s car, and I was mortified that she had driven off and forgotten me like that. I could hardly believe it! In my child’s mind, I had been abandoned. I moped around the tourist court for a while, then mustered the courage to knock on Imogene’s door. I called my mother. She was already home.
“Sissy! Where are you?” she cried, as if I was the one who ran off.
“You left me, Mama!”
“Oh, Sissy,” she said. “You’re so dramatic. You should be an actress.”
Maybe we should be careful what we tell our children.
I was my mother’s shadow; I went everywhere with her. Well, almost everywhere. I cried inconsolably when I couldn’t go with her to the swimming pool during an afternoon reserved for grown-up ladies who wanted to visit and swim in peace. I survived, but I’m certain I ruined all of her fun that day. She was very willing to let me into her adult world, even when her girlfriends stopped by for coffee and a chat. I would sit on my stool in that cozy red kitchen, or find a spot to hide under the table, while I listened to the women talk about their families, church, husbands, or any of the things that were happening around town. I can still hear their fluttering laughter and the clink of cups settling into saucers on the tabletop while I studied their shoes and stockings. I felt welcome and included, until one day one of my mother’s good friends, Grace Black, spotted me huddled under the table legs and said, “Sissy, you run on out of here. Your mother and I are talking. I came to see her, not you.” I was grateful that my mother stood up for me that day. She said, “Grace, this is Sissy’s house, too. So if you have something to say that you can’t say in front of her, then maybe it’s best you don’t say it.” (Apparently there were no hard feelin
gs. Years later, Grace Black would be the one heading up the activities at Sissy Spacek Day at the state park in Quitman.)
Mother had lovely manners, which she’d learned from her parents, and she tried her best to pass them on to her own children. But the three of us subscribed to only one table rule—one foot on the floor at all times. Mother would set the table properly for every meal and instruct us on the correct use of silverware, which seemed kind of useless to me. “Why do we have to learn stupid manners?” I’d complain. “It’s just gonna slow us down, and we’re hungry.”
“Because I want you to be able to dine with the President,” she’d say.
“Oh, Mother, that’s crazy.”
But sure enough, an invitation came one day from the White House, and I was ready. Thanks, Mother.
I never heard my mother say a harsh word about anyone. “If they knew better, they’d do better,” she’d always say. She even had kind words for the town drunk, a poor soul who we’d see staggering around town, looking like a bum with his scraggly hair and dirty clothes. “Now, don’t say anything bad about that man,” she told us. “He was a talented young boy who wanted to be a concert pianist, but his parents didn’t support him. Now he’s a drunk and a house painter.” I never looked at a drunk or a house painter quite the same way after that.
Both of my parents were careful with their money, as were most people who grew up during the Depression. My mother could cut up and fry a chicken into so many pieces that you’d think it was a feast for an army. Neither of them wasted money on junk, but they would save up for good-quality things that would last a long time. My dad was a true conservationist, and we were careful not to use more than our share of water and electricity. He did his best to train us to cut off the lights every time we left a room. Years later, the habit landed me in trouble with the director Robert Altman on the set of 3 Women. We were doing a very long scene and I had to walk from room to room while the camera followed me. I was still relatively new to the acting business, and I kept ruining the shot by hitting the light switch every time I walked through a door. After the third or fourth take, Bob was exasperated and wanted to know why I kept doing that.
“I’m sorry!” I told him. “I do it automatically. My father wanted to save money on the electric bill.”
“Well, the next time you see your father, please tell him that he cost me more money in one day of filming than you saved him in a lifetime!”
Daddy earned a modest salary but invested wisely, and we lived a comfortable middle-class life. My brothers and I always got nice presents for our birthdays and Christmas, but never anything extravagant. That made each item more precious.
One present Daddy always bought Mother at Christmastime was beautiful silk underwear from McDade’s. She would pick out exactly what she wanted, then he’d stop by after work to pay for it and have them wrap it up. My brothers and I preferred to do our Christmas shopping at White’s Automotive. Along with the car accessories, White’s had a whole window filled with games, toy trucks, and gift items. One year, Ed and Robbie and I pooled our allowance money to buy one big present for Mother from all three of us. We spent days and weeks staring in that window, trying to decide on the perfect purchase. Finally we settled on a pair of decorative ceramic pheasants. We thought she would just love them. Looking back, they verged on being tacky. But we were so excited to have bought such a big-ticket item that Mother’s present seemed even more important than our own gifts that year. When she opened the package, a look of delight lit up her face. She hugged us all and put those Christmas pheasants in a place of honor on the mantel, where they stayed for the rest of her life.
… 2 …
Every December we would drive down from Quitman to spend the holidays with Mother’s family in the Rio Grande Valley, stopping along the way to visit my dad’s parents in Granger. It was a twelve-hundred-mile round-trip in a 1949 Pontiac with no air-conditioning loaded to bursting with luggage and wrapped presents. It was quite a production with three boisterous kids. I was always carsick, so I was usually allowed to sit up front between my parents and fiddle with the radio dial while the boys rode in the backseat. Whenever my brothers complained about the arrangement, and I sat with them in the back, they quickly regretted it.
There were no interstates then, and we couldn’t make the whole drive without stopping at motels along the way. In the beginning, our parents allowed us to take turns picking out the motels. But one time it was getting late, and Robbie, Ed, and I saw the most incredible place beside the highway. It was the biggest, brightest motel we had ever seen, lit up like a Christmas tree with flashing neon lights. It was so wonderful it might as well have been in Paris, France.
“That one! That one!” we cried.
“I don’t know,” said Daddy. “This doesn’t look like such a good place.”
“No! No! We want that one!”
So in the spirit of fairness and democracy, we checked in. The room was horrible, with threadbare sheets and a dirty bathroom. How could this be? It was so beautiful from the outside. We wanted to move out, but it was too late to find another place to stay. The next morning we walked out into the daylight and saw that the huge motel was just a tiny row of cinder-block rooms; the lights were all fixed to a tall skeleton of scaffolding. From then on, the family rules changed, and our parents got veto power over any motel choice we made.
Our first destination was Granger, a small farming town about fifty miles northeast of Austin, where my father and his brother, Sam, and his sisters, Thelma and Rose, were born and raised. I love the color of yellow wheat against black soil in this part of Texas. The sky is wide and blue, and you can see rain coming from a long way off. The earth is so fertile underfoot that it feels like a living thing. When it’s hot and dry, huge cracks form in the ground. And when it’s wet, the black mud sticks to your feet as you walk around, and you get so tall you feel like you’re wearing stilts.
For outsiders who think that everybody in Texas is a cowboy on a horse named Trigger, towns like Granger would come as a shock. Granger was—and still is—an ethnic oasis, filled with the descendants of Czech and German pioneers who recreated the old country on the blackland prairie. English was rarely spoken in town until the mid-twentieth century. The kids we played with on our visits were named Bartosh, Zelenvitz, Ehlich, Walla, and Mikolencak. Our family came over from Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, along with Slovakia and Bohemia, and people in Granger still pronounce Spacek the traditional way: Spot-check. My dad changed the pronunciation to Spay-sik (like basic) when he was in college. One of his professors just couldn’t get it right and kept calling him Spay-sik; Daddy figured it was easier to change it than to keep correcting people. (Years later, when I met the Czech film director Milos Forman, he insisted on calling me Spacekova—the proper feminine title. I said, “Please, just call me Sissy!”)
Daddy was proud of his ancestry and was a great storyteller. His people were simple, hardworking farmers and merchants who knew the value of a zlaty and felt a strong, almost mystical connection to the land.
The first to arrive in America was my great-grandfather, Frantisek Jan Spacek II, who was thirteen in 1866 when he left his family’s farm in Moravia to sail to Texas. It was a miserable nine-week journey from the port of Bremen to Galveston Bay. The ship was tossed around in terrible storms and everyone on board was seasick. Frantisek later described the giant roaches that swarmed below deck and “flew around like swallows,” dropping into their bowls of rice soup. Finally they reached the Texas coast, and my great-grandfather spent three more days traveling by rail, wagon, and ferry to the small town of Fayetteville, halfway between Houston and Austin. The town was brimming with German and Czech immigrants, who took the boy in and gave him work as a farm laborer. After Frantisek’s mother died two years later, his father and four younger siblings followed him to America.
In 1875, Frantisek married Julia Gloeckner, whom he had met on the long passage from Moravia to Texas. Frantisek flouri
shed in the new world. He opened a grocery store and saloon in Fayetteville, and at one point he had a six-hundred-acre farm, rental properties, a livery stable, and a beer agency. He and his wife had two daughters, Julia and Albina, and three sons, Frank Joseph, Rudolph, and my grandfather, Arnold Adolph, known as AA.
All the Spacek children grew up speaking Czech, German, and English and worked hard to get ahead in the world. AA started out laboring in his father’s grocery store and other businesses, then he went away to an English grammar school to master the language he would need to improve his prospects. In 1905, my grandfather opened a tailor shop in the Czech outpost of Granger, where he met his future bride, Mary Cervenka. He bought a grocery store, traded it for some land in West Texas, and expanded his tailoring business to include the first off-the-rack suits sold in Central Texas. He bought and sold farms and businesses all over the state and helped organize the Granger National Bank in 1920, where his picture hangs to this day.
They still tell the story of how he saved the bank from ruin during the Great Depression. At one time there were three banks in town, but after the stock market crashed in 1929, people lost confidence in the banking system and started pulling out their money. This was before FDIC insurance, and if a bank went bust, you could lose everything. Two Granger banks were wiped out after the farmers demanded to withdraw their savings in cash, on the spot. When AA heard a rumor that there would be a similar run on the National Bank, he decided to take matters into his own hands. The story goes that he rode the train to the federal bank in Houston to withdraw his bank’s cash reserves, returning overnight with armed guards and a carload of money.