by Pat Summitt
—TYLER SUMMITT
I want to make something clear: my father wasn’t an angry man, or unkind, or abusive. He was just weary, and he had a lot on him. The whippings were of the tough love variety; he practiced the generational discipline he had grown up with, of the cut-your-own-switch variety. It was common in our community, and even in our schools, where paddling was regular and widely accepted. To this day, Tennessee is one of nineteen states where disciplinary corporal punishment is still allowed in classrooms.
My father was firm, but he had a giving heart, and he worked himself to the physical breaking point in the fields every day to provide for his family. His hands were brown and stained and the skin was cracked from work, and he limped; he would need two knee replacements by the time he was seventy. He came home at night to a household of five loud, long-limbed, roughhousing kids who at times must have seemed too much to handle. He knew if he didn’t teach us to mind, life would have been unbearable for both him and my mother. Obedience was a matter of self-preservation. Eventually, he didn’t need a belt; all it took was a word or a look from him. That intimidating man could make us straighten up just by the expression in his eye.
We were a wild, brawling brood when Daddy wasn’t looking, and he knew it. The neighbors joked that “hard” should come in front of Head because we were all so stubborn and willful. Tommy was our leader, a young sunburned giant with a shock of blond hair and hands as big and calloused as a man’s, who could take two of us on at once. Charles was smaller, the sweetest and most smiling of us, gap-toothed and good-humored, until he got mad. Kenny was the rebel; he had white-blond hair and ice-cube blue eyes and a talent for needling and surprise attacks. Among the things Kenny liked to do was load me on a forklift—and then hit the drop switch. He’d raise me up and then send me to the ground with a clang. Raise me up, and then whang again, until I cried.
The boys and I would start out wrassling, and pretty soon it would turn into a fight. In which I more than held my own. Once, I kicked a three-foot hole in their bedroom door because Charles was in there on the phone and wouldn’t get off.
Fighting often got you whipped. “You can play all you want, but no fighting,” Daddy said. We fought anyway. We fought with corncobs, firing them at each other like missiles. Kenny and Charles fought so bitterly one afternoon that Kenny threw some hedge clippers at Charles and cut his leg open, leaving a scar. I smacked Kenny with a baseball bat, and he answered by throwing a butcher knife at me that stuck in the kitchen wall.
Smoking got you whipped too, even though we tobacco farmed and it was everywhere. Daddy smoked an occasional cigar, but he told my brothers if he caught them at it, he’d switch them. “Boy, them your cigarettes?” he’d demand. “Naw, sir,” Charles would say. But they were.
My father wasn’t the only one who could give a whipping—Mama delivered a famous one to Tommy when he was seventeen years old, almost a grown man. It started at the table. Tommy said, “Charles, throw me a biscuit.” Charles threw it all right, so hard Tommy couldn’t catch it, and it hit him right between the eyes. Tommy picked it up and threw it back, and all of a sudden there was a food fight. Mother got up from the table, grabbed a belt, and whipped big old Tommy, who just stood there and took it, that’s how much respect he had for her. More important, he understood how much respect my father had for her. “I knew if I didn’t take it, I’d get a worse strap,” Tommy said.
Nothing got you punished quicker than not meeting your responsibilities on the farm. The family came first. Putting food on the table was more important than any hobby or any game you had, and the lessons of that—and the punishments—became core values. Daddy taught us that we were all counted on to share the load: before you did anything else, you had to contribute to the family upkeep. We lived from crop to crop, and we didn’t think of it as work so much as just necessity.
The only day we didn’t work was Sunday; my parents were strict about that. We were in a pew for as long as the doors were open at Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church, where the Heads have attended for over fifty years and my father’s parents had gone before us. There, we learned to worship with a simple gratitude to God and affection for Christ. We were taught that you didn’t talk about faith; you showed it through kindness to neighbors, and humility, the recognition that none of us was more valuable than another. We read words from Ephesians that would stay with me for the rest of my life:
I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned to be both full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (4:11–13).
But even on Sundays the cows still had to be milked, and the chores seemed unending the rest of the week. Tommy was picking up hay by the age of five and earning good money as a hay baler for a combine when he was nine. He got fourteen cents a bale, and three summers in a row he baled at least three thousand bales of hay. Daddy furnished the fuel and the tractor, and Tommy did the work. He earned enough to pay for a new baler and rake in one summer alone. Next, he bought a new cow, and eventually he wound up with four or five of them.
From the time I was small, I wanted to do what my brothers did, so I started setting tobacco at the age of six. I rode with Tommy on the tobacco setter, a machine hooked to a tractor that hauled the young tobacco plants and dug rows for them. Every time it rolled over, we had to place the young plants in holes in the ground. My brother would check my row, and if I didn’t set a plant right, he’d catch it.
“Don’t tell Daddy I missed one,” I whispered.
“You didn’t miss it,” he said. “I got it.”
Tobacco farming was the hardest work I ever did. We’d set from seven in the morning until nine at night. The tobacco plant has deceptively beautiful leaves; in late summer they darken until they’re almost blue tinged with a tropical lushness. But they have to be suckered in August, and chopped out in the early fall, and tied in bundles and hung to cure in the barns, which you do by laying down wood and sawdust and lighting a smoldering fire. After that, you never want to see a tobacco plant again.
I learned hard work never killed anyone—but there were a few days when I thought it would. We would get up at three thirty in the morning to chop tobacco before it got too hot. Then we’d go into the garden to pick okra, which you had to wear long sleeves to do because otherwise the prickles would irritate your skin. Then when it got cooler in the late afternoon, we’d go back to the tobacco fields and chop out some more.
My father put any of my friends who came to visit to work—I guess that’s why they quit coming. The sooner we got done, the sooner we could go play, so everybody just pitched in. I remember once my best friend, Jane Brown, came over and spent the whole day working in the field with me. Finally she got overheated and went back to the house. She staggered inside and lay down on the kitchen floor, because it was the coolest spot she could find. She was still lying there trying to bring her core temperature back to normal, when the kitchen door opened and my father came stamping through in his boots.
Daddy looked at Jane and grunted. He usually grunted more than he talked.
He said, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m tired, that’s what’s wrong,” she said.
Daddy just stepped right over her and walked on. Then he paused.
“You don’t know what tired is, girl,” he said. “You haven’t followed me around all day. Do that, and then say you’re tired.”
But all that work went into building something we were proud of. My parents gradually accumulated livestock and land, until we were farming twelve hundred acres of corn, soybeans, and tobacco, which we sold to the big companies, American Brands or Philip Morris. The dairy barn had grown until there were sixty-four cows that needed milking. Then there were the chickens, a herd of beef cattle, and a pen of hogs that had to be tended.
We raised all our own vegetables in a huge garden, eno
ugh to feed the family and also to sell in the local markets. We grew butterbeans, peas, squash, okra, and tomatoes that my mother made juice out of, which we drank fresh every morning. All the vegetables had to be frozen or put up for the winter, which meant shucking, shelling, soaking, boiling, bagging, and canning. We had a large outdoor freezer full of corn, beans, beef, and pork.
The cows had to be milked twice a day, seven days a week, at five A.M. and again in the evening. That was some of the most physical work. We started out milking by hand, then we bought a gas-powered milker, and finally an electric one, but it was still a big job. The milk went into tall metal cans that weighed about eighty pounds, and you had to lift them and set them down in an industrial cooler that was full of the coldest water you ever felt. Tommy got too hot one day and started splashing himself with that cold water—and staggered. He almost passed out from it.
Eventually, my parents made so much cash from farming that they were able to buy the small country store in Henrietta, which sold dry goods and gas. We stocked the shelves and ran the register and pumped the gas. Eventually they branched out and also opened a small feed mill across the street and sold farm implements.
There was never a day without some kind of heavy lifting. We got off the school bus and went right into the fields, or vegetable rows, or the barns. Some days I might plow. Others I might get on my pony, Billy, and round up the cattle for feeding. The color of the sky didn’t matter; the weather had a lot to do with what needed to be done most urgently. My father would tell us what our job was and then walk away to his own chores. He expected us to get it done without wasting time by standing over us. There was no balking, or dragging, and you knew better than to whine.
We had more responsibilities than other kids, and we knew it. I didn’t particularly like it at the time; I thought I was being tortured. My friends only had to do their homework, and they could go play. But we’d work, and work, and then Daddy would look at the sun and say, “I think we can get another hour in.”
It was partly out of necessity that we worked, but it was also a matter of philosophy for my parents. They didn’t believe kids should be idle, and they thought that farmwork taught a kind of ethics, as well as maturity. You had to take care of things properly so they wouldn’t break, find the right tool for a job, and tend the animals and beasts of burden on a farm before you tended to yourself. My father expected us to act responsibly and to make our own decisions in the fields. If you didn’t know how to do something, like say change a broken blade on a mower, you studied the machinery or the problem and learned for yourself, without pestering him with questions. If you didn’t get it right, he’d say, “Well, Trisha, you know better’n that.”
One afternoon when I was about thirteen, my father drove me out to an immense mown field and told me to rake the hay that was lying on the ground. Sitting there was a tractor with a large metal drag attached to the back. I’d never raked hay into bales before, only seen it done by my brothers.
“Daddy, I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
He just said, “Yeah, you do.”
I stared at the field and the machinery doubtfully and looked back at him.
That’s when he said, “You won’t learn any younger.”
Then he wordlessly got back in his truck and drove off, leaving me there. He just expected me to work it out for myself and get it done. For the next six hours, I was alone in the field. I motored back and forth learning to drag the rake so it would work through the hay, and then flipped it over and dragged the other way, until it was in neat piles. I figured out quick that driving in circles didn’t get the job done.
When my father finally reappeared, I was terrified of what he’d say or do. But he just looked around, and “Awright.” I knew that meant “good job.”
I learned to love raking hay. I’d head to the fields with a huge jug of iced tea and ride the tractor for hours and hours, daydreaming—mostly about getting off the farm.
My father didn’t praise easily. But he taught his children self-confidence and self-reliance, qualities that so many parents worry about instilling, and even pay good tuition for. He taught us to cope. We could fix complicated machinery, handle livestock, and push through the fatigue of heavy chores. This didn’t come from sweet words or laxity. It came from meeting Richard Head’s high expectations every single day. It came from knowing that we had to count on one another, and rely on ourselves, without having to turn to others.
I don’t recall my father ever telling me, “I love you,” or “I’m proud of you,” when I was a girl. He didn’t say those sorts of things to his children, and he never hugged us either. He reserved his physical affection for my mother. I would be forty-three years old before he actually put his arms around me and kissed me.
But he showed love in his own way. How did he show it? He put it on the table. He put it in the roof over our heads, and in the heat and the running water. He put it into the way he worked for all of us, from before sunup to after dark.
He put it into building us a basketball court in the hayloft. My father loved the game; he had played it in high school, and as a young man one of the few recreations he allowed himself was a weekend game with a local church league, before farm and family responsibilities weighed him down too much. The Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church team was made up mostly of his brothers and cousins, all of whom were as tall and stern looking as he was, and referees thought twice about blowing the whistle against them.
Tired though he was, one afternoon he climbed up a twenty-foot ladder to the loft carrying a stack of wood on his shoulder. Painstakingly, by hand, with excellent carpentry skills, he built us a wooden backboard that was better than the one we had at school. Then he retrieved an iron rim he had found somewhere and attached it to the backboard. Then he made another trip up and down that ladder and strung lights, so that we could play in the evenings after supper and chores. After it was all done, and done right.
There was no slack in the hayloft. It didn’t matter that I was a girl; my brothers needed a fourth, so they said, “Come on, sis.” They found out quick that I could elbow just like they could. The barn sat out in a field about fifty yards from our back door, but my parents could hear the racket we made all the way in the house, the high-pitched fussing that went with the thump of the ball, and the thwacking that meant someone had been hip-checked into the planks.
We played year-round. When it was cold, we hung old quilts up to keep the wind out, and we could hear the stabled cows who’d been brought in out of the weather shuffling below us. In the warmer seasons, we made sure to stack all the hay in the back to keep the court clear. It was usually Tommy and me against the middle boys.
I liked it when it was just the four of us, because on weekends when my brothers’ friends came over, sometimes I got left out of the game. I didn’t appreciate that at all, any more than I appreciated it when they’d go to Rittenbury Pond to swim naked and I couldn’t go with them.
“All y’all have to do is put on some shorts,” I protested. “Wear your shorts, so I can go with you.”
Basketball in the loft was physical; we were big kids and there was a lot of blocking and setting screens that turned into shouldering and shoving. If you drove in for a layup and someone pushed you, you went flying through the gallery door and into the long drop to the hay below. They talked smack, and so did I. When they really wanted to get under my skin, they’d call me Sissy.
“Come on, Sissy, let’s see what you got.”
We played rough at times but she would hit you just like a guy. It didn’t matter. You better hit her, ’cause she was gonna hit you. We played football in the front yard too. Tackle.
—KENNETH HEAD
We played practically every night and my father never stopped us, as long as we’d done our work. It was our one indulgence. Tall Man had been a better-than-average high school basketball player himself—I have a picture of him in shorts, impossibly lanky with old-fashioned ankle-high lac
e-up black sneakers—and he believed the game was good for us, better than any of the trouble we liked to invent for ourselves.
We made ’em work, but we did let ’em play ball. We always thought that was better than them running around with these kids that were doing nothing. A lot of them didn’t know what work was.
—HAZEL HEAD
By the time I went from the hayloft to organized basketball I was a confirmed tomboy—a tall, skinny, self-conscious one. I stood a head above every other child in my school except for my cousin Dennis Albright. Almost as humiliating as my height, there was the matter of my weight. I was so thin that my nickname was Bone.
But I was strong enough from lifting hay bales and milk cans that I broke the Roosevelt School’s old wooden flagpole by climbing on it. Which got me noticed. I was a third grader sitting on the seesaw in the playground one day when the school principal strolled by and paused. “I’d like you to stay after school and practice with the eighth-grade girls’ basketball team,” he said. I did as I was told.
My first coach left a large impression. Joe Daves was a six-foot-five disciplinarian along the lines of my father. He kept a large paddle with two holes in it, called Blister II, which he would use on students who acted up. I think he must have broken Blister I on his students. I caught a lick once from Blister II, for chewing gum and talking in class. Daves ordered me to bend over and grab my ankles, and then he blistered me. The paddle picked me up and moved me about a foot in the air.
Back in those days girls’ basketball in the state of Tennessee was a strange, inhibited half-court game with six players on a side. Three players stayed on one half of the court, and three on the other, and crossing midcourt was forbidden for fear we might faint. Gym teachers in those days didn’t believe girls were capable of running full court—we were capable of heavy farmwork, and of absorbing whippings, but for some reason, they didn’t think we could run ninety-four feet without getting the vapors and passing out, or damaging our ovaries. So instead, we practically broke our toes by stopping at the centerline.