by Pat Summitt
I learned to cook and would start supper while Mama was at the store, so that when she came home she could sit down to eat with my father. One by-product was that I learned all her recipes and became almost as good a cook as she is.
MISS HAZEL’S CORNBREAD
20 ounces cornmeal, salted
3 eggs
1 pint sour cream
1 stick butter, melted
1 (16-ounce) can corn niblets, drained
1 (15-ounce) can creamed corn
8 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
Mix ingredients until smooth and pour into a greased iron skillet. Bake at 350°F until golden brown.
Just because a woman worked as hard or harder than a man, I realized, didn’t make her an equal in all things, not even in her own family. I’d always labored alongside my brothers because I preferred the outdoors and I’d never felt treated as lesser-than when we were outside. But once we were inside a house, or a school, things were very, very different. I didn’t see why they should be, just because I was a female, but they were.
Things were especially different when I began to think about college. At some point the idea of using basketball to get off the farm occurred to me. It occurred to my parents, too, because they began looking for a university where I could continue my playing career.
There had been a time when Daddy would raise cane if we missed farmwork to stay after school for basketball practice. He even made the boys hitchhike to Little League. But then Tommy became a local all-star basketball player, and Kenny started throwing no-hitters on the baseball diamond as an eleven-year-old. Tommy explained to him, “Daddy, I’m gonna get a scholarship to play basketball, and Kenneth’s got a good chance to get a baseball scholarship, and it won’t cost you a penny for us to go to college. So you need to let us practice a little bit.” From then on Daddy didn’t fuss. Tommy, true to his word, got a basketball scholarship to Austin Peay, and Kenny followed him there on a baseball scholarship. Both would graduate with honors.
But whatever college I went to, my parents would have to pay my full way. It didn’t matter how good an athlete I was—and I was good enough that Ashland City High would eventually name the gym after me—athletic scholarships for women simply didn’t exist in 1970. My folks would have to carry my tuition, room, and board and finance my basketball as well, my shoes, my gear.
My father sorted through my college options, the few we could afford, and settled on the University of Tennessee at Martin, a small satellite campus of the state system. It was relatively inexpensive, a plain little campus of red brick and white stone, and we knew a couple of people there. The athletic director, Bettye Giles, was from nearby Clarksville, and the point guard was a good player named Esther Stubblefield whom I had competed against in high school. “Call that Stubblefield girl and talk to her,” my father ordered. So I did—I phoned Esther and she said, “I love it. You need to come.” That settled it.
The financial commitment would strain my parents, I knew. They had upgraded our house and the store, and they were in the midst of trying to build up Henrietta’s main street by adding a small Laundromat, and a one-chair barbershop. We worked as hard as ever; during my senior year, I did shifts behind the counter at the grocery, loaded and unloaded bags of fertilizer, and pumped gas for the cars that pulled up out front. Sinclair gas was our brand, with the green dinosaur sign.
But we were still cash poor. One reason was my father’s generosity to our Henrietta neighbors: whenever someone in the community was in need, he carried him on the books for months at a time. If the hired hands ran short of money and needed groceries, my father advanced them. If local farmers needed implements or fertilizer, he’d supply them what they needed and then wait, sometimes forever, to be paid back.
Tobacco farming was high risk because it only paid off as a crop once a year, and there was no telling how many people he helped out when they were shy, or a crop failed. Some of them lived close by and walked over to ask for help. Others came by tractor or car. My brothers and I figured that he gave away close to $100,000 that he never saw again.
Even my mother finally said, “Richard, you just can’t keep loaning money out. You’re too generous.” I agreed. Our own family had to sacrifice while he was carrying people’s debts. Since I helped at the family store, I saw the books, and it frustrated me. “All these people that owe y’all money are driving a lot better cars than we are,” I said. “If they’d pay you, we might have a better car.” Every now and then when we were short of cash, I’d get so irritated that I’d take the initiative and call one of my friends, like Ricky Elliott. “Come over and pick me up,” I’d say. “We got to go collect money.” We’d jump in his vehicle and call on three or four folks, and I’d collect $500 or $600 to put in the family till. My father wouldn’t say anything; he’d just grunt. But my mother would look relieved.
If at times I questioned my father’s parenting methods, I never questioned the size of his heart. Beneath that stern veneer, he was a sensitive man. I remember the day that Tommy left home for college. I was upstairs in that tiny bedroom, when I heard a strange sound from the back porch. I peered over the windowsill to see my big strong father sitting in a porch chair choking back sobs. Tears streamed down his face. My father wept, even though Tommy was going to school barely an hour away.
The trouble was, my father would never show it in front of us; he had to sneak off to the back porch and cry in secret. Richard Head just couldn’t express himself. As I got ready to go off to college I knew he was proud of me—but he never told me so. I knew he loved me—but he never said so. He took it for granted that everyone would understand he was a kind, loving person. He gave me, and all the rest of us, to understand that when he said something grunting and withered like “Awright,” what it really meant was, “You did well.” You were supposed to just automatically interpret it as a word of love. We all were. But sometimes it was wearying to do the work of interpreting Richard.
I would spend the coming years driven by a craving for his approval, absolutely determined to show: I am a winner, who deserves love and praise. But there was another consequence too, a certain wounded inwardness. By the time I left for college, I was a shy, socially awkward young woman who covered up her vulnerabilities. Don’t you cry, girl. I better not see you cry. I had become a little shut off, self-protective; whatever I felt, I learned not to show it to others.
All that work, all that hardness, beat something out of her. There was always this bit of a safe house inside of her. I think she got hurt emotionally when she was young in that family, and she knew she had to become a strong female to compete, and she learned to fight within the system.
—R.B. SUMMITT
And if that wasn’t my father all over. I drew the shades over my eyes, and later, when the young women who played for me cried, I told them champions and leaders and strong women don’t cry.
Shortly before I graduated from Ashland City High, my English teacher pulled me aside for a talk. He said, “Trish, have you ever told your parents you love them?” I just stared at him and shook my head. “No, I haven’t,” I said. We didn’t do that in our family, I explained. He told me that he had recently lost his mother and would never have another chance to tell her how much he appreciated her. He wanted me to try to express myself to my parents.
“Whatever you do, tell your mom and dad, before you go off to college, that you love them,” he said.
I thought about his advice all that summer but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Finally, the day of departure arrived and my parents drove me to UT-Martin. We unloaded the car, and then it was time to say good-bye. I turned to my mother, who was sweetness personified to me, the one person in the world who made everything better. Even with her, it was all I could do to say the words aloud. I reached for her and kissed her and said awkwardly, chokingly, “I love you, Mom.”
She started crying. We both of us stood there shuddering with tears for a moment. Then I turned to my fathe
r. But before I could even get the words out, he spoke first.
“Shut up,” he said.
Are you having any symptoms?
There are times when I wake up in the morning and I don’t know where I am.
That can’t feel good. Does it come to you after a few minutes?
Yes.
What else? Can you tell me any other effects?
Some days are more cloudy and foggy.
I guess you aren’t going to get through this thing with no symptoms at all.
I’m doing everything I can. I’m doing my puzzles.
[Later]
Do you have to do them all in one day?
You know me. I can’t do just one. I’ve got to kick its ass.
—November 12, 2011, Knoxville, Tennessee, six months after diagnosis
3
Miss Chi Omega
I made a raw impression at the age of eighteen. I was a frank, elbowy girl wearing a home-stitched skirt and cheap shoes, with a rampant mane of hair that ended in a flip. I arrived at UT-Martin carrying one small “soup case,” which is how my sorority sisters claim that I said the word suitcase in my Tennessee hills accent.
The moment I stepped into Clement Hall, the women’s dormitory, I felt backward. My only coloring came from fresh air; I’d never worn mascara or blush. All around me were women in bright cosmetics, their hair teased and sprayed. I’d heard that UT-Martin was a destination for rich girls from Memphis and these must be them, I figured. They seemed impossibly moneyed and made-up. There were prim girls in neat-buttoned cardigans, hip ones in bell-bottom trousers with sash belts, daring ones in miniskirts and knee-high boots that showed off their trim legs.
I shrank when I looked down. The hemline sewn by my mother fell below my knee, to midcalf.
Even the way the other girls spoke seemed well-heeled. They talked with gentle lilts and they didn’t say “ain’t,” whereas I said “yonder,” and “reckon,” and “done went and gone,” and I wondered how Daddy would manage back home in the fields all by “hisself”—judging by their manicured nails, they’d never had dirt on their palms.
Back home, “Trisha” could bale hay and drive a tractor, but at Martin she was inferior, and a figure of fun. I sought out Esther Stubblefield, whom I knew from playing against her in high school. Esther had grown up only twenty miles from me, but she was town reared one county over in Springfield, which had a brick courthouse and sidewalks, so I viewed her as the height of sophistication.
Esther greeted me warmly, but as she gave me the once-over, she realized how country and naive I was. She decided to toy with me.
“You should sign up for Russian,” she advised me. “It’s an easy A.”
It sounds terrible now. But she was just so gullible.
—ESTHER HUBBARD
I had never been away from Henrietta before, except for one overnight trip with the 4-H Club. The Martin campus had fewer than five thousand students and sat in a moderate-sized town halfway between Nashville and Memphis, merely a two-hour drive from home. It was hardly cosmopolitan—but to me it felt as foreign as the other side of the globe, and I was scared to death of it. So scared that the very first weekend, I ran back to the farm. I found a ride to Henrietta and walked through the door of our farmhouse with my laundry under my arm.
My father said, “What are you doing here?”
I told him I just felt like coming back for a visit. But we both knew the truth: I was frightened.
“Look, I don’t want you on the road every weekend,” he said. “And the next time you come, don’t bring your dirty clothes with you.”
What he meant was, grow up. When I got a little tearful, he said, “I don’t want to hear any more about that.” So I went back to campus and set about trying somehow to fit in. Slowly, hesitantly, I tried to meet people. One afternoon, I saw a smartly dressed young woman who lived in Clement Hall struggling to lift a heavy old iron typewriter out of the trunk of her car. Now, here was something I knew how to do. I bounded down the stairs. “Hey, hon, let me help you with that,” I said. I took the typewriter from her and hauled it up to her room and was rewarded with a bright lipstick smile and a thank-you.
But mostly I stayed on the margin, dreading any conversation that would betray my lack of social skills. I’d never thought about how I sounded before, but now when I heard myself I decided I’d just as soon not speak. I clamped my mouth firmly shut, and I hardly opened it, stayed so quiet that no one knew my correct name. Everyone just assumed that because I was enrolled as Patricia Sue Head, I went by “Pat,” and I didn’t have the voice to say that no one ever called me that; my name was “Trisha.” But rather than speak up and hear the hick from Cheatham County come out, I let it go. So I became Pat. It sounded stronger, I decided.
I was so modest I even dressed in my dorm room closet. But I watched people—a lot. I studied the girls who tanned themselves on the roof of Clement Hall, lying on aluminum foil. They lathered up with baby oil and iodine, and put Sun-In on their hair, so they would glow at the socials. I mentally cataloged their shoes and their blouses.
Esther Stubblefield rescued me. She was the leader of Martin’s basketball team, and she was also a campus social leader, a white-blond streak of energy with a crackling direct honesty, smart mouth, and wicked humor. She was as good-hearted as she was funny, and she felt responsible for helping me adjust to campus life, as both a teammate and an acquaintance from back home. We liked each other instantly, and she took me under her wing. She announced that she wanted to sponsor me for membership with the Chi Omega sorority, the house she belonged to. I looked at her like she was crazy. But Esther insisted. Pledging would help me meet people on campus and force me to get over my shyness, she said. The Chi Os weren’t snobs, she assured me; they had a wide-ranging membership, some beauty queens, yes, but also academics and athletes.
“You need to do this,” she said.
So I did it. I put on a white dress, agonized over whether my white shoes were right for the season, and went to a social. Esther stayed by my side and walked me through it promising she would back me for membership. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to, because unbeknownst to both of us, I had another sponsor. Esther was ready to make her plea on my behalf at the membership meeting, when the refined-looking young woman whose typewriter I had carried stood up. “I want to say something,” she said. And she told the story of my hauling the heavy machine up the stairs.
“I don’t know Pat personally,” she said. “But I want that girl in my sorority.”
So that’s how I became a sorority girl—I muscled my way in.
Joining a sorority didn’t solve all my social problems; I still didn’t feel I belonged. Esther invited me to be her roommate on the top floor of Clement Hall where the Chi Os lived. She introduced me around and gave me advice on clothes and makeup, which wasn’t easy on my feelings. I’d get ready to go to class, and she’d say, “You aren’t wearing those shoes, are you?”
One day, Esther and some of our other sorority sisters decided to go through my closet. My wardrobe either came from Kmart or was sewn by my mother, and I was suddenly ashamed of how limited it was. When they pulled out one of my favorite outfits, a navy blue jumper with a blouse with turtles on it, they all burst into laughter.
It was a Sunday afternoon and she came in and we were looking at her clothes and I don’t know why we were doing it, whether [it was] because she dressed badly. We were pulling things out and there was this blouse with turtles, and we were laughing so hard we were crying. And I know now it hurt her feelings. But she never showed it. She never showed a vulnerable face. She always had that air that everything was in control and fine. It never occurred to me at that time that stuff bothered her. But of course it did.
—ESTHER HUBBARD
I can still hear the high-pitched whooping while I stood there trying to smile. No doubt it was a tacky shirt. But I didn’t wear turtle blouses because I had poor taste; I wore them because they were all
I had. The laughter wounded me, and it made a lasting impression. I was tired of being made fun of—and determined to not be, ever again. I wanted to change, to fix myself, to acquire some polish. I told myself, If I ever get a good job—if I ever make money—I’m gonna dress nice.
I knew I needed help with my grammar. I earned another explosion of Chi Omega hilarity one day when I bounced into the room and flopped down on the bed and said, “My daddy’s gonna kill me.”
“Why, what did you do?”
“I done blowed four dollars, and I don’t know how!”
After the laughter died down, I asked one of my sorority sisters, an English major named Alison Cross, to help me with my speech. Alison, who became a good friend, began to patiently correct me, murmuring the right syntax into my ear, smoothing out my expressions and softening my accent. She had a talent for teaching: she went on to become a dedicated English teacher and guidance counselor in a local school back in Cheatham County.
I wasn’t just out of my depth socially at Martin; I was overwhelmed academically. Again, Esther came to my rescue. In the spring of my freshman year, she signed up for all of the same classes, so she could coach me through them. “I need to get in the classroom with you and show you how to do this,” she said. “This way we can study together.”
Esther tutored me in math and sat with me in geology and taught me how to make decent notes. She showed me how to divide up my reading load in a disciplined way and how to prepare for tests. “Pat, if you will just sit down and really focus, then you can get it all done,” she said. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that, like Alison, Esther went on to become a dedicated teacher who served thirty years in the Kentucky public school system, getting kids to love math. Following Esther’s lead, I became a decent student—not a great one by any means, but a determined and hardworking one.