by Sarah Smarsh
Grandma Betty, who had hated school and distrusted the institution in general, was less sure about this turn of events. At the farm over Christmas break, when I told some family members visiting from Denver that I’d been placed in the gifted program, she uncharacteristically snapped at me.
“Sarah, don’t brag,” she said, and my face went hot and red.
We were in a world, I see now, where going on welfare as a teenage mom or receiving accolades for your academic work had the same outcome: admonishment to keep you in your place. One was an offense to taxpayers who were supposedly pulling your weight; the other, an offense to grandmothers who had left school in tenth grade and were averse to anyone thinking herself too good for where she came from.
Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I’d been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as possible. Not because I reveled in it—I was a quiet loner, most often—but because I knew that was the only way I’d ever receive the chances I wanted.
Sensing that mission was up to me alone, as the American Dream will tell a poor child, my ability to do the right thing rather than the wrong one hung on my shoulders. On the cusp of adolescence, amid a family of people who had been marginalized as “troublemakers” at schools, jobs, and dirt-road beer parties broken up by county sheriffs, I would need to take extra care to show that I was a good kid.
From where I sit now, I can and must look at those years as a time that fortified and defined me in ways for which I am grateful. But I thank God you never had to fight such a battle—a child required to prove her worth to the richest economy in the world.
In the mornings when Grandpa Arnie went to the shed wearing stained jeans and plaid shirts, Grandma Betty went to Wichita wearing baggy pantsuits from Kmart clearance racks and earrings that turned her earlobes black from the cheap metal in the posts. I tagged along with her at the downtown Sedgwick County courthouse many summer days. My parents were working, babysitters were expensive, and the courthouse was so big I could scram without getting Grandma into trouble.
I followed her through the doors of the severe eleven-story 1970s building, to my Kansas eyes a skyscraper. I hurried to keep up with her fast step, feeling proud as her high heels clacked on the marble floor of the lobby. Attorneys, who were usually white, gave her waves. Security guards, who were usually black, gave her high fives.
“Let’s take the stairs,” she’d say, “for the exercise.” We’d huff up the echoing stairwell to her office. When she was running late, we’d take the elevator. If it was empty, she’d get in a few Jane Fonda–style stretches and I’d copy, touching my toes, then my shoulders, then the sky. People couldn’t believe how much energy Grandma had. She was in her forties and vivacious—an uncommon feat among people like us with lives that could age you quickly.
Sometimes we shared the elevator with men in handcuffs on their way to trial or back to jail. Other times it stopped and with a ding the doors parted to reveal the new district attorney, Nola Foulston—the first woman ever to hold that job—dazzling in shoulder pads and big earrings.
“She’s full of herself,” Grandma would say. “Only wants to be on camera.” In that place and time, even strong women like Grandma Betty absorbed a culture in which ambitious women were suspect.
That’s one bit of trouble I don’t think I would have passed on to you, perhaps simply because my generation got better messages about women than Grandma’s did. The district attorney didn’t seem full of herself to me. She seemed like a hero who, like Grandma Betty, had devoted her life to helping society. She did end up on TV a lot. In decades to come, she’d prosecute a Wichita serial killer and the man who murdered abortion provider George Tiller.
But, while Foulston’s job was to prosecute, Betty’s job was to rehabilitate the newly freed. She did it by drawing on what she knew from her own life about the difference between a reason and an excuse.
“I had them tell me that they came from this dysfunctional family—I couldn’t understand none of it, because I’d had it easy,” Betty remembered years later. She was unimpressed when probationers blamed their rapes, cocaine deals, and first-degree murders on their childhoods while assuming someone like her came from an easier place.
“I just told ’em, hey, don’t give me any bullshit about ‘dysfunctional family,’ honey—our family invented it,” she told me. “I’d have people come back later that had got off probation, or I’d run into somebody in the store. They’d say, ‘Thanks for being such a tough bitch.’ ‘My pleasure,’ I’d tell ’em.”
From the same source of that tough love arose an ability to see a so-called criminal’s humanity, though, to not be afraid of the people society most villainizes. All those years, our home address was public record. I asked Betty why, years later. She said it never occurred to her that one of her probationers would try to hurt her.
If she had carried that sort of fear, she would have had to be afraid of her own flesh and blood. Most grown-ups I knew had at least a misdemeanor on their records, but my criminal lineage ran even deeper than that. Mom’s biological father, Ray, had been a hired criminal for much of his life, according to family talk—beating and threatening people, burglarizing, even bombing a local business. Betty had spent her youth helping protect him from the law, refusing to talk to the police. His last words to my mom, just before they were estranged when she was fourteen: “Stay out of the pen.”
Those summer days when school was out and I went to work with Grandma, we’d pass the barred entrance to the county jail in a basement hallway near the elevator shaft.
“Be good,” she’d say. “You don’t want to end up in there.”
Was I a good kid or a bad kid? The answer to that question, I knew from both Catholicism and capitalism, would decide my fate. Heaven or hell. Wealth or poverty. Freedom or prison.
In Grandma’s office, there was a chair for visiting probationers and a big window looking out over windy downtown with its short skyline, a mix of nineteenth-century warehouses and midcentury angles. On the wall hung a framed certificate from a small local business college, which she had attended with a federal grant when she was in her thirties, along with little wooden plaques of cute drawings and goofy phrases: “Quiet, genius at work!” A file cabinet was topped with nickel items I had picked out for her when she gave me a quarter to spend at the garage sales she liked to hit over her lunch break: ceramic kittens, plastic birds hovering atop wires soldered to a metal base. On her desk, a typewriter that, over the years, became a clunky word processor and, then, a green-screen computer with access to criminal files throughout the county and beyond.
Sometimes Grandma would leave me in her office when she had business elsewhere in the building. To keep me busy, she’d suggest I pore over her paper caseload files. I was seven, eight, nine years old paging through grisly police reports about homicides and bestiality.
I look back on that formative experience with some gratitude—I knew a lot about the world at a young age, and I have a feeling that helped me more than it hurt—but that’s the sort of thing I would have shielded you from where my family didn’t shield me. It’s funny how often we would protect something precious in a different way than we would protect ourselves.
When Grandma was out of her office, attorneys stopped by, and I took down notes like a miniature secretary. Sometimes, she sent me around the building like a messenger, running up and down the halls with files to be delivered to stern women who looked down at me from the other side of their counters and raised their eyebrows. I got to be famous around the place. At the courthouse, I was “Betty’s granddaughter” the way I was “Nick Smarsh’s girl” when I worked the wheat harvest in the country.
Judge Watson’s chambers could be reached through Betty’s office. Smoking recently had been banned in the building, but cigar smoke wafted from beneath his door. “Judg
e,” as Grandma and his court reporter in the next office over called him, was the first African American to sit on the Sedgwick County bench. He was an ancient man who had been a judge for a thousand years and whose grandmother, he said, had been a slave in the South. He would smoke a cigar if he damn well pleased.
That meant that Betty got to sneak a smoke, too. When big-shot, white male attorneys charged through the office, Betty and Judge would exchange looks. After the white men had left, Grandma would flick cigarettes over Judge Watson’s ashtray of cigar butts while he threw back his head and laughed through the tobacco phlegm in his chest, his long, wet, black curls falling past his collar.
“You can come listen, Lou,” Grandma would say before a hearing. “This ought to be a good one.”
I’d set down a probationer’s cocaine-possession file I was reading, leave Grandma’s office, and enter the courtroom through the public entrance. From a bench like the polished-oak pews of churches, I’d watch the court stenographer and Grandma, her blond bob and frosted lipstick shining in fluorescent light, walk in through the bench entrance, followed by Judge Watson in his black robe. Grandma would wink at me from her raised seat next to Judge while I wrote down my observations of the defendant and arguments. The courtroom reminded me of Night Court, a TV show that Grandma watched before bedtime. Sometimes television news crews showed up.
Judge had a reputation as a hard one who handed down merciless sentences. This had earned him an unfortunate nickname from defendants: “Hang ’em High Watson.” If a lawyer or defendant got lippy with him, he’d say something witty in return to shut him up. Grandma would lower her head to cover a smile. Later I’d sit at her office typewriter and type up my “report” on district court letterhead and present it for her review.
I had to leave Grandma Betty’s office when probationers showed up for their mandatory check-ins. While I waited in the lobby outside the frosted privacy glass, convicted murderers, drug dealers, and sex offenders walked past me, their shoulders slumped and their feet dragging, into Grandma’s office to tell her why they hadn’t shown up for addiction treatment or behavioral counseling. Her office was a triage unit of sorts for the government’s “war on drugs,” the racist implementation of which arrested, convicted, and imprisoned black people at wildly disproportionate rates.
Sometimes while she counseled probationers, I’d take the elevator to the top floor and, with markers shoved in my pockets, climb a ladder in the empty stairwell to the roof hatch high above Wichita. I’d dangle from the top of the ladder and cover the walls of the building’s highest ceiling with the logos of my favorite sports teams. But other times I’d eavesdrop through the frosted glass.
Grandma Betty wasn’t well-read on policies or politics. Unlike Mom, who read the news, Grandma only took the paper for the Wednesday grocery ads and the Sunday classifieds telling us where the garage sales were. But, as with so many people in our community, she knew more about the system she worked in than a criminal justice professor at Harvard might.
She claimed to take the hard-punishment stance that both political parties were pushing then. But, as often happens when you’re of a class that isn’t groomed and formally educated to be a political creature, her behavior revealed a different perspective than her words. Through the frosted glass, I’d hear the men talk about their struggles. Then I’d hear Grandma’s voice—firm but tender, for all her big talk. I’d hear the men laugh and cry. When they walked out, they stood a little straighter, as though someone had treated them like human beings.
Betty’s empathy had been earned with a lifetime of sorry situations over which she had no control. Violent offenders didn’t impress a woman with her past, which reached across years of violent husbands to a violent dad. Her eyes went distant when she told me how, when she was five, Aaron and Dorothy were hammering together the little house where Betty spent most of her childhood. He told her to pick up nails in the yard.
“I don’t want to see a single nail when I come back out here,” he told her. When he scanned the yard, he said she missed one.
“I got my ass reamed,” she told me. “Aaron would just snatch hold of you. Mom would try to stop him, but then she’d get it herself.” He used a switch or a strap on the kids and his fists on Dorothy.
That sort of upbringing can send you in different directions, depending on your disposition. Betty’s older brother Carl became quiet and shy to avoid conflict. Betty turned into a fighter, even as a child. She liked to tell stories about how, as a kid, she took on someone who deserved it. When the neighbor children pinned a litter of kittens to a clothesline, for instance, she beat every one of them senseless until their mom came to the door threatening to call the cops.
“I was ready to whoop on her, too,” Grandma told me.
When a rich girl made fun of her new poodle skirt for being too long, she knocked her down the school steps with her clipboard and was suspended for three days. For getting thrown out of school, she got her first beating with fists to the face from Aaron. The punishment was just an excuse for his anger, Grandma told me. Her dad couldn’t have cared less about school. Betty didn’t care that she’d been kicked out, either.
“Best three days of my life,” Grandma told me.
One of her proudest confrontations involved Dorothy’s third husband, Joe, a Boeing worker she married after sixteen violent years with Aaron and a brief marriage to a line cook named Paul, who never hit her. (“He was a pussy,” Dorothy would later say.)
Betty was a teenager when her mom married Joe, and she loathed him.
“He was the kind of person who would eat right in front of you and not offer a bite of it,” Betty said, like nothing could irk her more.
One night Joe called Dorothy a goddamned pig, which he did most nights, and Betty came out of her bedroom and told him to leave. When he didn’t, she picked up a cast-iron skillet on the stove, still full of grease from dinner.
“I slung that son of a bitch as hard as I could, and it knocked his ass down,” Grandma Betty told me. “I bet he seen stars.”
Joe was lying on the kitchen floor with his head bleeding. Grease had splattered across the fresh wallpaper that Dorothy had just hung, which Betty remembered like it was the main regret.
At first Dorothy thought Betty had killed Joe, but he managed to stumble out the back door and collapse again. Betty picked up a broom leaning against the doorframe and beat him with the handle for good measure.
“Mom was screaming, ‘Let him go, let him go, you’re gonna kill him!’ ” Betty said. “I told her, ‘That’s what he deserves.’ ”
Violence like that is passed down from parent to child just like poverty and so many things. The current that moved through Betty when she beat her drunk stepdad could have been passed to you. But you might have received a sad gift along with it. What she and so many poor Americans lost in safety, lawfulness, and peace, some of us gained in compassion.
“Get a job,” Grandma would murmur about homeless people holding signs at Wichita stoplights under highway on-ramps. Then she would start cranking her window down.
“Lou, find Grandma’s purse, please,” she’d say. “Hand me my wallet.”
I didn’t know it, but I was the only female in my family who didn’t have a violent or absent father. I’d like to think you wouldn’t have had one, either, because having a kind dad let me expect kindness in a man. Not so for the women around me: Grandma Betty and Aunt Pud had vicious, drunken Aaron. Their little sister, my aunt Polly, had vicious, drunken Joe, the one Betty beat with a skillet. My mom had Ray, a man who by several accounts had killed people. My cousin Candy: a Colorado man she didn’t know. My cousin Shelly: a quiet Navy man who fled the responsibility of a child.
My dad had more than a few moments with the bottle. But usually when he was gone, it was to work a job, and his love was almost always apparent. Once, before their divorce, Mom was tired of him being the
nice guy and told him he had to spank me. He did it so softly it didn’t hurt, yet he felt so bad about it he cried anyway.
But those years after the divorce and his chemical poisoning on the job, circumstances took their toll on Dad mentally. He wasn’t himself.
The summer we sold our place in the country, the house he’d built and planned to live in for life, he decided to take Matt and me north across Kansas and Nebraska to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We’d had few family trips to speak of. As a baby, I’d gone with my parents and grandparents on the long drive to a horse-racing track in New Mexico. When Matt was a toddler, Mom and Dad had driven us three hours north to an amusement park in Kansas City. This was the closest thing we’d ever had to a vacation, though.
Dad cleared out some tools and covered the metal floor of his work van with a large rug. Matt and I wrestled and rolled on it while he drove along highways that made straight lines through expanses of Nebraska corn. We stopped at midcentury roadside attractions such as a jungle gym made of painted concrete dinosaurs. Dad took pictures with a 110mm camera of Matt and me dangling from them in neon shorts and dirty canvas shoes.
He seemed like he was doing something to try to make us all happy. He did not have a happy feeling about him, though. The man into whose arms I used to jump when he got back from the fields, when we all lived in the country together, was more distant in those years after such a string of hard times: the total loss of his work barn and machinery, a harrowing roofing job at a factory, near-fatal poisoning on another job, his father’s death, divorce, sale of the house he’d built—all in less than two years.