But he was having none of it. He seemed to get madder and madder, and the hoe seemed closer to Buzz with every swing.
Suddenly Mama flew down the front steps, a long butcher knife in her hand, the same knife she always sharpened on the pedaling wheel before Papa killed the hogs. But not even the knife seemed to sway him. Papa, three times as big as she was, towered above her.
“Go on, Lilly. Get in the house,” Mama said. I could see the look in her eyes, the fear and hatred that made her seem as wild as a rabid dog. I ran up onto the porch and, thankfully, Buzz followed.
Papa’s eyes flashed anger at me as I stared at him through the screen door, my breath coming in quick gasps.
“Go on home and leave that dog alone,” Mama said. She kept that butcher knife raised and pointed at him the whole time, jabbing it a few times in his direction when his temper flared back up. He dropped the hoe at last, and Mama backed him all the way down the steep driveway to the dirt road. And he left, lumbering and swaying his way back home.
As I watched this scene, I felt like I was suffocating, as if someone had stuck a sack of cotton over my head. I’d heard Mama tell my father how Papa had beaten her as a child. When she was little and he got to drinking, one of his buddies would rush to the house to warn my grandmother that Papa was headed home. She’d hustle the four boys and my mother out of bed to make a run for the barn, hiding in the hay for the rest of the night. Other times, without warning, Papa barged into their bedrooms, hickory stick in hand, and the beatings began.
After that day, I still rode on top of Papa’s wagon and helped him feed the cows and guinea hens, but I never trusted him again. I remember telling myself I’d better be careful about who I let myself love. It was likely they’d turn on you. I also realized it was a good idea to have a knife nearby whenever possible.
Not long after, Buzz disappeared. I figured he just wandered off. Thankfully, it never occurred to me then that Papa might have gotten his way after all.
MANY YEARS later, when I first started working at Goodyear, the union guys liked to tell the women that they were going to “pick” us. That is, they were going to catch us and pick each pubic hair from our bodies. Like so much that happened there, when you put it in words and see it on paper, it sounds too unreal to believe. But they were always up to some prank or another, often making work a dangerous sport.
One day, a woman worker, fed up with the constant haranguing, actually dropped her pants and dared the men to do it. With her pants bunched around her ankles, she stood there in her plain white underwear. The guys backed off her but kept up their nonsense with the rest of us. I knew I’d never do what she did, but I also knew they often made good on their word, one time pinning down one of the new young guys and picking him clean. I went home and found one of Charles’s knives to carry in my pocket, the hard leather sheath resting against my thigh in case they ever decided to test me.
Countless times throughout the years at Goodyear when I needed courage, I remembered how Mama had finally tamed Papa that summer afternoon. I never doubted my mother would have used the butcher knife that day, and in my moments of fear and anger, I never doubted I’d use my own knife if necessary.
THE PLACE where I grew up during the 1940s is a small bend in the road along the foot of Choccolocco Mountain in northeast Alabama. Just like those pinch-faced gray possums that roamed the pine forests, the people in that small community in the foothills of the Appalachians knew a thing or two about survival. They worked in the cotton or steel mills or scratched a living from the dirt. Some worked in the foundries or the army depot in nearby Anniston or, if they were lucky, had a good-paying job at Goodyear in Gadsden. The folks I knew would walk over broken glass to help a neighbor and just as soon kill you if you did them wrong.
In 1946, I was in second grade when my father came home from the navy and my parents bought land from Papa to build a slightly bigger house across the road from him. Life started looking up for my family then. It took me a while to adjust to the gleam from the naked bulb hanging off the thin cord from the ceiling, since I’d been so used to the soft glow of gaslight. A couple of years later, we got indoor plumbing and things really changed for the better. Gone were the days of tiptoeing through the wet grass in the black of night, wondering if I’d step on a rattlesnake on the way to the outhouse.
Our new house wasn’t much to look at, but we were lucky. We were the only ones in Possum Trot, besides the brick mason, who owned a television. Daddy worked the night shift at the Anniston Army Depot six days a week, where he reworked engines on the battered military tanks sent home from Korea and later from Vietnam and the Middle East. Before we bought the TV, in the evenings when Daddy was gone, Mama and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do—except for Saturday evening, when we turned on the radio, silent all week to save batteries, and listened to the Grand Ole Opry. But once we got the TV, folks gathered in every corner and doorway of our small house many evenings to watch the nightly news.
During the day, I had to come up with my own entertainment, and I ran wild, disappearing for hours to climb trees and explore the woods. My cousin Louise and I spent entire days searching for caves or hunting for arrowheads in the Indian cemetery. We also loved to mimic the holy dancing we saw at the church campground down the road.
Despite these wistful memories, nearly all of my childhood was spent in endless work. In the misty summer mornings Mama and I picked beans and okra before the sun started blazing down on us. After we headed back to the house to bathe and change, we spent the rest of the day hulling peas, skinning tomatoes, and blanching vegetables to can for the winter. We only stopped canning to sleep. On the weekends we roamed the woods to fill our syrup buckets with huckleberries and blackberries for jam and cobbler, slapping the itchy bites from the invisible chiggers with Listerine to keep them from driving us crazy.
Growing up, I never lacked for essentials, and I certainly never went hungry. I knew we were better off than a good many folks. Of course, I was also painfully aware that we weren’t as well off as some others—like my best friend, Sandra. I’d known her since first grade. While I wore homemade bloomers, Sandra could afford silk panties. Every day she came to school in a coordinated sweater and skirt, never without a perfect strand of pearls. Even the teachers called her “little princess.”
Sandra’s family lived in New Liberty, a neighborhood where no one whitewashed their trees or kept chickens running around the front yard. There, children didn’t have to share a bedroom with their grandmother, like I did. Sitting in front of the large mirror at Sandra’s elegant dressing table, I’d angle her hand mirror every which way to see my reflection, hoping to improve my profile. But there it always was, clear as day, the bump in the middle of my nose, the same mysterious Indian nose as Granny Mac’s and Daddy’s.
Every time I came home from Sandra’s, I felt inferior. Just the sight of my dingy white house and dusty dirt yard made me ashamed even though I knew how far we’d come. I dared not say anything about my disappointment. I saw how hard my parents worked. But the older I got, the more transparent the differences in my life and Sandra’s became, and my sense of embarrassment stayed with me, as indelible as a birthmark. I was keenly aware that all this privilege was due to Goodyear, where Sandra’s father worked. New Liberty was where the Goodyear families lived. And it’s where, more than anywhere, I wanted to be.
I used to stare at the Goodyear plant when I passed it on my annual summer Greyhound bus trip to Aunt Mattie Bell and Uncle Hoyt’s small duplex house in Gadsden. Right before you got into town, there was the plant, next to the Coosa River. A giant redbrick building with slits for windows, it sprawled for blocks behind a tall steel fence like a fortress. The huge smokestacks billowed black smoke. Riding past the plant, I dreamed about what it would have been like to ride around in a brand-new Mercury every few years like Sandra. Or I imagined swimming in the Gulf Coast during spring break like she did. I even fantasized about how smooth my hands would be if my d
addy worked at Goodyear. Maybe even best of all, if he did, I’d never have to pick cotton again.
ALL MY life I’d been surrounded by one continuous cotton field. I started picking cotton there before I entered first grade and had been picking ever since. It was the only job around, and I was in the field every weekend with my cousin Louise making extra money for the family. When I was older, during the summer Louise and I chopped cotton before it matured in order to earn some spending money of our own. We slung our hoes into the ground, attacking the johnsongrass that spread like gossip between the rows,sputtering complaints to each other that we dared not offer to anyone else. It wasn’t just the cotton. When we picked corn, we bellyached the same way, row after row, as cornstalks slapped our bare necks and scratched our hands.
At the end of the day, two men shouldered a pole between them and hooked our sack of cotton onto the P ring as Papa—all six foot five of him—loomed above me and slid a heavy metal ball across the bar to determine how many pounds we’d plucked from the prickly stalks. It took days to fill our long, skinny sacks. Sometimes it felt like I was trying to fill the sack with clouds.
Each time Papa weighed my sack, I held my breath, willing the ball to move farther. I enjoyed the anticipation of weighing my day’s work. Being paid meant not having to listen to Mama tell me no for the hundredth time. It meant I could save for the ready-made dress that was hanging in the window at Hudson’s department store in town. I was by now darn right sick of the homemade dresses my mother sewed from feed sacks. Yes, clothes were a focus of mine in those days. I was a teenager, after all.
In the fall of my ninth-grade year, I fell in love with the outfit of all outfits. I pined away for one thing more than anything else: a cheerleading outfit. I’d tried out for the squad with Sandra, and I made the cut. I was so thrilled, I actually thought my whole life was going to change for the better, until I realized I had no way to get to the evening basketball games and the outfit would cost a whopping $25.
Mama didn’t drive, but that didn’t really matter because Daddy needed the car to get to work every night anyway. But even that wasn’t the point. Neither of them had ever set foot in school, so there was no reason to think they’d do so now, just because I’d made the cheerleading squad. I finally convinced one of the basketball coaches to pick me up and take me to the games. But when I told my parents at supper that I needed to buy the outfit, Mama about scared me and Daddy to death.
She stopped eating and slapped her hand against the wooden table. “Let me tell you one thing, young lady. My best dress coat didn’t even cost twenty-five dollars! You’re going have to pay for that outfit.”
How could I have forgotten how Mama acted any time I wanted anything? She worried nonstop about whether we had enough money to pay the bills. All her talk made me think we were on the verge of having the lights cut off. If she wasn’t calculating what we needed for next week’s groceries, she was reminiscing about not having any sugar or any paper for the butter during the war rationing. And if it was anybody’s fault, it was Roosevelt’s: Mama blamed him for the Depression and the fact that when Daddy made a dollar a day working in the brickyard, two cents went to Social Security.
That night at supper as I felt the tears fill my eyes, I pictured how the salesman had shown the team the sweaters, how all of us girls fell so hard. We’d never seen anything so glamorous—the dark gold sweater with the purple capital letters RW for “Roy Webb” sewn in the middle, the gold silk skirt that flashed purple when you twirled, the delicate beanie to pin in your hair. Until that moment, I’d never wanted anything as much as that cheerleading outfit.
LATER, LYING in bed seething as Granny Mac snored away beside me, I reminded myself that Mama had been through a lot, and my life, cheerleading outfit or not, was roses compared with hers. Of course, being Mama, she rarely talked about her past. That would be a waste of time. I wondered so often what had made her so hard. But the only relic that she’d kept was a tattered Bible with a few funny-spelled names and ghostly dates scribbled in light pencil inside the cover.
It was only Granny Mac, Daddy’s mother, who liked to tell stories about her past. But whenever she’d launch into one about my father’s family, Mama hushed her. All I knew about Granny Mac herself was that she grew up an orphan in Georgia. I looked over at her sleeping peacefully and wished she were awake to distract me from my anger and my aching want.
She’d found another way to use her storytelling skills, and she loved to do so when it was pitch-dark outside. Her dark Indian eyes would glitter in the bedroom we shared, her long black hair flowing loosely, freed from the braided bun she wore during the day, as she told me ghost story after ghost story. She about kept me from ever going to sleep with all those stories. There was the one about the murdered man whose blood seeped down the walls of the house when it rained. But the worst story was her favorite one, about the pig who dragged a baby under our house and ate it. As I’d slide under my quilt, she’d tell me to be still and listen. Didn’t I hear that baby screaming under our room? It never occurred to me to ask whose baby it was or whether or not anyone ever came looking for it.
I hated that story, maybe in part because it reminded me in some strange way of another family story that was rarely spoken of, this one involving me: how I almost tore Mama in two when I was born and almost died myself. I first heard the story as I lay waiting for sleep on a pallet with the other children on the farm in Alpine, Alabama, where Aunt Lucille had taken us to pick scuppernongs, a type of muscadine grape. Behind the thin bedsheet hanging between the kitchen and the main room, Aunt Lucille told the other women about Mama being in labor for three days, my daddy unable to do anything but smoke and cry in the barn. Even with the help of two doctors and a nurse, we almost didn’t make it. Aunt Lucille said my face was bruised and my body crooked. Many years later, I asked Mama about it. She only said that during labor her bones wouldn’t separate. According to Aunt Lucille, Mama’s body was so torn up, she wasn’t able to have more children. That would explain why I was an only child.
Sometimes when Mama looked at me with that look of sour disapproval—like she did that night at dinner—I thought that maybe she’d never forgiven me for denying her more babies. I’d also wonder if she ever got over the time I almost burned her up. Mama had grabbed a piece of black coal I’d gotten hold of as a baby, and her skirt brushed against the smoldering coals in the fireplace. Fire blazed up her back. Daddy tried to put it out, but her whole backside burned. They couldn’t afford a doctor, so he just bandaged her up. Whenever I saw the scars, I wanted to peel the scablike skin off her back to reveal the unharmed flesh underneath, which I imagined would be as pure and smooth as the white trunk of a sycamore tree.
On the rare occasion when my mother did talk about her family, it was clear that she’d had to carry too big a burden as a young girl. Her mother, Lillie (my namesake), was part Cherokee, a petite woman with a powerful touch, known for her herbal remedies and giving ease to women in labor with the tea she mixed from the roots of cotton plants. But when she came down with cancer, my grandmother couldn’t heal herself, and died young. This left Mama to care for her four brothers, and for this reason, she never made it past the sixth grade in school.
Although Mama didn’t grumble about what happened to her, she did judge the world with a harsh eye. I can’t tell you how many times I heard Daddy whisper, “Hush now, Edna, that’s not our business,” before he took a cigarette from the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket and lit it.
Mama had the right way to snap beans, the right way to bake a coconut cake, piece a quilt, milk a cow, and break a chicken’s neck. Whenever Granny Mac cooked supper, Mama made a comment: The sweet potatoes were too sweet, the meat too salty. Every night after supper, Granny Mac cleaned up the kitchen. And every night my mother came right behind her and cleaned the kitchen again. No one else could keep the kitchen as spotless as it was supposed to be.
Sweet Granny Mac claimed she was hard of hearing and pret
ended not to hear Mama’s put-downs. She went about her business, smiling and accepting things as they were, and never stood up to Mama. Maybe Granny Mac just didn’t want to be orphaned again. (And she never was; years later when Granny Mac was sick and dying, Mama took care of her like she had her own mother, changing her diapers and bathing her from head to toe.)
That night, as I went to sleep still seething with a sense of unfairness and aching for that darn cheerleader’s outfit, I tried to remind myself that Mama had her reasons to be tough. And, hard as it was, I forced myself to remember the times she’d been kind. I thought about when I’d contracted yellow jaundice from the contaminated water at school and been laid up for months, how she’d tended to me. I would get the chills all the time, and Mama seemed to sense when the cold came over me and gently wrapped my feet with a warm blanket she’d heated by the stove each night. Sometimes when she finished, she sat silent for a minute at the foot of my bed, her hand resting on my bundled feet. But I knew I couldn’t expect her to understand what I was feeling now—how badly I wanted to step beyond my life as it was and into a new club where cheers and champions and a beautiful outfit awaited me. Feelings were luxuries for rich people. And the words “I want” were just not in her vocabulary.
SO THE next weekend I picked cotton with Louise, trying to earn some money toward the outfit. The strap from the cotton sack might as well have been a snake around my neck. I remember saying to Louise, out of nowhere, “When I grow up, I’ll never pick another piece of cotton again.” Louise laughed, her face red and sweaty in the bright sunlight. I guess I’d said it before, but that fall day, everything felt different. I stood for a minute, looking at the spot where a hawk had been moments before, yearning to fly out of that field with him.
From across the field Mama yelled at me to quit daydreaming. So I picked a boll and stuffed it into my sack, flecks of red from my bleeding hands trailing across it. Louise’s stooped figure moved in the row ahead of me. Behind her, every once in a while a piece of forgotten cotton fluttered above the bare stalks. Bending over, the sun beating on my back, I felt my promise in my bones. I wasn’t going to be like Mama, stuck in the same place I grew up. I wasn’t going to live like this forever. I was going somewhere special. I knew it like you know the wind is blowing even though it’s invisible.
Grace and Grit Page 2