Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  Although I’d started working motivated solely by financial pressures, I soon found a greater reward as I exercised skills I didn’t know I possessed. I enjoyed aspects of the job most people hated. I was the only one in the office who actually liked it when we had to piece together the copy machine the supervisor dismantled on purpose, to test whether we could fix it on our own. Tinkering with the copier parts, I thought about the hours my father spent in the garage repairing his cars for an extra buck. That wasn’t work for him. He enjoyed it. Now I knew why.

  At the end of the day when I clocked out, I rushed to pick up Vickie and Phillip. After I put the kids to bed, I left Charles, who, of course, was beside himself that I was leaving, at home watching All in the Family and returned to H&R Block to finish filling out the forms stacked up by my desk. During the three and a half months of my first tax season, I somehow managed to prepare five thousand returns.

  Charles resented my long hours; they were hard on everyone. He’d immediately regretted agreeing to my working. In his eyes, my job took me away from our family and church, and he complained about everything to do with it—especially the fact that I was sometimes alone in the office late at night with only my manager.

  The following summer I was offered a full-time position. I didn’t even consult with Charles. I knew he’d say no if I asked him about working the entire year. He’d only agreed to my working in the first place because it was something I could do during the short tax season, from January to April. I felt as though I was finally coming into my own, and I wasn’t about to let him take that away from me.

  I accepted the offer on the spot.

  WHEN I did tell Charles I’d taken a full-time position as the office manager, he acted as betrayed as if I’d had an affair. To show him I was no longer willing to be told how to live my life, at the end of my first week as office manager I marched, paycheck in hand, to the First National Bank in Anniston and opened my own checking account. When I’d completed all the forms, the banker pushed the papers back across the desk at me. I asked him what I’d missed.

  He looked at my wedding ring. “Are you married?”

  “Yes.” I looked at his left hand, trying to see where this conversation was headed.

  “You forgot to fill in your husband’s name.”

  I tasted the bitter residue from the packet of saccharin I’d poured into the cup of coffee he’d offered me when I sat down. I handed the forms back to him. “I’m opening a separate account.”

  He was quiet for a minute. “It’s happening more and more these days,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I glanced at the Anniston Star sitting on his desk. I thought he was referring to the headlines about the Vietnam War protests. My father, who worked at the Anniston Army Depot, viewed any antiwar sentiment as un-American; the demonstrations made Charles, a member of the National Guard, furious. I secretly sympathized with the protestors.

  “You must be getting a divorce.”

  “No, sir. As a matter of fact, I’m not.”

  He shook his head. I wondered if he was going to give the paperwork back to me.

  He rifled through it, signing below my name before he pulled an account booklet from his drawer.

  “There must be some reason you’re opening a separate account,” he said, more to himself than to me, as he wrote my name at the top with my new account number and the amount I was depositing underneath.

  I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t say that with my own bank account, I could prove to Charles how much of a difference my paycheck would make; and if I wanted to spend more on myself or the children, who was to stop me?

  He handed the blank account booklet to me. “You’ll receive your new checks in the mail in about two weeks.”

  A few days later, when I opened a charge card at Wakefield’s department store and applied for a Standard Oil gas card, I received the same response the banker had given me. This time I wasn’t surprised. When I told Charles about the account, he blew a gasket, raising his voice and then retreating to the garage for hours to wash and polish his car. The first time we split the household bills at the end of the month, he calmed down a bit.

  Charles settled down even more when we were able to buy our dream house in Jacksonville several months later. For years, we’d drive into town on Sunday afternoons to admire houses and see what was on the market; now Vickie, tired of being so far from school, was begging us to move. We made a budget and started our search in earnest. Charles and I soon found a redbrick ranch house that we all loved on a small hill, tucked near the end of a long street at the foot of a wooded ridge. The yard was big enough for Charles to build a work shed in one day. The best part was that it was only blocks from school and the Jacksonville Baptist Church. In spite of its proximity to public places, our new home was located on a quiet street, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to see deer grazing in our yard or wake up to the ghostly mist of a morning fog.

  Meanwhile, significant social movements were sweeping the country. Historic civil rights struggles were taking root in Alabama. No one in my family was sympathetic to the African Americans and northern agitators advocating change. I lived in a community where change came slowly, if at all; and when it did, it was often violent—as in the case of the firebombing of the Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders outside Anniston in 1961.

  Both my parents had voted for George Wallace for governor in 1962. They applauded him when he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama and so famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” His ranting and raving reminded me too much of Papa for him to get my vote. When politics came up for discussion at the Sunday dinner table, I kept my thoughts to myself to keep the peace. My parents’ voice was not my voice, as segregation seemed like a grave injustice to me.

  When I opened a bank account to prove to Charles that he was being unfair, I made no conscious connection with the bra-burning feminists. At the same time, I felt a yearning so many women like me at all levels of society were feeling. I was determined to find a new path. I’d learned early on not to take no for an answer, and in the end I got my way by working. My daily path was no longer confined to trips to the grocery store and church. Charles and I also no longer worried about how to pay for speech therapy. Charles had initially dismissed Dr. Luther’s concern over Phillip, saying he’d come around in his own time, but when he saw Phillip’s progress, he seemed relieved. As Phillip improved by leaps and bounds each week at therapy, I was overwhelmed with joy. Now I could even treat him to ice cream afterward.

  AS GRATEFUL as I was for the new challenges and the freedom more money gave me, many days I came close to giving up. I was unprepared for how tired I was working full-time—a feeling more debilitating than that leaden fatigue I’d experienced in the first trimester of pregnancy. I often wondered if I had the stamina to keep the pace up.

  I’ll never forget the late afternoon I found Vickie and Phillip sitting on the curb outside Mrs. Harris’s house waiting for me in the descending darkness. Driving up to the house, I saw them huddled together, alone, in the dusk. Mrs. Harris had somewhere to go and had left them when I was running late. I was saturated with guilt. I hated that feeling of giving up my most important job—caring for my children—to someone else. I even felt jealous when Edna or Charles’s sister took care of the children.

  One cool fall evening when I was making Hamburger Helper, Vickie asked me if she could help me cook. (Mixing a meal from a box and opening two cans of sweet peas wasn’t Edna’s definition of preparing a meal, but it was quick.) I let her pop open the soft can of Pillsbury crescent rolls by pressing it with the back of a spoon. As she folded the sticky dough on the pan she asked, “Can we make doughnuts after dinner?” At least once a week before I’d started at H&R Block, we made doughnuts together as a family, creating our own assembly line.

  I opened a cabinet to see if we had the ingredients (even though I knew we didn’t) before I said, “We’re out of
yeast and powdered sugar.”

  Vickie sighed. “But we haven’t cooked them in such a long time.”

  “I haven’t had time to go to the grocery store,” I replied too harshly. Noticing the dust balls by Vickie’s feet, I thought, I haven’t had time to vacuum, scrub the toilets, or wash a month’s worth of laundry, either. Vickie’s simple request irritated me because it highlighted my inability to get everything done; still, I was ashamed of my own irritation.

  Hearing Vickie’s frustrated tone, I felt like the worst mother in the world. In the frenetic mornings getting ready for school and work, I yelled at the children when they didn’t deserve it. Watching Phillip scramble into my car, his shoes untied, I wanted to rewind and start the morning over, attending to everyone’s last little need. Instead, I was frazzled. Every morning as Vickie rushed out the door I frantically tried to brush her knotted hair. I watched her traipse into school wearing a mismatched outfit she’d proudly chosen herself, her blond hair still tangled in the back from her tossing in her sleep. The other little girls in her class walked by with perfect ponytails their mothers had lovingly fixed. No matter how much planning and organizing I did, I had to live with the fact someone or something was not always tended to properly. I had to face the self-loathing this created. Vickie’s question made me realize that I didn’t want to quit making doughnuts or carving pumpkins or baking Christmas cookies because I was too tired to get it all done.

  I told Charles before bed that night that I’d quit work. At first he looked surprised, despite the fact that he’d staged his own protest by ambushing me almost daily with arguments on why I should quit. Then he hugged me as if the University of Alabama had just scored a touchdown. I was glad when he let me go and went to brush his teeth. I didn’t feel victorious; I felt deflated. I remembered all the times before I started working when I went to the A&P. I’d hold my breath during checkout as the cashier punched in the prices on the cash register. I was always within cents of my $20 limit, having kept a running tally of the groceries in my head, calculating the math before I placed each new item in my cart. To my relief, not once did I have to return anything to the shelves.

  The next evening, before I started cooking dinner, I gathered the family in the living room. Charles told Vickie and Phillip that I was quitting.

  Phillip asked, “Can we still go to Jack’s for a hamburger?”

  A hamburger cost fifteen cents. That expense would have to go. I recalled all the times I unsuccessfully begged my mother for a bicycle or piano lessons. I couldn’t believe it, but here I was telling Phillip no.

  “We’ll have to eat at home from now on. Hamburgers are too expensive.”

  Phillip jumped up and started mimicking Cousin Cliff, singing the jingle for the Jack’s ad on TV. “You’ll go back, back, back … to Jack’s, Jack’s, Jack’s … for more, more, more!”

  Vickie hushed Phillip and asked why I didn’t want to work anymore. When I explained that I couldn’t get all the housework done, she was silent at first, then she, too, became animated. “We can pitch in. I’ll clean my room every night before bed, and Phillip can clean his.” Vickie jumped up and ran into her bedroom, returning with a pencil and the lined writing paper she practiced her cursive writing on. “I’ll make a list for me and one for Phillip, and we can hang it on the refrigerator so we don’t forget.”

  Right then, I knew that whether I chose to stay at home or continue working, I’d have to live with the guilt inherent in each decision.

  I asked Phillip to find my car keys. We were going to Jack’s for dinner.

  Once we made our decision, we created new family rituals. On Saturdays we divided the chores and cleaned the house. I made Charles do his own laundry after he ruined almost all of my clothes with the blue ink pens he forgot to empty out of his shirt pocket. Between morning church and evening services on Sundays I’d fix a big pot of spaghetti or soak some pinto beans with ham hock that Vickie would warm up during the week. As she got older, she learned to make corn bread and slaw to go with supper. Phillip liked to tease her about burning everything she cooked, but she looked after him, and they were always close. During Christmas vacation, the whole family gathered around the card table folding reminders to fifteen thousand H&R Block clients to complete their tax returns early. Then we stuffed the envelopes and separated them by zip code. Charles and I gave the kids the $400 H&R paid me.

  Charles began shouldering a good portion of the responsibilities that had once fallen solely to me, such as picking up the kids from Mrs. Harris’s. As Vickie and Phillip became more involved in school activities, Charles was the one who participated in the PTA meetings, attended Phillip’s football and baseball games, and worked the concessions when Vickie was a cheerleader and in the marching band—I was grateful that not once did she have to worry about buying a uniform. Over time, he became accustomed to my working, and the day my paycheck became greater than his he finally accepted the fact that I had a knack for what I did. Eventually, he found a good job he liked as the housing administrator at Fort McClellan and stayed there until he retired, working his way up to the rank of command sergeant major and finishing his college degree.

  CONTENT AT H&R Block, I thought once I started there, I’d stay and manage the office, prepare returns during tax season, and teach the fall tax-preparation class at night for the rest of my career. Working the line at GE, I might as well have been one anonymous figure in a string of cutout paper dolls. Now I had a chance to define myself through hard work. The seventies were a rocky time as far as the economy was concerned, beginning with the oil embargo in 1973, a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Exorbitant oil prices were soon followed by debilitating inflation, widespread layoffs, and the energy crisis defining the decade. What this meant for me was a layoff from H&R Block four years after I started working full-time.

  When the state auditor who visited our office regularly recommended me for a position at an accounting firm in Gadsden, I took it. After a short stint there—I got tired of my paycheck bouncing—I became the officer manager at a small gynecologists’ office. My most challenging task, besides typing on a broken typewriter, was stocking up on boxes of Zest crackers and gigantic jars of pickles each month.

  Hoping to go back full-time when the economy picked up, I also moonlighted at H&R Block. The doctors’ office just wasn’t for me, in more ways than one: I knew I was in the wrong place when they offered to perform a hysterectomy on me. Like the other women in the office, the doctors told me, I could keep the insurance check when it arrived, pocketing the much-needed few hundred dollars, in exchange for letting them sharpen their surgery skills. I was hard up for cash but not desperate enough to give away a perfectly good uterus.

  Before long, I was talking to a friend at church and found out about an opening at Jacksonville State University in the financial aid office. I wasted no time pursuing the job. At the end of the interview, the financial aid director, Larry, a lanky guy with a mustache, told me, “You’ve got my vote. Now my wife and secretary just have to approve.” An easygoing, kind woman, his wife warned me that working with Larry would be like walking on eggshells, since he had low blood sugar. As his assistant, I got along with him just fine. Whenever he’d get really cranky, he’d pull a boiled egg from his coat pocket, or as if he were a magician, a sausage biscuit would appear out of nowhere. Most of the time he just paced the office eating spoonfuls of peanut butter from the largest jar I’d ever seen.

  The day I started work, I walked onto campus thinking about what my life would have been like had I gone there, if only my mother had let me earn college credit my senior year. I didn’t dwell on it too much. In my own way, I’d gotten to college after all. Working on campus and helping eager, grateful students in need go to college was something I looked forward to daily.

  Unfortunately, without my own college degree, I could only achieve so much financial success at the university. After I’d been working with Larry for three years, H&R Block contacted me, as I�
�d hoped, to become the district manager for the Anniston office when my old manager left. By then H&R Block had around seven thousand offices and opened a new office seemingly every minute. The pay was double my university salary, and as much as I enjoyed helping students and appreciated the academic setting, I had to move on.

  I returned to H&R Block in 1976 and stayed there until 1979, in the end managing fourteen offices. One busy morning as I was reading Business Week, I was struck by an article about Goodyear. Just as the technology behind making tires was changing with the newly constructed radial-tire plant built in 1976, so, too, was management philosophy; it was now emphasizing a team approach.

  I thought about the stories I heard growing up, the bloody tales of violence between union men and management. They were legendary, like the well-known local ghost stories. I remembered Aunt Robbie talking about her own uncle, who went into hiding during a strike to keep from being killed. My uncles had often referred to “the reign of terror,” the time before World War II when workers tried to unionize and labor organizers were beaten viciously on the main street in the middle of the day. According to the article, times had changed.

  I finished the article and held the magazine in my lap, considering, for the first time, the real possibility of working at Goodyear—the article had also said that women were becoming part of this new management team. I had no idea what went on behind those redbrick walls sprawling for acres next to the Coosa River. How a tire was actually made was beyond my comprehension. I thought about my friend Sandra wearing a different sweater set every day and the beach vacations and shiny Mercurys Goodyear provided her and her family. Maybe working at Goodyear could give me that stability I needed for the rest of my working life. I’d started late, entering the workforce when I was thirty-one, and I’d gone as far as I could at H&R Block without moving to another state.