Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  One of my most pressing concerns was college tuition now that Vickie was almost halfway through college at Jacksonville State University. Seeing both Vickie and Phillip successfully attend college was one of my greatest dreams, and I’d cashed out my retirement each time I’d made a job change to create a college savings plan.

  For a while, I’d been worried that Vickie was headed down the wrong path and wouldn’t even make it as the first person in our family to go to college. She’d been such a well-behaved young girl, but she’d started hanging with a rough crowd about the time she learned how to drive. Her teen years had certainly put a strain on Charles and me. She and her friends would do things like get one friend’s little dog drunk. Thank goodness, by the time she graduated from high school, she’d finally settled down. I couldn’t help but feel that my work-induced absence partly caused her rebellion. Maybe she’d been too responsible too young and wanted freedom from the burden of being such a good and helpful child. Now in her second year of college, she was serious about her studies, and too busy working part-time at the Dairy Dip (and as a receptionist at my office during tax season) to get into too much trouble. I wanted to make sure she would have whatever she needed to keep her life on track.

  As I approached forty-one, I was also beginning to realize that life was moving faster than I’d planned. There was only so much time left to accomplish what needed to get done—to establish a greater sense of security for my family. Phillip would be in college soon, and I still needed to build a good retirement. I felt I wouldn’t have many more chances left to achieve a certain degree of professional success. The youthful luxury of imagining I had all the time in the world to get it right was long gone. Facing the last half of my life, I understood how important the choices I made were.

  I’d also been taken off guard by Edna’s recent diagnosis of mouth cancer during the summer. Considering that my grandmother Lillie had died young from cancer, Edna was convinced she was also going to die. After the woman behind the Merle Norman counter told her they didn’t have any makeup to cover her sallow complexion, Edna liked to say, “Don’t worry about buying me anything—I won’t be living by the time Christmas comes.”

  In light of the fact that she’d had colon cancer ten years earlier, the diagnosis wasn’t surprising. She’d also dipped snuff and smoked all her life. She never understood why when we’d moved into our new house in town, I made her stand on the front step to smoke; one reason was that I’d had enough of customers blowing smoke in my face all day at the office, but I also hated the stale smell of cigarette smoke clinging to my upholstered furniture.

  What didn’t make sense was the idea of burying my mother. In her late fifties, she was too young, and I wasn’t ready to stand at her graveside. As difficult as she could be to deal with, the idea of life without Edna gave me a strange sense of vertigo. Now, as I saw what Edna called “liver spots” beginning to appear on the back of my hands, I felt the inevitable limitations of time constricting me as surely as the small wrinkles punctuating my knuckles like parentheses. My aging alarmed me.

  I PLACED the magazine on my desk, planning to take it home and show Charles. Just thinking about the fact that Goodyear was hiring female managers for the first time in the history of the company gave me goose bumps. I rubbed my arms and relished what felt like a door opening when I’d thought for sure, at this point in my life, the doors were only closing.

  Charles seemed surprised when I informed him of my decision to apply for a position at Goodyear. I took a personal day and put in my application anyway. As I sat in the human resources office filling out the endless forms, I read the plaque that hung on the wall in front of me. I mouthed the Vince Lombardi quotation engraved in gold to myself: FOOTBALL IS A LOT LIKE LIFE; IT REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE, SELF-DENIAL, HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, DEDICATION, AND RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY. It made sense to me. If that was what was required to work there, I was ready. A signed picture of coach Bear Bryant hung next to the plaque. I couldn’t wait to tell Charles—when Phillip was born on the same day as “the Bear,” he couldn’t have been more tickled.

  After the long interview, I wondered how many other women had applied. The only women I’d seen so far were secretaries in the front offices where I’d submitted my application, but I knew Aunt Robbie had worked there. One time when I was a little girl, I’d asked her what she did. She laughed at first. Then she said she’d started in shipping, where she “cut the tits off tires,” meaning, she finally explained, that she sliced the thin rubber protrusions off. I thought about her wielding a razor with the same hands she used for knitting and tatting. Aunt Robbie had been hired during World War II, when women manned the plant, making jeep tires, rubber soles for shoes, raincoats, and anything else the military needed. Even after the men returned from war, she managed to stay—refusing, she told me, to accept Goodyear’s offer in 1960 to buy her a brand-new house if she’d take early retirement. By then, she and Uncle Howard had built their own nice house with a swimming pool. She worked at Goodyear for twenty-seven years, until heart problems and a back injury forced her to retire.

  Leaving the plant after my interview, I passed photographs of the men from “Mahogany Row” in Akron, Ohio, lining the paneled hallway—the same men whose biographies I had no idea I’d be memorizing soon. I stopped for a minute and took a deep breath, staring at the black-and-white portraits of these men who exuded such a sense of power. I tried to imagine their lives: how it felt to run a corporation, travel the world, and dine at the country club. It was a life about which I could only fantasize. At least I had this chance to make my life better—a chance I’d never believed possible as a child.

  On the way home I stopped to check on my mother. Blocking the doorway, she was dressed in her housecoat, her dentures still sitting in their usual spot on her bathroom sink now that her mouth was too sore for her to wear them. I announced that I’d applied to work as a manager at Goodyear. She didn’t offer to let me in but cut her sharp eyes at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be doing what a woman’s supposed to do?”

  My shoulders tightened. A familiar feeling of frustration flooded my stomach. No matter how old I was, it always snuck up on me when something Edna said hurt my feelings. Throughout my life there had remained something stuck between us, something as elemental as two charged electrons repelling each other. It wasn’t one particular thing she did or said but the accumulation of all of the small things: the hard look that could stare a hole right through you, the critical tone of voice, the wall she erected between herself and the rest of the world even though she was always doing for others—myself and the children included.

  Vickie was the one who got the best of Edna those early years of her childhood when she and Phillip stayed with her on the farm in the summer while I worked at H&R Block. She was so good to Vickie, I’d have to remind her that she had two grandchildren. When the children became more independent, I’d go through phases of distancing myself from Edna, being too busy with work, even when she and my father moved a stone’s throw away after Papa died. I’d often fooled myself into thinking that I no longer cared whether or not I measured up in her eyes, yet here I was again, returning to her doorstep, seeking her recognition.

  When Edna finally decided to invite me in, I didn’t stay. I searched for my car keys in my purse and told her to get some rest. She looked tired. It was clear she didn’t feel well. Besides, I was too old for such childish nonsense, and I knew enough to recognize and accept that Edna was doing the best she could, as she always had. Really, how could I fault her if she didn’t know how to love me the way I wanted, if she never once said the words “I love you”? How could I blame her for only knowing how to survive by freezing her feelings, playing dead like a possum? It was the one thing I’d learned to do best, and it’s what would keep me alive during the hard times waiting for me just around the corner at Goodyear.

  CHAPTER 4

  Becoming a Rubber Worker

  Life should not be estimated exclusi
vely by the standards of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered fruit. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.

  —CHARLES GOODYEAR

  WHEN I started training at Goodyear, I joined the stream of workers driving to Gadsden before each shift. A small city on the Coosa River, Gadsden is circled by hills brimming with iron ore, coal, and limestone—the three ingredients necessary for making steel. Generation after generation of families had migrated from the surrounding foothills to find a better way of life at Republic Steel (the heart of this industrial city) and smaller factories, producing everything from wire to stovepipes. When Goodyear opened its doors in 1929, men from small bluffs and hollows named Gnatville and Turkeytown had a new opportunity to earn what seemed like a fortune, compared with their fathers, who had made only pennies a day farming. At that time, President Hoover had actually pushed a button at the White House to raise the American flag at the plant.

  In 1979, I, too, faced a new opportunity at Goodyear, but my first time inside the plant, I felt like I’d stuck my head in a barrel of hot roofing tar. No exaggeration. It smelled that bad, and I wondered, “Do I really want to work here?” The deafening machinery made my ears buzz, fumes from the curing pits almost choked me, tire-building equipment reared back like gigantic spiders on their hind legs, and machines called banburies, which looked like three-story cake mixers, spit out four-hundred-pound batches of black rubber marshmallows. Several times a day, from that day forward, I asked myself if I really knew what I’d gotten myself into.

  For six months I trained in the plant’s various departments in the five main divisions: the tube plant, the mill, the truck side, the passenger side, and the radial plant. I marveled at the fact that I was working in a fifty-acre maze, with miles and miles of conveyor belts and daily reports about “near misses.” It would take only a second to lose your fingers in the tire machine if you placed your hands on a “pinch point”—the spot where the cutter, as sharp as a guillotine, did its slicing.

  Lying in bed at night, I’d mull over the stories people told about the accidents that happened. One such story, in which a factory worker in the nearby Union City plant in Tennessee had suffocated to death when he was rolled up in a machine for two hundred yards, haunted me. I kept mentally replaying that moment when his father, who had been working the same shift, had to pull his body out.

  After listening to stories like this, I thought I understood how quickly a machine could become a death trap, but the idea never really hit home until the day I had my physical at the doctor’s office, located at the back of the plant. As I sat waiting for my examination, two distraught men carried in their coworker who’d been caught in the mill, a machine that operates two gigantic rollers moving in opposite directions. The mill is so hot that it softens rubber into liquid to be extruded. I found out later that they’d heard him screaming but thought he was yelling that he was taking a break. Instead, he’d been pinned between the moving rollers. I grew nauseous smelling his burned flesh. His clothes had melted into his skin, and his arm was hanging by a single thread of muscle. After that, I began each shift with a prayer that I’d leave like I came in: alive, and with all my body parts attached.

  Despite the hazardous machines, I looked forward to each day, which was always different from the last. My squadron of five attended seminars and toured fabric mills and retread plants in Alabama and Tennessee. I learned how to prep the stock, build tires, cut hot rubber in the mill room, and withstand a sandstorm of white chalk in the tube room. I’d lug home thick training manuals explaining the process of making tires or managing a team of workers. I took test after test on every topic imaginable, learning the biographies of men such as the founding father, Frank A. Seiberling, who started the company in 1928, and P. W. Litchfield, president when the Gadsden plant opened in 1929—the same year that Goodyear became the largest tire manufacturer in the world. I was even held accountable for memorizing the educational background, religious denomination, and children’s names of the top brass in Akron.

  As I studied the history of the company, I was especially moved by the strange story of Charles Goodyear, who discovered the vulcanization process for rubber but died penniless. What I admired about Goodyear was his determination and sense of purpose in developing a way to make a viable form of rubber. Until his addition of sulfur to the mix, rubber softened into a gooey blob in hot weather and hardened into brittle pieces in cold weather. He never gave up his search despite the odds against him and the fact that he was destitute, continually in and out of debtors’ prison. I admired his resilience but wondered how his family, who lived on the brink of disaster, endured the sacrifices they had to make. He never profited from his invention and died ignorant of how dramatically his efforts would change the future.

  After several months of classroom time, I began working as a supervisor trainee in stock prep on the night shift with my mentor, Andrew, a bear of a man who encouraged me in every possible way. He gave me management books to read outside of work, and pushed me to become a member of an Anniston business club (where I would work my way up to becoming the first female president). His confidence in me helped quell my fears about the machinery and bolstered my nascent belief in my ability to be a good manager.

  I was lucky I had Andrew to lean on. He warned me to choose my words and actions carefully. Anything could be twisted, and I didn’t dare joke with the guys. He’d remind me that half the people in the plant were related to one another somehow, and I’d better be careful whose feathers I ruffled or I’d pass those people on the way down.

  Even Andrew, who’d seen quite a bit as a supervisor, couldn’t begin to predict the crazy snafus I’d run into just because I was a woman. One night when we were short two people on the schedule after the race weekend at NASCAR, Andrew asked me to run the overtime clock. No big deal. I went upstairs and starting calling workers to see who could come in at 1:00 A.M. On my next shift, the men I’d called cussed me like a yard dog. They wanted to be taken off the calling list. Their wives had pitched a fit when they heard a strange woman’s voice in the middle of the night. From then on, I handed the phone to the janitor, who’d give me a quick wink before he asked someone’s wife if he could speak to her husband in the dead of night.

  WHEN I completed my training, I felt like I was on top of the world. The day I received my department assignment as a new manager, I sat in the conference room next to the other four trainees in my squadron. One training manager, a real hoot, warned us, “When you become a manager, it’ll be tough running your departments. I’m the only one who’ll tell you the truth. Being a manager is just like falling off a cliff.” Since training had felt as unnatural as jumping out of an airplane, his remark didn’t surprise me. I appreciated his honesty and was ready to prove I had the mettle to be a good manager—to show that I could motivate my team and withstand the daily dissonance of deadly machinery.

  I genuinely believed I could be an important part of Goodyear’s future, fostering a better relationship between management and the union, or “bargaining men.” Even more important, women in management were relatively new, and I was one of two women on my squadron—the other woman, Cindy, had been promoted from the union. The squadron represented a range of backgrounds. One of the men had come from shipping, another had worked at IBM, and the third worked as an assistant store manager at J. C. Penney.

  I felt like a trailblazer. Both Andrew and the human resources manager had told me many times through those weeks that I had a bright future at Goodyear, and that meant a lot to me. I wanted to matter, and I was ready to fulfill these high expectations. If I could make it, then the door would open for more women to follow. I already knew all too well about the woman who’d gone through training the year before me and had quit soon after being assigned the night shift, a typical assignment for new managers. I wasn’t quite sure why she quit, but for whatever reason, I felt compelled to prove something on her beh
alf. As the roomful of rookies left following our last meeting together, I looked forward to the day when there would be more women joining me.

  MY FIRST job as supervisor was in stock prep on the third shift, from 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., in the radial division. I knew from the beginning that being a female supervisor wouldn’t be easy, but nothing had prepared me for the daily hassle from both the union guys and upper management. One old-timer who’d been there for forty years was so enraged when I was made supervisor that he immediately requested to be transferred to another department. Another old man flat-out announced, “I take orders from a bitch at home, and I’m not taking orders from a bitch at work.”

  It wasn’t surprising that these men resented me; they’d never answered to a woman before. I tried to stay calm. I didn’t want the men to have something more to complain about by becoming too emotional. It would take a while for them to accept me, and I tried to rise to each challenge—even ridiculous ones, such as the time one guy insisted, “I bet you can’t find me a recipe my wife would like or doesn’t already have.” Maybe he was trying to prove I didn’t have the right stuff even at home, where I was “supposed” to be. I brought him a chicken and corn bread recipe, wishing he’d focus on what really mattered. He seemed satisfied.

  While the men I supervised resented a woman being in a position of authority, some of my supervisors feared that I wouldn’t pull my weight. I had only been on the floor in stock prep a few days before one shift foreman took me out onto the back dock, where he thought no one would hear him. In a low voice, he grumbled, “I’ve got this other loser [referring to an African American worker], and now I have you, and you’re a damn woman.” He actually scratched his crotch, so I just focused on the Y-shaped vein popping out smack-dab in the middle of his forehead. “I don’t want either one of you. You’ll ruin my record, and I’m gonna get rid of both of you.” As far he and some of the others were concerned, I might as well have been a missionary in a strange land, trying to convert them to a new religion.