Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

“I just had a similar meeting with the plant manager. He was telling me the same thing. That I wasn’t performing. And there I was acting like you. Couldn’t let it go like some young fool.”

  Eddie had criticized me recently on the floor for omitting something that in fact I hadn’t omitted. The next morning he caught me heading out the gate to the parking lot and whispered, “I have to fuss at you when I jump on the other managers, or else I’ll have hell to pay.” It was the closest thing to an apology I’d heard yet.

  “I kept badgering Henry that I wanted to see the numbers. I think at one point he thought I was going to come across the desk at him. I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

  I knew that in his own way Eddie was between a rock and a hard place. No one was immune to the plant’s politics. Someone wanted me out. Telling me my production was down was his way of pleasing upper management and holding on to his own job. “Did he show them to you?”

  He winced. “He didn’t have to. The numbers don’t make a bit of difference.”

  “How can you stand being lied to?”

  “What are you going to do about it? We might be cut from the same cloth, but I know when to shut up. Mouthing back won’t get you anywhere. You’ve never learned when to back down.”

  “Why are you doing this? You know it’s not fair.”

  “You’re always ready for a fight. You can’t let anything go, can you?”

  “But you still haven’t shown me any proof of your criticisms.”

  “And I’m not going to.” He picked up his unopened folder, stood, and walked away.

  I asked him when we’d meet again.

  He turned and barked, “You’re bad for morale, Lilly. Do us all a favor. Why don’t you just retire?”

  SOON AFTER, at our morning managers’ meeting, once again Jeff’s audit downgraded me. He’d reported that I didn’t have a lock on one of the machines, but he was the one who was supposed to give it to me. And he never did. My frustration overtook me. I couldn’t continue to try to hold my head high or push away my anger. I’d tried before, when Eric was still my supervisor, to speak to him about the mistaken audits. Sometimes when I approached him, he seemed friendly; more often, he was too busy to meet with me. I decided to talk to Jeff myself and followed him into his office at the end of the meeting.

  “You got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He didn’t invite me to sit down.

  “I need to know why you continue to downgrade my department when you know good and well my guys wear their safety equipment and my machines are always running.” I didn’t mention the fact that when the other auditor filed his reports I was in compliance with the guidelines.

  “You must have had a bad night. Something go wrong with a machine?”

  “Nope, but something’s gone wrong with your audits. Each one of them is marked wrong. I’ve been in my department with you, and you’ve seen what I’ve seen, my men dressed in all their safety gear. But that’s not what you’ve written here.”

  “Whoa, Nelly, simmer down now, Lilly.”

  “No. You quit doing me this way when I’ve done nothing wrong. My guys’ safety record is better than most.” I shook the paper in the air. “You expect me to keep taking this? Look at it. It’s all wrong. How can you even begin to say they’re not wearing their gear? And to write that my machines aren’t always running when you know they are.”

  “I mark what I see.”

  He was as smooth a liar as you’d ever meet. How it came so easy I’ll never know.

  “Then you need your eyes checked.”

  Jeff chuckled. “Hell, Lilly, I’m in a tough spot. You see these big old guys. If I write them up, they’re going to give me a whooping, push me around, and dog-cuss me.”

  I knew what he meant. I’d seen the other managers roughhousing with him. He was smaller than the rest, and I doubted he could hold his own with the bigger guys. But that didn’t mean he had the right to mess with me.

  “Then maybe you need to quit playing golf and take up boxing. But whatever you do, that doesn’t have a thing to do with me.”

  “Sure it does. It’s a hell of a lot easier to downgrade you. You’re just a little female. You’re not going to cuss me back.”

  I bit my bottom lip hard and thought, Just a little female? Who would believe this stuff if you told them? His words were beyond ridiculous.

  “Besides, I have to write up somebody.” He scratched the inside of his ear and inspected his forefinger. “Everybody can’t look good.” He flicked whatever it was off his hand.

  NOTHING CHANGED with my audits. Toward the end of that summer Eddie called me into his office again. “Lilly,” he said like he always did, as if about to scold me, “we have a technology-engineer opening you need to interview for. I’ve already recommended you for it.” He was starting to gray around the temples and his hair was thinning, but his temper hadn’t mellowed.

  I had the familiar feeling of being hemmed into a corner. I didn’t need to transfer departments. I liked the tire room. “I’m fine where I am,” I said, keeping my voice matter-of-fact.

  “It’s only to your advantage to interview for it and consider taking it.”

  Quality control, where I’d been moved during the EEOC investigation in the early eighties, wasn’t as challenging or interesting to me as supervising tire building. “No, really, I’m good where I am.”

  “Change is not bad, Lilly. We all resist it, but sometimes it’s the best option we have.” Behind his small wooden desk, he jotted down notes.

  My stomach tightened and a shot of pain ran through my lower body as I sat on the hard metal chair. “You know I enjoy where I am and I have a good crew there,” I said. And that was in spite of the fact that now if I disciplined a builder, Eddie wouldn’t back me up on my recommendations.

  He sat back up, clicked his pen closed, and placed it on his yellow legal pad. Leaning back in his chair, he finally looked at me. He placed the tips of his fingers together, forming a pyramid shape with his hands. “I felt the same way about change myself just a few weeks ago until I was convinced it was in my best interest to make a move. It’s only to my advantage to take the advice I was given and move to Lawton, Oklahoma.”

  For a second, I felt kind of sorry for him, having to move. He’d lived in Gadsden all of his life, working at the plant for the past twenty-six years. “I don’t know, Eddie. I’ve been in the tire room a while now. Like I said, I like it there.”

  “All I can tell you is what I was told. Change is good for you. Any other option won’t be what you want.”

  What options? I didn’t see options. “Who else is moving? Or am I the only one because I’m the only woman?”

  He leaned forward and said intently, “You’ve got to quit blaming everybody else for your problems, Lilly. You should be thankful your pay stays the same. And if I were you, I’d be glad to have a job. Everybody else around here’s getting laid off.”

  “I’ve moved a lot, and you know I’ll do what I need to, but I’d really like to stay where I am.”

  I didn’t dispute him any further. Rumors about layoffs and demotions continued running wild, but during the previous year, when the plant was supposedly shutting down, there’d been some layoffs of bargaining men but not any managers that I knew of. The scuttlebutt I’d overheard in the break room was that some area managers had gotten raises even though the word was that all salaries were frozen.

  “I suspect if you don’t take it, you won’t have a job either. Chris is waiting for you now to talk about the transfer. I suggest you go see him.”

  I did go see Chris about the technology opening, as instructed. I waited to be moved, but in typical Goodyear fashion, I stayed where I was for several more months until another person was found to take my place and the company released the position in quality control.

  AS THE Christmas holidays approached once again, I looked forward to the plant going dark for a week, so I could spend time with my family, but the ho
lidays didn’t turn out quite as expected. A few days before Christmas, the doctor found a tumor the size of a lemon lodged in Edna’s throat. She’d been having trouble breathing for over a year, and she could barely sleep without suffocating, but no one had caught the real reason for her difficulties: lung cancer.

  In the doctor’s office Edna sat on the examining table in a flimsy gown, her legs dangling, reminding me of a little girl. I retied the strings in the back of her gown to keep it from gaping opening as we waited for the doctor.

  When the doctor finally arrived, Edna asked him what kind of tumor it was, and he told her that she’d have to wait until after the holidays for more conclusive testing.

  “Do you think it’s malignant?” She crossed and uncrossed her ankles unconsciously.

  “Have you ever smoked?” he asked, still reading his chart.

  Her legs became still. “Yes.”

  He looked her straight in the eye. “Then you’ve probably answered your own question.”

  Time felt like it was melting as his words sifted through my mind and buried their weight in my heart. The sounds in the room—Edna’s wheezing and the squeaking soles of the nurse’s rubber shoes—became distant, and the doctor’s words sounded as garbled as the sounds Louise and I made when we used to try to converse underwater.

  “I can tell you this,” he continued. “If it is cancer, the only way I approach each patient I have is, no matter how advanced any cancer may be, I will do all in my power to cure you, if possible.”

  Based on what the doctor told me in private afterward, her prognosis wasn’t good. Somehow, Edna had missed the last two words, “if possible,” and she convinced herself and everyone who listened that she was being cured. Her mind was set, and knowing how she was used to being the one in charge, I knew I was in for a time trying to take care of her.

  WE GOT through the holiday the best we could. The new year started and I was officially transferred. In January 1998 I became a technology engineer, just another highfalutin term for someone in quality control. My position as area manager was filled by one of my former tire builders, a man, who’d been promoted.

  In quality control, the last stop before the tires are shipped, the inspection area covers about twenty thousand square feet and the ceiling is several stories high, reminding me of an airplane hangar. My main job was to hand-check 125 Hummer tires. If the offgoing shift neglected to do theirs, that meant another 125 to check. The worst thing an inspector can do is let a bad tire get out the door. Then you have to shut down the machines and scrap the batch of bad tires until someone figures out where on the production line the problem occurred.

  The first thing I did on my shift was go to the pits and set up the curing press. Each time I worked on the presses, I thought about the last thing one supervisor said to me after telling me to report to my new job. I was walking out the door when he called my name. I turned around, puzzled by the seriousness in his tone. “Lilly,” he said, “whatever you do, don’t make a mistake on the curing press.” What he left unsaid was: If you do, you’re done. I had a bad feeling then that I’d been hung out to dry.

  The curing press, similar to a giant waffle iron, gives the tire its final shape, engraves it with its tread pattern, and makes the sidewall markings, required by law for identification, that rate the tread wear, traction, and temperature and give other important information about the make and model.

  During the production cycle, when different tires are made, there are mold changes, so each shift I’d have at least three mold changes to double-check, making sure all the specifications on the new tire setup had been entered correctly. To do this, I took a computer printout one of the supervisors in final finish had given me outlining the specifications. Then I adjusted the gauges and dials for the length of time, temperature, and level of steam pressure for that particular tire.

  Once the tire was cured, after about twenty-five minutes in the press heated to over 300 degrees F, I caught the tire, which was released hydraulically, before it hit the conveyor belt so I could inspect it. I traced the entire tire with a thin waxed paper, comparing the drawing with an illustration in a manual to make sure the two matched exactly.

  After my very first shift as a technology engineer, my apprehension about my job only deepened. That shift I’d been left alone and told to call another supervisor if I had questions. When I did, he said he didn’t have time to help me, so I did the best I could with what little instruction I had. In all other departments, I’d always been given a job description and a training manual and spent a significant amount of time being trained.

  After I finished in the pits, I unloaded and spot-checked Hummer tires. One night as I checked a tire, it spun out of my hands, landing on the concrete floor. I let it sit there a minute while I wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my blue shirt. Then I bent over to prop the tire against my legs. In the dimly lit warehouse, I ran my flashlight over every inch of the tire, looking for lumps or splices burned into the surface when it was cured.

  After I checked the tire inside and out, I looked for a hoist to load the large tire onto a handtruck to wheel it to the side of the eighteen-wheeler, where I stacked the tires for the trucker to load onto his truck. A hoist was nowhere to be found. There was no way I could lift the tire onto the handtruck without it, so I rocked the eighty-pound doughnut across the floor to the empty eighteen-wheeler. About that time a young coworker, Bobby, who stayed in the pits, walked by on his way to the area where whitewalls are sprayed blue to keep them from being damaged during shipping. Only three or four of us worked in my department, and I was by myself most of the time, so I tried to catch his eye, but he looked away.

  “Hey,” I said, “can you help me out a minute? I need a hand stacking this tire.”

  “Don’t think I can help you, I’m afraid. I’m busy right now.” Bobby kept walking. The outline of a round Skoal chewing tobacco container created a worn white circle on the back pocket of his Carhartt jeans.

  As we say in the South, he acted as sour as a gallbladder. “It won’t take a minute,” I said a little faster, without raising my voice.

  He stopped and turned around. “Look, I got work to do. Besides, everybody says you’re a troublemaker and to stay away from you.” Glancing over at the tires that the shift before me had not finished unloading, he jerked his head in their direction before he said, “You’re on your own.” I’d seen that other stack of passenger tires, and it was a daunting sight. I’d also seen the hard look on Bobby’s face and heard his blind anger before. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want to be inspecting tires any more than he wanted me there, but there was no point in saying anything.

  During the break, I looked for Rodney, one of the quality control area managers overseeing the shipping end of final finish.

  “You know, the offgoing shift didn’t check their tires again,” I told him.

  A tall man, Rodney shook his head and clucked his tongue in sympathy. He’d been there as long as I had and had confided in me that when he first started, one of his supervisors was in the Klan. As an African American, he must have found that unnerving, to say the least.

  “You know, some of these guys don’t know to do anything but keep their feet on your neck. And they can come up with about anything to do that,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He continued, “One time I was told I was inflating my production numbers. Then the manager who did the investigation discovered that I was actually understating them. I wish I could have seen his face. That’s not what they expected to find, but they did.”

  “You lucked out that time.”

  “Like I tell the other black supervisors, ‘Know your job, do your job, and no one can find fault.’ ”

  “How am I supposed to know my job when I don’t even have a job description?” I cringed at the whininess in my voice.

  “You have to keep asking.”

  “I have. Several times now. I’ll ask again, but you’d think at
this point they’d have already have given me a description.”

  “Lilly, you’ve been here as long as I have. When I first started, I was still supposed to be sitting at the back of the bus. Now, how many times have they set up the guillotine for you? And each time, you’ve never walked through it. You’ve walked around it, and you might have even thumbed your nose at it a few times. And that makes them even more determined to drop the blade. Don’t get me wrong. I know what you’re up against better than anybody here. They’re pros at this game, and they’ve set up that guillotine for you again. But remember, you don’t have to walk through it.”

  Someone across the room called for Rodney. He patted me on the back and gave me a quick smile before he left. I needed to quit complaining, pull up my bootstraps, and get the job done, but the past couple of years had worn me out; I was done stuffing down my disappointment and swallowing my anger, throwing myself harder into my work like a good little hedgehog, thinking that if I just worked longer and smarter, my merit would speak for itself. It hadn’t and it wouldn’t. It had taken me too long to see what had been so transparent for so many years. I needed to earn the best salary possible, yes, but more than that, I needed approval for being someone special. That didn’t have a thing to do with money. I had stuck it out so long, to the detriment of myself and my family, in part because I was waiting for acceptance. Even though I’d found comfort and reward in other parts of my life, like dancing and my grandchildren, I never let go of the secret hope that Goodyear would change how it treated me.

  Just a few days earlier I’d finally been given my annual evaluation for the previous year. I’d met with Paul, a manager who had supervised me less than a month after I went on leave for my colon surgery. He told me I wouldn’t get the raise I had been counting on. Using Jeff’s audits, he said my performance was poor, specifically criticizing me for not having team meetings.

  I answered right back. “That’s right. Eddie froze the overtime pay and the guys won’t come in an hour early for a meeting if they’re not paid.”

  I was coming to the horrible realization that I held no real value in the eyes of those I had tried hardest to please. I knew I wouldn’t be given the material I needed to perform my duties successfully in my new department. Walking back to where I’d been unloading Hummer tires, I pondered how long I could maneuver the curing presses before I was tripped up unwittingly.