Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  Daily, I was inspired by the women I met, women of all ages from all different backgrounds. Their stories always resonated for me. We were all the same—young women struggling to pay for a decent education, widowed women struggling to buy medicine, military spouses, all hardworking people living paycheck to paycheck, a situation I understood well. When lying awake in a strange hotel room by myself worrying about passing the bill and Charles’s and my own dwindling finances, I saw these women’s faces and heard their voices. They carried me on my journey.

  BY THE fall of 2008 Charles could no longer hold out for an entire day in his woodworking shop like he used to. He took a nap in the morning, one in the afternoon, and another before he went to bed. He remained religious about attending his Tuesday-morning men’s prayer meeting at the church. But he’d gotten to the point that when he was driving he had to pull over on the side of the road and rack his brain to remember where he was going. As I continued to travel in support of the passage of the bill and Obama’s campaign for president, my heart ached for Charles.

  On election night I sat with him in the den and watched the returns. Throughout my life, I’d rather have voted for a blue dog, as they say in the South, than vote Republican, so I’d kept my politics to myself, especially at Goodyear. As usual, on any local or national election day, management at the plant got off early to go to the polls to make sure their Republican vote was cast. I’d pick up my purse and leave early along with everyone else in management, only pulling a different lever in the voting booth.

  As long as I’d known Charles, he might vote in the local races for a Democrat, but when it came to the president, he’d always voted Republican.

  That night, for the first time in five decades of marriage, our votes hadn’t canceled each other out.

  The day in December 2008 that I left for New York to be interviewed on 20/20 about the campaign for pay equity, I knew in my gut that I shouldn’t go. By that time Charles was feeling too sick to see the grandchildren when they wanted to visit us. Right before I left, he told me he’d had enough of life, but I pushed aside his comment like I always did. Charles used to tell me, “I’m gonna die early. My body’s just gonna wear out.” I told him to quit talking like that because if you visualize something, it will happen. I really believe that. When he’d first been diagnosed with cancer, he immediately started telling me, “You know I’m gonna die before you do, and you’re gonna be left to your own devices.” I’d say, “Then you need to show me how to do the outdoor lights,” to hush him up.

  The morning I was supposed to leave I sat in the den reading the paper. Charles was making coffee in the kitchen. When he brought me a cup, he asked me what I was doing.

  “I’m reading the newspaper.”

  “You mean you’re not going to New York?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t answer and pretended to keep reading an article.

  “Lilly, go on. You’ve already changed the date twice. Go on. Get it done, and that way they won’t call you anymore. You’ll be back tomorrow, and then it’ll be the holidays.”

  I thought about what he said. Things seemed to have stabilized since the doctor had changed his medicine. I could get the interview done, come right back, and then we could have a quiet Christmas together with the family.

  “Promise me you will call someone if you don’t feel well,” I said before I threw some clothes into a suitcase.

  On my way out the door, he stood watching. I started to kiss him good-bye, but he stopped me.

  “I’ve got a sore throat.”

  I kissed him lightly on his scarred cheek.

  “Don’t forget to get the cough syrup that you can take with high blood pressure when you get your decongestant medicine,” I reminded him.

  At the Atlanta airport, I called to check on him, but no one answered. I figured he might still be at the drugstore. When I called him once I landed, he still didn’t answer; I reasoned that he’d gone to bed early like he’d been doing for some time.

  Before the interview I tried once more. No answer. I thought maybe he’d gone to the post office or run to get a biscuit. Once I did the segment, I went straight to the airport to try to get an earlier flight. I really started worrying in the car on my way home from the airport when there was still no answer.

  The minute I drove up to the house, I knew something was wrong. The garage door was standing wide open, but it was raining lightly. Maybe Charles had left the door open so I wouldn’t have to get wet. Only what were the white plastic bags full of groceries doing sitting at the back door? When I walked into the house, every light in every room was on. I smelled something burning and found a scorched pan sitting on the hot eye of the stove.

  I discovered Charles lying on the floor by the bed, his hand over his heart, blood all around him. I knelt beside him. All I wanted to do was put my head on his chest to comfort him like I’d always done. I wanted to go with him so badly. And I was suffused with regret. I covered his body with the bedspread and told him, “I’m sorry.” Sorry he’d suffered so much and profoundly sorry that he was alone when he died. I finally got up, the knees of my pants damp and stained red from the blood-soaked carpet. I needed to call Vickie. As I picked up the phone, it occurred to me that the next week would have been our fifty-third wedding anniversary.

  In the coming months, as I tried to accept Charles’s death, I also tried to come to terms with the nature of my relationship with him over so many years—as well as my guilt about leaving him alone at home so often. He was always afraid I’d leave him for good, and in the end, in a sense, I felt like I had. I’ll probably never forgive myself for not being there with him when he died. But I also tell myself that he might have known how close he was to the end when he urged me to go New York. Maybe he didn’t want me there. Maybe he knew my own heart would have stopped from the shock of my loss had I been there with him. And in a way that would have been fine with me.

  THE MORNING after Charles’s funeral, I answered the phone, which had been ringing with calls from upset family and friends. A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Would you please hold for Senator Clinton.” Vickie was sitting beside me, and when I said I’d hold for the senator, her eyes got wide. On the phone Senator Clinton told me how sorry she was. I couldn’t help but mention that it was our anniversary, and then I lost my composure.

  Before I knew it, another call came. Could I please hold for the president-elect? He, too, was thoughtful and concerned, and again I became emotional.

  Early in the morning, two days after the funeral, I answered the phone not expecting to hear “What would be a good time for Mrs. Obama to call you?”

  “Anytime she’d like to,” I answered, sitting still on that spot on the sofa until she called not too long afterward.

  I don’t mention these phone calls to name-drop. I mention them because it was remarkable to me that these individuals took the time and effort to do this when they had more pressing affairs to attend to, but somehow, despite the fact that they were transitioning to a new office, they managed to maintain a real connection with real people.

  I never would have gotten through that sad time had it not been for the outpouring of kindness from so many people. My living room looked like a florist shop. I was so grateful. My grief had made me restless, unable to settle down, reluctant to sit still in the house Charles and I had shared for so long. In my heart, I was uninterested in the world that I found myself muddling through. Even though Charles had battled cancer for two years, enduring radical surgeries and toxic treatments, I was unprepared for his death. I hadn’t seen what was coming, swept away like those rafters on the Colorado River I’d read about in a newspaper account. They’d been drifting calmly down the river on what they thought was a good day. Before they knew it, they were swept up in a torrential current from a thunderstorm in the mountains many miles above them whose deluge, out of nowhere, had overpowered them. My own grief almost drowned me.

&nb
sp; And what took me most by surprise was the sense of fear that consumed me. When I was little and the sunset illuminated the sky a fiery red, my grandfather told me that the world was about to end. I’d stare at the setting ball of fire, facing the awful realization that I had no control over the fact that my life was about to be over. That’s how I felt on a daily basis with Charles gone.

  After Charles died, I found some stories he’d written in his unsure handwriting on lined notebook paper. He talked about his childhood in Asberry. He wrote, “History will tell you the Depression is over but no one told us. I am not in the mood to tell all about the hard times we had. We did survive. I’d much rather take stock of my blessings and tell you what I’m thankful for. The birds and that first ray of sunshine every day. I’m thankful I have a good wife beside me, that I can trust her and depend on her in a lot of ways. I am grateful we can talk to each other sometimes without even speaking and have an understanding on a lot of things.”

  Reading his words, I relived our early years together. Charles showed me the best in what man can be. It’s so strange how it’s the small things your mind latches on to as grand gestures of love. When we first got married, he ate my first upside-down pineapple cake—the worst thing you’ve ever tasted—without so much as a word. I had to spit it out, it tasted so bad. I sorely missed the simple fact that he made and brought me a cup of coffee every morning.

  He was a good man. If someone needed something, Charles would help any way he knew how. He was just the type of person who family and friends turned to in need. At church he started a bus ministry, picking up children who had no way to Sunday school. He overextended himself so badly, working long hours during the week and on Saturdays around the house, that by the time Sunday came he was plagued with migraine headaches. The doctor told him he was doing too much, that he had to learn to say no. He never did.

  I smiled through my tears remembering the time he dressed up as the country pop star Billy Ray Cyrus, imitating him and dancing to the tune of “Achy Breaky Heart” for a competition. I can’t imagine how long he must have spent convincing himself to do this. This was the man who was as sober as his military uniform most of the time.

  The only way I survived my darkest times dealing with Goodyear was through Charles’s kindness and clean heart. And when I was traveling so much over the previous two years, the person Charles leaned on the most was our preacher. They talked together for hours, and I felt some peace believing that Charles, a deeply spiritual man, was supported and sustained by God’s love through his journey, one we all face when our death comes.

  I was thankful that he left his stories that he must have written while I was away. As I read and reread them, I felt some measure of comfort to hear his voice again through his written words.

  BECAUSE OF Charles’s health, I hadn’t planned on going to the inauguration. I guess the White House felt sorry for me, because I was invited shortly after Charles’s funeral. The whirlwind week began in Philadelphia, where Vickie and I met up with a group of forty-one ordinary folks like me invited to accompany the Obamas and Bidens on the inaugural train ride, a 137-mile journey, covering part of the route President-Elect Abraham Lincoln made to his own inauguration in 1861. Over the course of one day, the inaugural train, nine gleaming silver cars with a blue vintage caboose draped in red, white, and blue bunting, whizzed from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.

  In Wilmington, Delaware, we stopped to pick up Vice President–Elect Joe Biden. The Amtrak conductor Biden befriended on his daily trips to Washington spoke to the ebullient crowd, who sang “Happy Birthday” to Michelle Obama for her forty-fifth birthday. (I couldn’t help but reflect that when I was that age in the mid-1980s, I was just about to be laid off for almost a year and work in the chicken plant.)

  It was here that the president-elect commented about the guests he’d invited, remarking, “These are the quiet heroes who have made this country great. They work hard, they look after their families, they sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren, and they deserve a government that represents the same enduring values that they live out in their own lives.” When he spoke those words, I forgot the bitter cold for a moment and thought with pride about all that had happened since the Supreme Court ruling. I had thought I’d come to the end with that crazy verdict.

  Along the train route, people lined roads, holding cameras and waving signs reading WE DID IT. They bundled up to survive the arctic blasts, huddled shoulder to shoulder on highway overpasses. They even hung from trees or stood waving their hats and arms, grinning from ear to ear, on rooftops, on porches, and in barren fields. I’d never seen or felt anything like it; the sense of hope was palpable. In Baltimore, around forty thousand people, whose toes and fingers must have been frozen, stood in single-digit temperatures to greet the president-elect. At the whistlestop rallies, the flush-faced crowds had waited for hours in the unforgiving winter weather for the train’s arrival. When President-Elect Obama spoke of the ordinary Americans whose voices he would carry with him to the White House, the audience waved their American flags, cheered, and wept all at the same time.

  During the entire trip I wore a microphone for my interview with ABC News. Most people who came up to me took one look at it and said, “I’ll be talking to you later when that thing is gone,” but I kept it turned off most of the time, periodically turning it back on to comment on what I was seeing and feeling.

  Early on, President-Elect Obama and Michelle and Vice President–Elect Biden and Dr. Jill Biden came through our car to say hello. They hugged me, and behind me Vickie sat by the window. She was so quiet that I looked over my shoulder to check on her. She had tears slipping down her face. She’d just lost her father, and the experience of seeing so many people, their expectant faces, all of them, no matter their race or class or gender, at heart the same, simply wanting something better for the future and placing that hope in this man standing before us, who was acknowledging us of all the millions of people in America, had gotten to her. As they moved away from us down the aisle, I asked Vickie, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” She wiped her eyes. “But you’re right. They’re amazing people.”

  Vickie and I differed when it came to politics. Not on the topic of pay equity, mind you, but we politely agreed to disagree, as the saying goes, on other matters, party affiliation being one of them.

  As we approached Washington, the crowds grew larger. The train arrived in Union Station at night as crowds waited along Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the president-elect make his way with his family to his temporary residence.

  At the swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol, the crowd was unbelievable. Looking at the kaleidoscope of faces, I marveled at the beauty and diversity all around me, soaking in the fact that it hadn’t been so long ago that only miles away from my hometown the infamous Scottsboro trial had taken place. So much had changed within my lifetime. Yes, so much more had to be done, but for that historic moment, I could celebrate progress. It was with wonder and great excitement that I watched the first African American president being sworn into office. Truly, it’s not an event I thought I’d ever see.

  Afterward, with the north wind bearing down on us, Vickie and I grabbed a hot dog from a street vendor and limped in our boots back to the hotel, where we thawed out and watched the parade on television.

  YOU WOULD think that winning a national championship in ballroom dancing would prepare you to dance with just about anybody. Well, I thought I was quite the hotshot dancer until I danced with the president at the Neighborhood Ball the evening after the inauguration. A small group of us were whisked to the elevated stage, where the president was dancing his first dance with Michelle. I was pleased to be wearing my favorite silver sequined skirt from my dancing days, but I was so thirsty I couldn’t stand it. I was told that if I left the stage, I couldn’t come back, so I ignored my scratchy, dry throat and started dancing along with everyone else in high spirits.

  We were all moving to th
e music when a nice young man who had been on the inaugural train ride tapped me on my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and said, “Come with me.” Next thing I knew, he marched right up to the president.

  “Mr. President, here’s someone you need to dance with,” he said like they were the best of friends.

  The president smiled his electric smile, took my arm, and off we went. I was concentrating so hard on making my body move the right way, I couldn’t say much. As he guided me on the dance floor, I heard someone below the elevated stage say my name. I glanced down. It was Kevin Russell, who’d argued my case before the Supreme Court, and his fiancée. I smiled at them.

  As I tried to make my stubborn feet act right, the president assured me, “We’re going to do this.”

  My tongue felt like stone and my words were blunted, but I thought to myself, Now, I know he’s not talking about dancing. He’s talking about the Ledbetter bill.

  ON JANUARY 15, the bill had passed the House, and only two days after the inauguration, it passed the Senate. I was elated, but when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to congratulate me, she pulled me aside and asked me, “How are you doing?” clearly wanting the honest truth about my state of mind after the loss of Charles.

  Frankly, I was more than a bit of a mess inside. But I said, “Fine, just fine.” I just couldn’t go there, to my core, in that moment.

  The day President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act into law, I walked with him on the red carpet to the East Room of the White House. As I settled into place to hear the president’s remarks, I missed Charles more than I ever had. Listening to President Obama talk about my struggles and the hardships so many families face, I appreciated his remarks about his grandmother, thinking of my own grandmother Lillie, who died of cancer at such a young age and left such a crippling legacy for my own mother to bear.