“It makes me so mad I could spit,” she told Wilburn. “They seem just amazed at how I can turn off work. They just stand there and watch!”
“They can’t believe their good luck,” he said with a grin. “They don’t have to hire.”
They had often boarded a hired hand, but now they did not. Christy threw herself into the work on the farm in a perverse effort to show how valuable she was. She labored spitefully, directing her youthful temper at weeds and shucks and mud. She tried to adjust to her married life, but she kept a little distance, saving herself, and gradually Wilburn saw it. He saw that flame of independence she hoarded—as if her mind were somewhere else, free. What he didn’t know was how often she wondered if she should have gone to Detroit with her aunt Mary instead of marrying him.
Many women, even farm women, were entering what they called public work—a job outside the home. In 1938, after two years of marriage, Christy began working in Mayfield at the Merit Clothing Company, which manufactured men’s suits. Bob and Ethel were scandalized, but Wilburn didn’t object. The factory was a multistory brick building with oiled wood floors and hundreds of paned windows. Its enormous rooms were filled with whirring machines that hummed and buzzed and click-clacked. People were intently absorbed at these machines, working as if they were privately engaged in a fascinating puzzle. Christy was thrilled.
She spent her first week making set-in pockets and welts for vests. But she didn’t catch on to the work at first and couldn’t meet the production quota.
“I was so young,” she tells me. “I didn’t know how to put out the work. This floor lady was supposed to teach me, but she had the hots for a foreman and she didn’t take enough time with me. Her job was to teach the new ones and keep tabs, but she was too busy flirting with the foreman. I did a bunch of work and done it wrong and had to take it out and do it over. They didn’t have repair hands then, to go along behind and fix mistakes. So all I made was a dollar and a half for the whole week!”
She bought a dress with that first paycheck. It was white eyelet, with a gathered skirt and ruffles around the neck. It was the first dress she had ever owned that wasn’t handmade.
“I hadn’t been working there long, and I still wasn’t making my average when the manager called me in and bawled me out. He talked to me like I was a dog, and I went out crying. He said, ‘I guess you know I should fire you, but I’m going to give you another chance, and if you can’t handle it, you’ll have to go.’ ”
The manager sent her to a simpler job, sewing labels inside coats. She did that easily, and in time she performed a variety of other tasks: she cleaned coats; she ran tacking machines; she mastered vest welts.
“People worked hard to hold on to their jobs,” she tells me. “Everybody knew how lucky they were to have them.”
The world of the factory dazzled her. The place was steaming hot, the air was filled with lint. The pressers worked in a cloud of steam that flushed their faces. Gigantic overhead fans swept the air. Christy sat proudly on a high stool and guided heavy material through her machine. She loved being out in the world, going to town, earning money. She felt important. “The people I worked with was really something,” she tells me. “There were all kinds of personalities, and I learned how to stand up for myself.” She learned not to be afraid to be herself. She gabbed and giggled and kidded. She bloomed.
“They included the label sewers in some of the office parties and conventions,” she says. “And all the employees got a corsage and a free big dinner once a year.”
I have a snapshot of her with a group of her Merit pals on an outing to a Civil War battlefield on the Mississippi River. The picture shows several women posed around a car, eating smile-wide slices of watermelon. I love to imagine her at this time in her life, when her youthful optimism took charge of her and lifted her out of her limited past. I like to imagine that I was conceived in some supercharged instant that arose from the electric state of mind she enjoyed while she was a Merit employee.
The Merit offered train excursions. In 1939, Christy signed up for a factory trip. She had earned enough money to pay her way. Wilburn did not go with her. The group traveled by train to Biloxi, Mississippi, a resort town on the Gulf of Mexico. They went on boat rides, took a bus tour of New Orleans, ate seafood, and saw more exotic scenery than Christy had ever imagined.
I went along on that trip, too. I was a stowaway, although neither of us knew it at the time. So began another radical change in Christy’s life, and so began my curious, wandering existence.
4
The first question I remember asking came to me when I was about four. Mama was sweeping our room. We lived with Daddy’s parents—Granny and Granddaddy. I asked Mama why she was sweeping.
“The floor’s dirty.”
“What are you sweeping it for?”
“Because I have to.”
“What for?”
“Cat fur to make kitten britches,” she said, exasperated.
To me, it was and still is a fundamental question. Why work? Does everybody have to sweep? Could I get out of it somehow?
I played house with my dolls, Nancy and Johnny. Nancy could drink from a bottle, and she could pee—she was modern. But Johnny was a hand-me-down rubber doll who had been left out in the rain. He was bleached-out and lazy and no-account. In one of my earliest memories, Santa Claus left a domestic tableau across the foot of my bed—a little iron and ironing board, and a kitchen stove and sink and pantry. Mama had saved all year to achieve this surprise, to see the delight on my face.
I practiced for my destiny with my new toys. But jigsaw puzzles, not dolls, became my obsession. As soon as my hands could manipulate objects, I was working jigsaw puzzles. In my playpen, I forced the pieces into place and celebrated my discoveries. I had tantrums if the pieces wouldn’t fit. “You’d stand on your head and show your butt,” Mama always says, with a laugh. I loved coloring books and connect-the-dots—any sort of play that caused a design to emerge—a surprise, like the sun coming up.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my parents and I all had the mumps. President Roosevelt was on the radio. Worry suffused the air, and Mama was afraid for Daddy. Daddy had to stay in bed, while Mama helped Granddaddy milk the cows and deliver the milk to our customers. Women could handle mumps, but mumps had a way of “falling” in a man, causing sterility, Mama explained to me years later.
Before the mumps, I had already been stricken with pneumonia my first winter. My parents and I slept in the unheated north room, the coldest room, and I was often sick. I slept in their bed with them for warmth. One night Mama awoke to find me completely uncovered. “You were cold as a frog,” she says. When fever developed later, she fed me juice she squeezed from onions roasted in ashes, and she painted my chest with black-walnut juice, staining my skin brown. She crooned baby talk, her voice throbbing with worry. I can imagine how she must have clung to me fervently from the time I was born. At last she had something of her own in the world. She had me. And she had survived childbirth. At every point of her pregnancy, she must have been aware of her own mother’s fate.
My earliest memories seem to have soundtracks. I try to make sense of the fragments of sounds I remember, but they are growing fainter. I try to grasp them from the foggy air:
My grandmother’s muted, stern murmur, and her soft way of protesting, with a slight self-effacing laugh, all wrapped up in the word “Pshaw!” It was a smoothly rounded cat-spit of a sound.
Granddaddy’s grinning “tee-hee-hee.” He was mild-mannered and calm most of the time, and gentle in his humor.
My mother’s series of little cat-sneezes.
The way she said “Shhh! Be quiet!” when Daddy was taking a snooze.
Her bursts of hilarity and Daddy’s guffaws, his haw-haw-haw laugh at anything foolish.
The bull bellowing. The slap of cows’ tails against their flanks, swishing flies.
The motor of the small truck, Daddy returning from his milk route.
The creaking chain of the pulley as Granny drew the bucket of ice-cold water from the cistern.
The voices of kinfolks gathering, the variety of pitches.
The individual voices—Mose, Herman, Uncle Roe, Uncle Bee, Mary, Datha. The older ones said “holp” for “help” and “ye” for “you,” and they all said “mess” for just about any situation.
Sounds had shapes. Before I learned to read, I assigned a visual language to the sounds I heard. The image for Daddy, naturally one of my first words, stayed in my mind for many years. It was a dented aluminum cup of the kind used for drinking water from a cistern. (We used an aluminum dipper to sip from the bucket drawn up on the screaking pulley.) This crinkled cup flashed into my mind whenever I heard the word “Daddy.” Even now, sounds always have shapes—abstract ones, arcs and shadings of spaces—and a typewritten word accompanies each one like a subtitle. A whooshing sound is long and drawn out, wide on the ends, rounded as the mouth would make it. Traveling along behind is the typed word “whoosh.” A train’s whistle is long and thin with a flared end, like a contrail of sound, and it covers the entire space it travels. A cat purrs a flow of dots.
The sounds linger in my head:
The electric milkers—suctioning the cows’ tits, sucking the milk.
The motor that ran the electric milkers at the barn. It had a throbbing rubber-against-air rhythm. In bursts, the exhaust air flowed to the outside of the small milk house adjacent to the barn.
In the barn, the two-by-four sliding into place, locking a cow by the neck into a stanchion so she could be milked. The splash and whish of urine running down a trough to a hole through the south wall of the barn. The plop of powdery white lime splatting and scattering onto the whitewashed concrete floor to smother the stain of fresh manure. The scrape of manure being shoveled from the barnyard into the manure spreader. The sound of boots sucking mud. So much sucking.
My pacifier was made of wood. I sucked wood. My first word was “sook-cow”—the cry my family used to call the cows at milking time. I’ve learned lately that the lowland Scots used “sook, cow!” to call their cattle; it comes from an Old English word, sūcan, to suck. It is a clue to our history, which has been mostly lost to memory.
My very first memory is a scene fading into that oblivion. It was a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon. I was still an only child. I was three. We had company, and Granny made vanilla ice cream, churned in a freezer filled with salted ice. I was wearing a blue-print dress and white socks and sandals. Mama had made my dress from a muslin feed-sack. It felt luxurious and finely textured, like Granny’s damask tablecloth. The kinfolks gathered on the front porch, where they could see anybody passing along the road, and I was sitting alone for a few minutes at the top of the steps to the back porch. The concrete stairway had a tubular metal rail, smooth and round to hold. When I got a little older, I would swing out under this rail to the ground, and the metal would make a slight squeak against my moist hands. But that day I sat on the top step in a quiet moment that has stayed with me always. I was concentrating deeply on a Coca-Cola bottle cap that Daddy had fastened onto my dress. He had separated the cork lining from the metal cap and then fitted the cap and cork together again, capturing the dress material snugly between. The texture of thin cork was like skin, pleasant to touch. The metal cap was cool, hard, and fluted, like the ones in Granny’s bottle-capper for the grape juice she bottled from the grapes on her arbor. I tested out the fitting of this marvelous wonder—the cap separated and then reunited on my dress—and I remember feeling that I was making a discovery about how the world works in clever ways—disparate objects making delightful, unexpected connections for no real reason other than for our pleasure in discovering them.
I remember the ice cream that day, vanilla and heavenly, with the occasional tang of salt from a crumb of salted ice flicked into the cream tub. (Granny and Granddaddy called ice cream “cream.”) Ice cream and Coca-Cola were imprinted on the appetite center of my brain that day. They became part of my mind’s unfolding, like the patterns on my dress.
That same year a much more significant scene occurred, but I have no memory of it. I climbed onto the kitchen table, and—no doubt pleased with myself—I stood there surveying the room from my new vantage point. Granny and Granddaddy had forbidden me to climb on the kitchen table.
“I was outside when I heard you squalling,” Mama says. “And I ran from the wash-house, up the back steps, to the kitchen. Bob was standing there with the razor strop in his hand. You were screaming like you’d been kilt, and he was fixing to thrash again. I jerked that thing out of his hand so hard it burnt the skin off of my fingers. Then I grabbed you up and run into the bedroom. I was bawling as hard as you were.”
When my mother tells her memory, it is as if she is going through it again. I can see the hurt on her face. “Your little legs was purely black,” she says. “I don’t know how many times he hit you, but you stayed bruised a long time. Wilburn didn’t say anything to his daddy that I know of. But Bob never hurt you again.”
“I don’t remember it at all,” I say. I think about how mothers report they never remember the pain of giving birth. I wonder if forgetting applies to all kinds of pain, and if pain is the reason so much of our history has been forgotten. I cannot remember the savagery of the razor strop, its sting, my squalling, the black welts on my legs, the shudder of my mother’s sobs. I loved my grandfather.
My legs seemed destined for trouble. In the summer of 1944, we had a new house and a new baby, my sister Janice. Shortly after she was born, I butchered my leg at the knee in an accident that required twenty-two organic, dissolvable stitches of catgut. I had a wreck with a breast pump. My cousin Sadie and I were playing with the pump someone had given my mother so she could save her milk for the baby. It was made of glass, with a rubber bulb on one end. We filled it with sand and took turns squeezing sand at each other. I was on the rope swing under one of the grand oak trees by the driveway. I was swinging as hard and as high as I could and Sadie was standing nearby, ready to spray sand at me as I swung toward her. But I slammed into the breast pump in Sadie’s hand. The glass shattered, gashing the side of my knee.
It was a Sunday, and some kinfolks were visiting. Granny wouldn’t let Mama see my leg. Mama was still in bed after coming home from the hospital with the baby. Now Daddy took me to the hospital. While someone prepared the ether, a nurse held me. She chirped about all the new babies that were in the hospital. “We’ve got the cutest little colored babies here now,” she said. “Twins! And black as coal.”
Our new baby was a white baby. I wondered, what if Mama had brought home a black baby? Did she get to choose which baby she wanted? Maybe they would send a black baby home with me and I could surprise her. The gas started flowing over my face, and a hundred little Humpty-Dumpties with high, squeaky voices began building an enormous Tinkertoy structure all over me. They worked busily. The scene was like a Katzenjammer Kids strip in the Sunday funnies, where the action is all over the place simultaneously. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand the Katzenjammer Kids, even after I learned to read. For years, I studied them hard, trying to work out the riddle of their fascinating speech.
That summer, my father was preparing for the inevitable. President Roosevelt was often on the radio talking about it. Daddy was waiting for the President to call him. He hadn’t expected to be drafted because he was a farmer with little children. And the doctor had told him he wouldn’t be accepted anyway because he had sensitive ears from having scarlet fever when he was a teenager. But the war grew worse, and now the word was that the government was taking anybody. Daddy began selling off his cows; he let some of them go dry.
In anticipation of the second child, Daddy built us a house—in the woods on a hill a couple of hundred yards away from his parents’ house. Granny and Granddaddy didn’t think much of it. It was not large and solid like their conventional farmhouse, with its porch and cistern. There was plenty of room for all
of us in their house, they believed. Our new house, a white wood-frame structure, was very small, a little square divided into four rooms—two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. It cost fifteen hundred dollars to build, with a friend’s help. For my mother, it was a mansion—her own place at last. She had a stove and a sink and a living-room suit. She had two little girls. She was happy that summer and full of hope that clashed with her dread of the war.
Daddy knew that if he were drafted, he would probably end up in the infantry and have to slog through the war on foot. So, after waiting as long as he dared, he enlisted in the Navy, hoping for better treatment. Janice was crawling when Daddy left for basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, and when he returned briefly on leave, she was walking. He was waiting for his orders.
At the end of his leave, Mama went with him on the bus to Nashville, where they went to the naval recruiting station and picked up a sealed envelope containing his orders. He was supposed to present it, unopened, to his commanding officer, but he kept worrying at the seal until he got the envelope open. The orders inside said California. That meant he would ship out into the Pacific, right smack in the middle of the war.
They stayed in a hotel. The night was hot and full of fear, and they couldn’t sleep. They parted before daylight. At home, my mother kept busy, afraid she would never see her husband again. She saw her life stretching before her on the farm, with her in-laws. She did not get a letter from him for a month. During that time, President Truman announced the dropping of atom bombs. “It was the hardest time I ever lived through,” she says. “I was nuts.”
Clear Springs Page 5
