So she, began a rigorous schedule, attending college during the days and working part-time, 3 P.M. to 11 P.M., at various nursing homes and hospitals. It was a grueling routine that our entire family endured from the fall of 1969 until the spring of 1971.
Mama had worked the swing shift pretty much since she’d completed the Manpower Program. So there was never much supervision for us kids. Thelma, Floyd, Grandpa Harve, and Aunt Mary Sue had provided some consistency in our lives. Now that we were older, Mama didn’t feel we needed as much oversight. Frank was fifteen, Linda, ten, and we were all big enough to be left on our own.
After Frank got us kicked out of Lake Forest Trailer park, Mama sent Grandpa Harve to live with Uncle Carl again. Her plan was to finish her degree and buy a house. Then she’d bring Grandpa back to live with us, forever.
So our entire family began school that fall. Mama at Columbus College, Frank at Columbus High School, me at Arnold Junior High, and Linda at Waddell Elementary. We all went our separate ways in the mornings. And when we kids came home in the afternoons, it was usually to an empty house. Sometimes Mama was there, but if she was, she had a thick medical book propped opened in her lap or on the kitchen table. She was determined to be the best nursing student enrolled at Columbus College.
The college is now known as Columbus State University, and is part of the University of Georgia educational system, but in those days it was often referred to as Cody Road High, a title that offended many of the professionals who staffed the school. So, like most second-ranked schools, they tried harder and pushed their students to their limits. Mama didn’t shirk from the challenge one bit, and she repeatedly earned her place on the dean’s list. Not bad for a rural Tennessee gal with a ninth-grade education.
One nursing instructor in particular was always giving Mama grief. Not much of a whiner, Mama didn’t usually talk much about how difficult school was for her. Although as a kid I didn’t understand the magnitude of Mama’s accomplishments, I was proud that she was trying to make things right for us.
One particular afternoon, Mama came home frustrated to no end. She said her instructor, Sister Marianella Senft, had chided her in front of the entire class over some procedural thing she thought Mama ought to have mastered already. A shy woman by nature, Mama doesn’t like to be singled out for any reason and certainly not for public humiliation. As I listened to her recounting the day’s events, I decided right then that somebody had to put the sister in her place, and it might as well be me.
I gathered up a fistful of change and left the trailer. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was going to do. I wasn’t too sure myself. But I knew there was a pay phone at the other side of the trailer court. I intended to have a little chat with Sister Marianella.
I found the college’s information number in the thick black book dangling from the end of a chain. I plunked a dime in the phone and dialed the number. “Could I please speak to Sister Marianella, ma’am?” I asked the receptionist.
“Just one moment, please,” she replied.
There was a long pause before a voice came on the line. I’d half expected the nun to talk in the same deep-throttle voice that Coach Bush employed when instructing the mighty Rams, Arnold Junior High’s football team. But Sister Marianella’s voice was pleasant, not imposing. That bolstered my resolve a bit. “Ma’am,” I said, “you don’t know me, but my mama, Shelby Spears, is a student in your class.”
“Yes?” she responded, no doubt curious about why some student’s daughter was calling her.
“Mama’s been having a tough time in your class. She comes home upset all the time. I don’t know what you said to her in class today, but she came home almost in tears.”
I didn’t pause to take a breath or give Sister Marianella a chance to take one either. My voice was growing louder, more intense. “Did you know Mama is taking care of three kids while she goes to school? Did you know that my daddy died in Vietnam? Did you know that when Mama leaves school she goes to work all night? Don’t you understand how hard she’s trying? She’s really trying. You ought not be so mean to her. Can’t you see she’s doing her best?”
There! Whew! I’d spit that all out.
“How old are you?” the nun asked.
“Twelve,” I said.
“Well, young lady, I think it is impertinent of you to make such a call,” Sister Marianella said. I wasn’t too sure what she meant, but I didn’t interrupt her for an explanation. “If your mother wants to be a nurse, she’s going to have to earn the right to be one. Perhaps she ought to reconsider, given all you’ve just told me. I will talk to her about it tomorrow.”
Click.
I couldn’t believe it! That old bag had hung up on me. She didn’t listen to a word I’d said. And she obviously didn’t carry an ounce of mercy in her deep pockets. I fumed all the way back home. But I didn’t say a word about the phone call to Mama. She was upset enough. No reason to get her more riled up. Besides, I was pretty sure the sister was going to tell Mama all about the phone call.
She did.
It was the first thing Mama wanted to know about when she got home the next day. “Karen?” she called out, walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. “Did you call Sister Marianella yesterday?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, pretending to be occupied cleaning up the toiletries on my dresser.
“You had no business calling my instructor,” Mama said.
“She’s being mean for no reason at all,” I said. “I just told her how hard you’re trying.”
“I know what you said to her,” Mama remarked. “She told me all about it. Don’t ever do such a thing again.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Mama spoke sternly to me, but I knew she wasn’t really mad. Otherwise she would’ve grounded me. I suspected when she repeated the story to her girlfriends that in her own quirky way, Mama was kind of pleased that I’d called the sister. I figured she probably wished she’d been able to tell Sister Marianella a few things herself, if it wouldn’t have been such a risk to her future.
I don’t think Mama or I realized it at first, but that phone call marked a change in the way we began to relate to each other. Months later, Mama summed up the change this way: “Sometimes I can’t tell who is the mother and who is the daughter here.”
She was popping off at me at the time. Angry over yet another battle we’d been waging. But she got it right. Our roles had reversed. From the moment I confronted Sister Marianella Senft, I viewed Mama as a needy person, incapable of properly caring for herself, much less us kids. And although she’d never said so, I suspected Mama doubted her own capabilities at the time.
When she wasn’t studying or working, Mama was drinking more than ever. Not alone and not usually at home. She often spent the weekend evenings partying with her nursing buddies. I hated Mama’s honky-tonking. I was fearful of being left alone at night. Sometimes I made desperate attempts to keep her at home. I’d cry that I had a bad bellyache. Or I’d take the thermometer and scratch it across the bedsheets, trying to raise the mercury level and convince Mama that I was running a bad fever. Sometimes I would tell her that I was scared to be alone and that I wanted her to stay with me. For the most part, Mama ignored me and my fears. She labeled me her “hysterical child” and often laughed off my silly sicknesses.
I didn’t make any attempts to hide my disgust with her indulgences. Mama said that before Daddy died she didn’t drink at all. Not even one beer. But then again, back then she didn’t have any screeching sorrows to quell. As long as she stayed busy, Mama could ignore Daddy’s absence. But at night an imposing shadow rested on the pillow next to her. The memories of the man she had loved with her whole heart, mind, body, and soul haunted her. Death is a cold companion to snuggle up next to. No wonder Mama often soaked her slumber in firewater first.
CHAPTER 17
for god’s sake don’t enlist
THE VERY BEST THING ABOUT ARNOLD JUNIOR HIGH WAS MRS. AN
N ANDERSON. MRS. ANDERSON SPORTED A backcombed hairstyle and sometimes wore white boots that made her look like one of Nancy Sinatra’s go-go dancers. But it was her laughter that captured my attention. She was the sort of teacher who kept her frustration burner turned down low and her giggle monitor cranked up high. If a kid acted up in her class, she’d put a dunce hat on him and tell him to take a seat in the wastebasket next to her desk. For that reason alone, very few kids ever acted out in her class.
But it was the stories we read that made me most eager for her English class. Mrs. Anderson introduced me and hundreds of other pubescent television devotees and comic-book readers to good literature. The backbone of our class that year was John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, a father’s tribute to his dead son.
The title comes from a sonnet by the classic poet John Donne. Gunther wrote achingly of Johnny, the son he lost in 1947 to a brain tumor. He summed up his son’s battle with cancer this way: “A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force—this was what went on in Johnny’s head. What he was fighting against was the ruthless assault of chaos.”
I read Gunther’s words in class under Mrs. Anderson’s watchful gaze and fought back my own fury against the “brute unthinking force” that had snatched Daddy from our family and the subsequent “ruthless assault of chaos” we were now enduring. Sometimes, as I read, Mrs. Anderson glanced my way and we locked eyes. I suspected in those moments that she knew how Gunther’s book was affecting me. I lived in a home haunted by Death, yet, no one ever spoke its name.
Like John Gunther and his wife, Frances, I wanted to know “Why? Why me? Why him? Why us?”
Frances Gunther summed up her family’s loss this way: “Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one’s fellow human beings, of the earth.”
I didn’t know if Daddy’s death made me more aware of life, as much as it made my world a much scarier place. I was keenly aware that I could lose Mama, Frank, or Linda. Or my own life, in a lightning-flash moment. Reading about Johnny’s brain tumor only heightened my ever-increasing anxieties. My head echoed with the sound of dirt being shoveled onto a steel coffin.
Shoving my way through the school’s crowded hallways between classes helped silence the voice of fear growing within me. Arnold Junior High was situated in a cul-de-sac in a middle-class neighborhood. Brick homes with white Corinthian columns and well-tended azalea bushes stretched out in every direction. There were no trailers, no cinder blocks, no rusted-out cars, and no tires with pansies planted in the middle of them. It was a working-class neighborhood, but no people of color lived nearby or attended the neighborhood schools.
There was only a smattering of black people at Arnold Junior High. Mr. James Bell taught math and Mrs. Uretha Gilmer was the librarian. All the other blacks worked in the kitchen or the bathrooms. Segregation didn’t seem strange or wrong to me at the time. I didn’t think much about it, really. It wasn’t something we kids talked about, and it wasn’t something Mama was talking about at home. I’d seen the occasional riot on television news. I’d heard Uncle Ray and Aunt Helen talk about the marches in Selma, but, frankly, since I didn’t know any blacks except Thelma, the plight of blacks in general didn’t affect me much.
The irony is that I knew what it felt like to be part of a population that others ignored, avoided, or even hated. I’d felt racism’s sharp sting as a freckled-faced towhead living in a Filipino village and attending Oahu’s Helemano Elementary School. And I felt that singled-out isolation again after Daddy died.
As a child, I was incapable of distinguishing between my father the soldier and the policies and practices targeted by protestors who were sincerely concerned about politicians’ misuse of military might. Certainly, the nightly newscasts and the headlines in the daily papers did little to help me make those distinctions. There was nobody sitting beside me explaining that the protestors burning effigies of U.S. soldiers or shouting obscenities about the Vietnam War weren’t necessarily angry at my father.
Their rage against the soldiers returning from Vietnam terrified me. The more virulent the protestors became, the more shame I felt over my father’s death. I feared telling anyone about Daddy’s death. I worried that they would label him a murderer and me the killer’s daughter. It was the sort of confused shame a sex-abuse victim might feel, as if I was somehow responsible for hurt that had been inflicted upon me. But I didn’t talk about my fears or shame with Mama, Frank, or Linda, or with teachers or friends. Frankly, I just didn’t even have the verbal skills to articulate my feelings.
For much of my life, I was embarrassed and conflicted over my father’s death in Vietnam. I thought he should’ve known better. All those intelligent people protesting the war certainly seemed to know better. Why didn’t Daddy? It was a question I pondered almost daily as I listened to Walter Cronkite’s latest war report and heard the growing casualty numbers during dinner each night. Yet, I never worked up the nerve to ask Mama why Daddy didn’t just run off to Canada. I knew that the simple answer was Daddy was a professional soldier. Like it or not, going to war was his job. It was a job he took seriously and did honorably.
Daddy, of course, was dead by the time the antiwar, antisoldier, antiestablishment fervor reached its zealous, screeching pitch. For that, I’m thankful. For my hardworking and honest father, coming home to a nation full of ugly folks spitting and spewing vulgarities at him, to people who neither respected nor honored his efforts as a soldier, would’ve been a death of a different sort, one I’m glad Daddy never had to endure.
Throughout his military career, my father kept a sense of humor about his job. It’s evident in a poem he wrote from Camp Gordon. (It’s probably a good thing he was a soldier because I don’t think Daddy could’ve earned his living as a writer.) Mama saved the piece of lined notebook paper with the poem scribbled across it in blue ink, the title written in Daddy’s best cursive script:
DOING A HITCH IN HELL
Just below the South Carolina border,
Gordon is the spot where I am doomed
to spend my time in the land that God forgot,
down with snakes and buzzards,
down where a man gets blue.
We sweat, freeze and shiver.
It’s more than a man can stand.
We are not a bunch of convicts, just defenders of the land.
We soldiers of Signal Corps, earning our pay,
guarding our people of millions, for meals, two-and-half a day.
Living with our memories, wanting to see our gals,
hoping while we are away they won’t marry our pals.
The people who know we are living, never give a darn.
Although, we are not forgotten at home, for we belong to Uncle Sam.
The time we spend in the Army, the good times we’ve never missed.
Boys, we hope the draft don’t get you and for God’s sake don’t enlist.
When I get to Heaven, St. Peter will surely yell,
“He’s from Camp Gordon, Lord! He’s done his hitch in Hell.”
Daddy’s keen humor also comes through in a letter he wrote to Mama, postmarked July 22, 1966, two days before his death:
Hi Darling,
Will answer your letter that I got yesterday. Sure was glad to hear from you for we haven’t been getting our mail like we should and everyone is pissed off about it. It has been raining here every day now. So we have fun staying wet most of the time, lately. I think they are trying to turn us into ducks. I hope by now that you have slowed down a little for your last two letters sound like you were staying busy 24 hours a day with all the moving and your job too. I always thought staying busy does help a whole lot, but as you say, you can get too much of it, so slow down and catch up with yourself. I know you have been real busy for your letters don’t sound like they used to.
It sounds like that it is just about as hot there as it is over here. I know that you must have a hard time working inside in that heat. So you are riding to work with your boss? No wonder the others talk about you. (Ha!) You said that rent was high back there. How is the price on food and other things? I am sure glad that you can save a little money. By the time I get back we should have just about enough to buy that trailer. You said that you had $200 in the bank already. Well, I have thought that I would be sending you at least $1,700 next month. So I would say that is a pretty good start on it…. Your last two letters have run out of ink. Do you want me to send you some pencils? I know that I told you to save money but I think you can afford a few pencils. (Ha!) I am pulling your leg. Well, Darling, I see that the infantry is going out so I had better get the battery ready to support them. I still think of you every day. I still love and miss you more than ever. Hope to hear from you today.
Love always, your husband
David
CHAPTER 18
slugger mama
MAMA WAS DETERMINED THAT FRANK WASN’T GOING TO GET HER TOSSED FROM ANOTHER TRAILER court. To begin with, there just weren’t that many decent ones in town, and moving a trailer cost money, something Mama didn’t have. Frank and I didn’t hang out much anymore. Probably because I was the kid sister but partly because he was continuing to run the streets, and I didn’t want to. When he was out drinking, I stayed home watching over Linda.
Linda and I tried as best we could to help out. We cleaned house and we cooked meals. We entertained each other and ourselves. On the rare times when Frank was around, he was bossing or beating us. Linda and I were both a little bit scared of him. Dealing with Frank was like playing a game of hot potato. You can’t hold it too long or too close because it’ll burn you for sure. His anger was scorching.
After the Flag Has Been Folded Page 15
