Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  I DIDN’T say anything to Andrew or anybody else, imagining that these situations would fade away as naturally as fog burning off the foothills in the morning sun. I couldn’t turn to Cindy for support—she decided to go back into the union not long after becoming a manager. She’d been assigned to the mill room, where raw rubber is mixed. During the mixing process, lampblack (also known as black carbon) is released. As fine as talcum powder, the lampblack seeps into every pore of your skin, making lungs bleed and sweat blacken. Cindy had such an adverse reaction to the chemicals that she requested to be transferred back to where she’d started.

  I hoped I could talk to Barbara, a tough old bird who’d become supervisor of the tire room. In the bathroom one evening, I asked her how she handled the stress of being the only other female manager. She let a string of cuss words fly before she told me, “You can’t trust a soul,” and cautioned me that if I planned to stay, I’d better watch my back. Eventually she left, too; I assumed she’d had all she could take from the men.

  AS A supervisor, I immediately learned to tune out all of the cussing. It didn’t take too long, either, for me to understand that I could never let my guard down. Whenever we were in the office together, one of my shift foremen—a tall, blue-eyed man named Donald—would grin and make the most inappropriate comments, without warning. Donald always dressed neatly and had a good-natured manner of speaking, so it sometimes took me a minute to register what he’d said. We’d be talking about work, and out of the blue he’d interject, “That must be one of them French bras you’re wearing, because it’s got those things up high and your nipples are showing.” Or he’d catch me retrieving a file from the file cabinet, and he’d observe, “If you kept bending over at the file cabinet, you might get something rammed in your ass that you don’t want. I know I could take care of that.” As his words sank in, I kept my head averted, shame spreading its red flush across my face, shock and embarrassment flooding my body.

  After a few of these awkward moments, I learned to steel myself for his comments. When Donald inspected my department, despite the fact that it was spotless and in order, he’d say things like, “Goddammit, Lilly, this looks like a whorehouse.”

  I wouldn’t flinch. “Really?” I’d reply. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a whorehouse.”

  I CONTINUED to give upper management the benefit of the doubt until the night in stock prep when I was overseeing the mills. When we ran out of stock on one of the machines, my supervisor barked at me, “Lilly, load her with that scrap rubber over there. The worst thing you can do is let her go down.”

  The scruffy union fellow running the mill, who looked like he might as well have been on one of the FBI’s Most Wanted posters at the post office, shook his head. “If you put the scrap in this machine, both the caps on each end will bust, and it will be a real hard fix,” he said.

  I didn’t believe him, and told my supervisor what he’d said. “Aw, hell, that guy don’t want to work. He just wants to sit on his ass,” was his response. So I did what my supervisor instructed me to do and made the operator load up the scrap rubber. I heard a loud explosion and was sick to my stomach. Sure enough, the mill was down all night. I knew I’d been taken by my supervisor. Throughout the night, as we struggled to get the mill up and running again, Barbara’s and Andrew’s words echoed in my mind.

  ONE OF the other shift foremen, Stan, a bowlegged man who talked too quickly, didn’t try to trick me. He announced his suspicions of me loudly and clearly the minute I became part of his department. He warned everyone that I was keeping information about people in a little black book because I was “a member of the ERA.” (I carried a steno pad around with me to take notes and record information to keep from making mistakes.) By then I had been moved from stock prep, where I’d been for about a year, to final finish, where the tires go after they’re cured in the pits and have traveled on overhead conveyors to cool, passing into the trimmer where the rubber tips are cut off. Once they reach final finish, if a tire is a blackwall, it goes immediately on the hook lines for two people to inspect by spinning and feeling for defects. If the tire is a whitewall, it travels to the blue paint machines to be sprayed so that the finish is protected during shipping. All of the tires are ground down by the force grinders to balance them out before being stamped and packed onto a truck for shipping.

  In final finish, Stan never bothered to give me instructions on how to operate the machinery. There were several panels with some fiddly old wiring, so it took me a while to understand the mechanics; but the union electricians who saw me sticking with it helped me. One night when we had one mechanical problem after another, I called Stan onto the floor for help. He immediately blamed my rib dressers, threatening to send them home.

  “My guys aren’t the problem. My crew is running more tires than ever,” I pointed out to him.

  He turned red in the face and said, “What did you just say? Are you calling me a liar, when you have no idea what you’re talking about?”

  “No, sir, I was just telling you the rib dressers have done their jobs. That’s my responsibility—that I do know.”

  He started yelling and waving his arms at me, and went on like this for at least thirty minutes—in front of my team. There was nowhere for me to go and nothing for me to do but stand there and take it, until he suggested that we go to the computer room and settle our differences.

  There he went on and on about what I was doing wrong. I finally said, “You’re right. You’re the boss. We’ll run everything your way. Just tell me what you want.” He moved his chair so close to me that I couldn’t move and leaned forward with his beet-red face in mine. I stared at his ears, puzzled by the stray patches of hair.

  “Where did you come from? You think you’re so smart. You’re not a manager and don’t know a damn thing about anything. You’re Goodyear’s mistake.”

  “Look, all I want to do is my job, but I can’t do anything if you won’t let me.” I asked him to let me go back to work, but he wasn’t through with me. My nerves were shot and my stomach was in knots, but something about the intensity of his anger cautioned me to roll up inside myself and play dead like someone being attacked by a bear is supposed to do, hoping the bear becomes discouraged by the lack of response. I was finally able to leave when the engineer manager arrived.

  When I talked to Andrew about the situation, he explained that Stan couldn’t be all bad. He couldn’t be a complete jerk if he’d taken in his brother-in-law when both the boy’s parents died unexpectedly. I tried to let our differences go, and when I did, Stan realized that I didn’t hold grudges or spy on people. Finally, he started to give me a chance. With Stan I learned I had to meet people in the middle and try to understand their personalities, even changing my attitude when necessary to make a relationship work. Before I knew it, we were able to work together without acrimony.

  I didn’t mention this incident, or any of the others, to Charles. During those first couple of years, Charles never knew the extent of what I was dealing with at Goodyear. We communicated mostly through notes on the stove; when I was home, he was at work, and vice versa. Our shifts just worked out that way. He was traveling a fair amount for his job at Fort McClellan, while also finishing the college degree he’d never completed when moving up in rank in the National Guard. The real reason I didn’t confide in him, though, is that I tried to leave work at work. I refused to let my troubles at work consume my family life, and when we talked, we were solving other problems at home—now Phillip was in high school and Vickie off at college. He never even set foot inside the Goodyear plant. I thought I could handle my own problems, so I adjusted to the situation, like a contorted tree twisting its way around another tree that’s too close, eager to find just enough space in which to grow.

  THERE WERE enough dependable people at Goodyear to keep me going. The first time I cut a batch of rubber running the tuber in stock prep, my supervisor gave me a dull knife—even though I’d asked for a sharper one. Whe
n the blade got stuck in the rubber, another man came over and jerked it out for me. He pointed the knife in the direction of the man across the room, who’d lost his thumb cutting rubber. “Let me show the right way so you don’t end up like him,” he said, slicing the thick white sheet that made me think of whale blubber. There were other simple acts of kindness, too, like when the guys helped me with faulty wiring on the old machines, or let me in on the best type of shoes to wear on the concrete floor.

  Once the guys got to know me, they usually came around—even the most stubborn. The day I was introduced to one of the millwrights, he leaned close to me and said, “Well, you think you should be here, don’t you?” He was a big ole boy with scraggly long hair. His breath was foul.

  “Yeah, I think I should be here,” I said. I wanted to ask him when was the last time he took a bath.

  He hitched up the waist of his stained khakis over his belly and said, “Well, you know, it gets hot out here and sometimes I wear cutoffs without anything underneath, and I might have to drop my shorts to cool off.” He spit a stream of tobacco juice onto the floor beside me. “Or fart.”

  I didn’t move away from the brown spittle.

  “I’m responsible for your production and making sure you’re paid properly, so don’t go changing your habits on my account. Just because I’m female doesn’t mean I require anything different.”

  That day he remained unconvinced, but he soon changed his tune once we’d spent some time together. It didn’t matter whether I was male or female—the union guys would have had to test me. That was the nature of the relationship between management and the union men. Respect was never a given for anybody. Just as a coach has to earn the respect of the players, managers, who had a history of stepping on men’s necks, had to gain the confidence of their crew. Once they saw I was willing to drag one-hundred-pound rolls of material off the conveyor by myself if someone wasn’t around to help, and work overtime on the weekends when they were sick of doing it, most of them started calling me Miss Lilly with a real sense of regard.

  THE SUPPORT of a few good men carried me a long way, and I could never have survived without the help of guys like the night engineer supervisor, who stood up for me when I was blamed for something I didn’t do. Everyone knew the machines were supposed to be running when you walked on the floor and when you walked off. Once a machine goes down, it might not start up again. It’s like a wreck on the interstate—especially down the line in the pits, where tires are cured. Those presses never stop running, and the tires keep coming, so you have to take them off the conveyor belt and stack them. Before you know it, you could have three thousand tires you’ve got to work back in at some point.

  In stock prep, the objective is to make sure a tuber never shuts down. The department is about as large as a town block, with trucks, skids of rubber to load, and a six-eight and a twelve-six tuber, both of which produce tire components. Heated rubber goes from the mills down into the huge tuber, which, like a sausage grinder, heats and mixes the different types of rubber before the operator puts in the die with a tread design. Then the rubber’s excreted out in the shape of tread that is weighed and cooled, sometimes traveling through water. A huge saw cuts the tread before two people offload the tread from the conveyor onto the flat leaves of a truck.

  I hadn’t been in the department long when the eight-inch tuber went down two hours into my shift. A ball of rubber caught up under the machine, causing the belt to break. The shift foreman blamed me, but one of the night supervisors, whose face, after he’d been caught in a press, looked like it had been slashed with a knife, stood up for me during a meeting the next day. He explained to the group of disgruntled men that the ball of rubber had built up from a piece of loose rubber scrap over time, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.

  I was grateful for his willingness to go against the gang. This was an exception to what usually went on, which was that any time the production was down, it was my fault. Ultimately I learned I had to take care of myself; I had to work harder and smarter than the rest. I started coming in two hours earlier than my shift to check the schedule, make sure stock was ready, and get any updates. That’s when Edna began saying, as she did through the rest of my Goodyear career, that she never knew anybody who took twelve hours to work an eight-hour shift.

  If my experience had been all bad in the beginning, I couldn’t have made it; but I was like the lab rat that keeps coming back for more because it never knows when it pushes the lever if food will come out or not. I was constantly seeking approval, unable to predict when Goodyear would reward or punish me.

  I HAD my first formal evaluation in 1981, after I’d been supervisor in final finish for a year. During the meeting in the cramped office of the department foreman, Jeff, it was made abundantly clear that I didn’t understand the unwritten expectations of me, didn’t know what a woman was supposed to deliver, so to speak. As Jeff asked me a few questions about the machinery in final finish, he chain-smoked, surprised when I gave him the right answers.

  The next thing I knew, he started talking about how well he’d done at Goodyear, and explained in detail his wife’s personal connections with the top dogs at corporate headquarters in Akron. After he finally quit talking about himself, I thought we were about to get down to the business of my performance and future. Instead, he said, “Well, I rank you an eleven out of twelve. If you want a better score, you can meet me at the Ramada Inn.”

  I stared at him blankly for a moment. Surely, he was just joking. I was used to crude remarks, but Jeff stared right back at me, expecting an answer—just as if he’d asked me another question about the machinery.

  I glanced at the clock. We’d been in his office for over an hour.

  I replied, “I’m not sure I understand.”

  He exhaled cigarette smoke in my direction before he repeated himself. My temples throbbed. I felt a jolt of anger. I told myself to breathe and think, and not to do anything I’d regret. Despite all his big talk, Jeff was a small guy, always tan from playing golf. Where did he find time for that? I’d heard from coworkers that he was untouchable because he had a relative high up in management. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t liked, either. I remembered seeing him plenty of times after work, hanging out in the parking lot with a group of guys, drinking beer out of a cooler in one of their cars.

  I asked, “How can you do that based on my performance?”

  “In a place like this, Lilly, it’s more important that your bosses like you than that you do a good job.” A wisp of smoke trailed out of one of his nostrils.

  I calculated Vickie’s college tuition. Phillip would be in college before I knew it. I still had a few years ahead of me before Vickie and Phillip were independent. Then there were the household bills and expenses that Charles’s paycheck didn’t cover.

  I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make the situation worse, so I stood up and walked toward the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jeff smash his cigarette with a rough jab into the overflowing aluminum ashtray on his desk.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. The following day I tried to ask Jeff about my evaluation. When I approached him, he said, “Nothing you say matters. You’re at the bottom, where you’ll stay.” I pressed him to tell me why, but he only replied, “That’s where I want you. You’ve made the wrong people mad these past few months and caused me a lot of trouble.” Several days later I tried to talk to another manager about the problem. He replied in an unconcerned tone, “What are you so worried about? If there’s a layoff, you’ll go anyway, so don’t worry about it. You’re okay.”

  It wasn’t much longer after this that Goodyear said it was cutting back on supervisors and demoted me, moving me from final finish to special tire trials in July 1981.

  I WAS more than upset about being moved to special tire trials, where I was excluded from manager meetings and training seminars. Soon after this demotion, I slipped on a grease spot in the parking lot, breaking my nose on a speed bump
. The Goodyear nurse gave me some Darvocet to take when I got home, but I was in so much pain that the usual one-hour drive took me two hours. Finally at home, I slept upright to keep from choking on my own blood. The next day, Charles took me to the hospital for emergency surgery. While I was in the hospital, the only person from the plant who contacted me was one of my supervisors, who only called to see if I had extra tickets for the football game on Saturday. When I returned to work, my nose was swollen and the guys started calling me “squaw.” I’d always hated the crook in my nose, and now I felt even more self-conscious and vulnerable. I wanted to hide my injury, to become invisible.

  In special tire trials I was anything but invisible. I worked with only one other employee, Dennis, who’d been at the plant for thirty years. He informed me right off the bat that he’d gotten his business degree at Jacksonville State University and had been part of the management at Goodyear. Realizing that he didn’t like the long hours and hard work, he’d convinced Goodyear that he had a nervous condition. He was demoted, as he’d wanted, but was still paid the same—a fact of which he never quit reminding me.

  Our working relationship started out pretty good until he started telling me about his personal problems, especially with a woman he called “the redhead.” They’d worked together in the tube plant, had an affair, and now she lived with him. You’d think Goodyear was Peyton Place, the way gossip ran rampant at the plant. Everyone referred to Dennis as “Goodyear’s number one pimp.” I figured I could handle him as the weeks passed and he continued to tell me in more and more detail about his sex life, his fights with the redhead, and his money problems. That’s just the way he was, and I hoped that if I brushed his words aside and did my best in the new position, he would quit talking that way.