Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  The day I met with Eddie and George, one of the department foremen, about my reinstatement, I was a nervous wreck. We were in an office about the size of a cubbyhole when they gave me my job back. Relieved that the madness was finally over, I said, “That’s all I wanted. I don’t mind working hard or even being cussed out. I can put up with a lot, but just don’t let anyone harass me like Dennis did. And don’t lie about my performance,” I added.

  Eddie started pacing and cussing and said, “Well, all I know is no goddam government is going to tell me how to run my department.” George quieted him quickly, and they hustled me out of there.

  Despite the tone of that conference, I faced my future at Goodyear believing that justice had prevailed, just as it always did in those westerns I loved as a child. I truly thought I’d successfully refused to be bullied out of my job. I believed the strength of the recent federal laws and the support of the decent people I worked with would sustain me. After two hellish years, I was ready to let the memory of my experience fade, just as I’d forgotten the pain of my first childbirth in order to endure a second labor. Refusing to let my doubts outweigh my hopes, I was determined to continue my career and to be treated fairly. I really thought things would change at Goodyear, but as with any twisted romance, I should have known better.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lighthearted, Light-Footed Lilly

  Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything [Fred Astaire] did … backwards and in high heels.

  —BOB THAVES, Frank and Ernest

  I CARRIED THE red velvet cake Edna had baked into the break room. The rule was that whenever you bought something new—a house, a truck, or even a washing machine—you had to bring something homemade to work. I didn’t have time to bake anything, so Edna, who stocked her pantry with a gallon of Watkins vanilla for her weekly baking, whipped up hummingbird or Italian cream cakes for me when I needed something. This evening I wasn’t celebrating a specific occasion, only that I was glad to be back as a supervisor on the late-night shift in final finish after the past year I’d spent isolated in quality control, waiting for the outcome of the EEOC investigation. The cake was heavy. Edna had doubled her recipe as usual, and still it would be gone in an hour. Setting the Tupperware cake carrier on the break-room table, I snapped the cover off and placed a plastic cake cutter next to the cake. I thought I might even cut myself a piece—hands down, no one made a better cake than Edna, and her cakes were the only ones I ate at work. I didn’t trust the guys who, in an attempt to pay back other pranksters, had managed a time or two to slip pubic hairs into the batter behind their wives’ backs. At least that’s what they said, smirking, after we’d all eaten a piece.

  I arranged a stack of colorful paper plates and plastic forks next to the cake, optimistic that I had another opportunity to make things work. I didn’t want to hold a grudge like my mother did. So many times she took any perceived slight from friends or family, held on, and wouldn’t let it go. All the things that had transpired the previous couple of years had been filed away in what Charles liked to call “File 13,” a phrase he’d picked up from the military to refer to the trash. Now I’d officially filed away those events; it was time to move on, time to return to normal.

  While I was licking icing off my finger, Pete, who worked the curing presses, walked in. Every week he went around the different departments taking orders for the steaks and baked potatoes he cooked on the scalding-hot twenty-foot-high machine in the middle of the Saturday-night shift. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

  “No licking all the icing off the cake.” He laughed and dropped some change into the Coke machine to grab a Mountain Dew. “I’m sure glad to see the cake maker’s been at it again.” All the guys referred to Edna that way.

  I started cutting large slices of cake. “Would you like a piece?” I offered.

  I handed him the biggest slice. Two tire builders I didn’t recognize came into the room.

  “Hey, save a piece for me,” one said.

  I gave him a piece. The other guy shook his head, his mouth set tight, when I offered him one. “Tell me, Lilly, why’d you have to go and sue Goodyear?” he asked.

  The mood in the room changed from lighthearted to somber as suddenly as if the power had gone out. The heaviness returned to my chest and reached down to the depths of my bowels. Sometimes it felt as real as someone pushing me against a wall with two hands pressed hard on my sternum. “I didn’t,” I said, wiping up crumbs from the cake’s soft open gash.

  “Then how come that’s what everybody says?” he continued, crossing his arms, his legs planted in a wide stance.

  No matter how many times I’d already answered this question, I’d never be “true blue and gold,” as the union guys liked to say in reference to their loyalty to Goodyear. “I didn’t sue. I filed a complaint. If I’d sued, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Whatever you did, it’s not right. You’re always causing a whole heap of hurt when we got enough on our hands already.” He looked at me as though I’d turned into a witch about to cast a spell on him. I wondered if he’d had anything to do with the recent rigging of my locker with firecrackers. “In fact, now I think about it, I don’t want to be anywhere near you.” He nodded at his buddy, looking at his plate so he’d hurry up and finish.

  “Come on. I can’t stand being in the same room with her.” He turned to leave. Pete and the other guy followed.

  I hoped that things wouldn’t turn ugly. When it came to practical jokes or retaliation, you never knew what the guys could come up with. You were lucky if you got away with something harmless like the wet pickle I found in my purse once. Sometimes things could take a dark turn, like the time the guy slipped a syringe full of liquid laxative into his daily honey bun, which kept disappearing from his locker. The unsuspecting prankster landed in the hospital for days. It was hard to find anything funny about that, but it didn’t stop their nonsense.

  I couldn’t let them dampen my spirits. I had to make the best of this second chance that I’d fought so hard to gain. The next phase of my career at Goodyear would be different; it had to be better than my rocky start.

  I cut myself a piece of Edna’s cake and left the rest for the others.

  TIME HAS a strange way of slipping up on you when you work in a manufacturing plant on the night shift; you feel like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone, and it takes a while, when you walk outside in the morning, to adjust to the rhythm of the regular world. One morning I’d stopped at Hardee’s for my biscuit and was reading the Anniston Star as I enjoyed my breakfast. My eyes focused on the year at the top of the newspaper: 1986. I looked again. Was it really 1986? Disoriented, as if swimming up from the depths of sleep, I felt like I’d been lost inside a dream. I grappled with the date the way you do sometimes with a simple word you know how to spell but that one day, all of a sudden, looks wrong. Where had the last several years gone? When was I going to do something else in life besides work?

  Then I noticed an advertisement for ballroom dance lessons at the bottom of the page, four for $10, at a small dance studio in Anniston. I closed my eyes and saw the page that as a little girl I’d torn from Life magazine and posted above my bed—a picture of Ginger Rogers, in a glamorous pink gown, waltzing with Fred Astaire. Ever since cheerleading had given me a taste of performing, I’d fantasized about learning how to dance. The reality was, I’d never done more than square-dance in high school gym class. The thought of dancing lessons sparked a sense of excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I blew on my coffee, waiting for it to cool. I couldn’t keep letting time slip away from me. I saved the page to show Charles. I wanted him to join me.

  “I don’t have time for that nonsense” was his immediate response.

  I pestered him, but he held firm: “I don’t know how to dance.”

  “Neither do I. That’s the whole point.”

  “Men don’t take ballroom dancing.”

  “Sure they do. It takes two people, remember?”

 
We went back and forth like this a few times because I truly wanted Charles as my partner in my new adventure, but I didn’t want to fight with him about it if he didn’t approve.

  I finally told him, “Fine. If you change your mind, you know where to find me,” and signed up by myself.

  I immediately fell in love with dancing. A couple of days a week, before my shift, Hector, a slim, flamboyant Texan with a head of slicked-back black hair who had more energy than anyone I’d ever met, taught me how to dance. I lived for my lessons despite Charles’s constant questions about Hector and the other people taking lessons. I’d tell Charles there was nothing to worry about. He tried his best to dislike Hector, but Hector’s charm disarmed even Charles.

  During dance lessons, I glided across the floor with Hector learning the tango, while Sabrina, Hector’s wife, sat on a bench watching us. “Smile, Lilly, smile,” Sabrina repeated as she tapped her foot to the beat of the music. We spun across the shellacked floor, and I caught my somber expression in the mirror. I wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. For the first few months of dancing, I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror, feeling ridiculous, practicing how to smile. Until I met Hector, whenever I smiled, I unconsciously covered my mouth with my hand, ashamed of the unfamiliar feeling of joy.

  After a while, when it came to dancing, I didn’t need Sabrina’s encouragement. I dreamed of becoming an accomplished dancer, of challenging myself and experiencing something new. I started competing on the weekends at showcases in Atlanta held at places like the Holiday Inn, places large enough to accommodate a ballroom and the hundreds of people who expected to be entertained. Before I participated in my first showcase, I asked Hector what we should wear, thinking jeans might be okay. “Honey, wear the best you’ve got. Better than even your Sunday best.” Polyester pant suits aside, that meant the dress I wore to Vickie’s wedding.

  I’d shopped for that dress at my favorite family-owned discount store. I thought I’d found a fabulous dress until the woman helping me asked, “Now, how many daughters do you have?” Just one, I told her. “Well, then, dear, don’t you think you better go to the department store and find a special dress for yourself?” Somewhat embarrassed but grateful for her advice, I went to the regular department store and chose a burgundy dress etched with cranberry-colored satin. The dress, now carefully stored in my closet, would be perfect for the showcase.

  The moment the music started, that first showcase transformed me from the drab, capable manager that had become my chosen identity into someone “footloose and fancy-free.” I couldn’t quit smiling. I felt a joyous release I’d never known, inspiring my performance and encouraging the audience’s enthusiasm for Hector and me. We continued to compete in showcases, and once I got so carried away that I flung my arm in a dramatic sweep, hitting Hector in the face and almost knocking him to the floor. We still placed first that day.

  AROUND THE time I started taking dance lessons, Eddie became one of my department foremen in final finish; it seemed the air around us was charged with static electricity when we interacted. He made me jittery, the vein under my left eye twitching slightly when we talked. Rumors of layoffs were circulating throughout the plant as well, and even of management positions possibly being cut, a first for the Gadsden operation. The uncontrollable fluctuations in the economy loomed like some infectious disease gone awry. Maybe someone would find a cure before it caught up with me and my family. Now that Vickie had found her footing in the world and Phillip, who’d also graduated from Jacksonville State University, was starting his real estate career, they, too, were susceptible to the unpredictable economic highs and lows.

  Unfortunately, the talk was true, and I was let go with a good number of other managers. The week I was laid off from Goodyear I walked into the dance studio greeted by a bouquet of balloons, one saying YOU WILL BE SUCCESSFUL. I wasn’t so sure.

  In the past, layoffs had often been temporary, and most workers were eventually called back. In light of the increasing inflation, Goodyear organized a job-skills session at the company clubhouse, since such a large layoff was predicted. Sitting across the cardboard table from a woman dressed in a blue suit, I filled out a questionnaire about myself.

  While she read it, I stared through the large bay of windows overlooking the golf course where Eddie and Jeff often played on the weekends, unsure how I was going to manage to find another job and unclear if I wanted to stay in manufacturing.

  She asked me how my job at Goodyear was.

  “Great,” I said.

  “How well do you run your department?”

  “Great.”

  “Okay, can you tell me more about yourself and your family?”

  “My family’s great.”

  “I see,” she said, fiddling with the floppy tie around her neck, some strange version of a man’s necktie I supposed.

  “How long has it been since your last job interview?”

  “Pretty long,” I said trying to calculate the years.

  “I see. Well, I think the place we need to start is how to answer a question when you’re being interviewed. The first thing is you need to say something else besides ‘great.’ The interviewer can’t get a sense of who you are with just a one-word response.”

  I’d survived the last ten years by building a wall around my emotions and creating a mask to hide how I really felt. I hadn’t always been this way, so mistrustful and closed-off. Now I needed to open up for a prospective employer?

  “Great,” I said.

  BEING LAID off meant I was forced to slow down, and once I did, I slept more than I had in years. I’d had no idea how tired I really was from the long hours and all of the overtime. I’d also had no idea what disarray the house was in. Rumbling around in the back of my mind all those years I’d been working were the teetering piles of photo albums and scrapbooks I’d planned to start filling. I had bags of special stickers and colored paper. They sat next to the stacks of accumulated family photos and the children’s elementary school artwork and schoolwork. The clutter drove Charles crazy, but I wouldn’t let him throw anything away. He went behind me anyway, organizing the disorder. Sometimes he demanded that I get rid of the outdated catalogs and magazines. I’d follow behind him, snatching a few magazines from him.

  “There are some good recipes in that magazine. You can’t throw that one out.”

  “You can’t keep everything.” He’d grab the magazines back.

  “What about your coin collection?” I’d fuss.

  “That’s different. It’s worth something.”

  “And you could fill the walls of every Cracker Barrel in America with all those rusty tools in your workshop.”

  “That’s not the same either. Anyway, they’re in my toolshed. You don’t have to look at them.”

  “I have to look at all the stuff you bring home and put in the garage. It doesn’t make sense. You get rid of my stuff just so you can have more room to bring home someone else’s trash.”

  One time when Charles was still working at Railway Express Agency he actually brought home someone else’s wedding dress, which had been damaged in shipping. I often teased him about that, but he was proud of the fact. He’d point out that Vickie had played dress-up in it until she’d worn it out.

  Instead of facing the layers of emotional debris collecting around my heart or the detritus scattered throughout my house, I threw myself into my job search. I updated my résumé and bought a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? I also bought the book Color Me Beautiful, about how to dress according to whether you’re a fall, winter, summer, or spring—I was a spring. Reading in my job-hunting book that, for every $10,000 you earned, it took a month to find a job with a comparable salary kicked me into high gear, armed with the right color palette for my wardrobe, of course.

  With my background in accounting, I gravitated to an opening for an Allstate agent to run the Jacksonville office. The Goodyear headhunter also informed me of another promising position for a manager at the
Tyson chicken plant, so I called someone who’d worked at Goodyear with me but had also previously worked at both a chicken plant and an insurance agency. When I asked him about being an agent, he said that before he’d even deposited a commission check, he’d start worrying about how he was going to make another sale, to the point that he couldn’t sleep most nights. When you’re in sales, he explained, “You eat what you kill.” If I could help it, I didn’t want a job that created chronic worry about my income reliability and that sounded as unpredictable as walking barefoot on a sidewalk scattered with spiky brown gumballs from a sweet-gum tree.

  With my resources limited, I knew I needed a steady paycheck. As part of the application process for Tyson, I’d even taken an industrial psychology test to see if I was suited for working as a manager in a poultry-processing plant. According to my profile, I was. I had also found out that the training for the Tyson job started several weeks earlier than Allstate’s training, and it seemed clear what I needed to do.

  LIKE AT Goodyear, at Tyson I had to learn every job on the production line. The plant, which produced all of the chicken for every McDonald’s east of the Mississippi, also packaged and shipped every part, except the feathers and the cackle, all over the world. The feet were a delicacy in China; the guts went into the process of making dog food; the flap over their bottom was supposedly used as a Japanese hors d’oeuvre; and the carcass was boiled for the tiny pieces of meat you find in your chicken noodle soup. My only problem was that the plant was located two hours south of Jacksonville in the small town of Ashland.

  At first I made the long commute on the narrow, two-lane highway—until I skidded off the slick road in the fog. Shaken, I rented a small apartment in Ashland, a town with only one restaurant, the Dairy Queen. As someone remarked when I first moved there, “There are two things to do here: go fishing or watch the leaves fall.”