Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  I’d drive down Monday morning, the backseat full of food Edna had fixed. Charles usually came down one night a week, and I’d drive home on the weekends. I was so tired at night during the week that it didn’t matter that I was alone because I went straight to bed after warming up leftovers and soaking in a long, hot bath.

  Learning every job on the line meant learning how to hang chickens. In the hanging room, always darkened to trick the chickens into settling down for roosting, I stood, nauseous, next to an overcrowded bin of live chickens. I had to grab three at a time, flip them upside down, and hook their sharp feet onto the chains attached to a conveyor belt at about eye level. The stunned chickens often fought me, twisting and turning and agitating the rest of the group and scratching the devil out of my arms.

  Another day, when I worked the killing room for the first time, I stood in my place in line on the far side of the sharp steel killing wheel. The entire time, my stomach was upset. To keep from being splattered in blood, I had my hair pulled tight in a hairnet under the plastic hat, and I sweated underneath the thick plastic raincoat I had to wear, drops of perspiration pooling under the folds of my breasts. Hundreds of chickens hanging upside down, a ceaseless stream, moved toward me at an unnerving speed, their throats level with the rotating blade.

  If the machine missed slitting a chicken’s throat, I gave the chicken hanging upside down a hard rake across its naked throat with my butcher knife. The very first time I did this, I looked across the room through the large plate-glass window. My eyes met those of the group of men who, having hedged their bets against me, had lined up outside the window to watch. Women comprised most of the workforce there, six hundred to a shift, but a woman in management was still an anomaly.

  Covered in blood that clung like blobs of red jelly to my hat and raincoat, I put myself on automatic to finish the business the killing wheel missed. The men eventually bored of their sport and left. At the end of the shift, I stopped outside the window where the men had stood. I looked at the bloody floor where I’d been standing. I doubted the men here had any tricks worse than the men at Goodyear and thought to myself that they hadn’t bargained on the fact that I’d grown up on a farm and seen worse.

  While at Tyson, I was in the studio dancing even more often. I competed in my first regional competition, in New Orleans, in early December, only several months after the layoff. During my first dance, as I sashayed across the floor, I got a thrill from the multilayered skirt that I would peel off after that dance to reveal a new outfit underneath. At the end of the judging, when the panelists announced that Hector and I had won first place, I held the heavy trophy I’d been awarded, an excitement and satisfaction I’d never felt before coursing through me.

  IF I thought I had discovered joy through dancing, the excitement I felt when I saw Will, my first of three grandsons, born in March 1987, was unparalleled. That promising spring day was dampened only by the fact that he was born a month premature. Holding his sweet little body for the first time and touching those tiny fingers tickling my hand, I made a promise to myself that I’d do a better job being present for my grandchildren than I had with my own children, and I would also do everything I could to help Vickie.

  By the time Will was almost two, no matter what the doctors tried, they couldn’t knock out an infection that had cropped up in his lungs. They predicted he’d lose one of his lungs. Somehow Will had swallowed a peanut the wrong way and it had lodged itself in the soft membrane of his lungs, causing a bacterial infection. Vickie discovered it when he fell off the deck and broke his collarbone; the X-ray had shown a gooey mass as thick as peanut butter oozing across his lungs.

  For weeks at the hospital, Vickie and her husband, Bill, never left Will’s side, supported by their company’s generous attitude toward family illness. Almost every hour, a nurse took Will’s blood, his arms as torn up as if a desperate chicken had raked its claws across them. It got so that the minute Will saw a white coat walking through the door, he’d start screaming, and we’d have to restrain him. The doctor sent each blood sample to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta so they could recommend which antibiotic to try next.

  To our relief, Will finally beat the infection. To my disappointment, I did not live up to the promise I’d made when he was born. My work schedule wouldn’t let me. I’d started working at Goodyear again, and I was willing to let down my family because I was more concerned with satisfying Goodyear.

  AFTER TRAINING at Tyson for nine months, the day I was supposed to start as a manager there, Goodyear called. They wanted me back. The economy was picking up, and with increased production they were in hiring mode. The pay was twice what I was making at Tyson; and because I hadn’t been laid off longer than fifteen months, I was able to keep my seniority, accumulated sick and personal days, and benefits.

  I couldn’t say no to the better pay, and I rationalized that I had no other choice but to go back to earn more than double what I made at Tyson. In hindsight, I see that it’s never that simple. You always have choices. I returned, driven to be recognized for my hard work and commitment, and I had given Goodyear the power to define me and my self-worth. But even more, Goodyear felt like home, and like the child of an alcoholic who marries an alcoholic, I gravitated to what felt familiar, an environment defined by fear and conflict, much like other parts of my life had been.

  I knew what I was returning to, but my ability to tolerate what most people would find intolerable was pretty high, and I believed, a victim of my own highly efficient coping skills, that I could handle anything thrown my way. I minimized the negative experiences, gave significant play in my mind to any gesture or word of kindness, and normalized much of the Goodyear politics and policies. Often, however, I’d feel strangely detached from my reality, as if I were an outsider watching myself. My body, always poised in a heightened state of defense, finally started falling apart. Only then did I start to see the truth of the situation. My stubbornness kept me from realizing that you don’t have to live a robotic, white-knuckle existence; you don’t just have to survive. You can live a life full of grace.

  How different my path would have been had I taken the Allstate job—especially when they were more than willing to hire me without an MBA, since I’d scored so well on their test. To this day the woman who started running the Jacksonville office at that time still works there. She couldn’t have had that many sleepless nights worrying about where her next commission check was coming from.

  BACK AT Goodyear, I was assigned to the glass house in the mill room, where the banburies mix rubber. I worked with one other person and was in charge of overseeing the setup operation for the banburies. Around four hundred pounds of rubber, carbon, sulfur, and a secret mix of additives are dumped into each banbury mixer, which creates a thick, black ooze. Steel rollers squeeze the ooze to continue the mixing process and eliminate any trapped air within the rubber—a process that sounds like fireworks going off. The rubber is then folded back and forth in a zigzag manner. Where I was working, there were guys on the floor, but I had no support staff and dealt mainly with the ongoing and offgoing shifts of truckers.

  The union guys liked to say that working in the mill room would turn me into an old lady overnight. There were the endless skin problems, and every day was a bad-hair day. At the end of my shift I looked like I had greased my body with cooking oil and sprinkled myself with black baby powder. I wore a military cap with earflaps, but my blond hair turned a light shade of green anyway. No matter what creams I used, my neck stayed blistered. One guy’s throat would get so irritated by the rubber poisoning that the inside looked like raw hamburger. Another guy couldn’t get rid of the runny sores covering his arms, and someone else had the poisoning so badly that the chemicals turned the whites of his eyes gray. The doctor who gave me cortisone shots on a regular basis for my burned skin told me, “I don’t know what that job pays you, but it’s not worth this.”

  Of course, none of us went to the company hospital or
requested being moved, because we feared losing our jobs. I took to wearing a turtleneck with my gray coveralls to cover my blistered skin. To keep the smell from suffocating me, I sprayed myself with much too much Eternity perfume before I started my shift, focusing a stream on the edge of my turtleneck so I could bury my nose in it every once in a while and inhale deeply.

  I ENDURED the challenges at work by looking forward to the thrill I experienced dancing and competing in one showcase or competition after another. I spent as much time planning what to wear as I did practicing my moves. At each showcase, I scouted the costumes the other women wore. Sabrina would design elaborate costumes for me, and she and I would shop for all types of material—sequined, satin, chiffon, fringed—to bring to a seamstress in Hoke’s Bluff who sewed them.

  Charles eventually realized the fun he was missing and joined me at the dance studio. It struck me that taking lessons and stepping out of his role as a deacon and a sergeant took everything Charles could muster. One rainy afternoon right when he was supposed to start his first lesson, I was running late for my own lesson, and I came across him sitting alone in his car in the parking lot. He must have forgotten his umbrella. I knocked on his window. He rolled it down.

  “You can share my umbrella.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going in yet.”

  I pointed at my watch. “What in the world are you doing, then?”

  “Finding my courage,” he said.

  To learn the moves, Charles took notes in a brown spiral notebook so he could study them later. He soon discovered what I’d always known: He had a great sense of rhythm. At home, for entertainment, we’d play Frank Sinatra on the stereo or pop a cassette tape into the boom box and fox-trot across the living room floor. Typical Charles: He started dragging home mirrors people discarded in the alley near our house, planning one day to line the garage with them so we would have our own private dance studio.

  WHILE I worked in the mill room, my father was dying. When he’d finally decided to retire almost ten years earlier, I’d just started at Goodyear. He’d wanted to retire earlier than he did, but Edna wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t even let my father rest on the weekend—she’d have him mowing the widowed women’s grass while she baked her cakes to take to them after he finished. It always amazed me when she’d sit in her rocker on the porch during her treatment for mouth cancer and talk about everything she needed to do. The minute she overcame the cancer, she got right back to her long list of chores.

  The day my father went to the doctor shortly after his retirement, I drove with him. On the way to his car when the appointment was over, he didn’t say a word.

  I got into the passenger seat, and he started the engine. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What did the doctor say?”

  He took the pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. I expected him to light his cigarette.

  He placed the pack that I’d never seen him without since I was a child on the seat between us. “I have emphysema.” He didn’t say another word on the drive to his house. My mind swirled back to the times he drove me, snuggled against him, into Piedmont on Christmas Eve to pick out a present before the stores closed. Sometimes on the way home, he let me hold one side of the steering wheel. I was never afraid as long as he was there to lean on.

  He left the cigarettes on the seat when he got out of the car. I waited a minute to go in and talk to Edna, watching a flock of cedar waxwings, drunk on the red berries, dive in and out of a stand of hollies in the neighbor’s yard. I crushed the pack in my fist, the cellophane crinkling, and followed my father into the house.

  He’d been smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. In his remaining years, he never touched another cigarette.

  EDNA MIGHT have forced my father to work longer than necessary, but she also prolonged his life by feeding and caring for him. His last two years, attached to an oxygen tank, he could barely breathe, much less walk. I had to force myself to visit him because it undid me so to see him sick.

  The day he died I’d gone to check on him and found him sitting in his favorite easy chair. He motioned for me to sit down on the sofa; it looked as if the skin on his arms was made of parchment, about to peel away as easily as the outside of an onion. His coloring was ashen, his breathing labored. A tray table with some untouched tomato soup and crackers sat next to him. On the nearby card table, he’d laid out his game of solitaire. Seeing the unfinished card game, I remembered how he used to play Rook with Louise and me; he was the only adult we knew who took time to play with us.

  I called the doctor. He said I could call an ambulance or keep my father at home; he’d just been in the hospital over a week. I didn’t want him to die at home, leaving the memory of his death lingering with Edna as her only company. I called an ambulance and jumped into his unwieldy brand-new 1988 Oldsmobile—what I liked to call his “two-bedroom car.” I followed as fast as I could, my hands slipping on the steering wheel from the baby oil Edna rubbed on his arms to soothe his slack skin.

  As fast as I drove, I didn’t make it in time. He died as they transferred him from the gurney to the hospital bed. I was devastated that I didn’t have a chance to let him know one last time that I loved him.

  I couldn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I had to stay strong for my mother as we tended to the expected and unexpected matters of death. I spent countless hours dealing with the fact that he’d been buried on the wrong side of my parents’ two plots. He was buried on the left, not the right. As is the custom standing at the marriage altar, the man is on the right and the woman on the left. To make matters worse, the headstone was placed on the empty grave where he should have been—and the company that made it had gone bankrupt, ruining any chance we had of correcting the problem.

  For six months after my father died, I drove by the cemetery every morning after work. I’d park the car on the edge of the grass. Sometimes I’d sit by his grave, which faced east, aligning my father with the face of God on Judgment Day. The area where he was buried was still bare of grass, but the morning air was free of traffic fumes. I thought about how mild-mannered he was. I’d always been a picky eater as a child, and it sent one of my uncles over the top when I left food on my plate. He’d cuss me at table for not eating, saying, “You’re just as finicky as your crazy father.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now I understood that it was the simple fact that my father was so unfamiliar to men like Papa and my uncles—he didn’t talk ugly about women, and he never used the n-word like they did.

  To keep my grief at bay, I parked myself on the sofa, ate too many potato chips, and spent hours watching QVC, mesmerized by each colorful purse or miraculous beauty product. I loved watching the live makeovers and listening to the callers; their voices eased my sense of loneliness, if only for a moment. Once something I ordered appeared on my doorstep, I sent it back or left it unopened on a stack in Vickie’s old room. It was the process of falling in love with the item, pursuing it through my purchase, and anticipating its arrival that gave me a sense of fulfillment, not the actual item. By the time that special piece that was supposed to make me feel good again arrived, I’d have lost interest. I’d have found something else I wanted.

  At this time, I became debilitated by mysterious aches and pains, even getting tested for lupus. Choked by my sadness, I didn’t know how to navigate through my grief or help my mother deal with hers. All I could do with any clarity was drive her—Edna didn’t drive unless it was a tractor—to the three grocery stores she liked. We certainly didn’t talk about our loss—then or ever.

  The day I helped Edna sort through my father’s clothes broke me. Gathering his old work shirts, still tainted with the licorice smell of diesel fuel, made me miss him more than I ever had. I sat on my parents’ bed, a stack of his shirts in my lap, and buried my head in them, crying. Sitting on the same chenille bedspread my parents had used for as long as I could remember, my eyes swollen, my nose red, and gulping for air, I learned that the body sometimes tells
us things the mind is afraid to face. Once I cried for the first time, I cried for weeks afterward, the phantom pains dissipating with my tears.

  I LASTED a year in the glass house in the mill room. The male managers supervising the floor complained they’d been treated unfairly because I hadn’t worked on the floor like everyone else who went to the glass house, so I was transferred to the tube plant, an older part of the operation. Before I left, some of the union guys pooled their money and bought me a fourteen-karat-gold bracelet. I wore that bracelet every day, grateful for their kindness and consideration, until I somehow lost it.

  In no time I was laid off for a week, able to return only as a worker, not as a supervisor, to run tire trials. I later experienced another layoff, this one for ten weeks, and was called back to fill in for a supervisor who’d had a lung removed. I was beginning to think I was in a pinball machine being played by a lousy player, ricocheting without any rhyme or reason.

  In 1990, I was fifty-two years old and I’d been married thirty-five years, more than half my life. I had been at Goodyear ten years, not including the time I worked at Tyson. That year, I was finally offered a permanent position replacing a supervisor in final finish on the second shift, from 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. Once again, unemployment and inflation were on the rise, and the conflict in the Middle East was heating up. Workers were afraid, and the mood at the plant was tense. A night after I disciplined a worker for not meeting production, some guys in a Trans Am with tinted windows followed me out of the plant. On the desolate two-lane highway, they rode my bumper, flashing their lights, and pulled up beside me.

  I pressed the pedal of my six-cylinder Cutlass to the floorboard. Without any pickup, I went as fast as I could until I saw a house and pulled in to the driveway. The Trans Am eased in behind me, its lights shining in my rearview mirror before being switched off. I pressed the heel of my hand on the horn until they backed out. On the road again, I came across another section without any houses. The Trans Am’s headlights appeared from nowhere, shining in my mirror. If I’d been a rabbit, my heart would have exploded. I promised myself that if I survived, I’d buy a gun. A knife in my pocket was no longer enough.