Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  They followed me all the way to my driveway. The next day I went to Lewis Carroll Jeweler’s, the only place in Anniston where you could leave your film to be developed, buy diamonds, and purchase a gun. I bought a gun.

  I NEVER knew when someone would turn out to be an enemy or a friend. I first met Mitch, a training manager, during the EEOC investigation in 1982. One day while I was working alone in quality control, he approached me to say, “I don’t know how you work alone like this.” Throughout the years, Mitch did his best to support me, pushing the other managers to make me the female representative for management at the union hall even though they always chose one of the secretaries. It was men with attitudes like Mitch’s who helped me stay.

  A couple of years later, in 1992, I was told to go see one of the plant managers. I thought I was getting laid off again. Instead, the plant manager, Sid, a pleasant, quiet man I admired for his good nature and fairness, informed me that I’d been chosen as one of four managers to start the radial light-truck division, where SUV and passenger tires would be made. I figured that Mitch had nominated me.

  In the new division we ran a skeleton crew on brand-new machinery, a nice change from so much of the old machinery that looked like it was held together with duct tape. Not long after the announcement about my promotion was made, the top brass from Akron, Ohio, came to Gadsden to meet with the chosen four in the company clubhouse, where upper management entertained the big dogs from other plants and held exclusive receptions in the small cafeteria. That day my new supervisor insisted that I go home.

  “If they go to the meeting, shouldn’t I?” I asked, referring to the three other managers, all male.

  “No, you need to go on home,” I was advised.

  I knew not to push and went home, but I wrestled with why I couldn’t go. I tried not to let it bother me too much, and I didn’t dare protest. I just chalked it up to the way things were done. I was getting used to the idea that no matter what good things happened for me at Goodyear, I was never going to be accepted into the boys’ club, and I couldn’t let my disappointment depress me when I’d received the honor of being chosen to run the newest division of the plant, the one that represented the latest in tire technology.

  I experienced another glorious moment when Hector and I competed at the National Ballroom Championship in Miami and won. Right before I went onto the floor, I called home and Phillip happened to answer the phone. He was checking on Oscar, our fourteen-year-old miniature dachshund, whom Phillip had bought with his own money as a young boy. Sometimes I thought Phillip loved Oscar more than he did the rest of us. Now Phillip sounded horrible. Oscar had died.

  On the dance floor, for a moment before the music started, I wondered if I could shake my sadness over the unexpected news. But once I heard the upbeat rhythm of the music, I felt soothed. As I danced, I saw reflected all around me in the mirrors a different Lilly from the one who’d started her lessons so long ago. I saw a woman swirling in her black-and-white chiffon skirt, one whose swept-up hair was no longer a bleached-out blond but dyed a golden yellow, who looked like she owned the world. This woman relished the way her body moved. I felt that same sense of expansiveness I had as a child swimming in Nancy’s Creek, flipping under the water, my body spinning, exploding with a powerful rush to float in peace until I crashed to the surface for air.

  We placed first in all three categories: the tango, the waltz, and the East Coast swing.

  IN THE radial division I worked with one supervisor I admired. He set an example I wanted to emulate, beginning our meetings by asking us to state three positive things about our previous shift. No matter what department I was in, though, the first thing I did when I went to my car was look around to make sure everything was okay—plenty of times managers had found their tires slashed. I’d never experienced vandalism to my car until I had to discipline several workers in a short period of time. The guy I wrote up who talked too much told me, “Lilly, I hate this job,” and eventually quit. When I caught another guy sleeping on the job and wrote him up, he looked at me, exasperated, and asked, “Damn, Lilly, management doesn’t want you around, so why are you hassling me?” He received a three-day suspension and threatened to make me pay for it. I bought a gas cap that locked. I didn’t want sugar poured into my tank.

  That wasn’t enough. Soon a screw as big as a thumb was stuck into the side of my tire. Shortly afterward, when I walked to my car at the end of my shift, it was covered in about a gallon of tobacco juice. Once I had that cleaned off, my windshield was cut out with a glass cutter, leaving one side intact to ensure that when I drove over a bump, it would collapse on me.

  I didn’t let these tactics keep me from disciplining someone if necessary, but I entered a whole new territory the day I drove to Birmingham after work to a doctor’s appointment to check on my chronic stomach ulcers. My car was driving funny on the way there. After my appointment, I couldn’t get it started. A mechanic towed the car to the shop, inspected it, and asked me, “Have you made somebody mad?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say.”

  “In all my thirty-two years I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone’s tampered with your gear cable. Without it, you have no power steering or brakes. If you’d driven on the highway much longer, you could have been killed.”

  I told my boss, the business center manager, Eric, a slender, neat man who’d once played college football, but he merely commented, “You’re getting paranoid.”

  But the vandalism didn’t stop. My fenders were slashed and my car keyed. I went to Eddie, Eric’s boss and next in seniority in upper management in my area. He said he’d look into it. I refused to leave his office until he promised that I could park my car next to the security guard’s office at the gate. Only then did the vandalism stop.

  AT THE end of this stressful year, in December 1995, Eric, who sometimes confided in me about how hard it was for his wife, a pharmaceutical rep, to work in an office full of men, handed me a piece of paper while we were down on the floor working. “This is going to be a great Christmas,” he said with a smile. Written on the note was the biggest pay raise I’d ever received: I’d earned the Top Performance Award, an award I’d had no idea existed.

  In the sixteen years I’d been at Goodyear, I’d received only a few raises after the change from cost-of-living increases to merit-based raises in the early eighties—one year earning all of $61 more per month. The highest raises I’d received throughout my career were those I received before I complained to the EEOC in 1982.

  I thanked Eric and placed the torn paper in my pocket. A few months earlier I’d asked him how my pay ranked among my peers. Eric drew a circle representing minimum to maximum pay and put a line through the middle of it. “You’re right below that middle line,” he said. The reason I was so near the middle rather than lower was my attitude and enthusiasm. My lack of tire knowledge compared with that of the builders who’d been promoted into management held me back, but if I continued the way I was going, he told me, that would soon change. I would find out much later that I wasn’t even being paid the minimum salary for the area managers.

  I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t known about the Top Performance Award. Everything at Goodyear was top secret. Politicians and school groups touring the plant weren’t allowed in the tire room, as if some student or schoolteacher might actually figure out how the tire machines operated and tell another company. So it was nothing unusual in offices with glass walls for a manager to slide someone a piece of paper with the amount written on it whenever anybody got a raise.

  I was thrilled to receive the Top Performance Award but perplexed that not a word was printed in the company newsletter about this honor. That was okay with me—I wanted to keep a low profile. The last thing I needed to do was provoke envy among my coworkers during tough economic times.

  The one time I had made the company newsletter was in a story entitled “Lighthearted, Ligh
tfooted Lilly,” highlighting my winning competitions in ballroom dancing. I became something of a star in many people’s eyes, and remained so for as long as I worked at Goodyear. Some folks at Goodyear even started taking a dance lesson or two themselves. For many, my greatest performance at Goodyear had nothing to do with tires.

  CHAPTER 6

  Up to My Knees in Alligators

  A woman is like a tea bag—you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  AFTER FOUR years as a supervisor in the radial light-truck division, in early spring of 1996, I was moved to the section of the tire room in the radial plant where the automatic radial full-stage (ARF) machines build tires. I continued to supervise the building of the smaller radial passenger tires on the older, more challenging machinery. The tire builders, according to the specifications logged into each machine’s computer, assembled the components—the liner, ply, bead, chafer, belt, and, finally, tread—onto a steel drum. Then an elevator carried the uncured, or “green,” tires on an overhead conveyor belt winding along the walls under the ceiling to the curing presses, where they were cured before they moved on to final finish.

  As part of my job, I had to ensure that the department maintained sufficient inventory, that the correct specifications were set on the machines, that the tire builders met their production quota, and that the men always wore their safety gear. While I was supervising the tire builders, Jeff, who had tried to get me to go to the Ramada Inn with him so long ago, started auditing my area. One day he sauntered in and stood behind one of the tire builders, watching him work. Across the room alert signs flashed. Next to those signs hung the erasable board that listed the daily tally of injuries throughout the plant. Today: five reported injuries.

  The last time Jeff had visited my department he’d neglected to fill out his safety audit as he usually did, marking the sheet while he was there. Instead, he sat at the break table shooting the breeze with a couple of guys, talking about his golf game and what kind of bait he’d used when he went fishing over the weekend. At our next managers’ meeting in what we called the war room, I was shocked when he handed me my audit; he’d marked that the men in my department weren’t dressed in their safety gear. I scanned the report; I was the only area manager on the summary report who’d been evaluated poorly.

  Now I watched Jeff survey my builder, who, like all the other guys, was dressed in his giant goggles resembling insect eyes and the standard steel-toed boots. The loud machinery and industrial fans were deafening, so the guys also wore earplugs. The builder had no idea that Jeff stood behind him observing him and the entire department for his safety audit. The weekly audits were based on eight areas: safety, quality, production, waste, attendance, housekeeping, team meetings, and cost containment. This time I was right there with Jeff looking at my builder dressed in all of his safety gear. He couldn’t pull that stunt on me again.

  I walked past Jeff, the hot wind from one of the gigantic fans knocking against me, and nodded a quick hello. Over the years, despite his claims that he had a relative high up the food chain, he hadn’t made it to top-level management as I know he’d expected to. In fact, he’d been demoted, his esteem throughout the plant dwindling over time, so that now he didn’t carry the same clout he once did. Several times I’d seen the bigger guys, a few ex–Alabama football players, wrestle him down for entertainment as they drank beer in the parking lot after work.

  Watching Jeff finally leave, I took a deep breath, trying to let go of my anxiety as I wondered what he’d written on the report this time.

  JEFF CONTINUED to rate me poorly on my audits, and each week reading the audit summaries, I tried to let my anger move through me. When he downgraded me in the other areas as well as safety, maintaining that the tire-building machines weren’t always running at full capacity, I tried to keep my composure. I tried to stand tall and throw back my shoulders just as I’d learned to do dancing. Once I’d overheard a woman talking at a dance showcase. We were in the bathroom primping. She was standing next to her friend and applying her red lipstick. She leaned toward her reflection, quiet for a minute as she concentrated on keeping the lipstick within the lines of her full lips. Satisfied, she straightened herself up, pointed the lipstick case at herself in the mirror. “You can win a competition with a smile, but it’s how you hold yourself that counts,” she said, and snapped that gold lipstick case shut. She dabbed her lips with Kleenex. “You have to look like you own the place. You have to hold your shoulders as if you have a shoe box between them. You might make a mistake with your feet, but the judges can’t watch your steps the whole time. They’re more impressed by how you handle yourself.”

  There wasn’t much I could do to prove that Jeff was marking the audit sheet incorrectly. The only thing I could do was handle myself with grace.

  As if things couldn’t get worse, Eddie, who’d had his mind set against me since I had filed the sexual-harassment complaint against Goodyear years before, became one of my supervisors again, replacing Eric, who’d given me two annual raises and recognized my work with the Top Performance Award only several months before. Managers were usually moved for one of three reasons: to replace someone who’d been promoted, to get more production from a crew than the previous manager had, or as punishment. Eddie was moved to my area as the business center manager because Eric had been moved. I had to wonder what that would mean for me.

  I’d worked for Eddie after the incident with the EEOC once before, in final finish. He’d been my department foreman in 1986 for a short time before he informed me about my layoff, after which I went to Tyson, so I was thrilled when he’d taken the time to write me a congratulatory note about being chosen as one of four to start up the radial light-truck division in 1992. His words—“You have worked hard and improved a lot the past few years and you deserve the opportunity”—had stayed with me. With his short, simple note, I’d achieved recognition from someone who’d viewed me as a troublemaker before. It was an important gesture, like the gold bracelet the union guys had given me.

  I reminded myself of these things when I became discouraged. From his note, it sounded like Eddie’s attitude had softened, but I was worried; I’d recently heard from another supervisor that Eddie had been told by the plant manager, who’d returned from Akron to turn around the Gadsden plant, to get rid of the drunk and the damn woman in his new department. I had been in a managers’ meeting with that plant manager, known for his hard, unforgiving ways, when he informed the group that Goodyear didn’t need women at the plant because they only created trouble. As his words sank in at that meeting, I suspected I was right back where I’d started so long ago.

  I COULDN’T worry too much about Eddie and Jeff. My most immediate concern was my stomach, which had been acting up for a long time but had suddenly gotten worse. My diet wasn’t so great. I went from eating too little to eating everything in sight. For a couple of months when I went to the restroom, I waited a minute before I turned to flush, disheartened to see the red water in the toilet. I ignored the blood until, doubled over in pain one day, I couldn’t deny the obvious anymore.

  My physical problem ultimately resulted in colon surgery. The doctor said my problem was stress-related—my rectal muscles had tightened to the point that they ripped when food tried to pass through my body.

  The charming joke at the plant was that I was having the two-way radio removed from my rear end. All the supervisors carried the radios, but the guys spent so much time swearing across the airwaves that I usually kept mine turned off. It drove them nuts when I wouldn’t answer.

  In the hospital room, lying in bed recovering, I said a prayer to myself and thanked God for letting me live. I was relieved that the surgery was over—I imagined the doctor stitching me back together like he was sewing a piece quilt—and the doctor didn’t discover any cancer. I had been worried that I had colon cancer, which had killed my grandmother Lillie.

  Like Edna might do,
in a melodramatic daydream before my surgery, I tried to envision my funeral. Who would come? What would they say? I’m not sure what my family could say since I’d missed out on so many important moments in their lives, moments I couldn’t relive. I still felt bad about not having helped Vickie with her wedding, the way a bride’s mother should, and that had been ages ago. She and Bill had had a simple but beautiful ceremony on the first day of fall. I was working so much overtime that I couldn’t be as involved with their wedding plans as I wanted to be. They handled everything, while Edna sewed the bridesmaids’ dresses.

  I’d barely shown up.

  Just as I had not flown to Texas to see Charles receive his ranking as sergeant or been able to attend his college graduation ceremony.

  And I hadn’t spent enough time with my father before he died.

  And what would the folks from Goodyear say after all was said and done? Would anybody say that I was a good manager, that I met my production goals, that I served the company well? Some would say I was a troublemaker, of course, but did it really matter what anybody said? What nagged me now was the larger question of what I’d really done with my life.

  THE TREES outside my window, now bare, reminded me that Thanksgiving was fast approaching. It was my favorite holiday, and the idea of cooking the turkey with Charles and baking my grandsons’ favorite pies relaxed me. In the most recent years, holidays had seemed more like a chore than a pleasure. This Thanksgiving, I was thankful for my health and felt a deep sense of gratitude for my family. I planned to enjoy our time together without letting my stress ruin our holiday, as it had done now for the past several years.