Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  To some degree I enjoyed my life in the mountains. The fact that I felt independent, the fact that I could card wool and could make a medicine out of herbs, could heat resin out of a pine knot to close a wound, made it almost enjoyable. These were things that I lived with day in and day out. I never felt that that was bad. I just felt a lot of emotional conflicts inside with the loneliness. That was the worst feeling. Being alone; never really feeling like I belonged. If I went to someone’s house and they had children of their own, I felt like I was invading them. I never felt that I belonged anywhere. No matter where I went, I was like the fifth wheel. That’s what I felt most of the time and so I spent a lot of time alone.

  I’ve tried to look back at [that part of my childhood] as an adult and justify the things that people around me did, but I guess I have different feelings than they did at that particular time.

  No one really cared. Everybody knew [about my living alone] and no one really cared. At that time, Daddy was making decent money in Atlanta and he dressed nice, you know. And I had an aunt tell me one time, “There’s no way I’m going to take care of somebody else’s child while he’s off and making this kind of money and blowing it on some whore.” Pardon me, but that’s the way it was, and that was the attitude of the community. He was making good money and I was his responsibility. They probably never saw my side of it, yet I can see theirs.

  One particular Christmas—I guess I was about eleven or twelve—I had been by myself. Daddy was down here in the city with his friends and Eldon was away. I had got a Christmas tree, and at school we’d colored little strips of paper and glued them into chains [for Christmas decorations]. It was Christmas Day, but I felt very much alone. So I thought, “Well, it’s Christmas Day, and there’s gonna be good spirit and good cheer at the preacher’s house.” I walked across the field, crossed the creek on a foot log, and then back up through another field to his house. When I went in, I didn’t feel any kind of uncomfortableness. Their house was so nice and warm, and I was cold. I didn’t have a fire [at my house] that day, and I was wet. [On my way over], I’d slipped off the foot log and fallen down into the creek, just like a kid will. The smells of turkey and dressing and all that food had my mouth watering. You’ve got to look at an eleven-year-old kid to understand what I’m saying. Anyway, I went in and the only thing I could think was, “Oh, boy! I’m gonna get something to eat because they wouldn’t dare ask me to leave on Christmas Day. There’s just no way.”

  And then all the family went in [to eat]. [I stood back because] I would never go into anyone’s kitchen without being asked. Then the pastor came out and pulled me aside and he told me, “Carolyn, I don’t get to spend much time with my family alone, and I would prefer to have this time alone. I would appreciate it if you could come back later.” He didn’t say, “Would you leave?” He said, “Come back later,” but I knew what he meant. I’ll tell you what. That was probably the only man I’ve ever hated in my life. That man was an A-number-one hypocrite. I disliked him then and I dislike him today, and he’s dead. I still dislike anyone who even looks like him. I’ve had drunk guys in Atlanta come and try to rape me and I’ve fought them off with a butcher knife. I don’t hate them the way I hate [that preacher] because they never professed to be loving and gentle and kind and then turn around and turn someone away.

  And from that day on, I vowed that I would never ask for anything from anyone for as long as I live. I’m still pretty strict about that. I have found that to survive in this world, you have to ask for some things, but you don’t beg for anything. I haven’t, and with God’s help, I won’t. I’ll beg God for help and forgiveness, but not another human being.

  I think that if it had not been for my faith in Jesus Christ as being my friend, I probably would have died. I felt like He was the only friend I had and He would be there when no one else was. [When Mother was living] we didn’t go to church that much. It was just something that I have felt strongly about all my life. Christ was the one friend that would never let me down. Even now I don’t go to church regularly; I don’t belong to a particular church or anything, but I feel very close to my Creator.

  There were times I could almost literally leave my body, and it was like [the cold, the hunger, the troubles] were happening to someone else. I could just step aside and I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t hungry. The Japanese have this theory that one can drink tea from an empty cup. That’s the way I think I got.

  Eldon and I couldn’t really communicate about our feelings. We just went on day by day and we didn’t say, “I hurt,” or “I want to cry,” or “I’m lonely,” or “I’m hungry,” or anything. We just did what we had to do one day at a time, and hoped that we lived until the next day or the next week.

  I was about thirteen [when I moved to Atlanta]. I came by myself on the Greyhound bus. Three cardboard boxes held everything I had. That’s really all there was to moving. Really, it was nothing for me to catch the bus and go.

  Eldon was already working in Atlanta by then. He had been sleeping in the back of a station wagon [but when I came], we made enough money to rent a two-room garage apartment. He looked older [than seventeen] and so he worked for Blue Plate Foods, making mayonnaise and that sort of thing. I went to work for Howard Johnson’s [Restaurant]. I would work in the evenings and go to school in the daytime. A lot of times Eldon would go to work at night and sleep in the day. [As we got a little money ahead, we moved from the garage apartment to a better place.] We would move every four or five months to a different place.

  It took me a long time whenever I came to Atlanta [to make friends]. I was very much a loner. I was quite different [from other teenagers] in the fact that I could relate to people twenty years older than I. People my age in the city had never experienced anything like I had. But for some reason I was still determined to go to school, even though there was no one in my life making me go. Daddy couldn’t read. He was a very intelligent man, but he was not educated at all. Mother could read, and she had a very strong appreciation for books and knowledge, but she was not well educated either. But to me, education was what I lusted after. In the seventh grade, I usually maintained all A’s. And then in high school when I came to Atlanta, I was in the Beta Club. I wanted to learn and to understand, to be aware of what was happening around me.

  [That was probably because I enjoyed reading so much.] In the mountains, one of the few ways I could find an escape [from the loneliness and fears I had after Mother’s death] was through books from the library. It didn’t make any difference to me what they were. I loved to read. I think that was what kept me strong as an individual, that ability to escape into a fantasy of books.

  I have done skydiving, I’m a licensed pilot, and I’m a certified scuba diver, but I can imagine no excitement like that I have felt when I was reading. I felt that I was away in my own little world. I’ve traveled in the Mideast to Aswan, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, but whenever I read, it is so much more exciting than actually going there. In the Bible I’ve read all about the walled city and going up to the Sea of Galilee. [I’ve traveled] to Jerusalem, and again, it’s nothing in comparison to having traveled there in my mind through books.

  [Going to school in Atlanta was certainly different for me. As in Youngcane] there was no one to supervise me [but here the authorities weren’t aware of that]. Whenever I was absent, I wrote my own notes. No big deal. I signed my own report cards and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t have any problems at all in school as far as the teachers or the school counselors went. Again, there was this attitude of, “Well, as long as the fees are paid, it doesn’t make any difference.” [I only ran into a problem once that I remember.] If we had any unexcused absences, we could not qualify for the Beta Club even though our grades were high enough. I forgot to write a note one day for an English class I missed, and of course the teacher was not familiar with my situation [and turned in an unexcused absence for me]. For that particular quarter, I was not allowed into the Beta Club.

&nbs
p; [In the Atlanta high schools, there was a program at that time called] Distributive Education. I could get out of school earlier, so I left Howard Johnson’s and got a job at a drugstore which was real close to the house [where we lived. This was much better because I had no car.] I was walking. It wasn’t long hours and I was getting a guaranteed salary plus tips whereas at Howard Johnson’s [my pay] was just tips.

  [I met Arthur while working at that drugstore.] He was ten years older than I was, but I seemed a lot older, so we started dating. It was quite a different world for me because he was from a family of eight; we’d go on picnics and cookouts and to the lake with his family. His mother just took me under her wing and so we dated about a year and a half, and then got married. My brother was off dating a lady in the mountains and he was never [at our apartment] anymore. He had his own place. Therefore Arthur moved into the apartment with me after we married. It was something how Arthur moved in with me even though he was ten years older than I.

  No one [at school] knew I was married, but when I got pregnant I had to quit. That was strictly taboo. I was in the eleventh grade. I only completed the tenth grade in regular high school.

  After I married, we were the typical middle-class family. We had a daughter, Tina. She is our only child. We had bought a house and two new cars. Both of us worked but our payments were such that if one of us missed a payday, boy we were behind! Then Arthur took strep throat in January and it settled in his kidneys. It completely deteriorated the filtering system in his kidneys and he was completely disabled by June of that year.

  Tina was nine when her daddy died and she still remembers what it was like to try to dialyze him. She knew what it was like for me to come in after working all day and trying to get the machine ready to put him on, trying to find the vein and an artery to stick him in. Then the machine might mess up at two o’clock in the morning or the power might go off and I would try to get the neighbors to help get him off the machine, because if we didn’t, he could actually bleed to death. She’s aware of these things for the four years that he was ill because she was in the middle of it. Again, I took it one day at a time. As a child, if I had thought about having to dialyze someone, then go to work, and to school, and come home and take care of Tina, Mighty God! Four years of this! I’ll never make it. But I did—one day at a time, and we never took one penny of welfare.

  It was necessary that I go back to school because I was not making enough money as a bookkeeper and a secretary to cover medical expenses and they were not totally covered by the insurance. I couldn’t get prescriptions filled because I just didn’t have the money. That’s when I went back to school at night seriously. I chose civil engineering because I was working in that field as a bookkeeper-secretary for an asphalt paving company, and there was a demand there, with people that knew my circumstances and situation, and were ready and willing to pay for me to go to school. I earned a certificate in highway materials engineering and transportation from the civil engineering department at Georgia Tech.

  There were no other women in the classes I had. There were only about eight percent women in the entire student body. [I was subject to ridicule] but for as many people that were bad to me because I was a woman, there were equally that many good to me.

  I continued to be promoted throughout the time that I was with the paving company. I became division manager and had a new company car and expense account. I made very good money for a woman at that particular time. I think I made close to $25,000 per year. That was pretty good in the early 1970s. I realized that I could not really advance [much farther]. I had been there twelve years and I saw people who had been there twenty years who weren’t any farther along than I was, except maybe their salary was a bit higher.

  So then I started C & S Paving, Inc. We’ve still got most of the people that we started with. I borrowed money that first year to pay them in the wintertime [when there was very little work to do]. I care a lot about the people that work with me. I spent Christmas Eve one year at the Fulton County Jail trying to pay the bond so I could get a guy [that works for me] out of Grady [Hospital]. He had a DUI [drinking under the influence] and he tore himself up really bad in a car wreck on Christmas Eve. I went to the hospital to see him and they had him handcuffed to the bed.

  Whenever the men work late, I buy their supper and bring it to them on the job site. [I feel it’s very important] to do things like that.

  We’re still young as a company. We’re still struggling. Most of it has been trial and error. We don’t have it made by any means, but I think there’s opportunity now because we have obtained a lot of tools that we need to really work. They weren’t there in the past—we had to do with what we had. When I started the company, all we had was a pickup truck and the kitchen table, but with God’s help we will continue to work and to grow and hopefully help people along, too.

  If there is [a point at which big is too big], our company has not yet reached it. A lot of times, I think clients force you to grow. And as long as it’s controlled growth rather than just in all directions, then I feel more comfortable with it. If you sort of guide it, then you’re much better off. I won’t take work if I know we can’t do it.

  PLATE 482

  I’m not gonna lie about my past because I think too many people lie to themselves and to others. I think all human beings do that to some degree. I worshipped my father and yet I was torn with these feelings of knowing inside what he was doing was wrong, so how could I love him? Well, whenever Daddy was sober, he was a very kind man and he had personality plus, and I appreciate that.

  [When we were still kids in Youngcane] we would come to Atlanta and live with Daddy for a while. He’d get drunk and come in and say, “Oh, Sis, I love you and I’m going to take care of you and everything’s going to be all right from now on,” but that’d last two or three weeks until [his new wife] would pitch a fit and say, “I’m not taking care of someone else’s kids.” So it would be back in the cardboard box to the mountains. We’d come down here [to Atlanta with my father] long enough to see the fights and go back!

  The thing is, I don’t think I’m by myself with this thing of people that are alcoholics and their coming home to their families and busting the television and breaking up the furniture and kicking down the door.

  I had a relationship with Daddy as an adult that was just as stormy as the childhood thing. He’d say, “Well, I need a chain saw to cut firewood.” I’d buy him a new chain saw and he’d take it and go pawn it and get the money and go get drunk for two or three weeks. Then he’d come back in [and say], “I’m sorry, Sis, I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  Of course, he’d go back to the same old things. “Well, I’ll try one more time.” That was the type of thing that it was. I feel that he was not dependable, but there was that magnetism in his personality.

  I paid totally for his funeral. Of all those people who criticize me for being honest about what he was, not the first one has ever offered to pay any portion of his funeral or to have his house roofed or to get him out of jail—anything—whenever he needed it. I’ve repeatedly had some of them say, “Loan me the money and I’ll pay you back.” And I’ve done that before. I just think that there’s a lot of hypocrisy in the world, and we have to look inside ourselves and really live for what we think is right. And if you do that on a day-in, day-out basis, then at the end of your life you can lie down and be peaceful with yourself. If you don’t have peace inside of you, then you might as well hang it up, because you’re not going anywhere.

  I still furnish a place for my stepmother to live and try to help take care of her. She’s a fine lady and I have a lot of compassion for her. It hurts her a lot of times whenever I talk about Daddy. That charisma that some people have was there and it just didn’t have as great an impact on her as an adult as it did on me as a child.

  I think a lot of times right now, I’m even more a child than I’ve ever been. I love to do things. I love going to the movies and I’m a sweet frea
k. I love to eat candy and popcorn—all the things you can imagine.

  I try to tell the truth day-in and day-out. I try to live every day, everything I do, as if it’s taped and recorded. If I’m going to face the world, then I’m not going to be ashamed of it. My standards and other people’s standards may not be the same, but I don’t feel ashamed of what I’m doing. God sees what I do behind closed doors. To me, that’s the only one I’ve got to answer to. People say, “Oh, Carolyn, I can’t believe you’ve got four houses, you’ve got this and you’ve got that.” But to me, I don’t have anything. This is something God’s allowing me to use. A lot of people criticize me, saying, “Carolyn, people will take advantage of you.” As long as I know what they’re doing, it’s not their taking. I feel comfortable in giving. And I just wish sometimes I had more to give. I really do.

  EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

  STUDENTS

  Allison Adams

  Chris Beasley

  David Brewin

  Cary Brown

  William Brown

  Melanie Burrell

  Pam Carnes

  Tammy Carter

  Rosanne Chastain

  Vicki Chastain

  Kyle Conway

  Teresa Cook

  Dan Crane

  Chris Crawford

  Leah Crumley

  Greg Darnell

  Hedy Davalos

  Charles Dennis

  Wesley Dockins

  Dawn Dotson

  Randy Dye

  Al Edwards

  Richard Edwards

  Kim English

  Kevin Fountain

  Roger Fountain

  Joseph Fowler

  Lori Gillespie

  Rance Gillespie

  Aimee Graves

  Curt Haban

  Kim Hamilton

  Dana Holcomb

  Shane Holcomb

  Carla Houck

  Melinda Hunter