She Never Had Nothing

Ethel

There were lots of mothers in my life, including this doll-like creature, all 4'11" of her: my maternal grandmother, Ethel, the toughest woman I've ever met. I don't have a date for this picture, but I think she was about eighteen, so that would have been 1918...just about the time she'd been declared Miss Draper, NC.  Ethel taught me how to have nothing.

Draper is a town that no longer exists except in the memories of people my age who were there before it was eventually folded with Leaksville and Spray into the larger town of Eden. She might have been Miss Eden, then, but for a matter of timing. There's so much irony in that, it hurts my mind; Miss Eden should have a charmed life. Instead, she had a third grade education, a twin sister who died at the age of thirteen (of scarlet fever, I believe), and a life that our generation would think of as punishing.

Ethel, on right

Think with me about her life. Shortly before this picture was made, my grandmother was courted by a handsome young baseball player for Elon College--my grandfather, Clark, of Greensboro, NC, and they soon married on the heels of Armistice Day and into the teeth of that great pandemic, The Spanish Influenza. The virus attacked the body by taking the immune system as host and hostage, so healthier young adults were hit hardest because their immune systems were most robust. 

Clark was working part-time delivering drugs for a local pharmacy to the victims of the influenza, when he felt suddenly exhausted and sought the nearest bed in a friend's room in a boarding house that was emptying for the summer. No one knew where he was, so he lay untended and dehydrating for days. He barely survived. He met and married Ethel and they had one daughter. Shortly thereafter he suffered a massive blood clot that rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. With the help of Clark's parents to provide housing and tend to the child, Ethel was able to go to work at the textile mill. She fed and tended to her quadraplegic husband in the morning, walked to the mill for work, came home to feed and turn her husband at lunchtime, walked back to the mill, then back home again in the evening to cook, nurse Clark, and care for their daughter. 

There were trips to specialists in Maryland and physical therapy for Clark to carry on at home with his wife's help. If there was one thing Ethel could do it was follow instructions. One day Clark moved his own big toe. From there, over a long and unbelievably hard time, he eventually regained enough movement to walk with crutches and braces. Clark inherited the small corner grocery his father owned and the couple lived in a house on the family's large property. Five more children followed.

Ethel and Clark, approximately 1918

Ethel and Clark may have considered the mid to late twenties the good years. 

My grandfather's job was, ironically, secure when The Great Depression occurred in 1929, but his neighbors' jobs in the mills were not, so the little corner grocery fed not only a family of eight, but at times, the members of its small community. 

Just as the oldest of the children were finishing high school and starting their first jobs, World War II turned Greensboro, NC into an Army base. Soldiers marched and drilled on the family's small street, waving to the pretty daughters and taking the first son with them. Ethel got letters from her son in Patton's Third Army. She watched her daughters start their lives in wartime.

And, shortly after the war ended, the grandchildren appeared. In the booming post-war economy, Ethel's married daughters and daughters-in-law went to work and Ethel provided childcare. Her weight had crept up, making her almost as round as she was tall, and she suffered from varicose veins, but she couldn't move less so she moved more slowly. The polio epidemic threatened those grandchildren and Ethel was not one to take the threat lightly, so she fussed us into health and safety.

As the oldest of Ethel's grandchildren, I don't remember the sweetness I see in her portrait. My cousins and I were a handful for her. I see her sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, mopping, cooking (rather badly, but that might have been due to the broken oven door; for years, she propped it shut with a walking cane), planting zinnias, chatting too briefly with the neighbor women. Ethel, Ada, Oneida...they were born into an era of ugly names for baby girls. They were born into lives that history treated so badly, you'd think there was a grudge at work.

At Granny's house, we weren't allowed to play cards or play with the neighborhood boys. When my rowdy cousins and I galloped through her living room to launch ourselves hard at her beleaguered sofa, vying for who could get closest to the bad picture of The Little Rascals or Annette Funicello or American Bandstand on the unreliable black and white television, my granny would admonish us by announcing flatly, "I just can't have nothing." It wasn't so much a complaint as a fact, observed.

She wasn't a fun grandmother, although she had a wry sense of humor when she wasn't too tired to indulge in it. She was brisk and dogged and determined, most of the sweetness knocked off by the early fifties, but she knew children should have fun...as long as they could do it without getting in the broom's way. She provided a wonderful big box of dress-up clothes from her own children's old clothes. And she had a wealth of soft, ragged old quilts to spread under the big oaks in her yard for hot days or to throw over the clothes line for tents. There were my grandfather's Readers Digest Condensed books that we devoured and kite string to weave between trees to make "rooms" for playing house. There were kittens. And Red Chief note books to journal in. She taught us old songs from her childhood: "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" and "Playmate" and "Barbry Allen"...not exactly cheerful songs, but dear to her. If we napped properly every day from 1:00-3:00 p.m.--a habit I could never fully break--we were given a nickel to spend at my grandfather's store for ice cream, a Pepsi, or penny candy. A "nickel's worth," we called it.

Clark died suddenly from a heart attack in 1957 while driving his jeep into town; that clotting disorder struck again. Granny continued to care for us and a neighbor's child after school and in summers. She taught us to iron by having us press the huge box of real ribbons collected from the wreaths at her husband's funeral. She said she'd make a quilt with them someday. We'd twist off the cruel florist wire and take turns standing at the ironing board telling stories about our idolized grandfather, turning the bows into shimmering falls of wide satin that folded themselves back into the box. There's a smell I'll never forget...hot iron on satin.

Until she went to a nursing home following her own stroke, to my knowledge Granny "never had nothing" but dogged determination to plow ahead no matter what. She was known for perseverance and a fierce commitment to taking care of the people she loved. She taught me that resignation is not the same thing as giving up.

She taught me to recognize the sheer good luck we think of as a normal life.