On a Pedestal

By Bessie M. David

A provocative fusion of truth and fiction fill the pages of this memoir. Annie Mae relives her life from innocence to a world of poverty, abuse, neglect, and alcoholism. On a not-so-pretty trip down memory lane, she travels across Texas panning for love, food, and shelter. The characters that come in and out of her life resemble members from a museum of oddities. She leaves no stone unturned with raw dialogue about her clandestine encounters, her unscrupulous family, and the faith that pulls her through.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514493137

Bessie M. David

Bessie M. David lives in Nassau Bay, Texas, with her husband of thirty-five years. She spends her time as a beauty professional and philanthropist alongside her lifetime passion for writing. The bulletin board of her elementary school was home to her first publication of poetry. Other writings include short stories, magazine articles, résumés, and bios. This first novel is a work of love, commitment, and endurance. Bessie spent one hour a day, one day a week, for two years listening to her grandmother recite the memories of her life into a cassette recorder. It would be another twenty years of transcribing and determination to bring this story to life. One woman’s memory and another’s creative intuition collide in the fictionalized memoir, On a Pedestal.

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Copyright © 2016 by Bessie M. David.

Author photo by Brent King

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016907566

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5144-9315-1

   Softcover   978-1-5144-9314-4

   eBook   978-1-5144-9313-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/22/2016

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My Journey

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

From The Author

Where It All Began San Saba, Texas 1918

Brady, Texas

Back To San Saba, Texas

Refugio, Texas

Nordheim, Texas

Refugio, Texas

Woodsboro, Texas

Edinburg, Texas

Falfurrias, Texas

San Antonio. Texas

Caldwell, Texas

Houston, Texas

Seabrook, Texas

Back To Houston, Texas

Lafayette, Louisiana

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Tampa, Florida

Back To Houston, Texas

Back To Tampa, Florida

Back To Houston, Texas

New Orleans, Louisiana

Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Back To Houston, Texas

La Porte, Texas

Back To Houston, Texas

South Houston, Texas

Back To Houston, Texas

The Sexual Revolution Circa 1980

Las Vegas, Nevada

Back To Houston, Texas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Back To Houston, Texas

Pasadena, Texas

Epilogue

About The Author

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Nanny. She was a woman of strength, perseverance, creativity and tenacity. Her laughter, fragrance and personal style still linger in my mind. Head up, breasts out and walk with confidence, was her motto. I am proud to be a woman and a descendant of her bloodline.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you Mr. Ed for accepting the challenge to not only read out of your chosen genre but to give me editing advice that subsequently put me on the fast track to publish. For my biggest fan, DJ Michaels. Special thanks to my BFF Annette who sought to kick my writing in gear in 1996 when she gifted me with a copy of the Liar’s Club by Mary Karr¹. To the many friends who have encouraged me over the last twenty-something years. You know who you are, so please tap your heart and feel the love I have for you. There are too many names to mention and for this I am blessed.

Enduring thanks to my husband Ken, who set the publication of this book into motion, and has showered me with love, devotion and encouragement. A talented writer himself, his edits and additional creativity helped make this story become a book.

Love, love, love to Michael David who continually reignites my passion for writing with his own prolific writing talent.

The final manuscript of this book would never have been completed without the editing skills of my dear friend Jean Gray. Her support and encouragement for this and many other pieces of my life is unsurpassed.

Most of all, I thank God for my eccentric, loving family and the Matriarch who sits on her pedestal in the big blue sky, Nanny aka Annie Mae.

PROLOGUE

For a child, a grandmother can be as enchanting as a fairy tale heroine. Her place in the hierarchy of the family is the most beloved and admired. My grandmother, aka Nanny, was no exception. She was colorful, eccentric and very opinionated. What I looked forward to the most, on visits to her house, was to go inside her closet, and admire rows and rows of her shoes. I would spend an entire afternoon prancing around in a beaded pump or a leopard boot.

She wasn’t the type of grandmother that sent you birthday cards or attended your ballet recital. By the time I came along, she had ten other grandchildren and an ostentatious lifestyle. She gave lavish Christmas parties for her family and entertained everyone with her piano playing. She was respected and loved by all who knew her.

As a young adult and aspiring writer, I asked her if she had ever thought about writing her life story. Her zest for life was infectious and it seemed the story of her life would be full of pleasantries and happy times. She said many people had asked her that question. So I naively inquired if she wanted to write her story with me. She seemed amused and replied, If you are up to it, then she laughed.

I had no idea what I was about to become privy to, nor did I expect to hear such intimate details. I had high expectations of what her life must have been like. I was not prepared for the tales of horrific relationships with men and the neglect bestowed upon her and her children.

With pen in hand, I asked her to recall her first memory. She began talking as if she were reading the script of her life, instead of reliving the memories in her head. I wrote feverishly to keep up, but, we soon realized a tape recorder was the only solution to documenting her memories.

For an hour a day, two days a week, I sat with her, and listened as she poignantly described the life she remembered. At times she repeated herself, and some of the memories were jumbled. However, I could feel, smell and visualize the scenes, as she recalled each moment. Two years had passed when her story came to an end. After that, I devoted many painstaking years, transcribing and reshaping her story, into what it is today.

I fretted over the final revision, and I’m saddened by the fact she is not here to share this moment. However, I am proud to be the one given this gift of her life. I treasure the recordings of her voice that spoke the words in this book. Here, her legacy will live on and others now have the opportunity to know her.

I see her now at the piano playing her heart out, with that smile on her face. That was her true joy— music. She had been given a gift from God to play the piano by ear, and could play anything a person could hum. Her music is alive today in my head and in my heart. My love for music is a direct correlation of sitting by her on the piano bench, and listening to her play. I was never able to play myself, it didn’t even interest me. I just wanted to listen. Listen, feel the music, and dance.

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FROM THE AUTHOR

The first response I get when I tell people I wrote a book about my grandmother’s life story is, Who was she? The expectations are that stories are only written about historical or famous people. Webster’s Dictionary² defines famous as celebrated in fame or public, renowned, distinguished in story; often followed by for; as famous for being celebrated. She will never be famous, but her legacy will be infamously known to all who choose to read her story. My hope is that the pages of this book have recreated the person she was and the joy she brought to many, even in the face of diversity. She was not perfect and made many bad choices. I am most amazed at the choice she made to overcome the abuse, neglect, poverty and shame, to live a long, pleasurable and carefree life. For all her faults, I will always remember her as an elegant, majestic, prideful, yet humble woman.

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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN SAN SABA, TEXAS 1918

Wake up, Annie Mae. Your breakfast is gonna be cold.

Mama dried her hands on a tattered apron. She finished washing the dishes and waited anxiously for my arrival to the kitchen. It was time to commence with the daily chores, and I still hadn’t eaten. Papa and my brothers were already out in the fields, plowing and picking cotton. He was less demanding on us girls, especially me.

As the baby of the family, I was quite spoiled. My sister Tubie and I were the youngest of seven children. We were also the closest except when our oldest sister was around.

She always sleeps late, said Tubie.

As I danced seamlessly down the staircase, I was thinking of something to say back to her. Sis was always teasing me. Instantly, they had gone back to chatting among themselves, and I was in the middle of my third pirouette. I twirled my way over to my special chair at the head of the table next to where Papa sat. The chair was shaped like a pedestal, and I felt like a princess on a throne. Papa had a special nickname for me as well. He called me his prima donna.

During his childhood and early adult years, Papa admired the talents and beauty of the original American prima donna Clara Louise Kellogg³. She was the first American opera singer, and Papa had a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from her career during her travels across the country. He would tell me stories about how I was gonna be like her when I grew up. Just like me, she had learned to play music by ear. Of course, as a prima donna, I couldn’t sit in a regular chair. This made my sisters jealous, and whenever they were together, they ignored me and told me I couldn’t play with them because I was too fragile.

Mama set my plate of biscuits at the opposite end of the table where Tubie and Sis were playing patty-cake. Neither paid me any attention when I climbed upon my pedestal. I looked at my plate of biscuits and realized they were bare, and I always liked to have a bowl of grease to dip my biscuits in. Grease was one of our few extravagances, and that’s exactly what it was—the grease left over from frying bacon or other meats. It was considered extravagant because we could not afford meat every day, and the grease gave our bread a meaty flavor. This particular bowl of grease was in the center of the table, closer to my sisters than me.

I want some grease, I demanded.

No one responded. Mama had walked out of the kitchen for a moment, and only my sisters were there with me. I raised my voice so Mama could hear me wherever she was in the house.

I want my greee-ase!

I tried to say it louder so someone would get it for me. My sister Tubie began taunting and teasing me,

Patty-cake, patty-cake, Annie Mae is mad. Give her what she wants and make her glad.

This upset me, so I took a fork (a four-pronged bone-handled fork) and threw it at her. The fork stuck right into the side of her face just at the temple and hung there, dangling. (I can still hear that sound just as if it were happening now.) There wasn’t much blood, but my sister was screaming at the top of her lungs.

Run and get your father! yelled Mama.

My older sister ran out the back door, hollering for Papa. He came in and pulled the fork from Tubie’s head. She was OK, but he was furious. He took me outside to the barn.

Annie Mae, this is gonna hurt me as much as it hurts you, but a child needs to know their limits. That fork could have gone into Tubie’s eye and blinded her. You need to understand the repercussions of your actions. Many a man has died at the hands of another by a single reaction.

I stood bent forward with my hands on my ankles, preparing myself for the pain. I started thinking about how Papa always spoke with fancy sayings. He didn’t talk much to us kids other than tell us how or what to do, but during those moments, he talked like a real educated man. My thoughts were interrupted when Papa took the handle of an ax and gave me my first whooping. He whooped me from my hips down to my knees. That was the thing about Papa: even though I was spoiled, whenever one of us kids did something wrong, he had a firm hand.

Afterward, I climbed upon a haystack and lay there until nearly dusk, just like a wounded animal licking its wounds. I fell asleep, and when I awoke I went into the house, and it was nearly time for supper. Everyone carried on as usual. Nothing was ever said of the incident again.

In 1920, competition for farming began with the European trade, and by 1921, the price of cotton dropped dramatically to nineteen cents a pound compared to thirty-five cents in 1919. We lost our land and began renting farms called thirds and fourths, which meant the farmer got three bales of cotton and the owner of the land got one. We would then sell the cotton for other necessary items, such as food and clothing.

Papa became weary and was really never the same. Our home life became mobile as we moved from farm to farm every couple of years. When my brothers married and moved away, my oldest sister Georgia helped my father harness the plow and do other jobs that my brothers had previously done.

At the age of eight, I started school in primer, which is now called kindergarten. I attended the Live Oak School in San Saba County, Texas. My sisters and I rode to school in a sulky cart driven by a mule named Kate. The cart would barely seat two people, because it was used for harness races and had room for one person. My sisters would sit there. Down in the front of the seat, there was a dip where riders would put their feet. I sat there. That old mule of ours was the orneriest devil. Out of the blue, she would just turn away from you, kick up her heels, and run off across the fields. I would be sitting so close to her in that little dip that I would have to dodge those hooves of hers.

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After first grade, we moved to Cat Claw, Texas. It was a small community with farms and a schoolhouse. The schoolhouse was also the church. There wasn’t a store of any kind. I was in first grade for only six weeks and was promoted to second grade. My teacher wanted to advance me to third grade, but Mama said no. I had obviously learned quite a bit at home from my two sisters and four brothers. I was quite the prima donna, totally spoiled and overprotected. Smart as a whip, my papa would say. Mama would follow with Too smart for her own good.

There were only about fifteen kids in the school when I was there, and most of them were older. There were more boys than girls. The boys were the oldest in sixth and seventh grades. They were pretty good kids but could be a little rebellious at times. I remember one year on April Fools’ Day when all the older kids decided to pull a joke on our teacher. We all snuck away during recess and climbed the hill behind the schoolhouse. At this particular time, our teacher had a bad leg and used a crutch to help him walk. We knew he couldn’t follow us as we ran off toward the hill. We stayed gone the rest of the afternoon. He could see us on top of the hill and yelled for us to come back, but we just waved.

See you later, teach, sneered Casey. The next day, we came back to school, and the teacher demanded the leader of the pack to confess and stands up in front of the classroom to take his punishment.

I know one of you boys come up with this little antic and bullied the rest to follow. So come up and take your whoopin’.

He already had his belt off and stood there waiting. No one moved. We had already decided that no one was going to confess to thinking this up. We knew he was gonna be mad. We all shouted, Nooo!

If he was going to whoop anyone, he would have to whoop us all. The teacher called Casey Hibler up to the front. Casey got up from his desk and slowly walked to the front. As soon as he stood in front of the teacher, we all jumped out of our seats and formed a circle around Casey and the teacher. He began to draw back his arm, and one of the older boys took hold of his wrist.

I’ll go first.

Then some of us girls started jumping up and down like it was Christmas!

Try me, try me.

Of course, we already knew this was gonna happen. We talked about it on the hill. The teacher was going to demand the leader of the pack to fess up. We had already decided if he was going to whoop one of us, then he would have to whoop us all. So no one got a whooping that day.

Strange as it may seem, we still learned back then even though we were mean and ornery as the devil. We understood the value of being able to come to school and learn. Most kids, especially boys, had to stay home and work the land. Even if they did come to school early on, they were done by the age of eleven or twelve. We all had a desire to learn, but work at home always came first.

We went to school from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon and had the usual two fifteen-minute recesses and an hour for lunch. Mama always packed our lunch, which usually consisted of biscuits and sausage or ham, but most of the time; it was just biscuits with butter and syrup. Sometimes we would get a baked sweet potato, or Mama would bake cookies. Everyone pretty much ate the same thing. When there were three of us going to school, we would carry our lunch in a syrup bucket. Back then, syrup came in a gallon bucket with a lid and looked exactly like a paint bucket; that way, if it rained, it wouldn’t get wet. Of course, it was mostly carried in that because we didn’t have paper bags and we certainly didn’t have plastic.

Along about this time in school, I was beginning to realize I was growing up. I was getting away from being a child. I was eleven years old I began to notice the boys a little bit. (I look back now and think my ideas about everything were changing.) The following summer when I was still eleven years old, I finally became a woman. I started having my periods. So that made me to grow up even more.

There was a family of children that lived in another community just outside of Cat Claw. They walked ten or eleven miles to our school barefoot, even during the cold and the rain. Their feet would crack open and bleed. The story has been told hundreds of times through the generations about how hard times were, and the expression Walkin’ miles in the snow barefoot to get somewhere was true for many families. We were very lucky in that aspect, but this particular family was not. I became friends with the girl. Her name was Mildred Ledbetter. All those kids were just so shy. They wouldn’t even talk. You would say something to them, and they would just grin. You could never get around them and be friendly or giggle like with most everybody else, but somehow, Mildred and I still managed to become friends.

At this same time, there was a new family that moved in near us. When they started school, I took to noticing one of the boys right away, and, lo and behold, I got excited about him. His name was George Bogus. I wasn’t quite thirteen yet, but I had already learned how to flirt. Actually, it just seemed to come natural to me. I started flirting with him right away and reeled him right in. I didn’t think much about any of the other girls liking him, especially Mildred, since she never said a word. At school, I would flirt with George, and on Sundays, everybody went to church. We always managed to sit across the aisle from one another in church and stare into each other’s eyes. This went on for about half the school year.

Our social life consisted of weekend ice cream suppers and little musical get-togethers. We girls would be singing and dancing while secretly looking at the boys playing ball out in the fields near the house. I danced just like a grown-up did because I was a good dancer from the time I was walking. I always had to dance on my toes because I was so short. I danced right on the tip of my toes like a ballerina. By the time the evening was over, my end steps would be so sore.

In the meantime, I had met the schoolteacher’s younger brother. He came down in the early spring, and I liked him too. So I was entertaining the two of them. Having a steady back then meant you had a boy to hold your hand and giggle with. I had two, but it didn’t dawn on me that this was affecting Mildred Ledbetter. We were friends, but she never really talked much. One day, things finally got the best of her, and she turned on me as if I was the devil. She told me just what kind of a person she thought I was.

You have everything in the world, and I have nothin’! All I ever wanted was George Bogus to be mine. You just step in and take him. Now you got that other boy too.

Mildred continued talking at the top of her lungs, using hand gestures and everything.

What do you need with two boyfriends? Why can’t I have George?

Of course, I was dumbfounded by the fact that she was actually talking. I went home that afternoon, just excited to no end because she had talked.

At school the next day, I told her I would give her George if she promised to keep talking. She was so happy, she couldn’t stop talking.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you!

She was nearly sobbing. Of course, the funniest part of all this is the fact that George and I had never said a word to each other. Our relationship consisted of glares and giggles.

I only knew George and Mildred for a few years. They became sweethearts, and then we all drifted apart after high school.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother passed away. My father lost interest in worrying about what I was doing in my spare time, so I had more freedom than I had when Mama was around. I began to go to the Saturday night dances with my sisters and brothers. I was meeting older boys, and some of them were in their late teens and early twenties. I soon decided I didn’t like boys my age anymore. I was infatuated with these older boys, especially those in the band. I would ask to join in with the band, and when I did, I sat up straight and imagined I was the new American prima donna, just like the lady Clara Louise my papa would talk about.

One particular night, there was a fiddle player named Denton Miller. I just got all gaga and gushy over him. My sister had warned me to be careful with the older boys and never let them give me a ride home. She said, If you let them bring you home, they’ll try to get in your pants.

All the guys in the band put me on a pedestal, just like Papa. I wasn’t worried about anyone trying to get in my pants. I guess because I acted so goofy and was really innocent. They all knew how old I was, and everyone always liked the way I played the piano, so I didn’t think any of those guys wanted to make any waves.

I didn’t know anything about the facts of life. My mama never told me anything. All I knew was what I’d picked up from my girlfriends. None of us had ever done anything with a boy past holding hands and a peck on the cheek. I hadn’t yet been exposed to anything different.

Since I had been spending time with older boys, I completely lost interest in the boys my age. They bored me to tears, always did. In high school, I couldn’t stand to go out with them because they never had a penny in their pocket, and when we would go out to the soda fountain to get a drink, they always asked me to pay for my own. Boys my age seemed silly and immature to me by then. All they wanted to do was get in your pants. I was more into playing the piano and being around adults than sitting in the backseat of a car, fighting for my virginity.

So now I was spending all my spare time with the older crowd at the dance hall. Since I was so young, the older boys respected me more and were too afraid to try anything with me. They knew my brothers and sisters were always around watching.

Eventually, my brothers and sisters married and moved away, leaving me alone with Papa. He always worked long hours and, of course, had never anything to do with the raising of us girls. That had been Mama’s job. He was just lost without her around. He didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t make things easy for him either. At times, I was awful thoughtless.

After school, I would go home with one of my girlfriends and maybe stay until nine or ten o’clock that night. Sometimes I’d stay over the entire night, and Papa didn’t know where in the world I was. He was beginning to come unglued. I couldn’t understand why because I wasn’t doin’ anything, as I would tell him.

He said, You may not be doin’ anything and you know you weren’t, but I didn’t know where you were, whether you had been hurt or what, and you need to tell me these things.

We finally came to an understanding.

Things were really different with Mama gone. My papa didn’t like the fact that I was into boys so much. He never did talk to me about sex or womanhood. He only gave me a little advice on boys. Over and over, he would tell me the same thing.

He would tell me, You be careful, Annie Mae. Them boys you seem to wanna like don’t need to be up to no good with you.

Don’t worry, Papa, Sis is lookin’ out for me.

Of course, he didn’t know she was just as boy crazy as I was.

Soon, there was another boy. I met him down in Cat Claw before we moved away. His name was Quinton Mullins. We liked each other and held hands sometimes.

During this time, he would walk down to the house in the evening to court me. We didn’t have an actual parlor for courting. There was a was just a room with a heater and some chairs, and Papa would sit in there and read the newspaper, while we sat there for a hour or two and never said a darn word. (This is why I preferred going out with my brothers and sisters instead of messing around with boys my age.)

This courting business was boring. I would have much rather been playing the piano and dancing, but Papa was determined that I should spend time with boys my age. This went on for a sometime. I was going to the dance hall with my sister on weekends and having courting sessions with Quinton on Sunday evenings.

I had met this older boy named Cecil and I was getting out of sorts with Quinton because he would just sit there and never say a word. Of course, he didn’t have any money to take me to the movies either. So we would just sit until Papa would clear his throat, and that meant it was time to go. Well, I didn’t really want to sit there that evening because I had a chance to go to the movies with Cecil, but Quinton had showed up. I got up to get me a drink of water, and on the table in the kitchen was a pack of Feen-a-Mint laxative. Of course, it looked just like a pack of chewing gum. I don’t know what possessed me, but I picked up the Feen-a-Mint and walked back into the room where Quinton was sitting behind the stove right against the wall, and it was always really hot back there. I took those things in my hand and asked if he would like to have some chewing gum, and without saying a word, he took it. He chewed and chewed and chewed, and I was sitting there, watching him. After a while, Papa got up and shoved a bunch of wood in the heater, and that damned old thing was just a dancing with flames. The heat was getting terrific, and Quinton began to squirm. He would frown and then he would squirm. I wanted to giggle so badly. He squirmed and squirmed some more. Papa looked down over his glasses.

Something wrong, son?

No, sir, said Cecil. He squirmed again, and, finally, all of a sudden, he jumped up so fast that he knocked the chair over. He took off running out the door. He hit that door so hard, that it bounced back and forth a couple of times. I just came unglued and busted out laughing. Papa asked me what was wrong, and I told him what I’d done. He stood up, removed his glasses, and pointed them at me.

Annie Mae, that was mean. You deserve a whippin’ for that.

Then he got tickled. We sat there and laughed hysterically. Poor Quinton, he probably shit all over himself. That was the last time I ever talked to Quinton. He was probably scared to ever court a girl again.

Sometime after that, we moved into a duplex apartment house. The house was big enough that Papa and I lived in one part, and my brother and his wife lived in the other part. I had gotten in high school by then and was at the ripe old age of fourteen. I met this senior in high school named Cecil Thornbloom. Our relationship quickly advanced into the hand-holding stage. He would walk to my house, and we’d walk downtown to the movies, and on the way back, we would always walk through what we called the grammar school. It was a great big building with long steps on all four sides. We would climb on top of those steps to sit and watch the moon. We’d sit and hold hands, and finally got to the kissing stage. We began to like each other pretty good. My father was actually allowing me to see him away from the house. I guess after the scene with Quinton, he rather preferred that my courting be done off the premises of his house. He didn’t want to be held responsible for any antics I might use on future boyfriends.

Cecil was a budding artist and could draw darn near anything. As soon as he finished high school, he planned to go off to art school. In the meantime, he saved a little money and got himself a car. It was a little roadster, and I shall never forget it. He picked me up one night to go to the movie house. After the movie, we took a ride out to Llano Road, where all the young folks hung out. Part of the fun was driving up a little hill to the turnaround and then coast all the way back. Just about the time we get out there, his car has a blowout. We were about five miles out of town with no way to fix the tire. It was getting late, and there was no traffic on the road at that time. We started walking. He kept saying, Henry Smith is goin’ to kill me.

Well, I wasn’t feeling too good about the situation myself. When we get in sight of the house, I noticed Papa pacing back and forth in the front yard. He come walking up and was plum mad. Poor soul, it’s a wonder he didn’t have a stroke. Cecil began to explain what had happened to the car, and Papa was yelling about how late it was and I was a young girl and he ought to have better sense and so on and so forth. Cecil finally got a chance to say something.

Now before you hit me, Mr. Smith, I want to tell you what happened, said Cecil.

Well, Papa finally did listen to him, with both of them shouting and me crying.

I’m sorry she had to walk that far, but when I saw I couldn’t fix the car, the first thing we did was start walkin’ as fast as we could to get her home because I know she shouldn’t be out late.

In the future, when the movie is over, ya’ll come straight home. Don’t you be goin’ out to Llano Road. I don’t want my daughter out there with all the riffraff! Papa shouted.

My father finally calmed down. Cecil quickly bowed forward in agreement and took off toward his house.

As time went on, Papa began to get nervous about taking care of me and wondering whether he was doing the right thing trying to raise me without a momma. Soon after that, Cecil and I was really becoming an item. We had become inseparable. It was just like in West Side Story—boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, and girl is from the wrong side of the tracks.

His family was a little more financially stable than my papa and me. He owned Thornbloom’s Garage, an auto repair place. Soon his father realized that Cecil was getting serious with that Smith gal, as he would put it. He never acknowledged me by my first name. He always felt I was beneath them and that Cecil should do better. He went as far as to threaten Cecil with not paying for art school if he continued to see me. Of course, as any red-blooded American teenager would do, Cecil defied his father in the beginning.

That’s why Cecil was constantly working through the summer so that he could pay his own way to school in the fall. Cecil and I spent more and more time together, and it became apparent that he and I were serious. Of course, no matter how much he worked, he was never going to have the money to pay for school, so he secretly agreed to his father’s proposition of giving me the boot for his education. He told his father that he would stop seeing me when school started. Of course, that would have been a natural progression, since he would have to leave the state for school, but his father wanted to send his son off free and clear without having a girl to clutter his mind and keep him from his studies.

One afternoon, I was at my sister-in-law’s, and we were in the kitchen, cooking together. I was making the biscuits. Everything was made from scratch, and I was elbow deep in dough.

Cecil stopped by the house. My brother was outside when he came up and asked if I was around. My brother came in the kitchen and told me Cecil wanted to see me. He was standing in the living room, and I came out of the kitchen with my hands behind my back. I had been wearing Cecil’s class ring and never took it off. I hadn’t taken the time to wash off the dough. I could tell by the look on his face that he was in a terrible state. He looked me straight in the eyes and I could see tears swelling up. His voice cracked as he spoke.

I just come to tell you that we have to break up. Next week, I’m leavin’ for school and I need to get my ring back.

I brought my hands around, and, of course, I was about to die already just thinking about it. I had my head held down, trying to hide the tears that were pooling around in my eyes.

I’ll go wash my hands, I mumbled.

I ain’t got time to wait! I can’t stand this! I’ve got to get out of here right now!

I was just standing there, holding my hands out, and he grabbed his ring, dough and all. By then, tears were running down his face something fierce, and I was boohooing as well. Out the door he went, and I was still standing there with dough all over my hands.

That was the first time in my life that I really got my heart broken. I was devastated. My first failed love. Of course, we had never done anything past the kissing stage. Heavens no! Not back then. People definitely fell in love from the heart, or maybe the feeling in our hearts was actually a sexual attraction. You