A Kind of Grace Read online

  “Who did he say he wanted to talk to?” my father shouted.

  “He said he wants to talk to Jackie!” Al hollered back.

  Hearing this, I ran into the room. Daddy got up off the sofa, stomped over to the door and stood behind my brother. “Boy, do you know what time it is?” he asked. “Don't ever come to my house at no nine-thirty at night and ask to see my daughter!” He slammed the door in his face as Al's laughter filled the house.

  It was humiliating—for me and for my friend. But we eventually started dating. He was on the basketball team and we shot hoops together at the Community Center. I liked him because we shared a common interest in athletics. My mother grew to like him because he was courteous and obeyed her rule that I be home by 10:00 P.M. after our dates. She called him a “gentleman.”

  But as his graduation approached in the spring, the guy wanted to start a sexual relationship, which I promptly reported to Momma.

  “No, no, no,” she said, vigorously shaking her head. “We are not making any babies in this house. If he wants sex, he can get it from someone else. You have too much to do in life. You don't have time to bring any babies into this world now.”

  I was head over heels for the guy. Still, I wasn't ready for anything serious. He said he wanted to date other girls, which I didn't like, but felt powerless to prevent. Several months later I heard that the girl he was seeing was pregnant. That night I sat in my bedroom and cried. Although we'd broken up, his actions felt like a betrayal. Momma came into my room and sat beside me. I told her what happened as she wiped away my tears. “I know it hurts now,” she said in a soft voice. “But the pain will go away and you'll see that you made the right decision.”

  After work each evening, my father stopped in front of the liquor store and tavern across the street from our house to get the lowdown on the day's developments from Squirrel and Doug. Inside the house, we heard his deep baritone chuckle as the group traded laughs, gossiped and argued about sports. Then he walked across the street carrying his lunchbox, waved to our neighbor, Mrs. Newman, and climbed the porch steps to the front door.

  Daddy had a reputation as a quick-tempered, tough guy around the south side of East St. Louis. A lot of men feared A. J. Joyner because he followed the code of the street: Hit me, and I'll hit you back harder. It wasn't just talk. A drunk stumbled out of the tavern late one night and tried to break into our house. My father scared him away before he could steal anything or do any damage. The next day, however, Daddy found the man and, according to street legend, badly beat him up. No one messed with A.J. or his family.

  My father had a tender side he rarely revealed. One of the first, and few, times I recall seeing it was early one fall morning when I was a second-grader. Al had come into my bedroom and said it was time to get dressed for school. Though it was still dark outside, at that age I believed everything my big brother told me. I got dressed and went into the kitchen for breakfast. Daddy had just come in from work. “What are you doing up? It's three in the morning!” he demanded.

  “Al told me it was time to go to school,” I explained helplessly.

  “Come over here and let me teach you to tell time so he won't fool you anymore,” he said.

  He hoisted me onto his knee and, pointing to the clock on the wall, explained all about the hours and minutes and short hands and long hands.

  My father also had a childlike, playful streak. Several times a year, he gave my mother a breather and drove Al, Debra, Angie and me to the Six Flags amusement park in St. Louis. He enjoyed the rides as much as we did, especially the roller coasters. He read comic books along with Al. And he relished any opportunity to poke fun at us. He taunted me about my long, skinny legs and gave our baby sister, Debra, the nickname “Hog” because of her jowly cheeks. At the dinner table, I teased Al about being a weakling and called him “Olive Oyl” when he wouldn't eat spinach. That always made Daddy throw his head back and roar.

  My father's favorite pastime was watching sports on TV. On fall football Sundays, he prayed for a San Diego Chargers victory, and whenever their games were televised, he was riveted to his easy chair. He felt a kinship with the Chargers, he said, because his “cousin” Charlie Joiner was the starting wide receiver. One day, after listening to Daddy's familiar speech about Cousin Charlie's inherited athletic brilliance, I pulled my chair close to the TV and noticed the spelling of the name on the back of his jersey.

  “Daddy, his uniform says J-O-I-N-E-R! That's not the way we spell our name. How can he be our cousin?” I asked him.

  “He's a distant cousin,” my father replied confidently. “His side of the family spells it differently, but we're all kin.”

  He was dead serious and no one could challenge him. Questioning my father's word about anything, even something as trivial as Charlie Joiner's relationship to us, was considered talking back—a most serious transgression. That's when we saw the side of his personality that made people fear him.

  The summer before I entered the eleventh grade at Lincoln High, a boy from our rival school, East St. Louis High—a name that we shortened to Eastside in conversation—invited me to a Jackson 5 concert. Ordinarily, Eastsiders and Lincoln students didn't mix. But during the summer, we ran track and played basketball together on a community-league team that competed in Amateur Athletic Union meets around the Midwest. I'd met the boy at track practice and we struck up a casual friendship.

  I was dying to go to that concert. My friends and I knew every word to every one of the Jackson 5 songs. Those concert tickets were like pieces of gold. I would have accepted his invitation on the spot, but I knew I had to get permission.

  “Ask your Daddy,” Momma said. I knew I was doomed.

  “A concert in St. Louis?” Daddy asked. “Who is this boy?” He made it sound like St. Louis was on another continent.

  “He goes to Eastside …”

  “Nope. You're not going out with anybody from Eastside. I went to Lincoln High, you go to Lincoln. We don't deal with people from Eastside, period.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Here we go with that again—”

  Before I finished mumbling, the back of Daddy's massive hand stung my cheek.

  “Don't you talk back to me, girl! The answer is no and that's the end of it.”

  During the 1960s, East St. Louis was a prosperous place, an ail-American city with low unemployment and a bustling economy. We had a Sears store, big grocery stores, a big Woolworth's store—complete with a luncheonette and a long counter—banks, several hospitals and a clutch of locally owned businesses.

  To the strains of “Burn, baby, burn,” the city was rocked by black militant protests, vandalism and arson during the late 1960s. White residents fled the city for outlying suburbs. With their customer base shrinking and their assets threatened, local businesses closed. Eventually, Sears left, too.

  The manufacturing companies with operations in town, including the glass works, the steel mill, the rubber and tire company, the railroad and the stockyards, followed. They relocated to areas where labor costs were cheaper. The moves threw people in my neighborhood, most of whom were union laborers like my father, out of work in droves. By the mid-1970s, East St. Louis's economy was nose-diving. Between 1974 and 1975, the already high unemployment rate skyrocketed from 12 percent to 17 percent. As unemployment rose, crime exploded. Pretty soon, parts of East St. Louis looked like shelled-out war zones and the city suffered from a terrible national reputation.

  For many years, Daddy made a good living, first as an airplane assembly line worker at McDonnell Douglas. After he was laid off by the aircraft company, he did manual labor at a manufacturing company. The mood around the neighborhood at the time was tense and grim. My father frequently came home with news of another plant or store closing or more firings someplace. He held on for a while, but finally the ax fell on him, too. He was out of work for a long time, doing odd jobs like mowing lawns before he was hired as a switch operator by a railroad company in Springfield.

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p; Conditions were tough. Our meals became skimpier and portions were smaller than in the past. Instead of hamburger and pork chops, we ate chicken, Spam, canned Vienna sausages and luncheon meat. When that ran out, we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes, the only thing in the house to put between bread slices was mayonnaise. So we ate mayonnaise sandwiches.

  Eventually, my mother found a job to help make ends meet. The morning before she left for her first day as a nurse's assistant at St. Mary's Hospital, she gathered Al, Debra, Angie and me around her to explain why she had to leave us on our own. Dressed in her pale blue uniform, white stockings and white shoes, she looked each of us in the eyes as she spoke. “I'm not going to be here to help you get ready for school, to make sure you do your homework and to cook your supper every night, because I have to go to work now,” she said. “I hope you understand. It doesn't mean I don't care about you anymore.”

  I know Momma hated not being at home with us. But entering the working world improved her self-confidence and gave her a sense of independence. She was in her late twenties and had been a housewife since she was sixteen. She'd never even learned to drive, so one of her coworkers picked her up every morning and dropped her off every afternoon. Momma's main responsibility was bathing patients on the south corridor of the fourth floor, in the surgical ward. She enjoyed her job and gained a reputation for being efficient and conscientious. And she made lots of friends. She learned to bowl and joined her girlfriends on their Wednesday night trips to the alley. Her very best friend was Joyce Farmer, the head nurse on one of the surgical wards. Momma and Joyce were inseparable. They went shopping together on weekends. On paydays, they treated themselves to the lunch special at Woolworth's—a hamburger on rye bread with cheese and onions. My mother and her friends also conspired to find eligible bachelors for Joyce to date.

  When my father found the railroad job in Springfield, 100 miles away, he rented a room and lived there during the week, returning home on weekends. Heart-to-heart conversations were Momma's specialty, but before Daddy left for Springfield that first time, he talked to us the same way my mother had the morning she started work at St. Mary's. “I'm not abandoning you,” he said. “So, while I'm gone, don't give your Momma a hard time because I'll be back every weekend and I'll get a full report.”

  It would have been easy for my parents to lose hope and give in to wayward temptations, the way so many other people did in East St. Louis. But they never became dejected or hopeless. They never blamed anyone for their predicament. They never considered doing anything illegal. No matter how hard the times were, they kept plugging away, working hard and doing the best they could with their limited resources. The beliefs they held and examples they set counteracted the negative forces at work on the streets of our neighborhood. Their unwavering commitment to the work ethic and their sound values informed my life from childhood into adulthood.

  3

  Inspirations

  With work keeping my parents away from home, most days our aging and sickly great-grandmother was the only adult around. We were virtually on our own, and my brother and I constantly squabbled about who was boss. Al was the oldest and in junior high. Debra, Angie and I were in grammar school.

  Every morning, the script was the same. At 7:00 A.M., about an hour after my mother had gone to work at St. Mary's, I jumped out of bed, roused Debra and Angie, and prepared for the moment I relished. Rubbing my hands together, the sleep still caked around my eyes, I took the short walk down the hall to the room at the back of the house. I burst through the door, and with all my might, gave the slumbering lump on the bed a violent shove. “Wake up, Al! It's time to get up!” I shouted to my older brother.

  He jumped up, swinging his arm at me. “Touch me again and I'll pop you!”

  “You gotta get up now!”

  “Get out of my room, you old buckethead!”

  As I left, I laughed and shouted back over my shoulder, “You better get out of that bed!”

  Al and I took different approaches to just about everything. I was diligent and responsible. He was undisciplined and happy-go-lucky.

  At the start of each school year, Momma asked each of us: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One year my answer was a Broadway dancer, the next a teacher, the next a physical therapist. The answer wasn't so important. She just wanted us to always think about and plan for our future.

  When he was thirteen or so, Al told Momma he wanted to be a pimp when he grew up. She slapped him on the side of his head and reported the comment to Daddy. Then, Al confessed that he didn't know what a pimp was. He was only repeating what his friends said. Daddy explained to him that it wasn't a job he should seek. Furthermore, Daddy said, “If you don't stop running with that bad group, you're going to end up right where pimps end up—dead or in jail.”

  Al didn't like school and was frequently suspended for fighting in elementary and junior high school. My father whipped him with an extension cord every time it happened, but Al's behavior didn't change. Those mornings before school were sometimes the only time my sisters and I saw Al until the evening, just before Momma got off work. We were all supposed to come directly home after school, but with no one at home to enforce the rule, Al never did.

  Before long, my brother was skating on thin ice with Momma and Daddy. He was caught behind the wheel of a friend's car, driving without a license. The police officer who stopped him knew Daddy, so he let Al go without a ticket. But when Daddy found out, he grabbed the extension cord, stormed down to Al's room and closed the door. All we heard was the sound of repeated lashings.

  Al was following a group of boys who were older and more streetwise than he was. They enjoyed throwing rocks at the windows of passing cars. One day while Al and my mother were at a relative's house, someone spotted his buddies breaking more car windows and called the cops. The police combed the neighborhood, rounding up them all. That close brush with an arrest and the thought of what Daddy would do to him scared Al. He never went near that gang again.

  I, on the other hand, loved school and hated to miss a day. But in the fifth grade, I was having trouble with arithmetic. I just couldn't figure out long division. Unfortunately, the students who performed poorly on tests got whippings with a ruler, and I became Victim No. 1. It got so bad, I dreaded going to school.

  I went to my mother in tears one morning and told her I didn't want to go. She knew something was wrong. When she saw the bruises on my leg, she walked to school with me. She met with the teacher and demanded that he stop the whippings. With the pressure off, I relaxed and was able to concentrate. I sweated over my math homework every night for several more days, reviewing the examples in the book over and over again, trying to decode the process. Finally one night, it all clicked. I had mastered long division. I called Momma at work to tell her. She was as excited as I was. My self-esteem soared.

  Growing up, I could always count on Momma to be my champion. Her constant encouragement formed my deep well of inspiration. I wanted to prove to her and everyone else that I had the ability to excel. I have approached every endeavor since then—athletic and otherwise—with that same sense of purpose.

  After school and on weekends, I spent hours playing in our front yard with my sisters, cousins Gerald and Sherrell, and the youngsters from the Cole family who lived next door: Kim, Felicia, Michelle, Phyllis, Renee, Keith and Craig. We made up games that reflected our yearning for the things we didn't have.

  One of my favorites was called “first star.” At dusk, we stood in the yard and twirled around with our heads back and noses pointed at the sky, searching for the evening's first star. The person who spotted it got to make a wish and, we told each other with conviction, it was guaranteed to come true. I always wished for a big house and good food to eat.

  During the day, after a round of tag or a race around the block, we rested on the porch, fantasizing that the passing cars were ours. By then, our family car was an old jalopy that didn't always run. The other kids
knew a lot about cars and could spot the various makes and models from a distance. But, when it was my turn, it didn't matter to me what kind of vehicle came by, as long as it was new, shiny and running.

  Every Fourth of July evening, Al, Debra, Angie, the Coles and I took turns climbing the oak tree in our front yard to stare west and watch the fireworks exploding above the St. Louis Arch. The edifice was called “the Gateway to the West.” Glimmering against the backdrop of those sparkling bursts of red, green, blue and silver, the Arch to me was a gateway to the whole world, a bright and shiny symbol of life beyond East St. Louis. As I watched the show, I yelled down to the others, “I can't wait for our field trip to the Arch next spring.”

  “I went last year,” somebody said. “It's great up there. When you look out the windows, it's like you're in the sky, standing on the top of the whole world. You can see all over!”

  The words made me tingle inside. Aside from a few family trips to my father's relatives in Toledo, Ohio, I hadn't traveled far away from home. Everything was so drearily familiar in East St. Louis. I wanted to know what the rest of the world looked like. I stared at the Arch. I just had to get up there and see things for myself.

  When the elevator doors opened that spring morning, I ran to a window and soaked up the view. All around me were pathways to the rest of the world, the Mississippi River, the highways and the bridges. Seeing it all stretched out before me made the possibility of finding that other world real. I remembered the words of a man who had spoken to our class earlier that year. Our teacher had invited him to tell us about his life and to offer some advice. He was successful, but he said his life had been difficult initially because he was lazy and didn't work hard. Once he turned his life around, he said he had vowed to give every task his very best effort because he didn't want to look back with any regrets.

  Although I was just eleven, I took the advice to heart. Standing at the top of the Arch as a wide-eyed sixth-grader, I just knew that if I followed those roads leading out of East St. Louis, I wouldn't regret it. I knew they would lead me to better things.