Children in the Closet.....Chapter 16

 

Chapter 16

               It was early in the summer of 1964 when Jesse received his draft notice. I had been seeing the Vietnam War in the TV news when I watched it with Mrs. Morrison. I remember Robert Trout, a CBS News anchorman, giving the midday news and feeling a knot of fear form in my stomach. What if Jesse had to go into the army? What would happen to me and Summer? Would I have to go back and live with my mother? How could I survive? My mind went crazy and I literally made myself sick.

               It wasn’t long before a second official piece of mail arrived. Jesse was classified 4F (disabled and unfit for military service) due to his eyesight. He could not see without his glasses. They were so thick his nose suffered from the weight of the lens. He had German measles when he was a little boy and his mother had sent him outside to play and his eyes were severely damaged in the bright sunlight. That put an end to my worrying about Jesse having to go off to Vietnam.

               It was early in July when Mrs. O’Dell – that’s what I called Jesse’s mother – asked us to stay for a week or so at her house and take care of Jesse’s little sisters while she went out of town. We were happy to do this since it was a bigger place with a nice back yard plus Mrs. O'Dell said she had stocked the kitchen with enough groceries for all of us to eat for a week. Plus, I loved Lynda Kay and Sherry. They were about the same ages as my own sisters, Lloydine and Lanita.

               I called Mother and asked her if she could bring both my sisters over to stay for that week with us. It was a good opportunity for all the girls to play together and have some fun. Mother said she would bring Lanita but that Lloydine would have to stay home and take care of Lonnie. She really meant she wanted Lloydine to keep house and do the cooking.

               Benny had been gone for a couple of weeks so I wasn’t surprised when Mother drove up to Mrs. O'Dell's house in a strange car with a man I’d never seen before. His name was Mickey. She never included the last names when she introduced or talked about the men she was with. Mickey was a short man with thin brown hair and wore black horn-rimmed glasses. I thought he looked very much like Daddy. Lanita brought her paper bag of clothes inside then went out in the back yard looking for Jesse’s sisters. Mother and Mickey played with Summer on the big king-sized bed in Mrs. O’Dell’s bedroom for a few minutes before they left to go back to Fort Worth.

               That particular week was a good one. I cooked a hearty supper every night and had it ready when Jesse came home from work. We all sat around the table eating together like a regular family. While I did the dishes, Jesse would take a shower and the girls would play with Summer.  She was nine months old and would laugh and giggle and crawl around playing a baby version of hide-and-seek. I loved to hear the happy voices of our sisters playing together and Summer’s little baby voice as she was trying to say new words. I recall thinking that was what family felt like.

               Jesse went to bed early as he was up before daylight and on the job site ready to start working when the sun came up. I would shut the door to the bedroom and then the girls would take a bath and I’d let Summer play in the bathroom with them.

               I would put Summer down on her makeshift bed on the floor beside our bed and then the girls and I would watch a little TV before we went to sleep. We loved 77 Sunset Strip and My Favorite Martian, Make Room for Daddy and Petticoat Junction.

               I wished that week could have gone on all summer but Mrs. O’Dell came back and we had to go back to our apartment on Haskell Street. It wasn’t long before Mother came to get Lanita. This time Mickey wasn’t with her.

 

               Clayton had moved back into the house on Bewick and turned Mother and the kids out. However, he gave her enough money to set them up in an apartment. Jesse took Summer and me over there to spend a few days.

               It was a small upstairs apartment with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and small bathroom. I loved it. We all did. I would cook meals like meat loaf and mashed potatoes and have dinner sitting on the table when Mother came in from work.

               It was the third day when I had set the table for supper that she brought Fred home. He was a tall, thin, dark-haired man and wore thick glasses with black frames. He ate supper with us that night. While we were at the table, he said he would come back over the next night and he would cook supper. Fred did and he made the best tacos we had ever eaten. But that was easy since they were the first tacos any of us had eaten and they were really good.

               A few days after we had arrived at Mother's, it was time for the family reunion. That was the reason for my visit, to help Mother set up her new place, prepare meals, visit with my siblings and cook for the reunion while she was working.

               The Carlton and Hancock reunion was held in Stephenville, Texas at the community center on the first Sunday every August and was always the summer highlight for me and my siblings. Mother liked to show up in a new car and we would all wear new clothes if possible. Fred let her use his nice car that year and she wore a pretty new pink polka dot dress with gold, pointed toe high heels and pearl earrings.

               Lloydine and Lanita got new matching short sets - both in blue cotton shorts and matching white tops with a triangle of red and blue stripes at the neck. Lonnie wore new shorts and a striped t-shirt. I had brought a dress to wear for myself and one for Summer. Mother bought a tiny pair of black patent leather shoes and a pair of lace trimmed white anklets for Summer.

               To look at us, everyone thought we were all so happy and had such a good life. No one in the family ever knew what our life was truly like. Mother acted the role of a doting and responsible parent. And because of her, we learned at a young age to act and we were good at it. We would continue to play act our way through the better part of all of our lives.

               As it turned out, Fred was an alcoholic but he never drank around the kids. He would check into a motel and stay drunk for days and then sober up and stay sober for a good while. Lanita, Lloydine and Lonnie liked him and he was nice to them but it didn’t take Mother long to lose interest in him.

               In late August, Clayton told Mother she could move back to the house on Bewick. He had bought a new house for him and his soon-to-be new wife. The timing was perfect since school would be starting soon. This was the first time they ever stayed in the same school district for more than one year.

 

               I turned 16 years old in September and Jesse took me to get my driver’s license. I passed the written test as well as the actual driving test – even though I could not parallel park. Not only could I not do it, I knocked down both of the poles in my attempt.

               I could drive now but we only had the one car and Jesse took it to work every day. When we did go somewhere in the evenings, Jesse let me drive and get used to the roads and how to get places if I ever went out alone.

               I was lonely sometimes with so little to do. I kept the apartment spotless but it was only two rooms and a bathroom. The living room was also a bedroom and we put Summer’s baby bed up against the wall and a dresser against a door that opened up into the upstairs hall.  We used the door in the kitchen to go in and out of the apartment.

               We had a small black and white TV so what time I wasn’t reading, cleaning or taking care of the baby, I would be watching television. Jesse started talking about buying a color TV. He had been given another raise and his boss was teaching him how to lay stone. This made more money for the boss, as well.

               It was an exciting day when Jesse brought the new television set up the back stairs and into our apartment. At that time, you could buy a larger black and white TV for a good deal less money than a small color TV set. We sat and watched hour after hour of programming. Some shows were still black and white but more and more of them were in "living color." The new TV helped pass the time for me and I was grateful to Jesse for buying it. He was building up his credit and payed for it in monthly payments.

               We continued to use the envelope system to pay our bills. Rent was now $20 a week including utilities and groceries were about the same amount. We paid $10 a month on the doctor bill and $10 on the TV set. Gas, car payment and insurance plus incidentals like doing laundry at the washeteria and an occasional meal out took the rest of the money.

               To make a little bit extra, I took up babysitting. I wrote out a little advertisement and tacked it up in the laundromat. The first baby I kept was a newborn. The mother left her with us for an entire week – day and night. I didn’t know where the mother was going but she seemed really upset – not so much about leaving her baby but whatever it was she was leaving to do. When she returned a week and a day later, she said she would bring the money to pay me later that afternoon. I never saw her again.

               The next babysitting job was a little better. The couple lived in the nice apartment house next door to Mrs. Morrison. The mother was in her early 20’s and worked at the perfume counter at Neiman Marcus downtown. She was thoughtful and would bring me tiny little samples of fancy perfumes which led to a real love for fragrance for me. Her baby was a little older than mine and I babysat her for about 6 weeks until they moved away.

               It was getting close to Thanksgiving when Jesse’s boss decided it was time for Jesse to go out of town and be the lead stone mason on a job in Mount Pleasant, Texas. His boss was going to stay in Dallas and keep the crew working on a fairly big job he had going on.

               Jesse decided to take us with him on this trip. I think he was tired of all my crying and carrying on whenever he went out of town. We left Dallas on a Sunday night and stopped to pick up Jesse’s helper, Claude. It was late when we arrived at the motel we would be staying at for the next week. This felt like a vacation to me and I was so excited. This was the very first time I had ever stayed in a motel before.

               There was a café next door so we walked over to get something to eat. I had not been out to eat but a very few times and that was mostly hamburger joints. We put Summer in a high chair and settled down to look at the menu. Kenneth had given Jesse money for the motel as well as for our meals. We ordered the dinner special. The waitress brought out salads and I remember thinking how fancy this place was. On the plate was a bowl of torn lettuce with diced tomatoes and a dollop of mayonnaise in the center and saltine crackers on the side. Looking back, this was a simple country café with a simple menu but I felt like a real grown up sitting there. It was a wonderful meal and we each fed Summer some of our mashed potatoes, green beans and meat loaf and I gave her my buttered roll.

               I looked around for Claude and was expecting him to eat with us. When we were halfway through our meal and he still hadn’t shown up, I asked Jesse where he was having supper, thinking he may have gone to a different place.

                “He’s eating in the kitchen” Jesse said. I could not figure that out. Why in the world would he be eating in the kitchen and not with us? Jesse finally spelled it out for me. Black people did not eat with white people. Claude did not even go in the front door of the café but walked around to the back entrance. I was shocked but Jesse said that’s the way it was.

               I was only 16 years old and had no idea about segregation or integration or civil unrest or any of that. In fact, I had not been around many black people. I loved the black cook at Mrs. Morrison’s church as did everyone else. I liked Claude, he was a very nice man. And I liked WJ, another black man that worked for Kenneth. It wasn’t right that we weren’t all allowed to eat together. As my world slowly grew bigger, I would learn more about how unfair life could be.

               Jesse took me to a grocery store the next day and we bought some peanut butter, jelly and bread so Summer and I would have something to eat for breakfast and lunch. But every evening Jesse would come back to the motel room, take a shower and clean up and then we would walk next door to the café and eat dinner. I looked forward to it all day. Claude would walk over with us but when we got to the front door, he would wave and go on around to the back.

 

               We didn’t even notice Thanksgiving that year. It was just another day. Jesse worked and I stayed at the apartment with Summer. I never even thought about going to Fort Worth to be with Mother and the kids. By this time Benny was back on the scene and money was even tighter for Mother than it had been.

               Thankfully, Grandma Collins was good about making sure my siblings had food and clothing. She was an avid shopper at the Salvation Army and often sought assistance for them on Mother’s behalf. Lloydine remembers Grandma inviting them to a Thanksgiving banquet that year. She and Lanita and Lonnie put on their best clothes and Grandma picked Mother and the kids up and took them to a nice place that was all decorated for the holiday. They all had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and dinner rolls. They even got dessert of pumpkin pie. The kids were all so happy to get to go to such a nice place. It was a real treat for them.

               When school started again the Monday after Thanksgiving, one of the boys in Lloydine’s class room saw her and said, “I saw you eating dinner at the Salvation Army! We were there, too!”

She was so disappointed to find out they hadn’t gone to a nice banquet hall after all. But the food had been good and she was still glad they went.

               Christmas that year was as sparse as Thanksgiving had been. Lloydine wanted a pair of black tights. That’s all she asked for. They didn’t have much of a celebration. They didn’t even get a tree. Mother came in and threw a package to each of them later on Christmas afternoon. My sister was excited to see it was a pair of black tights. She immediately tried to put them on only to discover they were much too small for her. Mother hadn’t even bothered to look at the size when she got them. Lloydine was so sad when she told Mother they were too little. Mother just shrugged and said, “Well, give them to Lanita, then!”

         Our own Christmas was somewhat better. Jesse bought a small fir tree and I placed it in the middle of the window. I had one string of lights and some ornaments Mother had given me that had been on the tree when I was still at home. I guess she didn’t need them since she didn’t put up a tree for the kids. I had always done it myself when I was home. I also used a package of silver foil icicles and thought it was beautiful. I would turn all the lights off in the room and just sit and look at the Christmas tree. We had bought a few toys for Summer and I had wrapped a couple of gifts for Jesse. Doing construction work and with all the sand and cement getting in his clothes, he needed a new billfold. I got one for him as well as a box of candy since he had such a sweet tooth. He forgot to get me anything. It hurt my feelings so much that he went down the street to the drug store and bought a little night light for me.

         We had been married one year and eight months. We had a car and our own apartment. Jesse had a job and was learning a trade. I had studied and taken my GED test that fall so I had the equivalent of a high school education and I was still just 16 years old. My baby was 14 months old and we were all healthy except for my infected ingrown toenails that prevented me from wearing real shoes. The only thing I could wear were flip flops no matter how cold the weather was. My kind old doctor had cut out my infected big toenails but they always grew back. Between my big toes and the many cavities that gave me awful toothaches, I was usually in some kind of pain. However, I thought overall our life was going pretty well