ALMA
Back at my grandmother Mimi’s house, after my mother’s terribly premature death, my brother, Ashbel, and I whiled away the hours, months, and years until a giant-spirited young woman met my father one fine fall day when I was four years old. Alma, my soul, came in the full vibrancy of her eighteen years. Gregarious, garrulous, she was who I had hungered for, for such a very long time. When she would set me on her lap and apologize for her scratchy wool skirt, I would think I was sitting on satin, feeling the softness of her love.
Alma had just graduated from high school when she came to us and married my tall, terribly handsome, 33-year-old father. At eighteen she took on our wounded family. Alma had a powerful personality. She talked all the time and knew from the beginning how to take charge of things.
My excitement by her presence was akin to that of a lost puppy who so longed to be lovingly taken home, fed, and put to bed. All my senses reawakened when this sweet, smart, vivacious young woman with soft, blue-green eyes came to us and seemed interested in becoming my mother. When my bedtime came the first nights she visited us at my grandmother’s house, the puppy in me would whimper and anxiously look around to see if someone didn’t understand that I really needed to stay there against her chest a little longer. Perhaps Mimi knew that just a little longer to sit in Alma’s warm lap still would not have been enough. I needed the promise of an entire lifetime with her to fill such a deep void as existed in my four-year-old heart. Still at such a tender age, my hope was unleashed that this bright new beacon of light could fill in that deep, dark chasm forevermore.
I must have been a flower girl in her and my dad’s wedding. What a happy day, a mischievous look on my face in the photo album. I had beaten the odds. God may have taken one mother from me, but by damn, I had found another. Now her home would be mine; mine, hers. I would wake up with this girlish woman every morning and head right into the routine of it, cleaning, cooking, occasionally going out with Daddy to count the cows as the day broke over the farm, but never far from this fun, gregarious kid of a mother.
Part of my luck in finding Alma was related to the gender discrimination of our times. As a young woman in the 1950s, though Alma had graduated at the very top of her high school class and despite her and her teachers’ best efforts, she was denied all the necessary jobs and loans for her to go to college. The final word from her own father to the local Rotary Club president was “college is for boys; girls need to get married, have children, and let their men provide for them.” Not able to continue in school herself, she still believed that a good education gave the very best chance to eventually overcome the rampant sexism of our day. So, she went straight to work preparing me for school.
Smitten as a little girl could be, I soaked up her lessons like a sponge. Perhaps not the smartest kid around, still I was doggedly determined to hold onto her. I did my best to learn everything Alma was interested in teaching. I began to accept her truth as my own. Her truth, in turn, was developing alongside mine as we grew up together. That truth of ours encompassed a deep desire for greater justice in the realm of women’s rights, an appreciation for children’s innocence and potential, and the power of love itself.
When I started first grade, Alma was quick to become a room mother for my class. Then, before I knew it, she was president of our Parent Teacher Association. I, like my brother, struggled to read. But with full fortitude to make this new mother proud of me, I managed to become a Bluebird, or whichever bird was the best-bird reader in my first-grade class, with sweaty palms and knowing all along it was by the very skin of my teeth. My achievement in school is a tribute to the ability of a kid, with constancy and determination, to be able to learn at the very outer edge of her ability. Perhaps my learning skills were quite ordinary and the sweaty palms had to do with what I feared the stakes to be. Perhaps, having already lost one mother, I was simply terrified at the possibility of losing another, and academic achievement from the very first grade seemed to be my worth. In every arena Alma would elevate me, telling all of our friends and family how smart I was. The sweetest part was, little by little, at some level, I was beginning to believe it.
Perhaps part of my vigor to please Alma stemmed from signs early on that her and my father’s marriage would not last. The first time she left him, I was only halfway through first grade. I don’t know what had transpired between them, just that I woke up the next morning with a desperate feeling. I went straight to Mimi, filling in again, feigning the sort of illness that might keep me from having to get on the school bus that morning. All I knew I had was a serious sickness of heart that was nauseating me through and through. My grandmother took one look at me and said, “Why, child, I’d say you are sick. Those eyes of yours are the color of a pumpkin! The only place you are going today is to the doctor!” Before the morning was over, they had admitted me to the hospital with a case of hepatitis A that was taking down my classmates one by one.
Feeling ever so vulnerable and alone as that orange little pumpkin, I begged them not to do any tests or treatments until Alma could be there with me. True to form, she was beside me before the day was through. This and a thousand other examples speak to how it was not that I was not quite smart enough to hold her, as I have subconsciously feared all my life. Indeed it was the horribly sexist times that our Kentucky farm family fully embraced that finally made her flee. She was not even allowed to write checks for the food she prepared for us each day. She tells me now that she often felt “one step above a slave” in our home.
Still, after they released me from the hospital, Alma came back home and coached me through six weeks of homework assignments while in the isolation of my bedroom. She tutored me so well that when I returned to school, having been absent too much for grades, I was, in fact, ahead of the class.
I developed a fondness for canned spaghetti those days but also have tenacious memories of the times the four of us—Alma, my father, my brother, and I—would gather around our little kitchen table for supper after I was well again and would devour an entire chocolate meringue pie for dessert. Little as I was, I would eat my entire quarter. A precarious satisfaction filled the air.
I was ten when Alma finally could not bear a minute more of the painful oppression of being a housewife in our rural community. Utterly emotionally dependent on this woman who had been the shining star in my life for six formative years, after she left I began to refine my abilities to live in a dream world that had no basis in reality. Just as I had had to go to heaven in my dreams to find my mother after she died, I began walking around the farm with a school binder inscribed with the name of Alma’s school district instead of my own.
She must have done some of the same, for at one point, she has told me, she charged into the administrative law judge’s office in our little Kentucky town to seek his counsel. When the secretary denied her access, Alma walked right past her, in her characteristic don’t-tell-me-what-I-can-and-can’t-do sort of way, and found the old judge at his desk. To him she said, “Please help me. There is a little girl I love who is dying to live with me, whom I have nurtured for some six years. How can I get legal rights to her?”
The administrative law judge asked, “Is there a blood relative who wants her?” Of course there was. The wise old judge shook his head as he solemnly said, “You may as well put down your gauntlet, young lady. No court in this country would give that little girl to you, no matter how much you both want it.” Much like star-crossed lovers were we, each so sure we were made for one another, everyone else so sure we weren’t.
My father didn’t waste any time finding an altogether new wife. Having lost two husbands before marrying my father, Marguerite brought four children with her and an attitude as angry and bitter as the day is long. I have imagined she might have been a witch in a former life.
To wean me slowly from my obsession with Alma, my father let me spend some weekends with her, even after his speedy matrimony. One evening when Marguerite came to retrieve me from Alma, I was under her arm, hugging her good-bye but feeling as if I really couldn’t leave her this time. It was as if, in my tender ten-year-old heart, I expected that if anyone could see how much I hurt to be away from this woman I called mother, surely they would know they couldn’t take me from her ever again. In fact, it seems, no one could see past their own insecurities. A powerful repression must have taken away my memory of Marguerite’s hand coming down on my face that evening as she yanked me out from under Alma’s arm, yet that’s how they say the scene ended. I imagine my visits became less frequent after that.
Those days I belonged to a school of tap, dance, and baton, which happened to give us another route to connive our way to one another. I began sneaking away from my baton class to go simply sit with Alma at her new job just down the street. At the insurance office where she worked for a dollar an hour, she showed me around like I was one of her best prizes in life, and I would fleetingly feel home again. Not surprisingly, ole Marguerite caught on before too long and sent me back to class.
The Jane Wall School of Tap, Dance, and Baton nonetheless had its merits for me. In the ensuing years of adolescence, I traveled considerably with that dance troupe, competing all around the country. When I was sixteen, we went on the road, entertaining at halftime shows for college basketball games. Once, when we were way down south on the Ole Miss campus, the band director asked if I would twirl alone for him. He was considering offering me a scholarship, if he liked what he saw and if I could come that year. Soon to retire, he was handpicking his Rebelettes for his last years of work. Totally oblivious to the band director’s agenda and well prepared for this moment through legends of competitions, I believe, in retrospect, I must have twirled that night as if my life depended on it. The entire next year I did the work required to graduate early from high school in order to be able to accept his offer of scholarship, my ticket away from home.
At seventeen I headed out alone into the deep South, taking Alma’s spirit with me. She had given me the will to learn and to thrive in the classroom, which would see me through university studies, medical school, and specialty training. At times like those when my knees were trembling in my university hospital halls, presenting cases as a medical student, I would hear Jane Wall’s voice resounding, “Get out there, girl, and perform like you’ve got corn for sale!” And with hope for a better day, given to me by the world’s greatest stepmom, I did just that.
