Her Own Place (2 page)

“You have anyone in particular in mind, child?”

“Yes, ma'am. Jeff Barnes.”

“Well, he seems like a right decent young man.” Her mama picked up the kerosene lamp. “If it's all right with your daddy, it's all right with me, honey.” Mae Lee smiled an inner smile and started planning as she followed her mother's tired form. Before she opened her bedroom door, Vergie turned to face Mae Lee. “You best let your daddy know you've started keeping company with Jeff Barnes before you bring up marriage.”

Mae Lee's daddy frowned and scratched his head when she eventually gave her carefully prepared speech about wanting to get married. She made her daddy chuckle when she mentioned she'd be helping win the war, reminding him of her young friends who had already married. But then her daddy grew serious. “Right now, you need to set your mind on graduating from high school.” He looked his young daughter in the eye. “Are you sure you're not wanting to get married so you'll get some of those allotment checks?”

Mae Lee's eyes widened. “Checks, what checks? Do they pay you to marry a soldier, Daddy?”

“You are so young, my child.” Her daddy shook his head. “Now, suppose you bring this young man over to see me.”

Mae Lee pushed her mouth into a pretty pout. “Daddy, you've seen him every Sunday since I turned sixteen and a half.”

“This time I mean for him to
see
me,” her daddy said.

For five Sundays straight Mae Lee waited for Jeff Barnes
to come. She especially wanted him to see that they had just had electric lights put in. From the time the Rural Electrification Administration started running power lines throughout the farming areas, Mae Lee's mama had longed for electricity. And after a few months' work at the munitions plant she had saved enough to help pay to have the power lines brought to their farmhouse.

The first night the electric lights were turned on, Mae Lee stood outside looking at the brightly lighted house until her mama made her come inside and go to bed. Even if it would be broad daylight and the sun shining when Jeff Barnes came to visit, Mae Lee knew she would turn on the electric lamp with the eggshell lampshade in the tiny company room.

On the day that Jeff Barnes was due to come, Mae Lee knew it would be afternoon before he arrived, but she started dressing early in the morning. She put on her single pair of silk stockings, licking her fingers to soften away any rough edges as she carefully pulled them on, making sure the seams were straight. She didn't want to get a run in her only pair, then be forced to wear the honey-beige ribbed cotton-rayon stockings. She hated them. She left the top button undone on the lace Peter Pan collar of the rose-colored butcher-linen dress her mama had ordered from a National Bellas Hess catalog, so that a peek of her light golden skin showed. A little of the lace on her slip showed from under her dress, but that didn't bother her. The pink slip was a fine one. It was silk. Her mama bought good underthings.

After church services one Sunday, a gust of wind had blown
the preacher's wife's new crepe dress up and the words “Not For Sale” on the back of her homemade petticoat flashed in the full view of onlookers. No bleach or lye wash in the world could take out the lettering on the white cotton government flour bag. After that Mae Lee and her mama never wore a homemade petticoat again.

Mae Lee scrubbed her even-set teeth with Arm & Hammer baking soda mixed with a little salt until they glistened, nibbled on fresh sprigs of mint to freshen her breath, and waited.

When Jeff Barnes came, he was in a uniform. He was so good-looking. She thought she'd die if she couldn't marry him.

Under the watchful eyes of her father he sat on the davenport as close to her as it was proper, stealing occasional glances at her until it was time to leave.

The day they were married down at the county courthouse, Mae Lee was determined not to notice that while her mama grinned broadly, her father didn't smile once. All she could see and care about was the handsome young soldier at her side.

The young couple spent their wedding night in Jeff Barnes's mama's company bedroom. Mae Lee put the small valise her mama had packed for her under the four-poster bed. She ran her fingers across the pretty cotton chenille bedspread. “This is mighty pretty,” she said, her voice shaking. Her new husband grinned. “So are you, Mae Lee.”

The next day Mae Lee stood alongside the highway waiting for the Greyhound bus with her new husband, tall and proud. She wore the same outfit that she had been married in, a soft
powder blue suit with matching blue ribbon streamers on her white straw hat. Her long brown hair was swept under in a pageboy style that framed her light golden skin and wide-set eyes. Her soft chin was determinedly set to be cheerful as she clung to the tall, handsome young man's arm.

Mae Lee was glad that the bus came quickly. She struggled for something to say, and so did he. Her husband kissed her good-bye and boarded the bus. She waved good-bye until the bus disappeared from her view, then removed the hat and picked up her valise. With her straw hat in her hand she walked home to her parents' house.

With husbands, sons, and even some daughters away at war, many farmers were forced to let their crops go. In some rural communities, it was almost as if nobody lived there anymore.

Mae Lee's daddy was determined not to let the crabgrass and jimsonweeds overtake his cotton crop, and, as in the year before, he had his daughter's help. Only now there was more farm work to do. His newly married daughter had insisted on her own additional farm crops. She had talked with her father long into the night about the best cash crops to plant. When she decided she would also farm sweet potatoes and peanuts in addition to her few acres of cotton, her daddy forewarned she'd have a hard time with the hoeing to keep the grass out of all those crops.

In the early spring, with her daddy's help, she'd bedded her seed sweet potatoes for plants and had plants ready to transplant into the fields as soon as they had late spring and early summer rains.

While his daughter hoed, Sam Hudson plowed. He worked his mule Maude in the morning, Molly in the afternoon. When he caught up with the plowing, he helped his daughter. They hoed from early dawn to sundown, stopping only for a noonday dinner break to eat the food that Vergie Hudson cooked before going to her job in the munitions plant. At day's end, Mae Lee would milk Starlight and help her daddy feed and water the livestock.

Mae Lee was always sure to be home around noontime. That was when the mailman usually arrived. Every day for almost a month she'd rushed to the mailbox hoping there would be a letter, a postcard, some word from her husband. After the first postcard giving her his address, there was nothing. Her heart always began to race when she saw the mailman's car, barely visible in a cloud of dust, rounding the curve on the dry dirt road. As he slowed to a stop she closed her eyes against the dust that surrounded her.

“Got some important mail today,” the mailman called out. Her heart leaped. Her eyes registered her happiness.

“It's your application for ration book number three,” he said and handed her a brownish yellow envelope.

Mae Lee's heart sank. Just another book filled with page after page of ration stamps, printed with pictures of fighter planes, aircraft carriers, army tanks, howitzers, and then pages of numbered and lettered ration stamps. Stamps allowing them to buy foods they couldn't afford in the first place. To families like hers they didn't need to say, “Give your whole support to rationing and thereby conserve our vital goods. If you don't need it, DONT BUY IT.”

The heat had gotten to her that day, and rushing to the mailbox
hadn't helped. The world swirled around her. Mr. Wesley, the mailman, was only a blur. He reached for the envelope in her hand, and read from it as if she could not read. True, at the time she couldn't.

“This application must be mailed between June 1 and June 10, 1943. Applications will not be accepted after August 1. Affix postage before mailing.”

He turned the form over and read on. “It's only two cents postage if it's mailed in Charlotte, North Carolina, but from here it will be three cents. Now remember, Mae Lee, you are not in Charlotte, North Carolina. You are in South Carolina. If y'all need stamps, put your pennies in the mailbox and I'll put them on.”

Mae Lee's daddy saw her slump by the mailbox. He rushed to help her inside the house. He was worried. “I must find somebody to work in your place, Mae Lee. You've got to stop working in the hot sun. It's too hot out there. I'm going to try and get you on at the munitions plant where your mama works. If you are not with child. Are you?”

Mae Lee wasn't. She got a job at the plant. She worked her shifts and wrote letters to her husband. It hurt that he didn't answer, but she wrote him anyway. She wrote about everything from old man Cooper's bout with lumbago to radio announcer Grady Cole's new slant on Hadacol, “the cure-all bottled remedy.” Some folks said the true name should have been “alcohol remedy.” And in every letter she sent a folded piece of white paper with blotted kisses of love in the ever-popular blackberry shade of lipstick. Her letters always ended with “Forever yours.” She didn't scold him for not writing. If
he happened not to make it through, she didn't want him to die angry with her. She never mentioned that she was working or saving to buy a piece of land. Their land. That was going to be the big surprise.

She stayed on with her mama and daddy, sleeping in the same cramped bedroom she had slept in as a child. When and if her husband came home from the war for good, she wanted them to move into their very own house on their own land.

The work at the munitions plant was hard. Hardest of all was changing shifts. There were three shifts. The first was from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the second from 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., and the third from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Mae Lee would work one of the day shifts for two weeks then switch to the next shift for two weeks. Sometimes she worked in the paint division, painting shells. She stood on her feet during all her hours of work, but the pay was good.

Every payday after work she pulled out a small tin bucket with a thin wire handle, pried open the recessed lid, and put her money inside. Her daddy had bought the little bucket for her; he called it her money safe.

Mae Lee saved almost every penny she earned. The few pieces of clothing she bought were all black, just in case. Over and over the radio told about the soldiers killed in the war. If anything should happen to Jeff, she believed she would wear black mourning clothes for as long as she lived.

One day in midsummer Mae Lee had time off from work. Her daddy had finished the final plowing for all his crops and didn't need her help. She went over to visit her friend Ella-belle. As they sat chatting out on the porch, a car drove up.
It was painted olive drab, the army color. Mae Lee got up to leave, but Ellabelle begged her to stay. “You never know what they might be up to,” she whispered.

They watched the two men start up the narrow path to the little house. One of them carried a briefcase.

“Ellabelle Ellis?”

“Yes, sir, that's me.” Ellabelle stood up.

The officer spoke in soft tones, his face drawn with traces of sadness, yet official and stern. “We have a telegram for you,” he said.

Ellabelle started shaking her head as he read, “We regret to inform you that your husband, Will Leroy Ellis, a rifleman in the Forty-fourth Infantry Division, has been killed in action.”

The officers helped Ellabelle inside her house after she slumped to the floor. Mae Lee watched, speechless and helpless. How many messages had they delivered like that one? If her own husband realized how much she needed to hear from him to be assured he was safe, then surely he would write.

After Ellabelle received her husband's GI insurance check from the army, she and her parents moved away. As much as Mae Lee hated to see them go, the thoughts of the house they left, and the farmland the Grangers might be persuaded to sell along with it, helped ease the loneliness.

Late one Saturday night in the spring of 1945, Mae Lee and her parents took the money she had saved and spread it out on the kitchen table to count. Mae Lee's daddy broke into a joyous laugh. “My baby girl has a few thousand dollars here.
I'm going to see Mr. Granger about that land and empty house on the hill first thing Monday morning. There is way more than twenty acres there.”

Mae Lee was anxious and worried. “Maybe he might not even want to sell it.”

“Oh, he'll let us buy it, since it's near to the land he sold your mama years ago. He probably won't even ask too much for it. Only about ten acres or so right alongside the road is decent farmland. Most of the ground all along Catfish Creek is bottomland, too wet for cotton, but, oh Lord, it'll grow sugarcane and late corn.”

Sam Hudson pulled a cotton drawstring tobacco pouch from his pocket and emptied its contents on the table. Mae Lee stared at the pile of carefully folded money. “It's your share of the cotton crop, honey. Without your help the grass would have eaten it up.” Her mama added a small wad of crumpled bills. “Since I didn't help this year, I'm giving you the share your daddy gave me,” she said. “Now you and your husband will have a little farm to start out with.”

The morning the papers were to be signed, Mae Lee was up early. When she got to the kitchen she was surprised to see that her daddy wasn't dressed and ready to go with her to buy the property. He was in his work clothes sitting at the table and drinking coffee.

“I guess you wouldn't want to wear your Sunday suit on a weekday, Daddy, but it seems like you would at least wear a white shirt and necktie and the clean, creased overalls Mama starched and ironed,” his daughter said. She glanced nervously
at the clock. “Oh,” she said, “we have plenty of time. I got ready early, I was afraid I'd be late. It's over an hour before nine o'clock.”