Farmersville Tales-Part Nine
Of Women
My uncle told us boys the story. He saw it happen.
My mother and father had stopped at a filing station in Farmersville, owned and operated by a family widely known in the community. The owner was known for careless talk, a “big mouth,” we used to call such men. That day, the owner came out and, as he was filling up the car, he stomped around the car, swearing and cussing. About nothing important, more like he was just showing off. His words were loud and vulgar. Loud enough for my mother to hear. And he knew it.
She stared ahead stoically. My father got out of the car, walked around the back and up to the owner, doubled up his fist, and knocked him down. Everyone watching, including my uncle, understood why. You didn’t disrespect a man’s wife like that. My Father stood there, waiting for the man to get up. He did get up but didn’t say anything. Though they sometimes pretend otherwise, loudmouths always know the insults they have spoken. The man kept his mouth shut and went back inside the station. Both of us boys later asked our father about the incident. He just shrugged his shoulders, smiled a little and got out the makings to roll himself a Prince Albert. He turned the subject to baseball. We eventually concluded it hadn’t been something he took any pride in. He wasn’t a boastful man. It had just been necessary. It was something a Man did. It was about respect.
Now, a contrast.
Decades later, after I retired, I was invited to teach Constitutional law at College of Sequoias. Standing outside the library one morning, leaning against a post, enjoying the sunshine, the hustle and bustle, the lightness of crowds of young people moving between classes, I overheard a group of girls talking. It brought the incident to mind.
In my life, I have played on many sports teams, spent many hours in boys and men’s locker rooms, served four years in the military, living with large groups of men in barracks all over the world, plus in my career I daily dealt with street cops and street crooks. So, I can confidently say, I have heard as salty language as can be imagined.
But it as I stood outside the COS library that day, and listened to this group of young women, college girls, still in their teens, I, a man who could not be shocked by another’s language was, well, shocked. The language these girls used was as rough and vulgar, as vile, and nasty as any I had heard in my life. I’m sure this generation of young girls had been taught, rightfully so, to demand respect in other contexts. Yet they had no awareness that respect for them had been compromised long ago, maybe by others, most definitely by themselves and each other. And they had bought into it.
The respect for women my father and other men of that time, insisted on was not based upon a view of a woman as some “delicate flower”, some fragile creature in need of protection from the coarse aspects of life. Women of that time were fully capable of defending themselves against man or woman and leaving the attacker regretting their aggression. Women were respected because they earned it. Working alongside men in the fields, sometimes with children in tow. And, when the men went off to work, it was them holding the home together, often against all odds.
And the women respected themselves. They knew their own importance. No one had to lecture them. They knew they were the glue that held together families, neighborhoods, the social fabric of a people. For sure, the strength they possessed was different than that of the men.
Our Father’s jobs were physical, difficult, and draining. Their jobs were not like trips to the local gym, where a man might lean on an arm of an incline machine dabbing a bead of sweat off his brow from his “work out,” checking the activity monitor on his smart phone to insure he had met his pre-set “goals.” Our Fathers came home grumpy with fatigue, beat up from the physical demands of a job in the fields or on a construction site, in 100+ degree heat.
But for women, from the time of living in those shacks in Arkansas or Oklahoma to those first years in Farmersville, their lives were often forged by dawn to dust drudgery. Working in the fields and packing houses, when necessary, but beyond that the cooking, washing often without running water, without machines, without conveniences of any kind. A major development in my own family was the acquisition of a wringer washer so at least clothes didn’t have to be wrung by hand before being hung on the clothesline.
And always, it was the women keeping the children safe, keeping them clean, keeping them out of trouble. Especially the boys.
That last was important work. In many ways, our moral sense came from our mothers.
Discipline by Fathers was to be feared, but not as much as the sudden, swift, many times physical punishment, for transgressions, doled out by Mothers. The welts from switches were not soon forgotten. From fathers we might learned how to work and how hard to work. From Mothers it was a day-to-day education on what was right, wrong, what was acceptable and unacceptable.
Children were their charge and something they took pride in. However, in their world, they very well knew, the act of childbearing itself was a risk, a danger. There were no giant corporate hospitals, no nicely appointed, clean and well lighted maternity wards. Not in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and other mid-western states, during and immediately after the Depression. The mortality rates for women giving birth were extremely high. My own father lost his first two wives in childbirth.
And that risk extended to the children. Women often suffered the tragedy of infants and young children dying in their arms. Sometimes needlessly for lack of access to medical care. My own mother lost her first born while he was still a toddler. Dobby was a brother I never knew, because when he got sick. And in Arkansas, where they lived, there was no money to get him to a doctor in Hot Springs. A bitter episode in my Mother’s life, I’m not sure she ever got over.
But despite their travails, women provided the stability, nourishment, a family must have.
And sometimes a welcome escape. Once in a great while, getting the family to a movie at the drive-in theatre. And daily, singing and dancing to a country tune on the radio. In Delano there was a program by a man named John Banks. Every day around noon, he played the country music we all knew. Hank Williams, Hank Snow. (If you want to know what real country music was like, find and listen to Ernest Tubb singing “Have you ever been lonely?”) John Banks was a celebrity to us. He was funny, friendly and we loved listening to his voice. And when my mother managed to get us down to Delano one day to be in the studio audience for one of his shows, it was like a trip to Hollywood would have been for everyone else.
And too, women provided the heart to the family.
My brother and sister were extremely intelligent. I was always the slow one, more interested in baseball, cowboy movies, and comic books. But my brother, Steve, was quick and well spoken.
And my sister, Sue, was extremely bright. She had intelligence and understanding. A big heart.
When I was eight, I went through the tryouts for Little League. Unexpectedly, I was selected for one of the Major League teams, usually made up of boys aged eleven and twelve. After the selections were made, they handed out uniforms. Man, was I proud. My first uniform!
I pulled mine on over my other clothes and walked home. Problem was, the uniform was way too large for an eight year old. I walked in the house, not realizing I looked comically ridiculous. The pants legs were so long I was walking on them, the shirt hung down to my knees and I had to hold the pants up with one hand, grasping my glove in the other. Even my hat, drooped down over my ears. The laughter started and soon the whole family was howling at the sight. My sister was the one who first noticed that I had teared up. She immediately grabbed me in a tight embrace and, she, now joined by my mom, assured me they would fix the uniform. That night they went to work, cutting, hemming, sewing, and the next day the uniform fit my frame just fine.
As with so many young girls of that time, Sue married too young, too early. It hurt her. As it hurt other girls. What may have been expected in those earlier times, in those backward places they came from, contributed to the compromise of many a young girl’s health. As well as their opportunities in life.
Her potential, as it is often said of young women, was limitless. Well, in fact, it was limited. Limited by the times, the culture, the expectations of an age.
I also, later in life, came to know two other sisters, Rethea and Annis, from my Father’s earlier marriages to the wives he lost. They remained in Arkansas over the years. When I got to know them, I listened closely to the stories they told of those times. It wasn’t easy. And they both were smart and strong women, successful in building families of their own, but also had been forced to resign themselves to the limits of their times and place.
Fortunately, in our generation, there were many women and girls who overcame their own times, pushed forward, broke through barriers to an education, to leadership positions in business, farming, ownership, full representation in the professions.
But somehow it adds to the sense of tragedy, that the girls and women just one generation before ours missed the chance to have a choice. It was like the sacrifice of the last military unit on the front line in a war just ending. Some girls from Farmersville just didn’t make it to the lives they wanted and deserved. And that was a loss.
To all of us.
Farmersville Tales is published Sundays. Next Week’s episode, “The Two Mile Road to Exeter High” will be the last in the series.
The photographs:
Some of my sister, in one she is preparing ride a queen’s float in the Memorial Day Parade, in the others, as a young girl and one with my brother and me goofing her pose up.
Two pictures of little Dobby, one with my father.
A picture of the visit to John Banks studio in Delano.
Pictures of my mother and grandmother,
The picture of the three young girls has two of my sisters from Arkansas.
For other writings by Phil Cline, visit philcline.com or my FB page, PhilClinePage.
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