'My mom's been dead nearly a decade now, after fighting cancer for nearly as long. I think I’ve reached the age — or awareness — at which we could finally have some good conversations, or where I could finally listen and hear what she was trying to say.'
Ironically, my mom knew plenty about hardscrabble, but she kept the details pretty private. She didn’t want to trouble her kids with a life she worked hard to ensure we wouldn’t understand.She left home when she was 13 to escape an abusive stepfather and a mother who couldn’t —or wouldn’t — protect her. She and her 10-year-old brother ran away together, down a long country road in Oklahoma, and parted at the crossing.
They were looking for help from their late father’s family. My mother was 7 when her father died, a 27-year-old coal miner destroyed by black lung disease. The company gave his widow some compensation for his death, and she met a man who helped her squander it, then hurt her and her children after the money was gone.Standing on that road, my mother and her brother were just children, but they knew times were hard and that none of their uncles or aunts could afford to house them both.
She never went back to school; her aunt and uncle took her in, but they had other children and a threadbare farm, so my mom had to earn her keep. She moved with them to Bakersfield and got work right away, picking cotton and grapes. Her mother, in the meantime, was having more children and wanted my mother back to help. Finally, her mother threatened to call the police to get her daughter back, so my mother’s aunt and uncle reluctantly drove her halfway across the country, from a tidy little farmhouse to a sagging shack in a weedy field.My mother’s stepfather was a junk man, and they lived in squalor, my great aunt said, in a shotgun house full of flies because the windows had no screens.
My great aunt and uncle then drove to a nearby relative’s house that night, but neither of them slept, and the next morning they drove back and just took my mother away, saying they didn’t care what the police did.My grandmother never called the police. My mom returned to Bakersfield, and when she was 17 she got a job making doughnuts at a restaurant. That’s where my father found her, on his daily walks to the bank.
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