Gram

by Mona Shaw

I don’t have a chip on my shoulder.  I have an entire forest.  The resentments I have from witnessing the mistreatment of the poor are rooted through the bone. 

Whenever I hear a rich person say, “I worked hard for what I have.”  It takes all the self-control I have to not go ballistic.

My grandmother worked hard.

Cora Victoria Riddle was born on February 19, 1914.  She was the kindest and most generous person I’ve ever known.  She was also the wittiest.  I never knew anyone to spend fifteen minutes with her not left laughing until their sides hurt.  When she wanted to compliment me most, she would tell me I was “somethin’.”

She was born to a Swedish father, an affable and charming drunk, and a Chickasaw mother on an Indian Reservation in Ada, Oklahoma.  Unlike her darker and younger sisters, she had fair skin, crystal blue eyes, and hair the color of butter.  Because of this, my great-grandmother doted on her.

When she was a child, she contracted malaria which morphed into St. Vitus’s Dance.  Her tremors were so violent, my great-grandmother had to tie her to a chair and spoon-feed her. Because of this, she had spotty formal schooling and knew what she knew by teaching herself.  For whatever reason—Gram attributed it to a chiropractor—she had healed by the time she was about 15.  My great-aunts complained that now that she was well, she still didn’t have to help with housework.  My great-grandmother told them, “All Cory has to do is be able to sit still and look pretty.”

She began dating a man named Bill Johns when she was 16. 

After I was grown, Gram would tell me things, always in voce sotto, not exactly a whisper, but quiet enough that anyone in another room couldn’t hear her.

“I was so damn dumb,” she told me once.  “Bill asked why I was taking Lydia Pinkham pills so much.  I told him that I hadn’t bled in three months, and I was anemic.  He said, ‘You’re not anemic, Cory, you’re pregnant.’”

Gram and Bill, about 1930

They married in 1932. The baby was stillborn. Three more children arrived each successive year.  My mother, born in 1933, was the first of those.  All were delivered at home by a neighbor or midwife.  She told me when the youngest was born, the midwife left her and said she’d be back later.  Gram begged her to wait just a little longer.  “Well,” Gram told me, “When she got back, there was Bunt bawling in the bed.”

Bill beat her, viciously.  She put up with it.  We were all told my biological grandfather died of a brain tumor.  He did not.  The day after my 21^st birthday, we were sitting in her kitchen, Bill's name came up, and Gram began talking in voce sotto, looking not at me, but into the past.  “I’d look up, and he’d be staring at me with crazy eyes.  He’s whisper, “I’m gonna kill you Cory.”  One time after he almost did, I had to have him committed. He might hurt the kids.  I just had to.”

He died, not from a brain tumor, but from an interaction with another inmate in which he was murdered.

Becoming a widow with three toddlers is never easy. In the early 1930s, it was impossible. The America's Great Depression was full-on, and as she said, “Men couldn’t even get jobs, let alone a woman.”

She fed her children and her charming ne’er do well father by doing anything that translated into money.  She confessed to me once of being frustrated with her father for not helping.  “I’d say, ‘Daddy, what if you drink yourself to death?  How will I pay for your funeral?’”

“’Oh, Cory,’ he’d say, ‘Just throw me to the hogs.’”

She sewed buttons on cards, not as an employee but piece work, for a button factory—one dime for a hundred cards of four.  She was fast and guessed she made about 15-cents an hour. Until the day she died, she still had scars on her finger-tips from those needles and thread. She ironed other people’s clothes.  She did their laundry and cleaned their houses.  Their diet was mostly biscuits and gravy, pork backfat, and the green beans she somehow found time to plant in the back yard.

“Green beans make their own seeds,” she explained to me once.  “And you can trust them to come up.  Anything else was too expensive and too risky, even tomatoes.  Don’t even think about carrots.”

Remembering one of those days always caused her to tremble.  A social worker knocked on the door and tried to convince her to allow the children to be temporarily placed in better homes until she got on her feet.  

"At least let me take the baby," the woman said.

Gram smelled a rat.  She splayed herself in front of the screen door, raised her fist and seethed, "You'll get my kids over my dead body!"

It was a common practice for parents to agree to this, only to later learn the paper work they'd signed meant they'd given them up for adoption.  Most never saw their children again.  The social worker never came back.  Though Gram said her heart pounded for years whenever she heard a knock on the door.

They survived.

Gram and Bamp, about 1970.

In 1942, she married Arthur “Jake” Nelson, the only man I would know as my grandfather.  His heart and soul matched hers.  They were deeply in love until the day he died.  Bamp, as we called him, is the only man I ever considered a saint.  He was the prototype of what a man should be.  Things were better.

“Jake made $10 a week,” Gram giggled once, “Me and the kids were living on $10 a month.  I thought he was rich.”

Of course, they were still poor.  Yet, they were content. As both often told me, “We didn’t have a lot, but we had enough.”

They scraped enough together to buy a house on a five-year contract.  They loved the house and put a lot into it.  My grandmother painted the kitchen white with red trim and hung red and white gingham curtains.  They were giddy the day the last payment came due.  A house, a real house, would be theirs at last.  When Gram arrived at the wealthy man’s house to give him that last payment. He asked her to wait until the next day.  Something unexpected had come up, and he couldn’t do the paperwork until then.

Early the next morning, the sheriff was at their door, serving them with a notice of eviction.  They were told that because their payment was late, the rich man had the legal right to take back the house.  He did.  They had to move so quickly that she forgot the kitchen curtains.

“Oh, I probably wouldn’t have a place to hang them anyway,” she thought.

They moved into The Manor.  The Manor or Flint Hills Manor, is where poor people, i.e. “white trash” lived in Burlington, Iowa.  It still is, but it's more racially integrated.  The Manor was built during World War II as temporary housing for workers at the ammunition plant, 5 miles from Burlington.  It was mostly cinder-block four- and six-plexes, but there was a small section of red brick buildings for more important plant employees. 

After the war, the buildings were sold piece-meal to various slum-lords. The buildings deteriorated quickly.  The streets were never repaired by the City.  The stigma of living there was solid and the fodder for many derogatory local jokes.  The red-brick buildings were slightly more expensive in rent.  Gram and Bamp moved into the cinder-block section.  This was the same section in which I grew up and didn’t leave until I was 18 and after I graduated from high school.

It should be noted that not as many poor people live in The Manor now.  In 2006, the City of Burlington evicted hundreds of residents under eminent domain.  They City razed about half of the buildings to please an investor who was going to revitalize the property.  Many found themselves homeless.  The investors backed out of the deal.  The property sat empty for eleven years.  Some of those evicted never recovered. The buildings still standing are now federally subsidized housing.

Bamp and Gram had moved from The Manor by the time I was born.  Bamp had taught himself to be a mechanic. He was one of the most popular in town.  He still didn't make much because he'd fix your car whether you could afford it or not.  He'd have the customer write down the amount they still owed, put the tab into a cigar box and tell them to pay him as they could. Bamp was always giving out something to someone.  His son criticized him once for giving $20, a sizable amount at the time, to a stranger.

"The man told me he needed $20. I had $20, so I gave it to him. Now be still about it."

They somehow managed to buy a large garage in the middle of town on an alley.  There was no house.  They fashioned a section of the garage into a tiny 500 square-foot apartment.  Gram had a job at Kresge’s dime store.  As far as they were concerned, life was now good.  They lived there until he died.

My favorite childhood memories are visiting Gram at Kresege’s.  The other workers knew who I was and ala “Cheers” would holler my name when I walked in. I never stopped being thrilled at that.  I remember, before the store had air conditioning, hot summers when the store’s lights were dimmed, and the ceiling fans roared at top-speed to give some relief from the heat.  I remember Gram using her employee discount to buy me a snow cone.  I can still remember the ice shavings escaping from the machine as it ground huge chunks of ice into snow.  Sometimes Gram’s boss would buy me the snow cone.  He adored Gram and always told me so.  “She’s the best worker we’ve ever had,” he would say.  Twice Gram won the award of Burlington’s favorite employee, a contest the local newspaper, “The Burlington Hawkeye,” used to sponsor. Both times Kresge’s put a full-page ad in the paper after she won, with her photograph, declaring themselves to be “the friendliest store in town.”

She didn’t see it coming, when she found a pink slip on her time card two weeks before her pension was vested.  She wasn’t the only one.  It was widespread practice then by the S.S. Kresge Company, later known as the Kmart Corporation, and even a later a division of Sears.

My memories of Gram as a child are a mobius loop of joy.  One afternoon we were snapping green beans while sitting in the swing, when she abruptly stood up and slipped her lithe frame into a pair of Bamp’s overalls on the clothes line and waited for him to come home. Another time she put on a convincing “proper” act for my boyfriend then flipped him the bird after he teased her, shocking him down to his socks.  

Some things would hit her serious side.  Once when I was about 8, we were taking a walk.  There were several signs in a front yard the all read, “For Sale.  Only to colored people.”

I said something about it being nice they would sell to colored people.  Gram was vociferously anti-racist, an unusual thing in the 1950s, and she set me straight. She explained the owners had gotten some raw deal from their neighbors, were being forced to sell their home, and the signs were payback.  She told me to sit on the curb and knocked on the door.  She went inside for a while.  Then she and a woman came out.  They began taking down the signs.  “Colored people are as good of folks as white people,” I heard her tell the woman, “They don’t deserve to live next to these assholes.”  The woman laughed.

She could even make you laugh at a funeral.  When her father died penniless, I wondered how she’d manage his funeral.  “I’m just gonna throw him to the hogs,” she said. She paid for his funeral over time.

After being fired from Kresge’s, she took a job as a pants presser for a local dry-cleaner.  I went in there once, the temperature was well over 100, and there was only one little fan on the floor.  I caught her once putting Vaseline on a burn. I noticed more gray patches on her forearms. She cautioned me to not tell Bamp.  “I'm fine, and it'll just make him worry.”

She talked about the job as if it were a lark and kept us in stitches.  I remember a story about a co-worker who kept singing the same phrase from the same song over and over and over.  She’d mimic it, “I shot a man in Reno, just to see him die!  She has a damned fine voice, but Jesus Christ.”

The job took a toll on her just the same.  When I was 15, she collapsed at work and had to have a pace-maker.  Bamp was terrified.  He’d phone me in tears and say, “I can’t live without her.  I can’t.”

One day he phoned and simply said, “I’m coming over to pick you up. We’re gonna paint the kitchen.  Cory’s gonna come home to a painted kitchen.”

We painted the kitchen red and white.  There was only one window in the kitchen, but we bought a yard of red and white gingham.  I made the curtain, and we hung it there.  And, yes, she was thrilled to tears.

Bamp never had to live without her.  He died in 1972, she was devastated, but stoic.  He died from arteriosclerosis.  He was diagnosed too late for any treatment.  Old Doc Patterson had treated him for arthritis for years.  They amputated one leg and were going to amputate the other, when they determined there was no point.  He had been admitted to the “poor people’s” ward at University of Iowa Hospitals.  They don’t have those anymore, but they did then.  He was on ward C23, an enormous hall with about 50 beds lined up on each side.   It was not uncommon to see filled urinals left on bedside tables for hours.  I would surreptitiously empty his and give it to a nurse. After, I learned he wouldn’t make it.  I began to sneak him cigarettes.  The attending resident told the nurses to leave us alone and just brought us an ashtray.  We sat and smoked and talked.  He would stop to writhe in pain and apologize for the interruption.  He passed from this world in absolute agony.  In pain so abject he no longer knew I was there.  I will never forget his screams of pain at the end, while trying to stifle his screams, then whisper, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

A University of Iowa professor Ken Amada, once bragged to me about how he had been admitted to the VIP section of University Hospital.  “The rooms have mahogany paneling,” he told me, “and the food is made by a certified chef!”  This professor neglected and sexually harassed his students and cut gay men from faculty searches.  I wanted to hit him.  I regret that I didn’t.

Gram dressed him in a brown, second-hand suit he had never worn, and a brand new pink dress shirt. No tie. They must have had an inside joke about the pink shirt, because she’d snicker every time this came up.  If there was, she never told me. His best friend, a Black man also with the name Jake Nelson, was a pall bearer at his funeral.

I stayed with Gram for a few days after Bamp’s funeral.  She had things for me to do.  One was to burn the receipts in the old cigar box of money people still owed him.  Even though she would now live on only her Social Security, she was clear about this. She feared someone might try to collect those debts to help her.  “I know they mean well,” she said as we watched them turn to ashes, “But Jake didn’t believe in dunning people.” I still regard this as the most empowering moment of my life.

My last night there before I went back to college in Iowa City, she had been quiet for a while, then spoke abruptly, not in voce sotto.  “I just gotta say this,” she paused, “He was a good man.  He was a very good man.  He didn’t deserve to die in all that pain.  I’m mad as hell about that.”

My uncle Bernard, her older son, would die soon after that from a brain aneurysm. He was too young.  It was the only time I ever saw her cry.  “It’s mean,” she confided in me.  “It’s mean.

She would make do.  She would even feed me when I stayed with her one summer between college terms.  The University had been dismissed early that year because of anti-war protests. I was in the middle of it, and she knew it.  I half expected her to object, but she didn’t, except to say, “I admit I worry about you getting hurt.”  Later she added, “Daddy always did say it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.  He had to have been right about something.”

She began to date and then married Lew Ebey, a widower she’d known for 40 years.  She moved to live with him in Macomb, Illinois.  They had a modest but comfortable house.  She planted a huge garden with green beans and tomatoes, and even carrots.

Gram died February 27, 1989.  She was 75.  I borrowed a car to go to her funeral. After a post-funeral dinner in a hall that was filled to maximum capacity, Lew took me aside.  “She so loved you,” he said, “Not a day went by when she didn’t tell me you were somethin’.”

The memory of Gram that haunts me the most took place that summer I stayed with her.  I turned 21 that summer, and she drove me to the store to legally buy a quart of cold beer.  She laughed when I insisted the clerk card me. We were laughing, and I was regaling her with all the ways I was going to change the world with my college degree.  Poverty and classism would prevent my ever getting that degree, but I didn’t know that yet.  I said, “Hey Gram, maybe you should go back to school.  They might write a story about you!”

She grinned and said, “Mon’ Lynne, ain’t nobody ever gonna write a story about me.Hell, after they cut out the dirty jokes and cuss words, there wouldn't be nothing to write. I ain’t never gonna be no rags to riches story. That’s okay, most poor folks ain’t.”