My Life in Words, Part Eight: Mama was a paradox

“Are you okay?  Do you love me?  Are you mad at me?” 

My mom

It was much later in my life before I realized that  my mom was a weapon.  She did quite a bit of damage.  Some was by her words, some by her actions, and some by simple selfishness.  Mama was a paradox.  While she often gave lavish gifts, she was just as likely to push others aside to get her own way.  It was years before I realized that she used things as anesthesia.  She could believe she was good – and she could make you believe she was good – if she gave you a nice gift, or took you somewhere you wanted to go, or did something you wanted to do.  As long as it cost her something.  And that something was always cash.  Sacrifice wasn’t her currency.  It’s hard for me to look back and try to understand why I didn’t see things accurately back then.  I imagine it was my childish heart.  A child always wants to believe in love.  Maybe we are even programmed genetically, or instinctively, to believe that our mother is good, that our mother loves us, and that our mother always has our best interest in the forefront.  I am not the only child to grow up and learn in hindsight that that wasn’t true.  But not knowing protected my heart and it needed protecting in those days.  I had been given the heavy obligation of making too many people happy.   If people were angry, if people were sad, it had to be my fault.  Why did no one try to take that from me?  Surely they noticed.  Surely to God they noticed.  The refrain that I repeated way too often was, “Are you okay?  Do you love me?  Are you mad at me?”  Of course, there was usually a response to that refrain.  But it wasn’t from my mother, the one I most wanted it to be from.  Her answer was too practical, too annoyed.  “I’m not mad.  Quit asking me that.  You know I love you.  I’m okay.”  Answers, but not the answers I wanted.  I wanted sweetness and caresses, and kisses that said I was the most important thing in her life.  But that probably wouldn’t have worked.  It is a law of life that for words to be seen as sincere, they have to match the actions of the speaker.   And my mother’s actions were far from saying, “You are the most important thing in my life.”

(Evelyn on the left)

I have to remember that my mother had me as the result of an accident.  I wasn’t born the lovingly wished for offspring of a fresh young couple.  I wasn’t the infant of an older couple who had prayed for a baby for over a decade, perhaps.  I was the result of two young kids fumbling around in some furtive encounter when neither of them had any thought that a life would start. Instead of joy at the realization that a baby was coming, I am sure there was anger.  If messages cross that placental membrane as easily as nutrients do, then I am sure I was bombarded with hate, rage, but mostly, fear.  When I realize that, it is easier to understand how quickly my mother was able to slide her parental responsibilities off to my grandmother.  Later in life, she tried to blame my grandmother for “stealing” me.  I presume she meant stealing my affection.  But anyone with any sense knows that it would be very hard to kidnap a child’s affection from a mother whose love was the most integral part of the child’s life.  I couldn’t have been very old before even I realized that I was an afterthought.  My mother was a working mother from my earliest memory.  She worked as a waitress, then for a caterer, and finally for most of my childhood she was a cashier for Winn-Dixie in our neighborhood.  

fire burns everything in its path, both good and bad

I am sure that she was a good worker.  If my grandfather imparted anything to the three women he raised it was to be a good employee.  One of the worse things that could be said of someone was that they were a lazy worker, or that they did not give an honest day’s work for their honest day’s pay.  That lesson led each of us to work far beyond what was expected.  We would arrive early and we would stay late, as needed.  We were a friend to all our co-workers.  However, in my mom’s case, she was perhaps too friendly to some of her co-workers.  The male ones, that is.  I can’t remember a time in my life after memories begin to stick, that my mother did not have a man in her life.  And at least one memory remains from a time when most children don’t have memories.  We had gone to her boss’s house for a holiday.  I loved going there.  He lived out near the Mississippi River levee, just as we did.  But his house was upriver from us, closer toward LaPlace and Destrehan.  And he had kids – lots of kids.  There is nothing an only child likes more than visiting families who have lots of children.  It’s like going to another country, or maybe even another planet.  Someplace so alien that it was unimaginable that people lived like that.    I wanted to go back, and maybe that is why I was so excited when I figured out  by my grandmother’s phone conversation that she was talking to Mr. Bud’s wife.  But that same understanding of who was on the phone couldn’t fathom what was happening on the phone.  But I knew enough to know my grandmother was upset and my inner demons kicked in and I began to ask if she was mad at me and whether she loved me.  After her reassurances, my little girl’s mind kicked back to that phone conversation and I peppered her with questions, “Are we going to Mr. Bud’s house again? Can some of his daughters come over to our house?”  The answer was no to all questions.  Had I been a little older, or perhaps a little more sophisticated, I could have put together the understanding that Mr. Bud’s wife had gotten to the bottom of my mom’s “friendship” with her boss.  I would have also known that the friendship, and my mom’s employment, was over.  And as surely as fire burns everything in its path, both good and bad, my friendship with all those children of one household was over as well.  I was way too little to understand everything about that whole debacle, but I knew it caused a scream fest in our house when my grandfather got home but that imaginary fire wasn’t done with its damage yet.  My mom took off in the car without permission and just like what would happen in the plot of a movie, she wrecked the car, destroying it.  When I got old enough to realize what had really happened, I wondered if that fire of passion had destroyed Mr. Bud’s marriage as well.  And I prayed it had not.  I did not want to feel that my  mother was responsible for all those little kids having to live apart from their father.  It was too sad for me to contemplate. 

The story began here, Part seven is here

My Life in Words, Part Seven: Ba Sister got tired of it all

My Mom's life story continues, Part six here, It all started here. 

Sibling Rivalry

Me-Maw and her daughters: Evelyn and Beth        

While there were only two girls in the family, they were not close.  They were rivals for affection, rivals for compliments, and rivals for any good words which were to be spoken of them.  From childhood, my aunt had been given a name by her older sister.  She was called Bay Sister.  Probably it was actually “Ba” Sister, meaning Baby Sister.  But that was the name she carried until death.  And I think she grew tired of being the baby sister who had to carry the older sister’s reputation on her back.  When they left the house, it was the baby sister who was reminded to watch out for the older one.  Because the older one, my mother, was a daredevil.  She would do anything on a dare, from crossing a canal that runs through the urban areas of New Orleans, to jumping off a second story roof.  She had a quick temper that matched the old wives tale of redheads being hotheads. 

She made a decision to get out

Mae Beth aka Bay Sister

Ba Sister got tired of it all.  She got tired of neighbors complaining.  She got tired of family hysteria.  She got tired of her mother making excuses for what Big Sister had done.  She made a decision to get out, and to get out as quickly as she could.  So she enrolled at Soule College, which was a business college and she excelled at everything young women are supposed to do well.  She took Gregg Shorthand.  She did bookkeeping (accounting was for the men).  She typed close to 90 words per minute and her spelling was exceptional.  She almost finished the complete program at Soule, but she was offered a job at Humble Oil, probably as a result of her father’s good reputation with the same company.  So she made the calculated decision that what she had left to learn in her program was not worth the delay in the start of her career.  At her age, she couldn’t yet realize how much she would grow to regret that decision.  It was one of the few things in her life which she didn’t see to the end.  But what she did do was take those first baby steps that would lead her to the rest of her life.  She had no idea at the time what would come from the decision to take that job.  It would truly be the yellow brick road taking her to her own wonderland, her own Oz.

She was the New Woman.  She would support herself, travel alone or with girlfriends, and rebel against every southern rule for women she had been taught.

A new Beth. 

Ba Sister’s first job for Humble Oil was in Grand Isle Louisiana.  What a tiny dot on the map of Louisiana!  It was barely even in Louisiana, but instead it was a collection of houses and offices built on pilings hanging on to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.  From a distance, it looked like a circus scene, with all the houses on stilts, and one would expect to see clowns emerge from them, also walking tall balancing on ten feet poles of wood.  If you are not from Louisiana, or another town that lives on the edge of water that routinely rises without mercy, you wouldn’t be used to the stair climb you would make every morning as you reported to work.  The “girls” in the steno pool would live together in what would appear to be a summer cottage to the uninitiated eye.  They had a chance to see many men in Grand Isle.  But what you really saw was the men arriving to work and then leaving work seven days later.  Grand Isle was the hub of men who climbed aboard helicopters which flew them out to platforms which consisted of oil wells, a heliport, and living quarters.  It was quite an unnatural situation.  Instead of men climbing on the city bus after slogging through a hard day’s work, these workers would walk across a metal catwalk, looking down at water that may be 100 feet or more  deep until they reached their living quarters, which was also the living quarters of 50 or more other men.  While that job was an excellent training ground for a future executive assistant, it was far from excellent as a hunting ground for a husband.  Of course, Ba Sister would have never been guilty of hunting for a husband.  She was the New Woman.  She would support herself, travel alone or with girlfriends, and rebel against every southern rule for women she had been taught.

She didn’t feel the sand of Grand Isle, Louisiana between her toes for long.  Her skills did not go unnoticed, and she was soon working in the Central Business District of New Orleans in the Humble Oil Building.  Even there, everyone knew her father, Red Honeycutt.  His was a hard reputation to ignore.  From his first job of driving a truck, he soon became a roustabout, then a drill pusher on one of those dots in the Gulf of Mexico.  It was the job of those men to pull  oil from under the earth’s surface to sate the thirst of a growing America.  His fellow employees respected and trusted him.  Within a very few years he was an important member of the Employees Federation, the pre-union organization which worked with the management of the future Exxon.  The election to President of the Federation was not a surprise to any who knew him.  His honesty and integrity was known and respected by the rank and file, and even more amazingly, by management – even the highest level of management in the company.  All this was to say that Red’s daughter didn’t go unnoticed by that same management.  She spent enough time in the pool of young workers to make good friends.  Earning good money for the first time in her life, she treated herself well.  The first big purchase was a 1953 Chevy.  It took her for weekend trips to places she had only heard about.  She went away to visit the families of friends she met at work.  But she also went to places her car could not take her.  She was the first one in the extended families of her mother and her father who had ever left the country – on purpose.  She had had uncles who had seen Europe, but that was on a trip paid for by everyone’s uncle – Sam.

The whole time Ba Sister was taking the world by storm (a little storm, but a storm nonetheless) the Big Sister, my mother , was attacking the world with her hammer.