Her Own Place

by Dori Sanders

Genres: Historical Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Dori Sanders’ first novel, Clover, won her the coveted Lillian Smith Award, a Walt Disney movie option, and an appearance on NBC’s Sunday Today. Now her eagerly awaited second novel takes her readers to rural South Carolina again for a gentle and wise look at the lives of everyday people, black and white. The only child of tenant farmers, Mae Lee Barnes marries young and saves her wages from the munitions factory to buy a farm. When her husband returns from World War II, he can’t keep a job, disappears for weeks at a time, and finally leaves Mae Lee alone to raise five children and run the farm. Being the proud and indomitable woman that she is, Mae Lee transforms her life through the years to meet the vagaries of fortune and the changing times. A perfect blend of comedy and pathos, Her Own Place is a journey of mind and heart. The talent of narrator Kim Staunton makes it a story to be savored and enjoyed.

Release date: August 1, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

The house was new, but an old person lived in it. There were all the visible signs. A young person would have followed the carefully balanced landscape plan of the builder, but these flowers and shrubs were carted in from the old place, planted like browning snapshots in a poorly arranged old photo album, a little ragged around the edges and straggly, like orphan plants with their support systems removed. The plants were very much like the owner of the house, a woman named Mae Lee Barnes. Her children, who had grown up surrounding her like plants in a carefully tended perennial bed, had removed themselves and left visible the now uneven edges of her life.

Mae Lee fingered the virgin brass doorknob on the heavy front door with set-in panels, thinking how grand it would have been for her children if they had been able to grow up in this new house. She smiled at the thought of her pretty daughters, dressed in their Sunday best, spending long summer afternoons on the front porch with their Sunday visitors. But at least now, through their generosity in helping her build it, this new house would be there for them and their children.

She walked inside, leaned against the closed door, and gazed at the clutter. She felt crowded by the abundant display of things, a collection which seemed to belong to someone who had lived for a very long time. She had moved an old past into a new house. It made her feel older than her years, old in mind.

She felt a twinge of guilt. Spring was almost over and she had not cleaned a single room. She couldn’t help thinking, What would my mama say? For years she’d carried out the same yearly rituals as her mother and generations of others before her. Spring cleaning, with all the winter garments and blankets hung outside for airing, then heavily seeded with mothballs, and in spite of it all, always sprinkled with moth-eaten holes by winter. These seasonal habits were performed with the exactness of migrating birds renewing their contract with the returning spring.

She looked at several Cardui calendars, each offering a different year. Old reading mixed with new. Black Draught, a favorite laxative for generations. Syrup of Black Draught for children “when child’s play is not fun.” Bold advertising splashes of Cardui formulas for women on “certain days” competed with ads for ointments to rub on for gardening pains.

She briefly studied the wall where the pictures of Jesus with a halo around his head, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy had hung, spaces now empty because Amberlee, one of her visiting “decorating” daughters, had taken them down. She had never been able to understand why her daughter left the old-timey Cardui calendars hanging. Maybe she had known her mama could not do without her planting charts.

Mae Lee knew it bothered her daughters that she held on to so many things. Sometimes it bothered her as well. Sometimes she even chafed at being locked into playing out the role of her mama’s life. Why do I feel I’m duty bound to keep holding on to so many things my mama left behind? she thought.

An image popped into her mind: a small child standing next to her mama as she lovingly cleaned the cherished things and reminded her little daughter, “Now you remember, child, this bowl belonged to your grandmother. They didn’t have many pretty things like this and it was passed down to me for safekeeping.”

Even more vivid was the memory of a long-unused, scuffed suitcase, not on display but tucked away in a corner of the closet in her bedroom, with the nightgowns still in it that her mama had taken to the hospital in her final days. The gowns had been in that suitcase over twenty years. She could not say why she was unable to dispose of them. In truth, when she had moved to the new house, the largest thing in the van had been the presence of her mama.

Mae Lee listened to music as she moved about her new house, opening windows. She had a new radio—two of them, counting the bedside clock radio her grandchildren gave her —yet she played the old wood-encased Philco. She kept it turned to a station that played the old hit tunes she liked so well, songs that edged out the new things in her life, even the new house. Her thoughts so often remained in the past. She felt dated, stuck in an old world.

A breeze moved through the house. At least the rooms would get aired out. Her mama would have approved of that.

She glanced at the clock. It was almost four in the afternoon. There was something she didn’t want to miss on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” The picture on the television flashed on, then off. The cable was out again. Now everything else would be out too. For a few minutes she studied the snow on the TV set. Blurred grayish white spots intermingled with black, shimmering across the screen.

It seemed like every time there was something she especially wanted to see, the cable was out. She reached for the phone directory to call and complain, then changed her mind. She turned on her reliable old radio, leaned back in her favorite recliner, and let her thoughts just go on and flow into the past.

There was a time when she didn’t have even a reliable radio. She remembered one day in particular. It was in 1941, December seventh, to be exact, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. When the sound of ringing iron bells filled the quiet Sunday air, her mama had struggled to get their old battery-powered radio to play, but the batteries were dead. Even though she’d tried wedging a copper penny in the end, nothing helped. On that day it seemed every bell in the rural countryside was ringing. Usually that meant something dreadful had happened.

Mae Lee had stood with her mama and daddy on the front porch of their house. They had stood there, their eyes searching the winding dirt road that led to the house for some clue to the disturbance. Her daddy knew only that whatever news it was, he should try to pass it on. He had started down the steps to ring their own heavy iron bell mounted on a sturdy cedar post next to the meat smokehouse when they spotted Bennie Sims’s old T-Model Ford car rounding the curve. Bennie braked to a screeching halt, but didn’t turn the engine off. “We’re at war, Sam,” he shouted, “we’re at war with the Japanese,” and was off on his way to another farmhouse.

Sam Hudson bought new batteries for the radio, and every night after supper the radio was placed on the table. They would sit and listen, hanging on to every word about the war.

After the Pearl Harbor bombing, the United States also declared war on Germany. Fear gripped the nation. In the rural farming community “war” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The menfolk, young and old, were pulled from homes and shipped off to camps, then moved overseas. Many of the women went to work in a munitions plant in nearby North Carolina.

Mae Lee and her girlfriends were finding it hard to concentrate during their senior year in high school. It seemed that all the boys in the eleventh grade were eighteen or over, and were either being drafted or enlisting. Jeff Barnes, the young man Mae Lee was hoping would start courting her, was going on nineteen. She’d had her eyes set on him long before the war started.

At a picnic the summer before, Jeff Barnes had held her hand for a long time, looking at her with his light caramel eyes, not even letting go when Ludie Gray, the most popular girl in Tally County, South Carolina, invited him to a box supper her mama was having. He still held on to her hand, and asked, “May I bring Mae Lee?” and she was on cloud nine for weeks.

When Jeff Barnes sent a handwritten note to her by her friend Ellabelle Jenkins, a note that read, “Will you please be my sweetheart?” Mae Lee knew she was in love. The weather outside was certainly not as warm as her inner feelings. The sunlight was bleak, like the war news. Mae Lee and Ella-belle had stayed after school working on a class project and it was nearly dark before they headed home. They buttoned their well-worn everyday winter coats and pulled their wool knit caps down to their eyebrows. It was cold, and the dark cloudy sky caused the winter darkness to move in even earlier. The frosty ground crunched beneath their feet as they hurried along. They’d have just enough daylight to take the shortcut over the train trestle above a rushing stream.

“I know how you can help win the war,” Ellabelle blurted out. “Marry the one you dearly love. It will make him fight harder to come back to you.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, and made Mae Lee promise not to tell a soul that she was going to marry Leroy Ellis, one of their enlisted classmates. Mae Lee felt warm tears stream down her cold face. “What about school? What about me? I won’t have any friends left,” she said. She felt better when Ellabelle assured her she wouldn’t be moving away. She would still live with her folks on the farm next to Mae Lee, in one of Mr. Jay Granger’s houses.

“I don’t suppose Jeff Barnes will ever ask me to marry him,” Mae Lee said sadly.

“I bet he will and soon. Remember your love note?”

Mae Lee brightened and later at home read and reread the note. She listened to the radio and solo-danced until her daddy came home. She held on to a broom, pretending it was a zoot-suited Jeff Barnes, and then twirled away to the beat of “In the Mood” and “One O’clock Jump.”

Ellabelle had been right. Jeff Barnes did tell Mae Lee that he was going to ask her daddy for her hand in marriage if she said yes. And, when he did propose, as she later learned when comparing notes with her girlfriends, he used exactly the same words that he and the other boys had learned from a class play: “It has long been my intention to ask you a very important question . . .”

Mae Lee knew that the big problem in getting her parents’ consent to marry would be her daddy. It would be easy with her mama. All she had to do was approach her at her most tired moment, which was at 11:00 p.m. after she came home from working a double shift at the munitions plant.

On a Wednesday two weeks later, Mae Lee’s mama worked late, and Mae Lee was waiting. A hot fire blazed in the potbellied stove just off her tiny bedroom. The little house was warm and cozy, yet Mae Lee shivered beneath the heavy patchwork quilts. She heard the front door open and close. The usual scene played in her mind. Her daddy would head for bed. In the dim flickering light of the smoked globes of the kerosene lamps, her mama would take the plate that had been fixed for her from the wood-stove warmers and listen to the radio while she ate her supper. Sometimes she would doze off, her head, cradled on her arms, drooped across the big, black King James Bible.

Mae Lee never had to look to know it was turned to Proverbs 31:10. There was no picture for these pages. The story of the woman to be praised was a picture in itself. She knew how her mama had tried to fashion her life after that woman. “She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard . . . her candle goeth not out by night. . . . She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and praiseth her.” Her mama had been the one who bought the farm they lived on. But her mama never spoke about it. She hadn’t even told her own daughter about it. Her daddy had told her. He was proud of his wife’s strength and courage.

That Wednesday night the routine held. Mae Lee eased into a chair next to her tired mama, and gently shook her. “Wake up, Mama,” she said softly. “It’s time to go to bed.” Her mama stirred and turned off the radio. By then the station had gone off the air and there was only static.

“I milked Starlight really good this week, Mama. Stripped all the milk out of her teats. Her milk won’t dry up like Miss Anna’s cow. Starlight will stay fresh for a long time.”

Her mama sleepily smiled up at her. “You are a good girl, Mae Lee.”

Vergie Hudson stood up and closed the dampers on the wood stove. Mae Lee stood so close behind, her mama bumped into her when she turned.

“Mama, I want to get married,” Mae Lee blurted out. When her mama didn’t answer, she asked, “Did you hear me, Mama?”

“Yes, honey. It’s good to get married.” She grabbed her back. “Oh, my poor aching back.”

“Mama, I mean I want to marry now, before every boy in Rising Ridge goes off to fight. Please, Mama, please let me.”

“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 on. . .