On a sleepy Sunday afternoon near the beginning of June in 1932, fifteen-year-old Claudia Aderholt sat in a rocking chair on her grandparents’ front porch and considered her situation. She’d arrived on Friday, with her mother and two younger sisters, Eleanor and Eileen, to stay with Mama’s people. Because they had no place else to go.
It was hot on the porch, but now and then a weak breeze would ruffle through Granddaddy’s forsythia, lift Claudia’s sun-streaked brown hair, and move on. The shrubbery was in need of pruning. A few yellow blossoms still clung to it. Overgrown as it was though, it did provide shade from the afternoon sun and protection, for those who took refuge there, from the prying eyes of passersby. This suited Claudia very well. She’d seen, and been seen by, plenty of people for the time being. She rocked and considered hard for a good little while.
Claudia still wore the clothes she’d worn to church that morning. She’d worn them through the noon dinner and afterwards as she helped with the dishes. She didn’t have much of anything worse, or better, to put on. It was a formerly navy blue cotton dress, now faded from numerous washings and ironings to a multitude of subtle, varied blues. It was quite a bit too short-waisted, since Claudia had “shot up,” as her mother put it, over the past two years. Claudia wore her old dress with a wide mismatched belt, because it almost served to hide her misplaced waistline. They’d let the hem down as far as it would go, which wasn’t far enough. And the old hem had left a pale, pencil-thin line where the skirt had once come to.
Her shoes were sensible. (When new, they’d been her mother’s.) And now they were worn down at the heels and up at the toes. Claudia had polished them the best she could. She’d gone bare-legged to church, having given her last decent pair of socks to her sister. The idea of hosiery had never entered her young head. Claudia blushed as she thought of how she’d tried to hide her feet in those dowdy old shoes and her rough, farm-girl ankles, by tucking them beneath her chair. One girl in the Sunday School class, Adelaide Forney, the lawyer’s daughter, had been so patronizing and vicious with her smiles. She’d been elegantly dressed and wearing silk stockings over smooth, perfect legs. Claudia had heard her daddy often say that no matter what was happening to the rest of us, the lawyers always seemed to thrive.
Claudia had worn her mother’s old hat to church too (because in 1932 hats were expected), though she’d been ashamed of it, with it’s frail, dust-colored flowers and tired felt. It was further adorned with greyish grosgrain ribbons that grew shorter (while Claudia grew taller) with continual raveling and trimming. It was a hopeless cycle of ruin and repair that soon would end in no ribbon at all. She hadn’t complained about the hat though. Because, the younger girls had worn older dresses and worse bonnets, all of which had been hers when new. And neither of them, not ten-year-old Eleanor nor Eileen, who was only six, could remember having ever had anything new of their own.
It was equally distressing to Claudia, though, that all of them had worn these things just two weeks before, the last time they’d been to the First Baptist Church. She feared that every person who’d seen them at their father’s funeral would distinctly remember their outfits. Though, logically, she knew that was hardly likely. There was nothing striking about their apparel to make the Aderholts conspicuous, except its well-worn and mended, clean but honest look. That was something to be proud of. And one shabby dress often seemed the same as another. There had been, thankfully, few in attendance at the funeral outside of relatives. And most of them had been adults, not girls her own age.
Still, Claudia had seen the disdainful glances of the other girls in Sunday School, girls who had never known hardship or constant dread. They still had their fathers and homes and would probably never face a single moment’s serious anxiety as long as their girlhood lasted. They would never worry where the next bite of food might come from or feel the certainty that a parent would die soon. Nor could they have any understanding of watching a father gasp for air, neither living nor dying, neither conscious nor out of pain. Watching and waiting for the end, she was woefully unable to divine how long a human person can hover in the agonies of death without actually expiring. It was a long journey down an unfamiliar road, when the end seems always out of sight. And all the while, the slow withering and shrinking of her father kept dragging the family down and down into further depths of poverty. Claudia wasn’t a cruel child and she’d loved her father and grieved for him. But out of love, she had wished him dead, finally. She was practical by nature. She refused to turn a blind eye to reality, when she could stand to look at it.
Kinder people, at least Claudia had heard it said that they were kind, had taken Mrs. Aderholt aside and offered her their children’s hand-me-downs. Mrs. Aderholt, being the thoroughly Christian woman she was, had humbly accepted every offer and expressed sincere appreciation for their generosity. She’d often said that in these times that were hard for everybody, it was ’specially important to appreciate Christian charity.
Claudia found it difficult to appreciate their charity or even accept their Christianity. She knew that the girls in church next Sunday, and in school next fall too, would recognize every drooping sweater and tuckered-out blouse or skirt and know exactly who had condescended to give the Aderholts their worn-out wardrobes. They would know who had worn them before. The donors’ gifts of what they themselves no longer wanted would make them the object of praise. “How thoughtful. How generous,” everyone would say. The whole town would feel good about it, thinking themselves superior, though it made Claudia more miserable than ever. The benefactors would feel themselves rising in town’s estimation, even in their own estimation, while the Aderholts fell lower and more to be pitied in everyone’s eyes, even their own. Was this really Christian charity, the charity that suffereth long and is kind? that vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up?
Claudia roiled inside with fury and humiliation at the thought of it. She knew what she felt wasn’t the Christian way either, and she was ashamed of herself. She was prideful. She should have accepted the misfortune of her situation, as well as the happiness of others. Charity envieth not too. And she did envy them their easy lives. But it wasn’t their fault if they had easy lives. After all, she supposed that some of them were good people, some of them did mean well. But not all of them. She could not convince herself that all of them meant well. She tried to be happy that her sisters would have something besides her own cast-offs, worn out before outgrown. But the thought of those scornful girls and their whispers, the arrogant expressions on their faces, made her so angry. They were puffed up. That was against the Bible. Even the kind faces, full of compassion for the Aderholts, had made Claudia furious. How dare they feel sorry for her?
It was a troublesome philosophical dialogue this little girl had inside herself. After much ambivalence, she came down on the side of pride. And to some degree, self-preservation. Whether she was wrong or right or responsible or a victim of sad circumstance might be a subject of debate. But that is where she landed. Claudia decided she’d rather wear her own clothes, the clothes her father had paid for, when he’d been able, than put on anything these people gave her. Truth be told, those clothes, worn as they were, were about all the material goods the Aderholts had to their names. They were all there was of what their daddy had left them.
Claudia’s daddy had been sick for a long time and he’d kept working. For more than a year though, for almost two in fact, he had not been able to work. He’d tried, until he just couldn’t struggle out of his bed. The pain was too great. And then, after all the fight was gone out of him, he died. He left his family with nothing to live on, outside the legacy of their own determination and deep-rooted work ethic. He’d been a hard worker himself and a loving father too, though not very wise in the ways of a dishonest world. After his efforts and agonies, he’d done all he could. There’d been bills to pay that could not be paid. And in the end, they’d lost what little he’d accumulated in all his fifty-two years to creditors and bank foreclosures.
After the funeral, the Aderholt girls and their mother had gone back to the only home they’d ever known to “tie up loose ends” as Mama said. They discovered it was a good thing to go to be moving away. They were ashamed to walk down the street at home and always feared the step of the grocer or butcher behind them, demanding his due. They spent the last days there in the house retrieving what little there was, at least what they felt they could lay an honest claim to. Most if it, which really belonged to the creditors, they would leave behind.
During those last hours at home, as they sorted through their paltry belongings, Claudia had come upon a satchel on a shelf of her father’s chifforobe. It was filled with many years’ old bank statements and bills and papers, so much that should have been discarded long before she found it. She looked through it all and tried to make sense of the chaotic state they were left in. It seemed to Claudia that some things didn’t add up. In the whole useless stockpile of papers, there was nothing that could help them, only things that could hurt them. There was no sense to it. Daddy had borrowed, even before he got sick, when there was money in the bank, when there seemed to be no reason to need a loan. Why would he do that? These were business problems, maybe, that only an adult might sort out. But who that adult would be, Claudia couldn’t imagine. Mama had no interest in figures or business. Daddy had made payments on a mortgage, even after the mortgage had been paid off. And yet they’d been foreclosed on. That was a fact that had been hammered home so often, it shouldn’t have occurred to Claudia to question it. But she did question it. She liked details to be logical and make sense.
Things were missing from the records that should have been there, she felt, such as the deed to their home place. Claudia had known for many months that the time would come when they’d be thrown out. She’d long dreaded the day when they’d hand that deed over and often pictured herself and her mother facing this final degradation. Outside the bank president’s office door, she imagined, inquisitive townsfolk would stare from the lobby at the Aderholts’ cruel disgrace, like the crowd at a public execution. All of the spectators would have faces radiant with relief. This time, the ax of misfortune would fall on someone other than themselves. As if the Aderholts’ misfortune would, in a way, give their neighbors a reprieve for one more day. Now it seemed, after all, the deed wasn’t there in the house. And so that humiliation was one, at least, they wouldn’t have to endure. She didn’t know exactly where the deed was, but what did it matter? What did any of it matter? Home wasn’t theirs anymore anyway. Maybe the bank had the deed in hand, but Claudia wasn’t going to worry about that right then.
One thing she was sure of, there was nothing of value in the old satchel. It contained only the muddled trivia of their descent in the world, painful enough to live through once. Claudia had no wish to save it to remember on some future sunnier day. Early one morning she placed the papers in amongst the stove’s few remaining embers, watch them catch and burn, then put the satchel away for some other use. On Thursday, she’d packed it with the Eileen’s few treasures: a small worn blanket, a threadbare doll, a sparse set of children’s books, fairy tales that Claudia, too, had loved long before Eileen was born, when she, too, had a childhood. Those few things might bring Eileen a little comfort, when they took their inevitable journey back to the strange new town where they had to go and live.
On Friday morning, they’d picked up their small bundles, walked to the livery stable, and caught a ride to Gearing in Mr. Arbuckle’s mule-drawn wagon. The rest they’d left for the banks and businesses to sort out.
As Claudia rocked pensively or violently by turns, all by herself on the porch, she thought through these events and looked to the future. It didn’t look good. Her grandparents could offer shelter, but not much more. Times were bad, as her mother said, for everybody. Well, if not everybody, at least for the kinfolks the Aderholts were to live with.
Mrs. Aderholt knew how to scrub a floor and keep a kitchen. She knew how to grow a garden and can green beans. She could make a good dinner from black-eyed peas and cornpone. Mama could pray better than anybody Claudia had ever heard utter a prayer. She was an inspiration.
But it was too late for a garden. And she couldn’t hire on as somebody else’s mother. Praying, the best Claudia could tell, was almost always a voluntary vocation, with no hard cash attached. Mama couldn’t go to preaching at the Baptist Church, because they had a perfectly good preacher already. And Mrs. Aderholt wasn’t Aimee Semple McPherson. She’d had no education to speak of. So, she couldn’t teach or nurse, the only acceptable occupations for ladies. The last resort for women with a bit of respectability left, the cotton mill, had just let a flock of women workers go. The last fired would surely be first hired, when hiring commenced again. Certainly they would get jobs before any fifty year old woman with no experience would be hired on. Claudia’s mother wouldn’t be able to find a job that paid. Or paid enough. Of that, Claudia was quite sure and certain.
As she rocked, Claudia noticed how boney her bent knees looked beneath the pale thin former hemline of her dress. Like glass knobs on a dresser drawer. She’d heard her mother and grandmother talking quietly about “how ‘pore’ Claudia’s arms and legs was gettin’.” She hadn’t taken much notice about it then, when she’d overheard them, except that it caused them uneasiness. But after that morning in church she did care, very much. She had lost weight in the last few months as she’d grown taller, instead of adding pounds, as growing girls are supposed to do. So she had a skinny frame she was ashamed of now. It worried her mother, who had plenty of other worries already.
She known she was way too thin to be fashionable in 1932. Not that Claudia had ever given a hoot about fashion. But once, when she’d slipped off to the bus station for the afternoon, she’d read an entire Redbook magazine, including the full-color advertisements for mayonnaise and linoleum, Chesterfield cigarettes and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. She’d learned about a lot of things. Curves were back. Girls should be rounded, in some places, and slender in others. All over skinniness meant poverty (in fact “poor” was another word for “thin” in the Alabama of the 1930s, when so many really were painfully poor and thin.)
Claudia made up her mind about a lot of things that Sunday in the porch rocker. She decided that she would grow fatter as soon as possible, if for no other reason than to show up those hateful girls she’d met that morning. For the first time in her life, Claudia dreaded the Sunday coming up next week, when she’d have to go back to that church and face again those haughty girls in her new Sunday School Class.
Claudia decided that she would have to go to work to help take care of her family. She’d work and go to school too. She’d sign up for a book-keeping class in the fall, so she could understand those figures and papers, and nobody would take advantage of her or her family again. She would see to it by the time school started that she and her sisters would have decent clothes, so that they would never have to take charity or be ashamed of what they wore again.
Claudia was seized with a sudden yearning to get a job and go to work right away, so she could walk to the corner drugstore and buy an ice cream sundae anytime she felt like it. But it was Sunday. Probably, the soda fountain wouldn’t be open for business. Just to take a task in hand and work till it was complete would’ve made Claudia feel better. She longed to find a brush and bucket and scrub the porch floor right then and there. But she knew if she did such a thing, she’d be scolded. It was Sunday. People driving by might see. Her mother and grandmother wouldn’t even sew on a button on Sunday. They said it was a sin. If it hadn’t been Sunday, Claudia would’ve walked to town that very minute and found somebody who would hire her. But there was nothing to do except to wait for Monday. And make plans.
And that is exactly what Claudia did.
She went into her grandparents’ house and searched for a scrap of paper and a pencil. She didn’t ask for it, because she knew it would cause as much concern for her soul as a request for a needle and thread. She found an old laundry slip with an unused back in a kitchen drawer and a pencil stub in a cup on her grandfather’s desk. A faithful disciple of small economies, Claudia wouldn’t waste a fresh new sheet of paper just for this, a blueprint of her life’s ambitions. She sat back down in the rocker and wrote out her plan. Then she memorized it carefully and folded it into her pocket for easy access.
Early Monday morning, Claudia Aderholt, a thin and gawky fifteen-year-old girl in a worn-out blue dress, walked out of her grandparents’ house right in the middle of The Great Depression and found herself a job. After that, she knew there would be no stopping her. She’d never look back.
Although, perhaps, after all, in years that followed, Claudia did look back. She went to work with a vengeance at the the corner drugstore, as the soda jerk’s apprentice. And she didn’t do much talking. She listened carefully to the directions she was given and followed them to a T. She made herself useful in a thousand ways and tried her best to fade into the background. She had never been one who wanted attention drawn to herself. She overheard conversations among the people who sat in the booths near the back and at the tables in the front. And she learned a lot.
There was a particular table in the front corner where the same group of men gathered everyday at the same time. They paid her no mind when she refilled their coffee cups or cleared them away, but kept chatting on any number of topics. She found them especially interesting, but never let on that she heard anything at all.
On Friday, as she washed dishes behind the counter, Claudia shyly spotted a dark and tall young man, about twenty-two years old, dressed in the latest and most expensive casual fashion. He too was on the slim side, but not too slim, and in no way did his rather handsome young figure portend the massive man he would become.
Claudia dipped out of sight on the pretext of putting something away under the counter. She didn’t want to be seen. She needn’t have worried. He never would have noticed her anyhow. She was beneath his notice that day, and she knew it. She also knew, without being told, that this young man could be no other than Byrd Richardson.
The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved
The Right Southern Corner
