Pocahontas Proud : Part 2

Redneck Woman: Stories from My Life
by Gretchen Wilson, Allen Rucker

(Page 2 of 5)

If you stay, your options are damn few. You're going to be a pig farmer or a corn farmer, or you're down at a diner or truck stop flipping eggs, or you're an auto mechanic working in a small shop in your backyard, or a hod-carrier, or you're pouring drinks down at Hoosier Daddy's. At least while I was growing up, everyone was pretty much in the same boat-barely making it and trying to deal with all the side effects of barely making it, like alcohol, divorce, and despair.

Like in most people's lives, there were good times and there were bad times. During the good times, when work was plentiful and the cash was flowing, we might move into a nice-sized house and feel almost like the people we'd see in the TV commercials serving Pillsbury biscuits in the kitchen or washing the new car in the driveway. During the bad times, I felt more like the homeless people you see on the six o'clock news. I remember, between houses or trailers, sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, more than once. The truck would have a camper shell on the back and we'd crawl into sleeping bags and call it a night. During those hard times, though, I never felt like a victim. I felt like a survivor. I knew things would change-they always did-and I was just anxious to keep moving and maybe find a place, for whatever length of time, where I could take a deep breath and try to enjoy where I was.

One day when I was about six, my mother's husband decided that he wanted to move to Miami, Florida. He had an uncle down there who could line him up with some prospects and, according to my mom, he saw it as a way to get away from all our in-laws in Southern Illinois so my mother wouldn't have anyone to run to when things got rough. In Miami, we were completely surrounded by strangers, often strangers who couldn't speak English, and completely dependent on my stepfather for guidance and protection. Which is exactly how he liked it.

Even in southern Florida, we never sat still for long. In the five or six times we relocated there, we lived in South Miami, North Miami, and Coral Gables, among other scenic stops. Not only did we impulsively move from Greenville, Illinois, to Dade County, Florida, when things got tough, we'd often live in three different places in Florida in a six-or seven-month period. It was a way of life.

I could see why my mother wanted to live in Miami- she was still very young and wanted the wild Miami lifestyle of the 1980s. To Josh and me, it was pure culture shock. We didn't move to postcard Miami; we moved to trailer-park Miami, a far different world than the one of the South Beach partygoers celebrated on Entertainment Tonight. We often lived down there among the lowest-income Cuban refugees you could find. At one point, our next-door neighbor was an old Cuban gentleman named Flaco. Flaco and his wife were in their seventies and kind of took Josh and me under their wing, for a little while anyway. They had a pet parrot that spoke Spanish. They were kind of a substitute for the grandparents we had left behind in Illinois.

The trailer park where we and Flaco lived was a big one-maybe four-hundred trailers in one enclosed area. It was way, way out of Miami, almost in the Everglades. It's where civilization ended. Our rent-a-trailer was small- twelve by sixty-and housed four of us. It had a screened-off porch where Josh and I played Nintendo by the hour and even played pool on a pint-sized pool table. The pool cue would always be hitting a wall, making it impossible to really shoot, but we did it anyway.

Flaco made his living by selling roses on the street. His trailer was only a bush line away from a big intersection, so he would simply hop over his fence every day, grab a bucket of roses from his wife, and peddle them to the cars stopped at the red light. Even at his age, he stood out there in that traffic for hours on end. Again, this wasn't fun-loving Miami. Flaco rarely hung out at the beach and neither did I. In the on-and-off four or five years we lived in South Florida, I bet I can count on one hand the number of times I went to the beach.

Miami and Southern Illinois were two completely different worlds, like living on Earth one day and Mars the next. And making the transition back and forth was always weird. I'd go from hanging out with a bunch of Spanish-speaking motorcycle friends at Lowman's Plaza in Miami at twelve or thirteen to sitting under the bleachers at a high school football game in Illinois with some fresh-faced country boy trying to get to first base. The boy in the bleachers had never been anywhere as far as one county over and had a curfew. The guys in Miami were adept at surviving in all kinds of worlds, Cuban and American, and didn't know what a curfew was-they couldn't even pronounce the word. In fact, they couldn't even say my name. They called me "G."

I had no choice but try to fit in as best I could in both worlds. I learned enough Spanish so that I could understand my math teacher; her English was so bad that teaching in Spanish made more sense. Even today, I know enough Spanish that if I'm in a restaurant and some guys are talking trash in the next booth in Spanish, I can understand them and lip off to them in their own language. They always freak out.

Shifting back and forth between these places was always disorienting and often painful. It was very hard trying to grow up and come into your adolescence not knowing where the hell you were, let alone who the hell you were. Looking back, I can now see that the experience of living in Florida may have opened me up in ways that a more grounded existence in rural Illinois wouldn't have. It gave me both a familiarity and a curiosity about the rest of the world, maybe even a taste for the new and exotic.

Many people growing up in small-town Midwestern America have no real sense of the world beyond their immediate surroundings. They are often fearful of the larger world and figure that if they ventured out, they'd be like the proverbial rube in the big city-scared, gullible, and an easy mark. At the very least, they think, they'll get robbed and beaten for just walking down the wrong street. The city, any city, is foreign territory.

I learned early in life that the big city was often strange and different, but no more intimidating than downtown Pocahontas on a Saturday night. Both Josh and I often had to fend for ourselves in the urban environment of Miami while our parents were having a good time or plotting the next move. And as with all the other obstacles that were thrown in our path as kids, we survived just fine.

Copyright © 2006 by Gretchen Wilson

About the Author

Gretchen Wilson's first album, Here for the Party, debuted at #1 on the Billboard country chart, and she received a Grammy in 2004 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. She lives in Nashville with her daughter, Grace.

Allen Rucker was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and has an MA in Communication from Stanford University, an MA in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a BA in English from Washington University, St. Louis.