Pocahontas Proud : Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 5)

No matter where we were-Illinois or Florida-our family life was a constant merry-go-round of feast and famine. In Florida, for instance, with my mom working full-time at Tony Roma's and her husband hitting a good streak in the deck- or dock-building business, we'd have a little spending cash. In a gesture of living large and probably stroking his own ego, my stepfather would go out and buy my mom a brand-new used car for her birthday. Two weeks later he'd have to sell the same car to pay the rent or to underwrite our next move out of the area. Perhaps that car would finance our way back to Illinois and another town, another trailer, and another short-term job to keep food on the table.

People often think kids don't see the stress and anxiety in their parents' lives or even if they do see it, can just roll with it and not be affected. In my experience, that is nonsense. Josh and I picked up on everything. We were smart enough to see that our school friends didn't live like this, assuming we made any school friends in the three or four months we spent at any one school. We knew that it was weird to suddenly move into an apartment or trailer on the first of the month and be out of there before the next rent check was due. We knew that when my mom announced that we were off to Miami again and followed it with "we're going to stay in one place and your dad's got a great new job and this time it's going to be different"-we knew it wasn't going to be a bit different. After a while, of course, we'd pack up and leave with my mom making no such promises of a new life right around the next corner. She realized we weren't buying that line of BS after hearing it a dozen times. We all knew the truth: that life was a damn mess all the time.

And most of all, we could see and feel the abuse. My stepfather was never a big drinker, a drug user, or even a cigarette smoker, but he was often violent and abusive, especially toward my mother. My mom lived in fear from the moment she married the man. The verbal abuse never stopped and the physical abuse was always one sassy comeback away. As she sees it now, my mom describes her whole existence as like being in an embryo position-curled up and cowering. For most of those sixteen years she saw herself as weak and powerless. He had her in a psychological prison.

Mom, only in her early twenties when the abuse became constant, didn't know what to do. As she's said many times, she was too scared to get out of this awful situation. Especially after moving to Miami, she was completely alone in fending off his attacks as well as trying to shield her two children from his wrath. She did call the police a few times when she felt her life was in jeopardy, but then was too scared to press charges or use the incident to get as far away from him as possible. The police themselves would bring him up on assault-and-battery and he would do time in the county jail, but the sentences never lasted that long and when he got out, my mom would be there to take him back in.

This kind of relationship is an ugly, unbroken cycle of intimidation and compromise and only the people who have lived through it can understand it. And of course, ours wasn't the only household in America where this cycle is a simple fact of daily life. All you have to do is tune into Oprah or Dr. Phil to know the widespread reach of domestic abuse in America.

My mom did try to escape this torment five or six times in their long marriage. On occasion, she would put Josh and me in the car in Miami and head back home for the love and support of her family. But he was always one step ahead of her. Before she got back to Pocahontas, he would have taken a flight from Miami and be there to greet her at the door. Then he would use his vast storehouse of charm and BS to lure her back, all the time telling her the same lie she was constantly telling us, i.e., "this time it'll be different."

Or, if that didn't work, he'd resort to pure intimidation. He'd tell her straight out that if she didn't come back, he was going to kill her, her two kids, her mom and dad, and any other jackass who dared to step in and tell him how to treat his wife or live his life. And she believed him. She had no doubt that he had the capacity to eliminate anyone who got in his way.

My mom tried to show us a normal childhood amidst all this craziness and fear. In Illinois, she signed us up for Little League baseball and kept us close to the loving influence of my blood relatives. In Miami, she kept me busy doing kid things. At times I felt like I was off to a different after-school activity every day of the week-Monday, ballet lessons; Tuesday, gymnastics; Wednesday, tap; and so on. I'll never forget this dance studio in Miami run by this Cuban woman named Miss Jerry. My only English-speaking friend there at the time, Amber, and I were all of five years old and scared to death of Miss Jerry. She would never harm us, but she was strong and assertive in a way that I rarely saw other women, especially my mom. She definitely left an impression.

Throughout all the confusion of growing up on the move, my saving grace, then as now, was my family. When we were located anywhere in Southern Illinois, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, my Uncle Vern, only six years older, and my Aunt Vickie. They were my escape from the tension of living with my mom and even though their lives were occasionally pretty nuts, they seemed normal and stable compared to mine. I did things with them that remain some of the fondest memories of my childhood, whether picking wild berries with my grandma in the woods behind her trailer or learning to ride a motorbike with Uncle Vern. It didn't take a village to raise me, but it took the love of my extended family to help me survive and grow.

When I was twelve, for instance, we were living in Miami and my mom thought I was running a little too wild with the urban kids I hung with. She was also having a particularly tough time with her husband and trying to leave him for the third or fourth time. So she packed me up and sent me back to Pocahontas, or Pokey, for the summer to live with my Aunt Vickie and her then husband, Eric Simmonds.

My Aunt Vickie was, and still is, a hard worker. For a lot of her adult life, she was a welder. She welded airplane parts at a sub-factory in St. Louis for use in military planes made by McDonnell Douglas in the same area. She drove to St. Louis every workday for twenty years. Depending on the exact location of her home at the time, it was an hour or so in and an hour or so back. Both she and Eric got up at 4:30 every morning to make the long trek into the city. She spent half her time welding steel and half her timing applying spray paint. She's probably filled her lungs with plenty of noxious fumes.

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.