Pocahontas Proud : Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 5)

So I went to live with Aunt Vickie that summer and what a great summer it was! Vickie and Eric lived in a doublewide trailer at the time and had a couple of kids. My job was to watch the kids during the day and have fun the rest of the time. A lot of that fun revolved around Eric's major passion in life-racing stock cars.

Saturday nights in the summertime was racing season around there. There was a quarter-mile, all-dirt track in Highland, a much bigger town than Pokey, and a huge crowd would gather there every Saturday night to drink, fight, drink some more, and watch their local favorites speed around in the dirt. Eric drove street stock-cars called "bombers"-which was the down-and-dirty class at the Highland Racetrack. He had one old Chevy that he raced and a garage bigger than his home to work on it. The car looked like crap but the engine was a masterpiece. When he wasn't working or racing, he was out in that garage working on his car. If half the men in the area on any given night were knocking back a can of Busch in a local tavern, the other half were in some buddy's garage, knocking back a can of Busch and arguing about carburetors and spark plugs.

The races were a trip. You'd drive over to the track at Highland and sit in a great big tin-covered bleacher seat with chicken-wire fencing separating you from the track. For most people, it was like a big outdoor party every Saturday night, an excuse to get sloshed with their friends, cheer on their next-door neighbor, and forget about all the problems waiting back home. The drunk and disorderly would slip and fall into each other's laps or spill beer down the back of each other's shirt. The whole arena was one big mosh pit.

And the fights were worth the price of admission alone. Especially in the bomber class, there was a crash on almost every spin and every crash would foment an argument in the stands. The worst offenders tended to be the wives of the race drivers themselves, women like my Aunt Vickie. Wife #1 would say something about her husband getting rear-ended by someone else's husband-"Why that dumb-ass SOB just ran into my husband!"-and wife #2 would leap over fifteen people to beat the crap out of #1. The stock car wives were a breed apart. I always thought there was a great movie about the wild lives of small-town stock car wives-along the lines of that movie about the murdering moms of Texas high school cheerleaders. These ladies of the track were a tough bunch of broads.

One photograph I still have and cherish sums up the sheer fun of going to those races for me. It's a picture of Vickie and Eric's son, Matt, my cousin, who today is still close by as one of the people working on my farm in Tennessee. Vickie, Matt, and I are in the stands at the races, watching Eric race his beat-up Chevy. Matt, all of eighteen months old, is sitting on his mom's lap. He's got on a hippie wig, is wearing earplugs to mute the tremendous noise of the cars, dressed in a diaper, and sporting an unlit cigarette in his mouth. At that moment, we were all in the Southern Illinois version of hillbilly heaven.

Along with watching others race around a track, I first learned to drive a truck that summer in Pocahontas. And an even bigger milestone took place-I drank my first beer.

One night Eric took off with his stock car buddies to drink and act up and he left Aunt Vickie home with me. Vickie was mad as hell. As the two of us sat around the kitchen table, cussing out Eric, I decided to light up a cigarette, a habit I had recently picked up from my Cuban pals in Miami. Vickie, at that point a nonsmoker, was shocked.

"A cigarette? You're only twelve!" I told her I'd teach her how to smoke a cigarette if she would let me have a beer. She was just in the right mood to say yes. We then proceeded to go out to Eric's shed, steal his cooler of Busch, drink every last one of them, and stack the empties in a pyramid on the table for him to see. Although I didn't feel too good the next morning from all the beer and cigarettes, the whole experience was a whole lot of fun and something Vickie and I laugh about to this day.

How did my mom handle such a long-term abusive relationship? Unable, like many abused women, to walk away, she tried every way she could to block it out and numb herself from the fear and violence. She started working all night in a bar in Miami while her husband was between jobs. Before long she was hooked on cocaine and drinking heavily, addictions that weakened and tormented her for years. This only aggravated an already desperate situation and made her both more dependent on him and less able to take care of Josh and me. She was unhappy, depressed, and, in her own words, a broken person. And she pretty much remained this way until my stepfather was completely out of her life and she could finally see what a mess she had become.

The effect of all of this on me was pretty apparent: I had to develop a pretty thick skin-Vern likes to say that I became "bulletproof." What he means by this is that, at least in my dealings with the outside world, I grew a protective shield to ward off an attack, either emotional or physical. Like many women who grew up in circumstances like mine, I developed a wariness about who to trust and who not to trust. I didn't let someone get to know me or tell them anything personal until I was assured that they weren't going to take that information and turn it against me. I was the opposite of a sheltered, pampered child. I was never someone's little princess or "Daddy's little girl." Early on in life, I had what you might call a real hard edge.

Uncle Vern likes to tell stories about how he saw this in me when I was still a tomboy growing up in Pokey. Because we were only a few years apart in age-he was an afterthought, my grandma used to say-Vern was often my principal playmate-and tormentor. I used to shadow him constantly and he was always looking for ways to tease or test me. One of his favorite memories along this line happened when I was five or six. My grandpa grew hot peppers in the garden he had at the time. They were so hot that all you had to do was smell them and your eyes would start watering. So Vern saw me playing in the garden one day and figured it was time to introduce me to the world of tongue-burning peppers. He broke a pod in half and told me to stick it in my mouth. Which of course I did, because even at five, I was game for damn near anything.

His mom-my grandma-was washing dishes in the trailer and heard my bloodcurdling screams (I already had a strong voice). She came running out of the house with a wooden ladle and whacked Vern on the head for what seemed like forever. Vern claims that was the only time she ever laid a hand on him. All I know is that I never bite into a pepper today without thinking about how Vern introduced me to my first one.

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.