Pocahontas Proud : Part 5

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

(Page 5 of 5)

Part of whatever bulletproofing I developed had to do with being raised in the country where kids had a lot of time to just screw around and had few places to do so. Vern's idea of a good time back then was to knock me down, get on top of me, pin me to the ground, work up a giant slimy hocker in his mouth, then get real close to my face, and proceed to shoot it right at me, then pull back at the very last second. Or he'd give me Indian burns until the skin would start to peel off my arm. Or, after he learned to ride a motorbike, he'd find his sweet little game-for-anything niece, stick me in a Radio Flyer wagon attached with a telephone cord to his 175 hp Kawasaki, and take off down a back country road going sixty miles an hour. Vern was a thrill-seeker and tried his best to turn me into one. I'd say he succeeded.

Also, Vern was a star athlete as a teenager. He played football and baseball in school at Greenville and was known by everyone who followed local sports. When he graduated from high school, he was offered a full scholarship from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville to play baseball. His dad said, "Sorry, we ain't got enough money for gas," and that was that. For lack of gas money, Vern was denied a free college education. He got a job in the masonry business and started hauling bricks for a living.

A budding jock myself, I was always bugging him to play catch with me and as he got stronger and stronger, the pitches came faster and faster. By his mid-teens he was whizzing sixtyand seventy-mile fastballs at my head and though it scared the hell out of me, Vern claims I never walked away. I'd put the glove right in front of my face and take whatever he was throwing.

I don't think I would've had any of these experiences with testing my limits if I'd grown up in the suburbs. You can get toughened by economic stress or people around you who abuse or mistreat you, but you also toughen up by taking risks. There is some connection, at least in my head, between taking that hot pepper from Vern and refusing to give up in the face of a lot of rejection when I got to Nashville. In both cases, you learn to take it and keep going.

Given the craziness surrounding me, I had to grow up fast. I had to walk into a new school in a new town every few months and devise a way to fit in and make the most of it. I had to fend off Cuban boys one day and whoop it up with good ol' boys the next. It takes an entirely different set of social skills to order lunch in those two worlds, let alone make friends and avoid enemies.

My first real boyfriend was an Italian man from Miami named Christopher Salvatore Leone. He ran a pool hall with his father on Byrd Road in South Miami. He was a cross between Rocky Balboa and Tony Danza-exotic, fun-loving, and tough. The relationship didn't last that long, but long enough to upset my grandpa. He especially hated Italians for some strange reason, maybe because they were Catholics or seemed to be having too good a time in life. My grandma, on the other hand, loved them all, even the New York mobster types. I, a crazy-ass hillbilly girl of thirteen or fourteen, had to figure it out all by myself. Without the guidance from an often spaced-out mother and a completely uncaring stepfather, I had to figure out how to handle many of the common problems of growing up. I also had to watch out for Josh, my little brother. And, given her state of helplessness and addiction, I often had to be the mother to my own mother.

The final episode in the sixteen-year-long saga of my mama and my hellish stepfather came after I had left home at fifteen and moved back to Illinois from Miami to live on my own. My mother and her husband had moved back soon after that, and my mom, in another fit of common sense, had separated from him again, hopefully for the last time. At the time she and Josh were living in Pocahontas with her parents, my grandma and grandpa, and Mom was tending bar at a tavern nearby. Her now estranged husband was living in a trailer in Collinsville, a few miles down the road.

As my mom tells the story, one afternoon he showed up at the bar where she was working and demanded that she accompany him back to his place in Collinsville. When she refused, he just pulled her into the car and took off. He drove to his trailer, threw her inside, and locked the doors. He had essentially kidnapped her and had no intention of letting her go until he vented his rage.

When I pulled up to the trailer, she came running out, panicked and completely naked for all the neighbors to see. She jumped in my car and we sped away from her irate husband. We immediately drove to the nearest hospital to have her examined. While we were sitting in the emergency room, her husband burst into the hospital and was ready to finish the job he had started in the trailer. Thank God hospital security and the police took over at this point, jumped him, and hauled him off to jail.

My mom went back to her parents' home to stay and my grandpa now had his shotgun cocked and ready in case the jerk decided to drop by and "patch things up" for the four hundredth time. Finally the court handed down a substantial sentence for terrorizing my mom-thirty-two days in the Madison County jail. It wasn't nearly enough time to justify what he had done over so many years, but it was apparently sufficient for him to finally give up and leave us all alone. He never really bothered my mom again after that.

To this day, my brother, Josh, still finds a place in his heart for this man. Maybe Josh is the one person in the family he managed not to hurt.

I feel differently, of course. I feel like a large chunk of my childhood was damaged by that marriage. My mom shares some of the responsibility, of course. I think she did the best she could under some horrible circumstances. But, hey, I'm a redneck woman, remember, and I grew up a redneck girl. I'm "Pocahontas Proud," and as I say in that song, "You know, where I come from, we don't give up easily." I had plenty of strong people to help me keep going and not give up during my strange childhood, and the strongest of them all was my grandma.

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.