Necessary Lies

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, heading for the icebox. I opened it up and took out a bottle of Pepsi Cola. I wished I could of stood in front of that icebox the rest of the day, the cool air felt so good, but I closed it quick. Didn’t want to get yelled at for leaving it open too long, although there was nobody around who’d yell at me. Not the boy, who I knew from seeing him at school. Not the colored woman, who wouldn’t yell at no white child. And Mrs. Gardiner wasn’t no yeller. “She’s a saint, that one,” Nonnie always said to me and Mary Ella. “A real fine Christian lady. We can all learn a lot from her, girls.”

  I carried the Pepsi Cola to the counter and she had a box of Nabs all ready to go. My mouth watered looking at them cheese crackers. Seemed like dinner was forever ago.

  “Things going good at the barning today, Ivy?” Mrs. Gardiner asked as she put the box in a paper sack. She was so pretty. Real white skin you didn’t hardly ever see around a farm. Shiny, soft dark hair in a bun at the back of her head. Blue eyes, like Henry Allen’s. The only thing that kept her from being beautiful was a mean-looking scar that ran from her temple to her chin. It was a thing that was hard to look at, but you could sometimes forget about it when she smiled.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “A little short in the field today, but it’s going okay.”

  “That’s good to hear.” She handed me the bag, then leaned toward me. “Sometime you need to cool off, you just come over here and put your head in that icebox.” She smiled at me, and I smiled back.

  “I will. Thank you.”

  I walked out to my bike and fit the bag into the basket. I finished my drink, then climbed on the bike and started pedaling back to the farm, thinking about what she said and how sweet she was. You’d think she would of treated me and Mary Ella mean, but she never did, even though she sure had a right to. No one would blame her if she did, because that scar across her cheek? Our mama was the one who put it there.

  7

  Jane

  Charlotte Werkman’s car was a surprisingly dusty 1954 Chevy, and we rolled the windows down as we headed out of Ridley. It was my first day of work and I’d been twenty minutes late, because I got lost. I never would have guessed the Grace County Department of Public Welfare would be above a Laundromat, but that’s where it was. Four small rooms, and a floor that vibrated with the hum of the washing machines below.

  I would share an office with Charlotte for my two weeks of orientation. She introduced me to the director, Fred Price, a big, balding man who looked happy about his upcoming retirement, as well as my fellow caseworkers—a dour older woman named Gayle, who seemed very tired of the work, and an effervescent girl named Paula. I thought Paula and I actually looked a bit alike, with our blond pageboys and brown eyes, and I was excited to find someone closer to my age. She seemed equally thrilled, peppering me with questions: Where did I live? Was I married? Was my degree in social work? Hers was in English, which she called “utterly useless!”

  Gayle was probably around Charlotte’s age and her smile looked bored as she greeted me, as though she’d seen many staff changes over the years and this was nothing new. She was very pale, made more so by her short jet-black hair, and she wore red lipstick that was creeping into the fine lines above her lips. She was telling Paula and me about one of her clients, a newly widowed woman who wanted to put her five kids in foster care, when Charlotte called me into her office. She handed me a thick department manual full of rules and regulations. “For the nights you can’t get to sleep,” she said with a smile.

  Now I sat in her car, my new briefcase at my feet and my purse in my lap, hoping she’d turn west and not east on Ridley Road.

  She turned east, though, and my heart gave a thud. It’ll be fine, I told myself. Charlotte was talking about the different regions I’d be covering, but I barely heard her. I remembered an earlier time on this road, a happier time when Teresa and I were kids, driving to the beach with my parents. I remembered my mother saying, “This is where Ava Gardner’s from,” and Teresa, next to me in the backseat saying, “She’s actually from Brogden,” and me kicking her leg and my father asking her how she knew that and Teresa shutting up, because she wasn’t supposed to read those movie magazines. She thought Ava and Frank Sinatra had the best marriage. Teresa would never know about their divorce. There was so much she’d never know.

  “Where are we headed?” I tried to sound casual, suddenly aware that being in Grace County was going to be harder than I’d thought.

  “I thought we’d start with the Jordan family. Ordinarily, I’d see the Hart family at the same time because they live close together, but I don’t think we’ll have time for both today, since I … we”—she glanced at me with a smile—“have to pick up an elderly gentleman to get him to his doctor’s appointment by noon. Besides, it’s harvesttime for the tobacco, so everyone’s probably at the barn. I’m hoping we can catch Lita Jordan at home since she’ll be getting lunch ready for her boys.” She glanced at me. “‘Lunch’ is called ‘dinner’ on the farm, by the way,” she said. “The main meal of the day.”

  We were coming up to the Ku Klux Klan billboard. It looked even bigger than it had that terrible afternoon two years ago. Red background. Hooded man on a white horse holding a burning cross. JOIN & SUPPORT THE UNITED KLANS OF AMERICA. FIGHT INTEGRATION AND COMMUNISM. Beyond it was the stand of tall loblolly pines that haunted my dreams. In an instant, we were past it, just like that. I let out my breath. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it.

  “Ava Gardner’s from here,” Charlotte said.

  “Yes.” I smiled to myself. I wouldn’t argue with her. “Did you see On the Beach?”

  “Wasn’t she marvelous in that! Depressing movie, though.”

  On either side of us stretched tobacco fields, people toiling in a sea of green. Mostly colored. Some white. The sun beating down on all of them. The car windows were wide open and I was still perspiring. I couldn’t imagine how hot it was out there in the fields.

  We passed an occasional house, the yards dotted with trees and shrubs, bicycles and trucks. Every farmhouse I saw was painted white and most looked well cared for. Tall tobacco barns, many of them buzzing with activity, were tucked into stands of trees. We turned off Ridley Road onto a narrow dirt road. Dust rose up around the open windows, but it was too hot to close them. I now understood why Charlotte’s car looked the way it did. I supposed mine would be just as dusty in a few weeks.

  Charlotte looked at her watch. “All right now,” she said, as we pulled into a long drive leading to a white farmhouse with a red metal roof. Tobacco fields stretched away from the house in all directions. “Let me give you some background on your clients here.”

  “I’ll have clients who live in this farmhouse?” I asked, looking at the broad front porch. I was astounded that anyone who could afford a home this nice would need welfare.

  “No, not in the farmhouse. You’ll see.” She pulled to the side of the road and turned off the ignition and the car immediately filled with heat. “This farm is owned by Davison Gardiner. No relation to Ava.” She smiled. “Spelled differently. His family’s farmed this land for generations. The Jordans and the Harts live on his land, and they’re your clients. The Harts will almost certainly be at the barn, like I said, so tomorrow or the day after, we’ll come back later in the day and you can meet them. We have too much else to do today.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering how late she was talking about. I’d have to make sure dinner was ready to pop in the oven as soon as I got home. Robert had been very sweet about me starting my job, even buying the briefcase for me and wishing me luck when he kissed me good-bye this morning. But last night he said I seemed more excited about the job than I was about fixing up our beautiful new—well, new to us, anyway—house, and that was true. The house was perfect just as it was. I didn’t care if the drapes had been picked out by someone else or if the wallpaper in the guest bedroom was a little faded. He joked that I wasn’t a normal woman. At least I hoped he was joking.

&nb
sp; “The Jordans live in that house over there.” She pointed to the end of the road where a tiny unpainted building stood out in the open. I’d thought it was some sort of outbuilding, but now I could see laundry hanging from lines strung between the house and a couple of small trees. A little building stood a ways behind it and I guessed it was an outhouse.

  “No indoor plumbing?” I asked.

  She looked at me kindly, the way you’d look at a child who had so much to learn about life. “Not many of your clients will have indoor plumbing,” she said. “Some don’t even have electricity. Mrs. Jordan has four boys and a girl. She sent the girl, Sheena, to a family up North about five years ago, so now it’s just the boys.”

  “Six people lived in that tiny house?” I asked. Maybe it would look bigger when we got up close to it. Right now, it looked smaller than the dining room in my new house.

  “Right, but Lita won’t be having any more, thank goodness. I was able to get her into the Eugenics Program after she gave birth to the last one, though it wasn’t easy.” She looked at me. “You probably don’t know what that is, do you,” she said.

  The only time I’d heard the word “eugenics,” it had to do with Nazi Germany, and I couldn’t imagine that’s what she was talking about.

  “Not really,” I said. “It makes me think of Hitler.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She laughed. “Get that out of your mind right now. We have a Eugenics Board we can petition to get certain of our clients sterilized. It’s been a godsend to many of them and Lita Jordan’s a good example, but it was rough going, getting the board to okay her petition.”

  “Was this something she wanted?”

  “Heavens, yes. She was tired of having babies—I think she thought she was finished and then another one came along and surprised her a few years ago. She heard about the program from a friend at her church and pleaded with me to be sterilized.”

  “Then why was it hard to get them to okay it?”

  “She didn’t meet the qualifications. She needed to meet one of three criteria. Mental retardation, for one. She’d have to score low enough on the IQ test to be considered feebleminded. Do you know anything about IQ testing? What that score would be?”

  I tried to remember the little I’d learned about intelligence tests in my psychology classes. “Seventy?” I said.

  “That’s right. You have to score below seventy to be considered feebleminded. And she scored one fifteen. A hundred and fifteen! Most of the poor folks out here barely test in the normal range, but that woman could run this farm. She graduated from the colored high school in Ridley, which is no small feat given the environment she grew up in.”

  “Oh, she’s colored.” I’d been picturing a white family. I had to alter the mental image I’d had in my mind of Lita Jordan and her children.

  “Yes, colored. And definitely promiscuous. Five kids and no father in the home? Promiscuous she is, but on its own, that’s not enough reason for her to be sterilized, although there are some social workers who’ve managed to make that case.” She looked out the window away from the Jordans’ house and appeared momentarily lost in thought.

  “So,” I prodded, “mental retardation is a yes. Promiscuity’s a no.”

  “Well, if the case can be made that a promiscuous woman is unable to manage the children she has, then the board would consider it, but Lita Jordan’s children have never been in trouble and Davison Gardiner says she’s a sterling example of motherhood. So my hands were tied there. Mental illness and epilepsy are the other two reasons the board will agree to a sterilization, by the way, and she was neither mentally ill nor epileptic.”

  “What about birth control?” I thought of my pills and how lucky I’d been to get them.

  “I had the public health nurse, Ann Laing, bring her whatever she could—condoms and diaphragms and whatever, but she still got pregnant with the littlest boy, Rodney. If we ever get access to the new birth control pill, we’ll be in hog heaven, except the people out here who need it most don’t have the discipline to take a pill on a regular schedule.”

  “So how were you able to get the Eugenics Board to say yes?”

  “Ah. I finally remembered the ‘one hundred and twenty’ rule. You multiply her age, which was then thirty-three, by the number of children she has and if the result is more than one hundred twenty, she can be sterilized. Five times thirty-three and there you have it. I petitioned the board and she had a tubal ligation—that’s where they cut the fallopian tubes—after Rodney was born. She was one grateful woman, I can tell you.”

  I looked toward the long clotheslines. I was too far away to tell what was hanging from them, but I could imagine all the work this Lita Jordan had to do with a house full of boys. “Shouldn’t the father … fathers be helping out? Financially, I mean?”

  “Jane,” she said, “look at that field.”

  I did, and I suddenly saw the workers out there in a new light. They weren’t just faceless field laborers—they were men who wanted a bed and a woman at the end of the day. And Mrs. Jordan’s little house butted right up against the edge of the field where they worked.

  “It could be one of a hundred,” Charlotte said. “Or more likely five of a hundred. Life is very bleak for lots of folks out here, and you can’t blame them for taking comfort where they can find it.” Her tone was sympathetic. “Sometimes it’s in a bed. Other times in a bottle. Whatever gives them momentary pleasure, because the future doesn’t hold much promise.”

  I nodded, fanning my face with my hand and trying not to look too obvious about it. I was perspiring, but Charlotte’s flawless skin was still powder dry.

  “So.” She smiled. “You’ll discover we’ve got a lot of mothers in our caseload, and precious few fathers. Immaculate conceptions happening all over the place.”

  I laughed.

  “Always check for a man living in the house,” she said. “I don’t worry about it with Lita that much, but some women hide the fact that they’ve got a man living with them to keep the welfare checks coming in.”

  I wondered how you checked for something like that. “So what do you do for these families?” I asked. “What do we do?”

  “Plenty! We figure out how much aid they get and evaluate the family for problems that need addressing. Avery—that little Jordan boy with the vision problem—well, he’s not so little anymore.” She laughed. “He’s fifteen, but looks older. I drive him to the itinerant Braille teacher in Ridley every week unless someone from their church can take him, so you’ll be taking over that responsibility.”

  I pictured myself driving a blind teenaged boy. What would I talk to him about?

  “How do you get people to talk to you?” I thought of the intimate conversations Charlotte must have had with Lita Jordan to get her to talk about birth control.

  “You become a good listener.”

  “But … do they just automatically start talking about their personal things?”

  “You feed back what they say. They say they feel overwhelmed, you say ‘you feel overwhelmed?’ And you’ll be surprised how that opens the spigot.”

  “Really?” It sounded silly, but I figured she knew better than me what worked and what didn’t.

  “Really,” she said. “I’ll give you some books.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful.”

  “If you’d had social-work training you’d have learned interviewing skills, but Fred and I are the only degreed social workers in the department. Gayle has a bachelor’s in psychology, so that certainly helps, but Paula—”

  “A degree in English,” I said. “She told me.”

  Charlotte laughed. “However,” she said, “Paula’s been a caseworker now for six years, so she certainly knows the ropes. And she certainly knows how to manipulate them.”

  “Manipulate them?”

  She brushed away my question. “So,” she said, turning the key in the ignition and pressing lightly on the gas, “this week you just observe and next week
you can take a more active role with me supervising. It will work out.”

  I was relieved to have air blowing into the car once more. We skirted the tobacco field and drove up the dirt lane till we reached the dilapidated house. It looked even smaller close-up. We parked on the hard-packed dirt that was the front yard. “In the office, I’m Charlotte and you’re Jane,” Charlotte said. “When we’re in the field, though, I’m Mrs. Werkman and you are Mrs. Mackie.”

  “Forrester now.”

  “Yes. Forrester.”

  As we got out of the car, a woman appeared in the open doorway of the house.

  “Hello, Mrs. Jordan!” Charlotte called, her voice cheerful.

  “Hey, Miz Werkman. Who’s this you got with you?” She was holding one hand above her eyes to block the sun and eyeing me up and down. A little boy stood at her side, hanging on to her dress.

  “This is Mrs. Forrester,” Charlotte said. “She’s going to be taking my place. I’m moving into an administrative position.”

  “You don’t say.” Mrs. Jordan frowned, and I could tell she was none too happy about the change.

  “Can we come in for a chat?” Charlotte asked. Gayle had told me it was important to see inside the house. She said she recently found a fancy television and new furniture in a client’s living room and she cut off that family’s welfare check.

  “I ain’t got nothin’ to offer you,” Mrs. Jordan said, adjusting the blue kerchief that covered her hair, “but you’re welcome to come in.”

  She stepped aside while Charlotte and I walked through the doorway. I was carrying my new briefcase, which now contained both my notepad and the manual Charlotte had given me. I loved feeling the weight of it in my hand.

  Charlotte bent down to greet the little boy. “Hello, Rodney,” she said. “I think you’ve grown two inches in the last two weeks.”

  “Ain’t that true,” Mrs. Jordan said. “All my boys is like that. Growing too big too fast.”

  I could see the whole house from inside the front door. We stood in a small, dark living room. Beyond that, I could see a kitchen, a pot of something savory on the two-burner stove. Whatever was in that pot made my mouth water. I saw the edge of a table and the corner of a cot. Someone slept in the kitchen. Through an open door on my right, I saw a cast-iron bed. I couldn’t imagine how five children and their mother ever fit into a house the size of a postage stamp. No wonder she sent one of them away.