Grace and Grit Read Online Free PDF Page A

to me. I worried that Charles still pined for his first girlfriend. Her mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and when her daddy hassled Charles so badly, afraid the same thing would happen to his daughter, Charles moved on. My fears proved to be true when he started dating her again during his first year at Jacksonville State University when he and I didn’t see each other as much. Finally, he broke it off with her for good, and we started dating exclusively.
    Meanwhile, I’d finally come to my senses about Johnny. He was halfway across the ocean most of the time, and when I saw his sisters around, they insisted that he was dating dozens of beautiful girls. I finally realized that I didn’t know the first thing about love if I was moping around for someone I barely knew anymore. We’d simply played together as kids. What I loved had nothing to do with him: I loved the idea of him and my fantasy of living in exotic places.
    Living out in the country, I didn’t know the ways of the world. What I knew about sex I overheard my uncles teasing about at Aunt Lucille’s dairy farm or learned from my friends in the locker room at school. When I discovered I was bleeding for the first time, I was terrified. Without a word, my mother handed me torn bedsheets.
    But despite my lack of worldliness, I had my secret ambitions. Even though most girls, if they weren’t already married, worked in the cotton mills or became secretaries after graduation—the really smart ones studying to become teachers or nurses—I wanted to bea lawyer when I was in high school. Where my aspirations came from I haven’t the foggiest, since we didn’t keep a single book in our home.
    Later, encouraged by my math teacher Mrs. Self, I decided I wanted to be an engineer. In class I marveled at the fact that she could catch a mistake before a student finished solving an equation on the blackboard. I whizzed through my math tests, the purple ink always damp, emanating a strong, almost skunkish smell from the mimeograph machine. For me, calculating numbers felt like listening to my favorite music.
    Mrs. Self also happened to play bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Gray, the most educated couple I knew. On Saturdays they drove from Jacksonville to our house to buy fresh butter. When I heard the sound of a car in the driveway I’d peer out the window to see Mr. Gray, a retired chemistry professor, behind the wheel of his red convertible, his bow tie somehow still neatly tied. I wondered if he slept in it. He was so different from my uncles, more like my history teacher, a slim, energetic man the boys made fun of for living with his two aunts and walking to school carrying an umbrella.
    Sometimes I was invited to the Grays’ house in town. Eating dinner in their formal dining room, I worried about which fork to use as I tasted unfamiliar dishes like asparagus casserole served on delicate, rose-patterned china. I recalled what Granny Mac said about how my father had the finest of everything and drank from crystal glasses at their mahogany dining room table. My father’s father, who’d been a foreman for Southern Railroad, supervising the black crew fixing the railroad tracks, sounded downright rich. Returning a gun he borrowed for Granny Mac to keep for protection while he traveled all over Georgia with his crew, he accidentally shot himself in the groin as his wagon bounced over the tracks. Gangrene killed him. After his death, Granny Mac packed up all the fancy furniture and fine china—except for a tea set shenow kept in the trunk under her bed—and moved with my father to Aunt Lucille’s farm in Alabama, where she kept most everything stored away.
    When it came to my education, it was Mrs. Self who had hopes for me, and she asked Mrs. Gray for help. She wanted Mrs. Gray to convince my mother to let me take college courses at Jacksonville State University, a teachers’ college only a short walk up the hill from Jacksonville High School, half the day during