Grace and Grit Read Online Free PDF

my senior year. Mama said no, of course. It cost too much. Anyway, a high school education was all a girl needed. So my senior year, at my mother’s insistence, I took home economics instead of earning college credits, almost failing my sewing assignments.
    I’ll never forget the sting I felt when the week before graduation, the principal stopped me in the hall and congratulated me for being near the top of my class of one hundred. On the way to class, I was sick to my stomach, as if I’d swallowed a bottle of castor oil.
    I found my way around most of my mother’s objections, but I didn’t know how to work around that conundrum. I’ve often speculated about how different my life would have been if I’d gone the eight miles down the road to Jacksonville State University. Later, when I went to work, I took every seminar and training class I was offered. But it wasn’t the same.
    N OT LONG after I realized I couldn’t go to college, I took the picture of Johnny and gave it back to Beulah. I wrote him my last letter. I didn’t know Johnny the way I’d come to know Charles, a steady worker and a churchgoing man. Johnny was a figment of my imagination. I’d seen Charles, calm and competent, steer a school bus from slipping off an icy bridge. Charles was the one who taught me how to drive. We circled the school parking lot in his Chevrolet or blew down the white road made of chert gravel in front of my house, a trail of milky dust fading behind us. It didn’t matter what we did or where I went with Charles. We always enjoyed eachother’s company. Being with Charles made me forget how lonely I was as an only child. And on some level I knew he was the one, the way you just know some things, deep in your soul.
    During my senior year Charles dropped out of Jacksonville State University to take a full-time job at General Electric, located about twenty miles outside Possum Trot, so that he could earn a steady paycheck. The last thing he wanted to do was farm for a living like his father, Willis. When relatives provided Willis, an illegitimate child, a place to live on their farm, he was treated as an outcast. While the rest of the family ate supper, Willis fed the cows and pigs. Later, Willis treated Charles almost as harshly on their family farm. I knew Charles admired the fact that my father wasn’t a farmer and respected his job as a diesel-tank mechanic.
    Once Charles was employed with a decent salary and benefits, he bought from his aunt Sudy a piece of land, located several miles from my house. Then he immediately started building our home. By December of my senior year the walls were dried in. I don’t remember Charles ever formally proposing. We just talked about it like we did everything else. At least part of the reason we decided to get married when we did was that we could afford it.
    The day I told my mother I wanted to marry Charles, I was sure she’d pitch a fit. I wasn’t used to her saying yes to anything I wanted. And in this case she needed to agree, as I was still a minor. In my heart, I wanted more than anything to marry Charles. There was hope: He was the only boy of the few I’d dated whom she’d liked, and she appreciated the fact that Charles was such a hard worker.
    I stood in the kitchen doorway and tried to gather my courage. I waited until she was in the middle of cooking fried apple pies; that way I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. Then I told her, fast and to the point.
    When she turned away from the black skillet and looked at me, she simply asked, “Are you sure?”
    I nodded. I was seventeen. I was ready.
    She finished frying her first batch of pies, then made me sit down at the wooden table. “You know, what you see is what you marry. What you see across the table won’t change all those years you’ll be married, so don’t think you can change another person,” she said.
    I sat silently, sweating in the warm kitchen. Grease dripped down the side of the black skillet on