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splinters beneath my fingernails. But I will never betray my grandmother, whatever they may do to me. They push broom straws under my nails until they bleed, but my jaws remain clenched. Luckily their aunt calls them home for lunch. Untying me, they congratulate me on my courage.
    I’ve learned on the playground at Lincoln Elementary that the best defense is a good offense. Recently a trashy-fifth grader from Highland Park was standing beside me at a stoplight as I walked home from school. She was wearing a red silk wind-breaker embroidered with a dragon, which some older brother or uncle must have bought in Korea, and she was smoking a cigarette. I was nervous because some Highland kids were said to carry switchblades.
    â€œAre you John Reed’s sister?” she sneered.
    â€œYeah,” I sneered back. “You wanna make something of it?”
    Fortunately she didn’t.
    My grandmother is a founder of our town’s Virginia Club. To be eligible you must be born in Virginia, sport a silvery blue perm, and wear white gloves downtown. Mrs. J. Fred Johnson belongs. My mother, the New Yorker, does not. The Virginia Club meets every month to discuss famous Virginians, such as Captain John Smith, George Washington, General Robert E. Lee, and Mrs. Mildred Spencer, the 1952 Pillsbury Bake-Off National Champion, the first to use mayonnaise in chocolate cake to keep it moist.
    The Virginia Club also discusses the superiority of Virginia over Tennessee and the number of acres in each member’s ancestral land grants from King James I. A feature in our town newspaper has reported that the Virginia Clubbers come from “old Virginia bloodlines and money.” My grandmother refers to them as “those fine Colonial ladies.” It’s not unheard of for a member, upon going into labor, to insist that her husband drive her the eight miles across the state line so her baby can be born a Virginian.
    Yet we never go to Virginia, despite the fact that my grandparents between them have fourteen brothers and sisters there, plus many aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and cousins. My grandmother’s mother died of pneumonia when my grandmother was thirteen, and my grandmother didn’t get along with her stepmother. Could this be why we’ve never met her family, or even seen photos of them? When my father was a boy, the drive took ten hours on unpaved roads. The road is paved now, but we’ve gone only once. I recall picking through a slag heap at a coal mine to find amazing fossils of prehistoric plants and insects, but I don’t remember any relatives.
    My father has mentioned a Cherokee ancestress. When I ask my grandmother about this, she speaks of the recent rainstorm and current warm spell.
    As I continue to bug her, she finally snaps, “My family may be a tiny bit Indian. But it’s not a Cherokee. It’s Pocahontas. Pocahontas was a Virginian.”
    Not only have I not been born in Virginia, I am now a left tackle on the Longview Losers. Our coach, the father of Sam (who will go on to become a quarterback at West Point), tells my team, all of them boys but Ellen and me, that if they’d play with my grit, we might win a game or two. I don’t tell him that it’s not grit, I just like the body contact.
    One stormy afternoon we play a team from the mill village called the Stampede. Joe, their captain, is a son of the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly. I slog through the mud with my usual fervor, but the final score is 96-14 in their favor. In parting, Joe says sympathetically to Johnny, one of our halfbacks (who will soon become my first boyfriend, bringing me a real stuffed baby alligator from Florida), that it must be hard to have girls on your team. As the rain pelts down, our team, caked in orange clay, turns as one to gaze at Ellen and me, and we realize that our gridiron days are numbered.
    The boys have an ally in my grandmother, whose silver Cadillac is lurking in our