Easter - Age Eight

         Easter in my childhood meant a new pair of shoes. Mary Janes, so we could wear them to church and school. A new pair of shoes meant living with blisters if our feet grew too fast and stuffing newspaper in the toes if our feet grew too slow.

         Ours was a hardscrabble town living on the wages of the coal company. We died by the coal too, in the gasping breaths of men who spit black and died too soon. We had it worse than many since I was the youngest of eight girls. No boys to go down into the mines with Pa. Eight girls in the coal country of West Virginia meant a lot of folks looking at you with pity.

         I was the hellion of the brood, or so Mama told me every time she sent me out to cut a switch. I’d bet the boys at school I could jump off a higher rock than them into the river, and when I won, they had to pay with trousers and shirts. I’d wear those forbidden clothes for the rest of the day, ‘til I got home to find the mother of whatever boy I’d beat out standing on the porch with my Mama, and both of them giving me the evil eye.

         I hated Easter. For one thing, I had a hard enough time figuring out baby Jesus, so I couldn’t begin to grasp why someone would nail him to a tree. For another thing, I had to wear a fancy dress. All day, not just to church. Mama worked as a seamstress in Beckley sometimes, and her ladies let her keep lace and scraps of cloth. She made these into the fanciest, frilliest, most awful dresses I ever had to put on.

         Easter morning when I was eight, we all lined up to get our new shoes. I was last, being youngest, and after Mama tied the laces on my black and whites, she looked at me and said, “I got somethin’ special for you, Annabelle.”

         “What you got?” I asked, wondering if I could make myself throw up enough to convince her I wasn’t faking and somehow duck out of church.

         “Your grandma sent it over from Talcott.”

         I waited for her to go into her room, and she came back with this white bit of fabric. I took it first for a kerchief, but then she opened it up. It was a bonnet, with a big brim all trimmed in lace.

         “I ain’t wearin’ that.”

         Mama frowned at me. “Yes, you are.”

         I’ll spare the details, but an hour later we set off to church, me with a very sore butt and that god-awful bonnet on my head. The only good thing was that I was so mortified about being seen in public, and so busy taking mental notes of which boys were making fun of me so I could beat the crap out of them later, that I didn’t pay any attention to the sermon, and service ended sooner than I’d have thought.

         After church, we all piled into the pickup and Pa drove us up to Talcott to visit my grandmother. Grandma McBride was about as ancient as a woman can get. I kind of liked her, because she told stories about growing up in Talcott back in the eighteen hundreds, and from some of them I’d gathered she wasn’t always such a lady.

         Grandma met us in the front yard of her house, and grinned toothlessly when I climbed out of the back of the truck with that damned bonnet on my head. She held out her arms and I grudgingly went to give her a hug.

         “That looks right fine on you,” Grandma said. “I’ve got tea on the back porch for ya’ll.” Everyone else headed around the house, but Grandma took my arm. “What you think of that cap, Annabelle?”

         “It’s all right, I guess.” I knew better than to disrespect an elder.

         She let out a long laugh. “You think it’s the worst thing since petticoats.”

         I’d never worn a petticoat, but I got her meaning and nodded bashfully. “But I ‘preciate you givin’ it to me.”

         She led me to the front steps and sat down with me. “Let me tell you somethin’ about that cap. I wore that the first Easter I was old enough to take the bread and wine. I kept it all these years and nobody’s worn it since. Know why I sent it to you?”

         “No, Ma’am.”

         “’Cause you’re just like me when I was a young’un. Wild as a bobcat. You got an independent streak a mile wide, and when you grow up, I don’t want you t’give it up like I did. You make somethin’ of yourself, and keep that cap to remind you of where you come from.”

         I didn’t get her meaning, but I thanked her anyway and when we got home I carefully folded that bonnet up and tucked it away in my special box, right on top of the marbles and the pen knife I’d stolen from Tommy Wilson.

         Grandma died later that year. As I grew up, I started to realize what she’d meant. I studied hard and landed a scholarship to the University of West Virginia, the first one in my family to go to college. I majored in women’s studies, kept on in school and finally wrote my doctoral thesis on the role of women in the society of 19th century West Virginia.

         I teach at the University now; women’s studies, feminist history, all the classes Mama is too embarrassed to tell her friends about. But every time I start to feel a little superior to the rest of my family, I pull that bonnet out of my special box and think about Grandma, and remember where I came from. A hardscrabble town, where a new pair of shoes came once a year. And there isn’t a whole lot wrong with that.