I’m the last living witness to this 65-year-old tale of loving unconditionally.
In Clarksdale, beside McDonald’s, was an old motel called the Plantation Inn, which had a swimming pool out front big as you please. One Fourth of July, my mom and I spent all day around the pool eating fresh boiled shrimp on ice and cold watermelon. My sister Dorothy showed up to the farm with her young son in a semitruck driven by Ginger and surprised us with this 3-year overdue visit.
Dorothy was my fun sister and I looked up to her. Thirteen years older, long black hair, she laughed and smiled and spoke to everyone. She made me feel loved, she was loved dearly and her son was the first and only grandchild, as it turned out, for the next 10 years.
Dorothy had married Bill, her high school sweetheart, when she was 19.
He had joined the Air Force and they set off on their happy life. Mom and I visited them once in Orlando. There was this city park with a huge round fountain ringed with sprays of water under a show of colored lights. The sprays would arc high toward the center, each a different color, and then change color. It was the most magnificent thing I had seen up to then.
As military life happens, Bill was ordered stationed overseas and Dorothy chose to remain with us. My mama and Dorothy found jobs waitressing at a local truck stop in town. Yes, there was a truck stop in Tutwiler, about where the Dollar General is now.
Dorothy hadn’t heard from Bill for a long time and came to find out he had been thrown in jail after getting caught taking a military vehicle off base with the commander’s wife. There was a divorce in probably 10 minutes.
Soon after, a semitruck loaded with tires pulls into the truck stop driven by this woman in clean pressed white slacks and a white printed silk shirt wearing red lipstick and diamonds with ginger red hair. Dorothy being Dorothy and mom being mom, they talk her head off being friendly.
Dorothy packs a bag for her and her son and runs off to learn how to drive a truck and make tons of money in the used tire business and, buddy, did she ever over the next 40 years!
It took a while before Mama or Dorothy figured out what Dorothy had walked into that day. What started out as a career opportunity became first an introduction to drugs to keep her alert on the road, then to financial dependency, then to a lifestyle that didn’t include men.
When Dorothy finally called my mom for help, Mama stood up in church and asked the church for prayers because Dorothy was with Ginger and had her grandson. Mama ensured with her faithful trusting prayer, standing up in that church, that Dorothy would not be able to come home again for three years until that Fourth, then in old age to bring mama home to die.
That Fourth of July spent at the Plantation Inn pool eating shrimp and watermelon was the beginning of understanding that my mama would stand by her children, walk through fire and never turn her back on any one of them no matter what.
We all ended up with different lives away from this farm. Just kept the land and the house. Mama ended up living with Beth, and it turned out Beth had married a man who was not interested in women. Knowing this, she loved him unconditionally and grieved not having children. He asked for a divorce after about 15 years of being supported by Beth.
I would drive mama to wherever Dot and Ginger were living and take my kids, sometimes letting them stay weeks in the summer.
When my children had a stepfather, we opened our doors to his high school senior son because the boy’s mother could not condone his lifestyle choice.
Today my stepson is a fifty-something year old man living with my forever beloved daughter-in-law (who I refuse to think of as an ex-daughter-in-law) in her live-in nanny quarters. He is an Army veteran, a medic from the Desert Storm war. When I go to visit my son, this is where I go to stay because my grandchildren are there and I love these people unconditionally.
I made a personal decision once in California to join the kind of church that would welcome Dorothy as a member. It was an Episcopal church, I loved it. The priest had been married about 30 years when his wife died in a car accident. He then chose a male partner. In my heart, I filed that under grief and nuts.
I visited my daughter’s church a few years ago — a huge church, and I mean huge. There were homemade pride signs from the arch post along the upper outer walls. There was a choir made up of entirely LBGT people and a notice to attend the pride parade.
As a Southern Baptist at the time, I found that to be too much. I wanted to love folks unconditionally, accept them in my church, sing with them without the tutu parades, or posters. I’m sure it shows on my face. I have squinty eyes from not seeing well or hearing all that good either.
My judgement makes its own parade marching across my face. People tell me to smile. Well, I’m not gonna do it.
Ginger was in Dorothy’s life over 40 years. Most of it was business and making money and being family. Ginger had money enough to attract party friends. Dorothy nursed her until the end, unconditionally, even after the money was gone.
Mama came home to die on her land to be with her last living brother — the brother who forced her and my grandfather by gunpoint to the lawyer’s office to declare my grandmother’s will void due to incompetence since my mother was willed a larger share based on the amount of grandchildren.
My mother loved her brother unconditionally. Like I said earlier, I have that judgmental face.
We buried my mama, we buried Beth and Dorothy. If folks talked about tales at the beauty shop or in passing, they had to get around to saying they were a loving bunch of folks that could talk your head off but were loved by all or most.
Am I ashamed or embarrassed? Lord, no. You may have only heard one itty-bitty pinch of words cleaned up to print. My mama raised us to love and accept and be kind, because that’s how she lived while walking through bunches of trials.
