For Life Story Writers

Life stories have long, high-jumping, fast-running legs. They can heal, pass on culture and history to future generations, and set the record straight. They leap into memoirs, autobiographies, songs, poetry, visual art, satires, cartoons, novels, and fact-based fiction. If you're already writing your life stories, or planning to, I hope that my writing journeys shared here will give you ideas for where your journey can take you.


Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Peanut

     There’s no cause for panic, my head tried to reason with some terrified part of me that wasn’t connected to my thinking. Another part of me was dragging me along the sidewalk by my collar. My hair was mashed under a blue and gold freshman beanie. A large dictionary, a high school graduation present from my mother, leaned in precarious balance atop a stack of textbooks rising to inches beneath my chin.
    It was 1962. I was a freshman at Pikeville College, a small Presbyterian school high above the town on the side of a mountain in Eastern Kentucky. Eighty-six crumbling cement steps led from the road that went along the sidewalk in front of the college buildings, down into the tiny town of Pikeville situated in a long narrow valley. A railroad track ran along the foot of the college’s mountain, as did the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River that floated away whole houses in the floods of the spring thaws. Rising up from the other side of the valley, facing the college’s mountain was another, taller tree-covered mountain, distinguished by an enormous rock formation near the top known as Lover’s Leap.
     On this first day of fall classes, unfamiliar faces of men and women, some in blue and gold beanies like mine, passed by me in all directions. If I could just walk faster, I could make it to the safety of my classroom unnoticed. Off to the left on the wide steps of the administration building, a group of men were standing around my pretty roommate, blue-and-gold-beanied Betty. My skinny legs propelled me in a wave of people up those same steps towards the giant entrance doors, one of which Betty was now opening for all to walk through, under the learing supervision of the men who had stopped her. I slipped in without being noticed. A few yards down the hall, I could see the classroom where I was heading. Large drops of sweat dripped single file down the insides of my arms, and my stomach felt like it was inches from my throat. How would I ever get through three days of this, I wondered.
      My books and I collapsed with a loud crash, the former onto the floor and the latter into a desk near the door. My dictionary chose to divide itself in half, face down over the narrow part of the armrest, an unholy treatment of a sacred book, to be sure. And, yes, I was splayed out from the small desk in all directions in a most unfeminine manner, but you know—I hadn’t yet passed through the adolescent all-arms-and-legs stage yet. So why were all the other beanied beasties in the room staring at me? Or were they?
      During the hour of safety in the class, all I could anticipate was the loud clanging of the bell that would ultimately discharge me back into the student stampede, a world of strange rules and frightening people. Where was the confident high school senior I’d been three short months ago? I couldn’t focus on the class proceedings, so decided to try to dissolve my fears with the problem-solving approach. I would list exactly what I was afraid of, then the reasons why I shouldn’t be afraid.


What I’m afraid of:

(1)   MEN!—fat, thin, ugly, smart, stupid, clean, smelly—it didn’t matter. They were still men, and I was a kid. My life experiences had been with boys, and here I was, making that leap alone, into the Big Leagues. What if they didn’t like me? I’d be nothing.



(2)   Public Humiliation—for these first three days of fall term classes, beanied freshmen carrying dictionaries would be the dartboards of the upperclassmen—specifically older students who wanted to flirt with freshmen of the opposite sex. We were to do anything upperclassmen told us to do—look up a word in our dictionary, open doors, carry their books, pick up whatever they dropped, and any other demeaning thing they could think to make us do. Freshmen who disobeyed orders would be sentenced in an evening session of a “kangaroo court.” Being publicly embarrassed in the guise of being a “good sport” would be an intolerable occurrence to me.



Why I shouldn’t be afraid:



(1)   All summer I’ve been working in the Dean’s Office as a workship student at this college and living in the dorm with the summer school students. I’m already settled in!



(2)   I already know at least a third of the upperclassmen, including the student council president, and they seem to accept me. (But this was part of the problem. They knew I was a freshman. If I were caught without my beanie and dictionary, I would certainly be tossed into the public humiliation arena.)



(3)   My own grandmother is the secretary to the president of this college and lives in a small apartment in the faculty building. The students all know and love her. Her reputation alone could keep them from humiliating me.



(4)   Most of the faculty and administration have known me since I was born. I’m safe.



(5)   I came to this small town from after graduating from a modern high school in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA, and should have confidence in myself.



     The list didn’t help. My stomach was in a death struggle with my intestines. If I could make it back to the dorm, I could go to bed for three days, but I’d get behind in my classes, and if the administrators found out I wasn’t really sick, they could take away my workship, and I wouldn’t have the money to pay my tuition.
     The bell rang suddenly and too soon. The rushing students swept me out of the classroom, down the hall, through the giant doors to the top of the front steps. Now it was only a matter of hiding among the descending crowds and making it to the safety of the dormitory, which was a lawn away from the administration building.
     Halfway down the steps a hand gripped my shoulder. I turned to face the student council president David Stacey, and a small sinister army of male strangers.
    “Where are you going in such a hurry?” David asked in an Eastern Kentucky twang that I had to work very hard to understand. “Didn’t you want to open that door back there for us?”
      I tried to stretch a good-sport smile, but it started twitching downwards. Actually, nothing was very funny.
     “I want you to look up a word in your dictionary, so you’d better put down those other books,” David said.
      I dropped the pile onto the cement step and opened the dictionary. Dave told me to look up and read aloud the meaning of a word that he’d made up. When I couldn’t find it, the men all looked displeased, and I was ordered to appear that evening, promptly at 7 p.m. in room 17 for sentencing in the kangaroo court. David gave me a printed ticket and added my name to a list in his notebook. I slowly lifted my stack of books from the cement step and walked down the remaining flight. Now what?
     Afternoon classes and my scheduled work in the Dean’s Office passed too quickly. Before the evening meal, my roommate Betty and I had a few minutes together to share our experiences. Stopped by numerous men and summonsed to kangaroo court, she’d had a wonderful day in the spotlight of male admiration. I tried to share her merriment, but my laughter, joined with hers, didn’t sound the same.
      At dinner, Jim and I sat by ourselves in the cafeteria while I poured out the day’s woes. Both workship students, we had become friends during the summer. As a college junior and a veteran of freshman hazings, he would have been a comfort had my conscious reasoning been available. He related stories of innocent, fun penalties imposed on freshmen in other years of kangaroo courts and kindly laughed off my fears, reminding me that I could only be called to court once, so this would be my one and only sentencing.
     Inside the door of room 17, I suddenly knew how a diver would feel when, after springing headfirst from the high diving board, he discovered there was no water in the swimming pool. Fifteen freshmen received cute little sentences that evening from Judge David Stacey. Betty’s was the first. She was to carry Sonny Dotson’s books for the next two days. Mine was the sixteenth and the last. I was sentenced to push a peanut with my nose along the sidewalk from the front of the girl’s dorm, past a spacious lawn of grass and benches, past the administration building, and all the way to the walkway leading to the men’s dorm. This event was to take place the following evening just before dinner, at a time when students would be crowding the sidewalk enroute to the cafeteria. If I were to estimate this distance, I’d say it was at least a mile, but of course, that would be an exaggeration. However, the administration building itself was a wide, four-story school building structure, full of classrooms and administrative offices.
     All night while my roommate slept, I lay awake in the dark pushing that peanut with my nose and breathing in ants on every inch of that sidewalk. I heard the hushed whispers and saw the ankles and shoes of hundreds of legs walking along on all sides of me while I endured this butt-in-the-air, head-down, knee-forearms fiasco alone. I wondered if David Stacey really intended for me to carry it through. Was that awful moment already planned and scheduled? Or would my appearance at dinner suddenly remind them of the forgotten sentence? Then would they kid me about it in good humor, or would someone produce a peanut and challenge me to good sportsmanship? I asked myself hundreds of other similar questions with no answers as the dormitory room temperature fluctuated from too hot to too cold, and the blackness behind the closed curtains turned to light blue, then orange.
     My first class was at 8 a.m., but I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere that day. Before 7 I was already dressed, slipping quickly across the narrow street and dropping out of sight onto the steps on the side of the mountain. A gravelly pathway, with a dozen large flat stones for steps, led in a gentle slope down and across the side of the forested mountain. Once on the path, I could see my grandmother’s modernish 2-story brick apartment building sticking up out of the trees in the distance. This was the same path she walked each day to and from her office next to the college president’s in the administration building.
     My grandmother accepted my early morning appearance as a normal occurrence. She’d already survived three months of my unpredictable behavior, and she’d already proven she could intuitively guide me through the underbrush of my frequent confusion and fear with a calm, non-reactive approach. On this morning, she was preparing to leave for work as she did every morning, five days a week, in time to be at her desk promptly at 8 a.m. Looking back on that day, I wonder how this kind, intelligent, realistic person was able to behave as though my plan was perfectly acceptable and logical when I told her I would be hiding behind her couch all that day and into the evening.
     Behind the couch seemed to be the best location. Her second floor apartment opened onto a wide porch that faced Lover’s Leap on the opposite mountain across the valley. Her large living room picture window stood beside her smaller bedroom window, both starting at waist-level. Besides the bathroom, the combination living room/dining room/kitchen and the bedroom were the only two rooms in the apartment. The drapes on the windows weren’t closable, so from the porch, the rooms were entirely visible through the windows. A small folding screen behind the couch partially separated the living area from the dining area and adjacent kitchen.
     I’d figured out that everyone at the college knew I was Mrs. Beem’s granddaughter, and they knew where she lived. If Stacey or his cronies came looking for me, they could see into her apartment and see me! My weary depression dictated that I would be sleeping, so I opted for the carpeted living room floor between the back of the couch and the folding screen, instead of the cold floor in the bathroom or kitchen. I also ruled out the small dining area just behind the couch. Grandmother wasn’t the most meticulous of housekeepers, and I didn’t want to share my sleeping space with critters munching on crumbs.
     I was already stretched out behind the couch, when my grandmother said a cheery good bye and locked the door behind her. From the sound of the soft rustle of crinolines beneath her skirt I knew what she was wearing. Every day, even on Saturdays and Sundays, she wore the same style of dress of soft rayon material in tiny pastel flower patterns. They only differed in colors and flowers. On the nights when she wasn’t photographing student activities for the yearbook and developing the negatives in her downstairs darkroom, she hand-sewed her dresses while she watched television. Already in her mid-70’s, my grandmother wasn’t glamorous, yet her flowing skirts and low, graceful necklines falling in soft folds, draped low across her chest and up onto her shoulders, seemed to forgive her misshapen body with the pronounced hump in her back and her one remaining breast, the unbound curve of it showing just inside the top of her dress. She stood barely 5′ tall and wore her white hair neck-length in soft fluffy curls.
     Throughout the long morning, I slept cramped behind the couch, waking up periodically from scary dreams to listen for anyone who might be coming up the steps onto the porch. Finally I did hear quick, light footsteps and the clicking of the front door lock. My grandmother was home for lunch. From behind the couch, I asked about her morning at work and if anyone had asked about me. She assured me that no one had said a word. Of course, as I’d asked her to do, she’d given messages of my illness to the dean for whom I worked and to my instructors, so I was properly excused for the day. My quiet grandmother never shared her thoughts or details of her life with any outsiders, so I absolutely knew that she would never tell a soul where I was or why. In fact, I believe she still holds this secret in heaven.
     At the end of the day she returned from work to begin her evening routine. As it was the time when I was supposed to push the peanut, I was still in grave danger and couldn’t come out to join her for dinner, so we had a short, perfectly normal conversation while she ate her fruit salad and cottage cheese by herself at the small dining table a few feet from the folding screen.
     I was still in and out of sleep, which seemed to be a comforting relief from my anxious state. The crackle of something frying and the smell of something wonderful woke me up. From the glow of electric lights on the ceiling, I knew it was after dark. Grandmother’s crinolines were rustling in the kitchen.
     “Your dinner’s ready,” she said in her sweet, soft voice. The danger seemed to be over. I crawled out and stiffly stood up. There on the table was a steaming plate of my favorite food: fried green tomatoes. It had been a long, difficult day, and I was very hungry. I sat down and ate with a grateful heart to have such a loving, understanding person in my life.
  
Epilogue
      Not a word was ever spoken on campus of that sentence or of my disappearance. By the end of the third and final day of freshman hazing, my mind had finished digesting the last detail of that memory (an inadvertent technique I use to this day for coping with painful events).
     Two years later a new president took control of the college. His first action was to outlaw freshman hazing. His speech to the student body was powerful and emotional, during which he recalled first-hand accounts of injuries and humiliations during freshman hazings in other schools. At the close of his speech he opened the floor for comments. Angry students argued that the hazing at this college had never taken any of those forms. It was clean fun, they said, meant only to acquaint the students with each other and make them feel at home.
     I listened with detached interest. I could see why the president’s past experiences had led him to take that action, and I sympathized with the students for their expressed point of view. My own hazing trauma remained submerged in a world that didn’t exist.
    In 1977, eleven years after my college graduation, a newspaper report of a college hazing incident unlatched the door of this hidden memory. Now in fearful moments when I need my grandmother’s couch to hide behind, I can see her calmly standing by me in another form, and I feel very loved and very safe.


Renelle West
Somewhere on the road

1978

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