Standing on Principle in the Oil Patch

Although she paddled my behind more times than I could ever count, the only time my mother ever slapped me is branded into my memory with the fiery iron of righteous wrath. I was 4 and we lived at the time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where my father worked in the oilfield.

The slap came like greased lightning when I bounced in the house after playing with some of the neighbor kids, reciting in sing-song, “Eeny-meeny, meiny mo, catch a n- — -er by the toe.” Whap! and I was on my bottom, looking up at my beautiful Mama, too shocked even to cry. She apologized instantly and then we both were crying, but her message was conveyed in unmistakable body language: That word, that attitude was anathema in our home.

Mother was a homemaker, though not always happy with that role. She loved my father — and he loved her — with a passion and commitment most of us can only dream of. But her devotion to him took her to places throughout their marriage — small Southern towns, where the oilfield work was — that weren’t a fit for her intellectually or culturally and with which she struggled throughout their marriage to make her peace.

One of the areas of struggle was with the racial attitudes that have always stained the South. Mama was born in Oklahoma, but for reasons I don’t entirely understand, mostly having to do with her Christian faith, her interests transcended those of many — most — of her peers. (She would best be described these days as a “Red Letter Christian” — disinterested in the family values nonsense and deeply committed to compassion and social justice.) She and my dad shared a love of literature and sometimes our family dinners were more like a book club with fried chicken. We — my sisters June and Donna, and my parents — read, discussed and backed up our opinion with citations, great training for the writers and journalists we were to become. She loved classical music and all the finer things, which she held out to us as aspirational. We might be in this place, but we didn’t have to be of this place. Aim higher.

Though we were always poor as church mice, our home always was as clean and lovely as she could make it. And, in Louisiana, we had “help.” When one lived in Louisiana, no matter how low you landed on the economic ladder, if you were a white lady, and not white trash, you were expected to have help. Mama was told explicitly by the neighbor ladies that she had to have a maid. Anyone who didn’t take advantage of the system was socially suspect, and I think for my sisters’ and my sake, she played along. So Mama hired “girls” — a succession of them, women roughly her own age — to come help her with the laundry and cleaning. And, because she truly believed the little poem I heard a thousand times throughout my childhood, “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in God’s sight,” Mom insisted these women sit down and enjoy lunch with us.

We had a parade of these women, sometimes only lasting a day, and Mother was baffled by their leaving. With the next one, she redoubled her efforts to be gracious and welcoming, and they, too, hurried off, glancing over their shoulders for the Hounds of Hell. Until I read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, I didn’t fully appreciate what terror that invitation must have struck in those poor women’s hearts. Our final “maid,” Claudy, was so lovely and Mama liked her so much, she finally broke down and cried and asked her what she was doing wrong. This dear woman patiently explained the rules and told Mama that she would be in danger and perhaps Mother, too, if neighbors saw them eating together at the kitchen table.

Mama was appalled. But she wanted Claudy to stick around so she agreed to let her sit on the back porch — though it never ceased rankling her — but insisted on leaving the door open so we could talk. So we would all sit around the kitchen table having lunch “together,” with this idiotic barrier between us.

One of the great gifts of my life is that my mother made no bones about the fact that it was idiotic. For Claudia’s safety — Mama quickly learned that her real name, not the diminutive form given to “colored people” and pets — was Claudia, and thenceforth Claudia was Claudia in our home — Mother agreed to abide by the rules, but she didn’t pass them on to her daughters as in any way reasonable. We clearly understood that it was a stupid structure we were trapped in, but that it was imposed, not true, and by no means, Mama repeatedly pointed out, a part of Jesus’ teachings — the real deal on human interaction as far as she was concerned.

My eldest sister June remembers from these back-porch tête-à-têtes (she is nine years older than I am and was more aware at the time) that Claudia’s husband couldn’t live with his family if they were to receive the public assistance they depended on. He lived elsewhere and sneaked into the house occasionally under cover of darkness because if even one of his shoes was found in her house when the “welfare lady” came by, Claudia would lose what little stipend she received and would tumble down the rabbit hole of abject poverty.

The system was de facto slavery, state-sponsored. Wages for blacks were kept so low, they had to have the subsidies, and white people got to hire them for next-to-nothing while sneering at them for taking welfare. There was no welfare for intact families, so the fathers had to stay away, then were blamed for being absentee. There is no word for that other than wicked.

Claudia stayed with us, after Mother mastered the code. She stayed because Mama learned her place, not the other way around.

About this time, Mother decided she wanted to get out in the world, make a little money of her own, have something that wasn’t a hand-me-down — regardless of how generously shared — from my father. So she took up selling Beauty Counselor cosmetics door-to-door.

This was a job I could completely get behind because it involved having dozens of tiny lipstick samples in a size I thought entirely fit for a 4-year-old. (After I continued to sample the wares, one of those legendary paddlings disabused me of that notion.) But Mama did let me go with her on her rounds as she walked from porch to porch in our neighborhood, offering samples and talking up the unabashed merits of Beauty Counselor makeup over mere-over-the counter brands.

And then, when she ran out of homes in our neighborhood, she crossed the railroad tracks (which shows you precisely our location in the white-people economic hierarchy: the journey was a short enough that a 4-year-old could make it on her own skinny little legs). And she went down those blocks, selling cosmetics to the black people and Cajuns across that great divide.

And when the white ladies in the neighborhood found that out, they let it be known that Mother had sold her last cosmetics to the white people. Apparently the Beauty Counselor reps were equally horrified, but Mama kept selling, daring them to make her stop. “The ‘colored people’ are nicer and their money spends, too,” she said.

Mama had the beginnings of a pretty good business with those makeup sales, and the “colored folks” were good customers. Who knows where the conflict with all those white ladies might have led, but Dad was tired of working the crazy hours his job involved and was ready to leave Louisiana. If he knew what was going on on the domestic front, he never said anything. At that time, he didn’t necessarily share her opinions on race, but he was under orders to keep any of his “Southern opinions” to himself. And he cared more about her than about his inherited attitudes (which he gave up completely later in life when he and Mama refused to move from their “white-flight” Oklahoma City neighborhood. Another story.) Mama was, in his words — sometimes fondly said, sometimes not — a “pistol.” As an adult he told me that one of the reasons he loved her so much despite her “thorny” temperament was that she had more integrity in her little finger than most people muster in their entire lives.

My thorny, uncooperative Mama was one tiny boat afloat in an ocean of racism and misogyny and all she could do was to do what she could. She didn’t march. She didn’t yell and wage open combat, though I’m sure she often wanted to. She just took as many steps in the direction of right as she could, given where and who she was at the time. She tried to the best of her ability to follow the dictates of her faith that bade her “love one another.” Period. Full stop.

That example is tethered in my heart and I can’t help thinking how different our world would look these days if each of us could be a pistol like Dorothy Compton.

K.C. Compton is a journalist now living in Seattle.