Chapter XXIX. God’s Rights?
I never thought of God as having any rights, only duties to help us make sure we knew how to exercise our right, principally to freedoms. It wasn’t my right to go to Smith College, but my privilege. It wasn’t my right to visit Spain. It was my privilege, my class, my caste. It wasn’t even my right to get married or have children. It was my hope, my love, my choice, and, yes my privilege—until the murmurs and shouts of feminism, housewifery, wifeyness, and at-home mothering became my duty.
I began to think beyond the particulars of my duties and understand that my whole duty was to live my one precious privileged life to its full in compassionate consideration of myself, God, my family, and my neighbors near and far. I had left myself out of all these duties, and I was wilting.
As much as I’d loved Mr. DeNood I had to get off the teeter-totter of the rights/duties paradigm, because I was losing my balance, and I had to get on with that life and DO something. So I got pregnant—again. I also wanted to get out of Alabama, especially since the misogynist old gynecologist had fitted me for a dysfunctional diaphragm. My father was recently retired and he proposed to Bill that they start a cable television business together, with Bill on the electronics and sales and my dad offering business advice and financing. Our ticket out of Alabama! On the road again in our Chevy station wagon named Roosevelt Franklin, we headed “home.” I was nursing a huge belly and our fourth child-to-be—nearly born en route but holding on till we arrived at my parents’ home in North Canton, Connecticut. We lived with them until the house across the street was ready for us to purchase and move into with our family of six. It was 1970, November.
Chapter XXX. Ether
I was surprised to see that Ether was now living with my parents. She had lived in Stamford and had moved upstate with them. Her boyfriend, Willie James, was in prison. I didn’t know why. As nearly as I can reconstruct it, Ether and my mother, who wanted a laundress (imagine!), cooked up a live-in arrangement that suited both of them perfectly. I don’t know what my father thought, but Ether became a member of our family. She was a large woman, strong, affectionate, and popular with the children. She accomplished a task I thought could not be done soon after we arrived at my parents’ home.
It was dark. My sleep was fitful but oddly sound. I was engaged in a dream in which I was drowning and struggling to save myself. As I emerged from the dream state, I realized I was drowning—in a pool of blood. I’d managed to contract an obstetrician in Hartford. Bill and I woke my parents, being very careful not to startle my father who, after reading Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, had purchased a shotgun which he kept at his bedside. (Our family would not be murdered by intruders, but Dad might murder one of us by accident.) We took towels for my blood and hopped in Roosevelt Franklin to head for Hartford Hospital, the exact location of which we didn’t know. Why we did not call an ambulance I have no idea. We made it. The doctor showed up, gave me Pitocin to “induce her labor” he said. My first thought: “More labor?” My second thoughts: “Oh dear God, let this baby be born safely and don’t let me die! You could also make this labor short. Please and thanks.”
John Thomas Brakeman was born about 5:30 a.m. within a couple of hours (not bad, God). John weighed almost seven pounds, and I stayed alive even though this was another placenta praevia birth. This doctor had given my Scopolamine, a drug that gave me powerfully terrifying hallucinations of wild beasts—huge tigers and much more—racing all over the ceiling. When I asked the doctor about this drug he did not tell me it came from a poisonous plant that sedates and has hypnotic properties, but he did reference my “old and tired uterus.” Lots of drugs that addicts adore come from plants. However, this son was fine and gorgeous I thought, and I was alive. Thank you, dear God. I also thanked myself and Bill, my father for not shooting us, and this baby—but not this doctor.
I would also soon thank Ether who took on the task of cleaning up my mess— not only all the sheets and blankets but the entire blood-soaked mattress. I do not know how she did it, but I was in awe—at her physical strength and ingenuity but also at the way she plunged into this task with utter commitment, you could say devotion.
Ether was a blessing in many ways, mostly I think for my mother who had moved from a city to a busy suburb, and now to this practically rural area. My parents had moved there because an attorney had advised them that labor for their new business would be cheaper in this area. Mom was lonely at first and felt out of place. Ether, though still a maid, became also a friend in whom Mom confided from time to time. I know this because a few years later after my sister and her family moved into the house next door—a commune no less!—Ether commented that my mother had one good daughter and one bad one. I was the bad one. Laurie my sister was the good one. I resented Ether so did not get to know her very well. Her perception, however, was accurate, because I was feeling overwhelmed, alone in a marriage that wasn’t working well, drinking too much, and inwardly planning my breakaway from my mother’s lovingly intended control. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if my mother was living her own life or mine. I was inwardly preparing to consider a little job all my own. It was the 70s!
Chapter XXXI. The Silent Divide
In time Willie James got out of prison, and Ether rejoined him back in Stamford. My children had loved Ether, and I trusted her completely with their care. I felt not so much love but admiring affection for this black woman who was so so much more than a maid. She did not do the cooking, but boy, could she iron—not a wrinkle unnoticed. Willie James, for his part, made a tea cart with wheels for my parents as a gift of gratitude for their taking care of Ether. Sometimes, it is hard to tell just who is taking care of whom.
I noticed, however, that Ether never ate meals with my parents or the family whenever we all had dinner together. She had her own room and bath and must have eaten her meals there. That did seem strange. She was part of the family, and not.
Looking back, I do think that this separate eating was race-based. This made no sense at all given other interactions, and yet I was embedded in a family and class system that held dear the so-called “maid” phenomenon. It was clearly racist although it had little to do with mutual affection. Oddly, it had to do only with eating together, chiefly dinner. Was this racism by social distancing? Was it manifested with unique rigidity at the dining room table? Why didn’t Ether eat with us? Would I now invite my friend, Carol Lee, whom I'd first betrayed to my dining table? The irony of this strange tacitly-agreed-upon silent divide happening at a dining room table did not escape me. I had years earlier first met God under another dining room table.
I took little time, however, to reflect much on this divide. I was too busy questioning the status of women and my own in particular—beyond motherhood and my own “maid-ism.”
