Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter Read Free Book Online Page A

episode of
I Love Lucy
where she’s working in the chocolate factory and the belt speeds up so fast she has to stuff her mouth and hat and brassiere with chocolate drops. We couldn’t stuff our bras with scrap material, but before we left the plant, management would rifle through the aspirin and lipstick in our purses, looking for pieces of scrap.
    At first, my foot hammered the pedal too hard and I generated too much scrap. Even after I got the hang of it, the machine would get too hot, scorching the filament. But I learned to block out my surroundings and focus on lightly tapping the pedal. There was nothing I could do about the machine’s temperature.
    We were paid by the piece and given a bonus after we made a certain number of tubes. When we exceeded the production numbers, we were quickly broken up, our synchronicity scattered, so that we wouldn’t have to be paid extra. But when it came to the men there, often the women worked against themselves, acting as ridiculous as schoolgirls. I was glad I was married and not caught up in all that nonsense.
    One supervisor had a bad habit of choosing one woman at a time to pick on. When he came around to picking at me, I got so frustrated that I actually started looking for another job, interviewing at Sears and the nearby hospital. When I realized I could make $40 a week somewhere else, or hang in there and keep making $150, I decided to tough it out. I refused to be run off. So I kept earning my paycheck, saving for a new dining room suite we’d put on layaway.

    A FTER ABOUT a year of working, Charles, who had joined the National Guard, was stationed at Fort Belvoir right outside Washington, D.C., for six months. I wanted to take a week off to go see him. At my age now, I know six months isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, but back then I missed Charles so much it felt like a part of me had been amputated. When I put in my request, the foreman said no. We usually got vacation time in July, when the plant shut down, or around Christmas, when production slowed, so my union representative said there wasn’t much I could do about it.
    I told the foreman I was going anyway and he’d see me the following week. I really expected to be fired, but I knew I could find a job somewhere else, with more responsibility and better treatment, just less pay. I was willing to take that risk.
    The night my father drove Sandra and me to the Atlanta airport, I almost didn’t make it onto the plane. I’d convinced Sandra to go with me, since her husband was stationed there as well. We scrimped and saved for our plane tickets and took the cheapest flight, the red-eye. Sandra balked at the sight of the plane. I didn’t want to climb those steps into the plane’s tiny door any more than she did, but she announced that she was staying home. I said, “Oh, no. You are going with me,” and dragged her onto the plane.
    Things only got worse when we arrived. It occurred to me as we zipped past Fort Belvoir on the Greyhound bus that something was wrong. Charles had told me to catch the bus to the base, but I’d never seen a city bus. In my mind, the word
bus
meant Trailways or Greyhound. I jumped out of my seat and told the driver we needed to turn around. He said, “Lady, you’re on the wrong bus. We’re not stopping, so you might as well sit down.”
    I stepped down closer to him and heard myself say in my best Edna imitation, “Listen, you have to stop this bus right now.” Bythen, the base was miles behind us. The passengers became quiet, peering over the tops of the headrests. He stopped the bus.
    Dressed in skirts and heels, with cars and trucks whizzing by us, Sandra and I lugged our suitcases across the six-lane highway. I found a pay phone at a gas station and called a cab. I’d never been so happy to see Charles in all my life. That week we never left the base. I’d spent all my sightseeing money on cab fare, which cost more than my plane ticket.
    The next Monday