Living History, Unknown [books to read in your 20s female TXT] 📗

This cruel punishment went on for months until Emma’s sister, Belle Andreson, came for a visit and put a stop to it.

My mother found some relief from the oppressive conditions of Emma’s house in the outdoors. She ran through the orange groves that stretched for miles in the San Gabriel Valley, losing herself in the scent of fruit ripening in the sun. At night, she escaped into her books. She was an excellent student whose teachers encouraged her reading and writing.

By the time she turned fourteen, she could no longer bear life in her grandmother’s house. She found work as a mother’s helper, caring for two young children in return for room, board and three dollars a week. She had little time for the extracurricular athletics and drama that she loved and no money for clothes. She washed the same blouse every day to wear with her only skirt and, in colder weather, her only sweater. But for the first time, she lived in a household where the father and mother gave their children the love, attention and guidance she had never received. My mother often told me that without that sojourn with a strong family, she would not have known how to care for her own home and children.

When she graduated from high school, my mother made plans to go to college in California.

But Della contacted her―for the first time in ten years―and asked her to come live with her in Chicago. Della had recently remarried and promised my mother that she and her new husband would pay for her education there. When my mother arrived in Chicago, however, she found that Della wanted her only as a housekeeper and that she would get no financial help for college. Heartsick, she moved into a small apartment and found an office job paying thirteen dollars for a five-and-a-half-day week. Once I asked my mother why she went back to Chicago. “I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out,” she told me. “When she didn’t, I had nowhere else to go.”

My mother’s father died in 1947, so I never even met him. But I knew my grandmother, Della, as a weak and self-indulgent woman wrapped up in television soap operas and disengaged from reality. When I was about ten and Della was babysitting my brothers and me, I was hit in the eye by a chain-link gate while at the school playground. I ran home three blocks, crying and holding my head as blood streamed down my face. When Della saw me, she fainted. I had to ask our next-door neighbor for help in treating my wound. When Della revived, she complained that I had scared her and that she could have gotten hurt when she fell over. I had to wait for my mom to return, and she took me to the hospital to get stitches.

On the rare occasions when Della would let you into her narrow world, she could be enchanting. She loved to sing and play cards. When we visited her in Chicago she often took us to the local Kiddieland or movie theater. She died in 1960, an unhappy woman and a mystery, still. But she did bring my mother to Chicago, and that’s where Dorothy met Hugh Rodham.

My father was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the middle son of Hugh Rodham, Sr., and Hannah Jones. He got his looks from a line of black-haired Welsh coal miners on his mother’s side. Like Hannah, he was hardheaded and often gruff, but when he laughed the sound came from deep inside and seemed to engage every part of his body. I inherited his laugh, the same big rolling guffaw that can turn heads in a restaurant and send cats running from the room.

The Scranton of my father’s youth was a rough industrial city of brick factories, textile mills, coal mines, rail yards and wooden duplex houses. The Rodhams and Joneses were hard workers and strict Methodists.

My father’s father, Hugh Sr., was the sixth of eleven children. He started work at the Scranton Lace Company when he was still a boy and ended up as supervisor five decades later. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, quite the opposite of his formidable wife, Hannah Jones Rodham, who insisted on using all three of her names. Hannah collected rent from the houses she owned and ruled her family and anyone else within her reach. My father worshipped her and often told me and my brothers the story of how she had saved his feet.

Around 1920, he and a friend had hitched a ride on the back of a horse-drawn ice wagon. As the horses were struggling up a hill, a motorized truck plowed into the back of the wagon, crushing my dad’s legs. He was carried to the nearest hospital, where the doctors deemed his lower legs and feet irreparably damaged and prepared him for surgery to amputate both. When Hannah, who had rushed to the hospital, was told what the doctors intended, she barricaded herself in the operating room with her son, saying no one could touch his legs unless they planned to save them. She demanded that her brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas Rodham, be called in immediately from another hospital where he worked.

Dr. Rodham examined my dad and announced that “nobody is going to cut that boy’s legs off.” My father had passed out from pain; he awoke to find his mother standing guard, assuring him that his legs were saved and that he’d be whipped hard when he finally got home. That was a family story we heard over and over again, a lesson in confronting authority and never giving up.

Hannah strikes me as a determined woman whose energies and intelligence had little outlet, which led to her meddling in everyone else’s business. Her eldest son, my uncle Willard, worked as an engineer for the city of Scranton, but he never left home or married and died shortly