JETTIE'S RIPPLE EFFECT - A Changed Life
From
Letters to Lori
Chapter 17
“Mission Condemned and Jettie”
Every year there were always one or two students who needed special help and others in the community with very unusual situations that I would try to work with. If they sincerely wanted help and were willing to learn and change by working hard, I would do whatever I could to help them.
Well, this one year, there were two girls with unique circumstances that I was especially trying to help. One was about sixteen and in the second grade. The other was a twelve-year-old who had never attended school. I had determined that I was just going to go all out and get those girls caught up with the other students their age. It didn’t take to long to figure out that the sixteen-year-old just didn’t seem to care if she learned or not. Sometimes she would show up for school and sometimes she would be out for days or weeks at a time. She didn’t live all that far from the school; she could have gotten there if she wanted to. So I decided to put all of my attention on Jettie, the twelve-year-old.
Jettie was actually kin to us. Her daddy was Eddie, one of Ben’s younger brothers. Zora, Jettie’s mama, was barely in her teens when Jettie was born and Eddie was only about fourteen or maybe fifteen. They were both too young to get married, to each other anyway. It wasn’t that it was all that uncommon around here for a girl to get married when she was twelve or thirteen years old, but it was almost always to a man who was much older than she was. A boy of Eddie’s age would have a real hard time taking care of a wife and children, raising crops and animals. And, for sure, that was a lot more than Eddie wanted to take on. Zora wasn’t real keen on responsibility either. She just stayed on with her family and not all that long after Jettie was born, Zora ran off and got married and just up and left Jettie there.
Jettie had a terrible home life. The folks down there where they lived were pretty wild and she had seen and experienced just about everything. There was a lot of drunkenness and violence—and a whole bunch of foolishness. In the family, there had been a lot of incest, and Jettie herself told me that her uncle had been the first one to do anything to her, but there were other family members who had molested her too.
Jettie wanted to come and live with me. She wanted to get away. She wanted to have a chance to go to school and learn. Nobody down where she lived went to school, and if they did, it wasn’t for long. They’d either quit after a year or so, or because of their rowdiness, they would not be allowed to come back. Her grandparents were not all that bad to her, but they never did protect her from the others. They were extremely poor and ignorant. Oh, they were nice enough people, all right, but very short on common sense.
Her grandparents had no objections to me taking Jettie so that she would be able to go to school, but they were a little hesitant. Even with the welfare money they received for Jettie, they hardly had enough to survive on. So I told them, “Just don’t mention the welfare check to anyone. I can keep Jettie without a problem; you can go ahead and keep the money and use it just like you have been doing. Spend it for food and what you need. You don’t have to worry about giving Jettie any money either. She won’t need any. I’ll buy her clothes and give her whatever money she needs when we go to town.” I didn’t want them to take her back just in order to get the welfare money.
For school, I got both first and second-grade books for Jettie. At school, I had to start her in first grade. Because I had so many children in my school, I couldn’t take special time with her there to help her get ahead. But I found a couple of the older girls to help her and then every night Miss Minnie and I would work with her. First, I helped her with her first-grade work, and then Miss Minnie would help her with some of the second-grade work. Sometimes Desmer would come and help her too.
Jettie had a speech problem when she was little that she never did outgrow. Her whole family talked the same way, so it may have been the way she learned to talk. It sounded like she was tongue-tied. She was rather short and a little chubby, but a real pretty girl with black, long hair. She kind of favored Eddie. Every morning I would plait Correne and Jettie’s hair. I guess Correne was nearly eight years old then.
Jettie was rough talking and she drank coffee and used chewing tobacco. When Jettie first came to live with us, I told Correne, “Now, she can do lots of things that you can’t do. I’ve told you what’s right and wrong and how to behave. There’s been no one to tell Jettie those things and since she hasn’t been told, she just doesn’t know any better. And since she doesn’t know better, it would be wrong for you or for anyone to make fun of her and not be her friend. I’ll talk to her when the time is right. In the meantime, we’re just going to love her and we’re going to do our best to be sure she feels welcome.”
From the time Jettie first moved in with us, she loved school and learning. She was excited about everything and eager to please. She had never in all her life received so much attention and she simply glowed with the glory of it. On Saturday night, after her first week at school, I had Correne and Jettie bring in their tub water from the spring so I could heat it for their bath. When it was time for Jettie to get into the tub, I heard her in the kitchen. So I called for her. “Jettie, what are you doing?” She answered, “I’ll be thar rat directly.”
I went in the kitchen to check on her and there she stood at the table with the big ol’ lunch box that Correne, Jettie, and I shared. She had packed it full of biscuits, fried apples, sausage, and few other things. I said, “Jettie, what are you doing?”
“I’m a-fixin’ our lunch. We’re goin’ to Sunday school in the morning and we’ll be needin’ a lunch.” She thought Sunday school would last all day like regular school did.
On the way home from church the next morning, we were walking along towards home with Miss Minnie, Mrs. Click, and some of the children that lived along the way. Jettie was carrying my Bible for me. She was always wanting to help me with something. Well, all of a sudden she got mad. I don’t know what about, but she angrily threw my Bible to the ground. It kind of worried me, her throwing the Bible like that. All the children thought it was awful too. But I told them, “She doesn’t know any better. She’s never been told about God and the Bible.” She really didn’t know anything at all about spiritual things or treating God’s Word with respect.
Why, earlier that week, I had seen Jettie standing looking up at a picture of Jesus on the wall next to Correne’s bed. I had given that picture to Correne for her birthday and I guess Jettie was trying to figure out just who in the world that man was. She saw me looking at her and she said, “Miz Opal, tha’ man up thar, he mi’be rat good lookin’ ifin he ha’ a save an’ a ha tut?” She meant “shave and a haircut,” of course.
I didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh. I didn’t know what to say to the child, so I just said, “Yea, that’s Correne’s picture that I got her for her birthday.” That’s all I knew to say. See, it had never been pointed out that it was a picture of Jesus. She’d had no way of knowing who He was, but by staying with us and going to church, I knew that she would soon know all about Him.
For the first few times she went to church, she was real quiet, never saying anything to anybody. Not one word. When the preacher started preaching, she would lay her head down in my lap and go to sleep, or maybe pretend to. She was as big as I was, but I let her lay there in my lap. I wouldn’t say a word to her. I just left her alone. The preacher and everybody would shake hands with her and talk with her before and after the services and pretty soon she snapped out of it. I guess she could tell that she was loved and accepted and it made her feel comfortable enough to start talking to people and participating in the service.
I kept her dressed just as well as I did Correne. If I got Correne something new, I got Jettie something. She and Correne got along real well. Correne didn’t think a thing about how she was when she first came. I was always real proud of Correne and the way she treated Jettie.
The girls at school were all so kind to her too; they’d do anything in the world for her. I had told them the same thing I had told Correne. When I told them about the tobacco, at first, they thought that was just awful. But after that, I never heard them say a bad word about Jettie the whole time she was there. She didn’t have a cross word with any of them.
Well, it wasn’t long to until the boys felt just the same as the girls. They just loved her to death. Of course, she had to whip up on a few of them before that happened. Why, I’ll tell you what! She could just whip the foolishness right out of them boys. I declare, if they bothered her, she’d just as soon whip them as look at them and she could wear any of them out.
Jettie stayed with me three years; that included the whole time Ben was gone away in the army plus a little time before and then a little after he came back. She was the best thing that ever was. When she was ready to start her fourth year of school, she was in the seventh grade. There was so much change in her. At the beginning, when Jettie first came to stay with us, of course, I had no idea that she could accomplish all of that, you know. It wasn’t me bragging. It wasn’t nothing I had done; it was the Lord. I saw the need and thought I might be able to do something about it—so I took it on. Of course, Miss Minnie and everybody was so good to her. Everybody wanted to help her out.
By that time her grandparents wanted to have her back home. They had moved to a little ol’ shack they had built off the highway up in the hollow above the grocery store so she would be close enough to catch the bus to school there in Del Rio. Her grandparents were getting older and she was big enough now to help them out and be of some benefit to them, besides the welfare check. I knew that they needed her worse than I did. She went ahead to the seventh and probably to the eighth grade. But I don’t think she finished the eighth before she got married. She would have been nearly eighteen years old then.
You would never know that she had been through anything like she had as a child. She became a Christian while she lived with me. She married this young man that came from a pretty good family—the Hux family. He was my Aunt Annie’s sister’s step-grandson. He was a Christian too and worked at the factory. They soon got a little dairy started and she milked cows and sold milk.
She worked like a mule and raised a house full of kids, twelve of them, but I think three of them died young. I believe she had about five girls and four boys and they all finished high school. Isn’t that just something, now! She got every one of her children through school. Nearly every one of them got a job at Stokeley’s and a couple of them still work up there. They all made the best kids that ever were; just turned out good, every one, and I reckon every one of them belonged to the church, too.
It was unusual and that’s all there was to it. It wasn’t anything I had done. She just got out and away from those influences long enough for it to make a difference. I always said if she hadn’t gotten an education, there would have been twelve more uneducated children around these parts and maybe another generation of them after that.
About three years before Jettie died, she had a stroke. She couldn’t talk a word, but she got so she could say single letters like she’d call me O. She’d just smile and be the happiest go luckiest, sweetest thing that ever was. You would never know there was a thing wrong with her except when she tried to talk. She lived about two years that way.
That day when we walked down the road and she threw my Bible, I never knew she would turn out the way she did. She had seen everything. I mean, they had a lot of awful things going on down there and she had seen all of that. She had been right out there when some of them had been killed. Some had been railroaded and some had been shot. She had been through all that madness, but I do believe that the Lord intended from the very beginning for her to be somebody special and He saw to it that it happened.
That’s one reason I always helped everyone that I could, didn’t matter who they were. After all, you just never can tell when one of them might turn out to be like a Jettie.