My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (9 page)

The Select is where I saw some of the most influential films of my life:
The Night of the Hunter
, a noir classic with Robert Mitchum.
The Miracle Worker
, with Anne Bancroft—with whom I was thrilled to work once I became an actor myself. My favorite of all time, though, was
To Kill a Mockingbird.

There are so many reasons why I love that film, and the book on which it’s based, but what really pulled me in, I think, was the depiction of small town life in the South, a time and place where “somehow it was hotter then.... And people moved slowly.... A day was twenty-four hours long, but seemed longer.” The fictional town of Maycomb reminds me so much of the Quitman I knew in the 1950s and ’60s. And the way the story is observed through the eyes of a young girl resonates to my bones. I was a tomboy, like Scout, who climbed trees and spoke her mind and hated wearing dresses; who kept a box filled with private treasures stashed under her bed. Like her, I had a wise and capable father who loved me unconditionally and never tried to break my wild spirit. My dad was my Atticus Finch. But I was much luckier than Scout, because I had a mother.

There were other similarities. While Quitman had never gone through a racially charged trial like the legal lynching of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman—a scenario that drives the narrative of
To Kill a Mockingbird
—my hometown was just as much a part of the Jim Crow South as the fictional Maycomb. I’d heard whispers of a lynching by an angry mob on the courthouse square sometime back in the nineteenth century and rumors of a dark side to my otherwise sweet little town.

The first time I noticed the segregation of races was at the Gem Theater, where African-Americans had to line up outside a separate side entrance and then sit in the balcony. I didn’t understand it. Pretty soon it dawned on me that whites and blacks had separate just about everything. The Wood County courthouse had separate bathrooms: I’ll never forget the signs, one for
WHITE LADIES
and the other for
COLORED WOMEN
. Even as a child, I knew that had to hurt someone’s feelings. During my days of snooping around the courthouse, I couldn’t resist walking into the colored restroom to see what it looked like. An African-American woman whirled around from the sink when she saw me. “You’d better get yourself on out of here, young lady,” she scolded. “You don’t belong in here.” Wide-eyed, I backed out the door. The courthouse also had separate drinking fountains labeled
WHITE
and
COLORED
. (My husband, Jack, grew up in Illinois, and the first time he saw a “colored” drinking fountain he thought that rainbow-colored water was supposed to come out of it.) The Jim Crow rules were perplexing, but segregation was all we ever knew. To white children, it was an abstract concept. So many white folks say, “There was never any trouble in our town,” but that’s only because it wasn’t trouble at all for them. So I don’t really know what race relations were like in Quitman, because it really didn’t touch my world. Except for one time.

Like just about everywhere throughout the South, whites and blacks in Quitman had their own schools and lived in separate neighborhoods. Sometimes we’d be driving through the “colored” part of town, and my brothers and I would stare out of the car windows at families sitting on their front porches enjoying the evening; the kids would look back at us with similar fascination. We might as well have lived on different planets.

But if their mothers or fathers did housekeeping or sewing or yard work, they would often bring their young children along and we would play together. Churches and schools might be separated, but commerce was different, and trading for services was the way people got to know one another back then. And all children are color-blind unless they’re taught otherwise.

We had some favorite friends, Sevitra and Brusker Fannin, whose mother, Martene, was a schoolteacher who also had an upholstering and sewing business at home. Mother often drove out to her house to drop off fabrics or pick up finished pieces. Robbie and I always went along to play. The Fannins lived on rolling farmland a few miles north of town, and they had the softest, sandiest soil in their yard, like a sandy beach or flour that had been carefully sifted, so that it felt wonderful on bare feet. We loved playing with Sevitra and Brusker, just running around like crazy while our mothers visited inside.

It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and playing hard made us thirsty. There was a covered well beside the house, and one afternoon we all climbed up there for a drink of water. Brusker lifted aside the wooden lid and dropped a bucket deep into the well, while we gathered around in a circle, staring down into the hole. After Brusker hoisted the bucket up with a rope, he filled a metal dipper and started passing it around. Everybody took a sip, and then it was my turn. This was the time of polio, and I’d been raised never to drink after anybody. I didn’t even drink after my brothers. Now the prospect of sharing seemed even more illicit, and thrilling.
I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing
, I thought, as I held the dipper to my lips and drank long and deeply. It was the coolest, sweetest drink of water I’d had in my life. In that moment I had an epiphany. From then on I would trust my own instincts about people and their rules. If I always did what was expected, I might miss out on the most wonderful things in life.

I started riding cows at a young age. My parents thought I was too little for a pony, so I decided the old milk cow that grazed in the fields across from our house would have to do. My girlfriend Vickie Johns would run the cow down in the gully and I’d jump on its back. Then I’d run it down in the gully and she’d jump on its back. We’d ride that cow until we got pitched off, then we’d start all over again. One day a lady called my mother and said, “Mrs. Spacek, do you know your daughter and her little friend are out back riding a cow?” When I got home my mother said, “Honey, you shouldn’t be riding that cow. You might sour its milk.”

Vickie Johns and I were always having adventures together. Sometimes in the summer months, when Vickie was sleeping over with me, we’d wait until everybody was asleep in the house and then slip out for midnight walks around town. In our pajamas. We couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, and I can’t tell you why we did it other than for the thrill of doing something forbidden. Of course we would take Vickie’s old dog, Queenie, along with us for protection, as we walked the back streets toward town, past the empty brick school buildings, past the church, through the cemetery with the moon throwing scary shadows between the rows of stones (we hurried a little through this part), and then looped back into the center of town with its quiet shuttered stores. We weren’t afraid of anything except getting caught by the night watchman, Shorty Horton. There was no crime to speak of in Quitman back then, and we didn’t have much of a police department. The county sheriffs and Shorty were the only protectors of public order while the city slept.

Shorty’s nickname was not ironic; he was a very, very small man who wore a large cowboy hat and cowboy boots and patrolled the night streets in a very large pickup. We knew he would turn us in to our parents if he found us wandering around in pajamas. So we kept our eyes and ears open for that white truck; it added to the danger of our walks. One night he nearly caught us. We were rounding the corner of a three-sided parking shed, just past the graveyard, when suddenly there was Shorty, coming the other way. We ran around the other side, but he’d already spotted Queenie standing next to the building so he decided to stop and investigate. He was a nice man and he leaned down to pet Queenie.

“What are you doing out this time of night, girl?” he asked the dog. “Shouldn’t you be at home asleep on the rug?”

He pointed his flashlight beam in our direction just as we made the corner. With our little hearts pounding—and trying not to giggle—we stayed just ahead of him as he circled the building. He finally gave up and drove off into the night. We ran the whole way home with Queenie as our sentinel.

I was always a good student, but I wasn’t the smartest in my class. That was Hill Goldsmith, my sometime boyfriend. We sat next to each other in first grade while we were taking achievement tests. It was multiple choice so we had to color in a little circle with our pencils next to the right answer. I happened to glance at Hill’s paper and saw that one of his answers was different than mine. So of course I changed my answer. But when I got my paper back, the answer I’d copied from Hill’s paper was wrong. You would think that experience would have taught me a lesson, but I had one more ill-fated brush with cheating.

Vickie Johns was my childhood partner in crime. We were both in Mrs. Frost’s fourth grade class when we came up with another brilliant idea: I liked to do math, which was simple for me, but hated writing out all the spelling sentences. Vickie loved to write but hated math. So we decided to join forces and do each other’s homework. We figured it was stupid to have to suffer through work we didn’t like, when the solution was so obvious. For about a month we had a real production line going. The last thing I’d always say when I handed Vickie my assignment was “Remember! Write like me!” Apparently, she was a pretty good counterfeiter. But we made the fatal mistake of bragging about our system to some friends.

One day Vickie and I convinced our mothers that we were both sick and that we should be allowed to stay home from school and convalesce together at my house. We had a big time lounging in our pajamas. When we got tired of reading comic books, we decided to do an art project in the bathtub. First we melted down dozens of wax candies that we had been hoarding—those miniature soda bottles filled with horrible, sweet, colored liquid. Then we sculpted a magnificent horse out of the wax. Vickie and I were congratulating ourselves on our creation when the phone rang. It was a friend warning us that we were in deep trouble. Another one of our classmates, emboldened by our absence from school, told Mrs. Frost what we had been up to. First we panicked. Then we came up with a plan: We’d apologize and give Mrs. Frost the wax horse as a peace offering, hoping we could bribe her into forgetting about the whole thing.

The next morning Vickie and I slunk into Mrs. Frost’s class a few minutes early and presented her with our great gift. She put it on her shelf without saying a word and then told us she’d like to talk to us at recess. We sat through the class wringing our hands, worried sick. Not only was Bonnie Frost our teacher, but she and her husband—yes, Jack Frost!—belonged to the same church and knew our parents. Disaster loomed. But much to our relief, Mrs. Frost didn’t turn us in to the elementary school principal, Mr. Goolsby. She talked to us about the importance of doing our own homework, that it was about learning, not just grades. We promised her we would never do it again, and didn’t. But every Sunday, Vickie and I would see her talking to our parents at church, and the sweat would drip off of us. She never told on us in all those years.

Sometimes I got in trouble in school without even knowing it. Pop Pearce, who taught science, took points off my grade for every day I was chewing gum in class. Except he never warned me, and I only found out when I got a low grade on my report card.

I couldn’t be mad at him, though, because his wife, Peggy, was one of Mother’s best friends. Peggy was a dear, sweet woman who was frightened of many things. When Pop, who was also the football coach, was with the team on away games, Peggy could only sleep with the radio on and a baseball bat under her bed. When I was about nine years old, Mother would send me over there to stay with her so she wouldn’t be so afraid. She had two children, Mike and Andy, who weren’t that much younger than me, but I babysat for them sometimes. I’ve been friends with Mike and Andy all my life.

I’ve known for a long time that some of the best things in life you just have to wait for, like going barefoot and riding your own horse. I must have driven my father crazy begging him for a pony of my own. When I was eleven or twelve, he finally gave in. Daddy had a conversation with Granville Benton, the president of the bank and the town’s premier horseman, and asked for help in picking the right horse for me.

“I don’t know much about horses,” my dad told Granville. “Do you think you can find one for Sissy that won’t kill her?”

A few weeks later, Granville pulled up in front of our house with a horse trailer. He’d found me a twelve-year-old buckskin roping horse, well behaved and small, somewhere between fourteen and fifteen hands. I couldn’t believe my luck. He was so beautiful, with a dark mane and tail and a tawny coat, the color of the quarry rocks they use to build houses in Central Texas. I named him Buck, and he turned out to be as smart as he was gentle. I learned to ride him bareback. I cried when I finally put a saddle on him and lost that physical connection, the heat of his coat and the feel of his spine and his muscles working as he moved.

About the same time Vickie got a pinto she named Rebel Joe. He was very young and athletic and was quite a character. She would give him a pop on the rump with a little wire switch to get him to go, but it would also make him buck. We thought it was fun to ride bucking horses, and I got good at hanging on. Pretty soon I started fancying myself a real cowboy. When we watched
Bonanza
on television on Sunday nights, I’d imagine myself as the fifth Cartwright, rounding the corner right after Little Joe.