My mother’s youth was burned away, more by working in the fields than by the time, making her old much too soon.

When that work was gone she did whatever she could find. She stripped long rows of sugar cane and picked tomatoes and picked up pecans, doing backbreaking stoop labor, sometimes for money and sometimes for “halves.” She cleaned the houses of the rich folks and flipped hamburgers at a café and took in washing and ironing. People would drive up to our house in nice, big cars and leave off bundles tied up in sheets. She washed some of the clothes in a sink and some in the old wringer washing machine on the back porch.

She ironed in the tiny bedroom I shared with my brothers. I used to go to sleep, countless nights, with the clothes of strangers heaped around my bed, under strict orders not to touch them. I touched them anyway. She only made a few pennies a shirt or blouse, but she worked hours and hours at it, dripping sweat, the hiss of the iron like a live thing. It seemed all she did was work. She did not go on dates even though she was still a pretty woman in those early years. She did not go to church because she did not want people to stare at her, because she did not want to have to explain where her husband was. At least, that was part of it.

It would be years before I realized the main reason she exiled herself to the little house, going out only to buy groceries. She avoided crowds, even our school. It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away. She could live with the fact that she wore old tennis shoes with the toes worn clean through, but she was afraid we would be ashamed of her.

If we passed a store, she bought us Golden Flake barbecue potato chips and Grapicolas while she pretended that, “No, child, I ain’t hungry. I’ll just ask them if I can have some water.”

Like I said, we were too stupid to realize that, as our lives spun round and round on these trivial things, my momma’s life was running through her hands like water.