about it!

An honest bank?

Sad to say, this is where

I bank—in Atlanta on Peachtree

across from the Brookhaven

Oglethorpe Marta Station.

Alabama. September, 2005.

My assignment: A magazine story about poverty in Alabama. Fifteen hundred words. Real people, real names. Due in two weeks.

High stepping, but I knew where to look. I’d worked at walk-in helping social service agencies, taught school in rural Alabama, and clerked at debtors’ court. I cast a big net. Soon, the director of a women’s shelter suggested I meet someone on her staff.

That’s how I came to know Ginger McNeil.

We met at a sandwich shop. A woman dressed in lime green and brown linen dashed through the door. I spotted her briefcase and guessed she was Ginger, hurrying from court in the next county.

The woman stopped short. The tentative expression that crossed her face as she scanned the room turned into a broad smile when she saw me waving from a back corner. Her brown page boy bounced against her collar as she made her way toward me, hand out, half-way through an introduction even before she reached my table.

“I’m late,” she said, dropping into her chair, “but at least I’m not in jail.”

I did a doubletake.

“Auto theft.”

She dropped that bomb with a straight face.

“In the courthouse parking lot. Under the nose of the sheriff.”

Her eyes were the color of coffee. I spotted mischief in them and smiled.

She leaned forward in her seat and lowered her voice.

“As I was racing to come here. My key wouldn’t fit in the ignition. Then I heard a tap on the window and there stood the judge. I was in her car, not mine. I ran before the law came.” She threw her head back and laughed at herself.

Her words flowed but she hung onto mine. She talked about her work with abused women and I could read on her face the satisfaction in it. I ate my chicken salad.

 But abuse isn’t about poverty. I didn’t know.

We talked through lunch and refills of iced tea. Pleasant chatter, but the clock was ticking toward my deadline. I needed to find a source for my story.

Just as I thought we were finished, Ginger said, “I’m a former client of the shelter. I didn’t have two dimes the day they took me in.”

I settled back into my chair.

“I lived in a cabin in the woods, too poor to afford electricity and too afraid of my husband to leave. I even made my own soap.”

“You made soap?”

“From hog fat. You have to butcher the hog first.”

She told me she slaughtered, butchered and canned, shingled roofs and bush-hogged land—whatever it took for her and her two sons to survive.

“And you were afraid?”

“He hit me.”

This woman with a briefcase. What I heard clashed hard against the image before me.

She drew a map to the cabin, twenty miles north up the Natchez Trace, left on one dirt road, right on the next. I promised to meet her there the following Saturday.

The first road I found quickly, then I topped a rise and looked for the second. Nothing but scrub oaks, piney woods and red dirt lay ahead. Three times I drove back and forth before I spotted tire ruts between two scrawny oaks. Then the open gate appeared against the undergrowth.

The road wasn’t hidden, but nothing marked or announced it. Had I not known there was a road and a house and once a family living back in the trees…that thought played in my mind even after I returned home late that afternoon.

The road dipped, rose and circled through the trees to a small clearing in the midst of sheds and a cabin. Ginger had heard my car and she bounded toward me. No briefcase today. Instead she wore jeans and heavy boots. The cabin behind her was a cracker box with a tin roof and board and batten walls. Leggy red geraniums strained out of a clay pot by its front door.

Ginger ushered me inside, past the black wall-to-wall wood stove that dominated the first room, and through two bedrooms hardly larger than their beds. Cozy. Neat. We popped cans of Diet Coke and stepped out into a dry day with no breeze on this last weekend of September.

“I’ve made changes,” Ginger said. “What you see as a clearing used to be so thick with vines and thorn bushes, someone could be within thirty yards of the cabin and never see it. That’s how Mike planned it. He didn’t want company coming.”

We strolled along the dirt road and picked through tall grass to a metal contraption attached to a hickory tree.

“See this winch? After Mike slaughtered a hog, we hoisted it here to cure. And that fire pit over there?” She pointed toward a mound of gray ashes. “That’s where I boiled the fat with lye to make soap.”

They had dug a pond and stocked it with fish. “We caught cats and I canned them over the wood stove.”

I’d visualized the cabin tucked behind tall trees in a deep forest, solitary and haunting, not cluttered with sheds and tools. I hadn’t taken into account the realities of living off nothing, the making-do with whatever could be caught, grown, or bartered.

We stopped beside what looked to me like a concrete block chimney.

“This is a final exam.” Ginger touched her hand to it. “It’s a smokehouse. My boys were barely teens when they built it. Had to use solid geometry, math, and physics.”

The boys had passed their test.

I failed mine I tried to operate the chicken plucker but, without a chicken, I didn’t catch on. All I got was a red face while Ginger got a good laugh.

I was ready for shade. We opened more Cokes and settled into lawn chairs under hickory trees.

“You lived like pioneers or survivalists,” I said. “Did you choose this way of life? How did you get here?”

“How long do you have?” Ginger laughed, then her face grew serious. “Was there a choice? Yes. I made my choice when I married Mike. He chose this way of life for us and I bowed to his decision. I never expected it to lead to such poverty.”

She pushed her hair off her face and took a swallow of her Coke. “Strange as it may seem, poverty can be a choice, especially when it allows one person to control another.”

We talked for more than an hour. When I stood up to leave, Ginger pointed to a path. “The root cellar is up there. You’re welcome to see it. I don’t go there.”

“Not me. I’m claustrophobic.”

I didn’t question why Ginger shied away from the root cellar until I was in the car on my way home. I had an hour’s drive to marvel at her skills and the strength and energy they required. And to ponder why they had lived as they did in a place so hard to find.

I wrote fifteen hundred words, but the story begged for more. Much more.

When I approached Ginger about a book, she mulled it over for several weeks, talking with her family over the Thanksgiving holiday, exploring her feelings and theirs. 

Ginger and I met again at the sandwich shop. She was somber and thoughtful.

“When I sought safety at the shelter,” she said, “my bed was waiting, the sheets already turned down. I had my own kitchen with a refrigerator and gas stove, and food, shelves and shelves of food, canned goods and food in boxes. Everything I needed. Somebody had prepared all that just for me and my kids.”

She paused, her eyes focused over my left shoulder, locked on something I would never see. A slight smile crossed her face

“They didn’t know my name or that I’d be coming, but they did this for me,” she said. They anticipated what I would need. I’m still overcome with gratitude for this person … these people. I’ve wondered how to repay them.”

She placed both palms on the table, and her eyes suddenly shone with tears. “Telling this story is what I can do. It’s worth whatever the cost is to me.”

Whatever the cost. Those words had little meaning for me. I had no measure then of how great the risks would be for Ginger.

We began regular conversations wherever we found a quiet private place, her house, a secluded corner at the public library, an artist friend’s studio. Sometimes we pored over photos, journals, letters, some dating back to childhood, some from her children to her, including the son she lost.

Ginger was unflinchingly honest, even when probing scarlet pain and remorse.

“Everything I was taught and believed and have done, it’s all part of me. It’s what made me a sitting duck for a man like Mike. And it’s where I drew my strength in the end.”

Long before the magazine article turned into a book, I knew I had to speak with Mike. I had to allow him to tell his side of the story. So I phoned him, asked if he would meet with me. He agreed.

I was apprehensive. I had no idea what to expect of him, especially when I’d have to confront him with questions about physical abuse. Was I courting danger? I didn’t know. 

We met at a Waffle House in the late afternoon. His choice, his territory. He’s a regular there. But it’s a public place, which I hoped meant a safe place for me.

I stepped inside the doorway and stopped. Several men were hunched over their coffee and ashtrays at a gray counter. In booths opposite the counter, other men and a few women talked in twos and threes. Two men sat alone in two booths, the first with his nose in a book.

I approached the second, a man with gray-blonde hair, a white mustache and bushy eyebrows who was scrambling to a half-stance in the booth.

“Mike?”

“You got me.”

He smiled. His eyes were Paul Newman-clear-blue and his face was pleasant. He slid back to his seat even as we shook hands.

Firm handshake. Strong hands. Medium height, fit enough for a man in his fifties. Wearing a white dress shirt like he’d rather not, unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves rolled up, and no undershirt.

“Have a seat.”

I did and ordered coffee. I never glanced at the man reading the book. He was my husband, ready to come to my aid if needed.

There was no need.

Mike fidgeted. He smoked nine Winston Reds to three cups of black coffee. But he spoke candidly about his marriage to Ginger.

“Ginger was always out to please. Nobody in her growing up gave her approval, and I had to turn all that around. Most of my life I spent battling to get her to take up for herself.”

He talked about picking peas and going to church, at no time showing any animosity toward his former wife, a woman whose public speeches identified him as a batterer.

Neither of us had mentioned the subject, though it was the reason I’d asked for this meeting.

“Ginger told me there was abuse, physical abuse. Was there?” I tensed, ready to flinch or duck.

“Yeah, there was.” He thought for a minute. “One time I hauled off and slapped the fool out of her. She said I shoved her other times. But you have to remember, this was over twenty years.”

“So you acknowledge there was abuse that included physical abuse?”

“That’s what I said.”

Matter-of-fact. Without apology.

I wrapped up the conversation, thanked him and was five steps toward the door when he called out to me.

“Hey! You didn’t pay for your coffee.”

Heads turned in my direction. I felt my face flush. “You’re right. Sorry.”

I settled my bill and left. Mike won our first encounter.

Two months later, with the article growing into a book, Mike emailed me that he wanted to participate. I didn’t know why and didn’t ask, afraid he’d reconsider and bolt.

We continued to meet at the Waffle House until its clatter chased us to quieter spots. By then I was less uneasy around him. He never denied any of the bad times. “Men will understand. Men know what the program is.”

He has no remorse. “I wouldn’t change a thing if I could go back.”

To Mike’s thinking, he and Ginger couldn’t be where they are now without having experienced it all.

Mike has a story too. It trickled out as if from a medicine dropper. He announced early on he would have “his say,” and one day he did just that. Mike took me inside his skin or let me think he did.

Either way, I came to appreciate what it revealed of him, even the parts that to this day I can’t fully comprehend.

This story has many voices. Ginger and Mike speak, as do their family, friends, coworkers, and court officials. They tell what they remember, or what they chose to divulge, about things that happened a long time back, then comment on them in the present.

I met with them from the corner where Alabama meets Tennessee to south Texas from 2005 to 2009. A few other people I chased down by telephone. All knew they were speaking to a writer doing research toward publication. Occasionally their memories differed.

The dialogue, scenes, every part of the story is compiled from these interviews and my research. I’ve adhered to the facts as closely as possible, wherever possible. But sometimes no one remembered each detail, or the specifics were protected by confidentiality, such as scenes at the shelter. At those times, and with Ginger’s or Mike’s help, I exercised creative license while remaining faithful to the essence of the story.

2005. That’s when I came in. Not that I intended to do more than listen, record, and tell. But my questions took people back to old places, sometimes dark places, and this time I was along when they relived the memory. Sometimes they uncovered something new.

And so I joined the journey.

This is Ginger’s story and Mike’s, yet it doesn’t begin with them and, despite Ginger’s prayers, it may not end with them.

This from Lundy Bancroft, an authority on abuse and especially on abusive men:

“Rarely has a story of a woman’s courageous fight for freedom been told in such an eloquent and moving way. And, even more unusual, we get an open view into the twisted mentality of a vicious man who was able, like so many abusers, to convince the outside world that he was normal. A hard book to put down.”

Lundy Bancroft, author of “Why Does He Do That?” and co-author of “Should I Stay or Should I Go”

From Jedwin Smith, twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative rporter; author of Our Brother’s Keepers, Reader’s Digest Book of the Year, and Fatal Treasure, a nonfiction soon-t0-be a movie.    

This story grabs hold of your heart and squeezes it dry. It is a tale so touching, so emotionally overwhelming, women will cringe and thank God they never had to walk in Ginger’s shoes, and men will wish they could have met Ginger’s husband in a dark alley. I applaud author Jennie Helderman’s gift for writing, I marvel at Ginger’s courage for sharing it.

From a police officer:

From the executive director of Voices for Alabama’s Children:

“Couldn’t put it down…had to know what happened to Ginger, but didn’t want it to end. Now can’t get it out of my mind…Performs a service yet good enough to take to the beach.” 

Sycamore bark

“With the careful eye of a journalist and the committed heart of a creative writer, Helderman provides witness to the kind of domestic violence and its after-effects that too many women suffer without the ability to express its tragedy. As the Sycamore Grows becomes a fully realized and powerful account as Helderman twines her voice with that of Ginger, an abuse survivor.  Such a story demands that it be told loud and clear, which is just what Helderman does.”

Sue William Silverman: Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir.

_________

The bridge that inspired the logo.

and chief bill-payer.

If experience is the best teacher, then I’ll earn a graduate degree soon.

Sycamore will launch in October, to coincide with National Domestic Violence onth. Eagle Eye Book Store in Decatur asked to host my launch party. Then I’ll travel to Florence, AL for a second launch, this time at the Kennedy-Douglas Center.

In the meantime, the book’s web site will be up by July 4 and will take pre-orders at a discounted price. $16.95 retail for this 6×9 soft cover TRUE story. Knock off $2 for pre-publication orders. All to be found on www.asthesycamoregrows.com.

At least in book publishing. 

Learn from experience

This well-known sycamore tree actually is at Hadrian’s Wall in England.

We were in rehearsal one afternoon when Britt Leach skidded his bicycle down the gravel driveway. Britt lived a few blocks away. He was older than we were, by almost a year, and he would enter junior high school at the end of the summer. A 7th grader.

We were in awe.

Britt was in love. He had a crush on Mary Louise, who had the lead in the play.

Not only was Britt an older man, he had experience in theatre and business. He put on puppet shows for kids’ birthday parties.

“Where’s your curtain?” he asked.

Curtain? It hadn’t occurred to me that we needed a curtain.

We searched through the basement and found an old wool Army blanket. Britt threaded a wire through it, strung it up somehow and, voila, we had a curtain. That opened and closed. The curtain was the first of his questions that led to help for us and an excuse for him to join in the production.

In fact, I think he delayed the opening night for a couple of days so we could get ourselves together. We needed one more day.

Our actresses had stage poise, even when the murderer reached for a rope that we had failed to provide as a prop. They mimed and the play carried on. Not that the audience of parents and neighbors in assorted lawn chairs would have complained. One mother had enticed her friend along, the friend being a columnist for the local newspaper.

Britt went on to Hollywood and a career as a character actor. You’ve seen him on the screen and television many times: Father of the Bride, Fuzz, The Last Starfighter, MASH, Hill St. Blues, Spencer’s Pilots, The Waltons, St. Elsewhere, The Dukes of Hazard and the list goes on.

I’ve never written another play.  After all, I got a rave review when I was ten. How could I top that?

parents and neighbors lined up in assorted lawn chairs as an appreciative audience.

My friend’s mother invited me along on a trip through the Caribbean. A heady invitation for me. People didn’t hop across oceans back then quite like they do now and spring break meant two days off from school to play in the back yard.  Leaving the country was a big deal. At least for me and my family.

My friend’s mother like to travel. She also liked to test her French and Spanish which she never mastered despite years of study. She was bright, Phi Beta Kappa, with a love for drama that didn’t play well on our small-town stage. Translate that to few friends and a need for company on her travels through the islands, even if the company were teens.

So we began an adventure which led to my first martini and only voodoo ceremony. It was also my first encounter with racial integration and all the issues it raised. Most I had never considered, but this time I was among the minority.

I kept a journal and I still have it. Not as detailed or in depth as I’d like now, but what a 15-year-old chose to record. More from it and of this trip later.

s

Move over, WalMart people.

Attributed to a very well-regarded artist

Who is she? What’s she thinking?

Do you know this woman?    What do you see here?

Wore an orange jump suit to all the football games?

You know when you’re watching a game on TV and there’s always one voice in the crowd who yells over all the rest? He’s the one. And I had a blind date with him once.