Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [5]
Living as we did on the fresh produce and livestock we grew or raised in our own backyard, I never felt I had gone without. It was only later that I realized the sacrifices my parents made. “We’re not hungry. You two finish this up,” they’d say as they divided their leftovers between us. Ours was a strong Methodist community, so my parents said grace at every meal and attended church weekly. If Pat and I skipped Sunday school, Pa would chase us around the yard with a dose of castor oil. We received the same punishment or a mouthful of carbolic soap if we were caught smoking homemade cigarettes rolled from Pa’s dried tobacco leaves in the smokehouse—especially when we accidentally set it on fire.
Although my strong-willed mother and I often clashed, she instilled in me from an early age the conviction that, if I wanted any sort of life, I had to get out of Bosworth. I’d watch her reflection in the mirror as she was applying her lipstick and fixing her hair each morning and wonder if I’d ever be as beautiful or as fearless. I could tell from her faraway expression that she fantasized what her life would have been like if she’d been born someplace less dull. As for me, I didn’t know any different; Bosworth was all I’d ever known. I’d heard talk of how much more exciting things were beyond its windy plains; I’d gaped at the stylish kiss-curls and clothes of my Kansas City cousins when they came to stay. I’d inherited my mother’s curiosity about the world, but at nine years old I was happy to live skipping distance from the general store and dip freely into the gummy beans. Little did I know what a candy jar my life was to become.
By the time I was ten years old, my mother had finally worn my father down. There were no more one-sided arguments or uncomfortable silences; we were off to start a new life in Wichita. Despite how he must have felt, Willis Blakeley went quietly.
With the help of her sisters, Mother rented us a house near the Little Arkansas River and enrolled me in the nearest school. That summer of 1937, I was plucked from a tiny, red-painted, six-room primary school and dropped into an enormous inner-city school where most regarded me with disdain. A stranger to cashmere in my homemade clothes, I was the tall, skinny country girl with the “twang.” It had never occurred to me before that I had an accent.
Almost overnight I went from cheerful and headstrong to quiet and shy. Taller than everyone else, I developed a peculiar way of standing by bending my knees and hunching my shoulders that can’t have endeared me to anyone. When a gang of girls knocked my books out of my hand one day in the playground, the only black boy in the school helped me pick them up. I’d never seen a black person before, but he was kind and thoughtful and I always made a point of speaking to him after that, even when the friends I made later warned me not to.
While I was trying hard to fit in, my mother found her niche immediately as the manager of two budget dress stores known as the Dixie Shops. My father, however, was like a catfish out of the water. He found a job selling shoes, but it lasted only a week, and after that he remained home alone, lost in his memories of Bosworth. He missed the country, his family and friends, and until the day he died he hoped Mother would agree to move back there. Years later, my mother discovered a secret stash of money he’d saved for the journey “home” just in case she ever changed her mind. She never did, of course, and he returned only for the occasional vacation and family funerals. Pa Hillis went first; then Ma fell down the basement stairs and broke her hip, dying soon afterward. My father came back to Wichita with the sad realization that there was nothing left for him in Bosworth anymore.
When my aunts Mary and Fontaine got caught up in the craze for the evangelist Billy Graham, my mother followed suit. As a “born-again