Through It All

In my hometown, it was expected that girls would get married soon after college graduation. My fiancé proposed to me and I accepted. My girlfriends were getting married all around and having nice weddings. I knew I would not get help from my mother or my grandparents because my grandparents were not at all pleased with who I was about to marry. They each had a list of three or four guys who showed interest in me as well as promise for being productive citizens. They couldn’t figure out why I was not interested in dating one of them. Their wishes fell on deaf ears. In addition to not getting help from anyone financially, I could not afford even a small wedding. By this time, the $267.00 had begun to feel meager. Although, I was not personally ready to pay for a wedding, the guy I was about to marry told me not to worry because he had saved lots of money and it was in a bank in Inkster, Michigan where he once worked. He told me to just order everything I needed and he would pay for it before time for the wedding. He also told me he was working on getting an apartment so we’d have somewhere to live when we got married. Well …, the plot thickened. He was a barber and one Saturday while he was cutting hair, I went through his backpack. I found a bank statement on which his balance was 39 cents. Yes, 39 cents. This was one week away from our wedding day. I was terrified. I didn’t want him to know I had gone through his belongings but felt I had to let him know I knew he had no money. I confronted him and he told me that what I had seen was a statement from an old bank account and I shouldn’t worry because he had money in another bank in Inkster. I took his word. I had paid for everything I possibly could but still needed to pay the photographer. The photographer showed up, took lots of pictures, and I never saw one of them. The total for the pictures was $96.00. My husband had no money in any bank anywhere and I did not have enough money to buy the wedding pictures. I worked out an installment plan with the photographer and agreed to pay $10.00 a month until paid in full. Even that was short-lived. I just could not afford it, so I stopped making payments. I do recall being a beautiful bride while wearing a beautiful lace wedding gown with a long train. The dress didn’t belong to me. I talked myself out of feeling bad about not having a wedding dress of my own and put it in the category of “something borrowed”. The dress belonged to one of my cousins. Several other girls were married in the cousin’s wedding dress, including her own sister. We all named it “something borrowed” and it became the community wedding dress. My maid of honor had come from another state and lived with me in my grandparents’ home shortly before and shortly after the wedding. I couldn’t help but notice that she was better dressed than I at my wedding reception which was held on the lawn of the projects where my husband’s family lived. A few days after she left, I received my bank statement only to find that she had forged a check on me in the amount of $93.10, putting me deeper into situational poverty. That was a mega amount of money at that time. She had bought the dress she wore to my wedding reception from one of the high-end stores in Meridian, MS. I signed an affidavit at the bank and my money was replaced. The banker told me that if they found her, she would go to jail. Rumor had it that she was found in Halifax, Nova Scotia and did go to jail. I have not seen or heard from her since my wedding day. What a friend! In retrospect, I was not financially ready for a wedding and probably should have waited. When it was time for the groom to pick me up and take me across the threshold, he took me across the entrance to his mother’s apartment in the projects. I left a large family-owned farm to live with my husband’s mother and his siblings while he lived and worked 90 miles away in Jackson, MS. I only saw him on weekends. Fast forwarding, I was hired at the airport in Jackson one summer when I was not teaching. We quickly rented an apartment. By this time, we had one daughter, Victoria, and our apartment had very little furniture. The apartment came with a refrigerator but without a stove. My dilemma was figuring out how to fix meals for my family without a stove. It occurred to me that I had received a large percolator (coffee pot) for a wedding gift. It was time to put the coffee pot to use for something other than making coffee. I washed a chicken, season it, and put it in the coffee pot to boil. The chicken boiled for most of the day before it was fully cooked. No, I was not mentally ill. It was called survival. I couldn’t tell my mother or my grandparents what a hard time I was having because they all used to say things like” Every tub has to sit on its own bottom” or “If you make your bed hard, you must lie on it”. Since I had to work 2 weeks “in the hole”, one month would pass before payday came. The first possible time we could buy a stove was on my husband’s next payday. Obviously, I ruined the coffee pot by cooking everything from oatmeal to a chicken.