The Deed Book
My name is Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett, and I’m seventy-two years old.
I have cleaned houses since I was fourteen. I have scrubbed floors on my knees in Maury County, Tennessee, for fifty-eight years. I have raised a daughter, buried a husband, buried my mama, and buried more friends than I care to count.
And I have never in my life stood in a courthouse and read my own name in a book that big.
Rosella turned that book around to face me.
She put her finger on a line.
“Read it, honey,” she said. “Read it yourself.”
I put on my reading glasses. My hands were shaking so bad I nearly dropped them.
I looked down.
There it was. In type. In black ink. On thick, cream-colored paper that smelled like old dust and lemon oil.
My whole name.
ELNORA RUTHANNE WHITSETT.
And right under it…
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My mama always said you can’t understand the end of a story if you don’t know where it started. So let me start where it started.
On a porch.
I grew up on the Lockridge place.
It’s out on the Hampshire Pike, eight miles west of Columbia. Three hundred acres of rolling pasture and woods. A big white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch, sitting up on a little rise so you can see it from the road. Built in 1889.
And at the end of a gravel lane, down past the barn, past the pond, back where the land dips toward the creek, there’s a little white tenant house.
Four rooms. A tin roof. A porch with a swing hanging on chains. And behind it, a pecan grove. Forty-one trees. Big ones. Older than anybody living.
That’s where I learned to walk.
On that porch. Holding on to the swing chain. My mama said I took my first steps from the swing to the screen door and fell flat on my face and laughed.
My mama was Odessa Whitsett.
She cooked and cleaned for the Lockridges from 1946 until 1989. Forty-three years. She started for old Mr. Amos Lockridge, Mrs. Henrietta’s father-in-law, when she was sixteen years old. Then for Mr. Walter Lockridge and Mrs. Henrietta when they married.
She was paid eleven dollars a week in 1950. And the tenant house to live in. Rent free.
That was the arrangement.
That’s what I was told it was, anyway.
My daddy worked the farm. Plowing. Haying. Cattle. Fixing fence. He died in 1961 when a tractor rolled on him on the north slope. I was eight.
Mr. Walter paid for the funeral. Mama cried, she was so grateful.
Mrs. Henrietta brought a ham.
I left the Lockridge place when I married Clarence Whitsett in 1971. Well, I kept my name. Clarence’s name was Whitsett too. No relation. People thought that was the funniest thing. Two Whitsetts marrying. Mama said it saved on stationery.
We had a little house in Columbia, on East End Street. Clarence drove a truck for the phosphate plant. I cleaned houses in town. Doctors’ wives. Lawyers’ wives. A dentist who wanted his baseboards done with a toothbrush.
We had Alfreda in 1974.
In 1989, Mama got sick. Her heart. She couldn’t work anymore.
Mrs. Henrietta called me.
“Elnora,” she said. “Your mama’s been with this family forty-three years. I won’t have her anywhere but that house. I’ll take care of her doctor bills. But I need somebody to help me out here. Will you come?”
I came.
Mama died in 1992. In the tenant house. In her own bed. With the window open so she could smell the pecans.
I kept coming.
Clarence died in 2004. Lung cancer. Phosphate dust, the doctor said.
I kept coming.
Twenty-six years, all told. Since Mama passed.
Mondays, the kitchen and the bathrooms.
Thursdays, the floors.
Fridays…
Fridays she wouldn’t let me touch a mop until I sat down with her for coffee and a biscuit.
At the kitchen table. The long oak one. Under the window that looks out on the pasture.
She’d have the coffee made. Percolator. Maxwell House. She never would get one of those fancy machines. And biscuits from scratch. Every Friday. Even at ninety-three, when her hands were so stiff she had to roll the dough with the heel of her palm.
“Elnora, the dirt will wait,” she’d say. “I won’t.”
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