My Granddaughter’s Mother Told The School I Couldn’t Come To The Spelling Bee Because I Never Finished Eighth Grade. Before The Final Word, The Pronouncer Set Down His Card And Asked If I Was In The Room

From the first week of September until the second week of February, my granddaughter Lily and I spelled words at my kitchen table every weekday afternoon from 3:45 until her mother’s car pulled into the driveway.

I live in LaGrange, Georgia, in the same little brick house on Hill Street I’ve lived in since 1984. The kitchen table is yellow Formica with a chrome edge, and there’s a burn mark on one corner from a skillet my late husband, Roy, set down without a trivet in 1991. Lily always sat on the burn-mark side. She said it was lucky.

“Okay, Mamaw. Give me a mean one.”

“Rhythm.”

“Can I have the language of origin?”

“Greek.”

She shut her eyes. She held out her left hand, palm up, and traced the letters on it with her right pointer finger, the way I’d shown her.

“R-H-Y-T-H-M. Rhythm.”

“That’s right, baby.”

“That one’s not even mean. It doesn’t have a vowel and it acts like it doesn’t care.”

I’m Wanda Kimbrell. I’m sixty-nine years old. By Christmas we had worn through eleven hundred index cards. The school gave her a study list. We did that list in three weeks. After that, we did mine.

Mine came out of a paperback dictionary I’ve had since 1979. But I’ll get to that.

Brittany

Lily is eleven. She’s my son Wade’s only child. Wade drives a truck for a freight outfit out of Atlanta and is gone four and five days at a stretch. He and Lily’s mother, Brittany, divorced when Lily was seven.

Brittany has primary custody. She’s thirty-eight. She sells houses for a real estate office on Lafayette Parkway, and her face is on a bench outside the Kroger, smiling with very white teeth. She is a pretty woman and a hard worker, and I have never once in fourteen years seen her relax her shoulders in my presence.

The first time Wade brought her to supper, I made chicken and dumplings. I said something like “Y’all set down, it’s fixing to get cold,” and I saw her look at Wade. Just a little look. Later, in the car, I heard through the open window as they backed out: “Does she always talk like that?”

I do. I always have.

After the divorce, I became Lily’s after-school. Brittany couldn’t afford the program at the YMCA, and I was free. She never said thank you, but she never said no, and for four years Lily came up my front steps every afternoon with her backpack bumping and the screen door slapping behind her.

Brittany would pull up at six or six-thirty and honk once. She never came in. If I walked Lily out to the car, she’d keep her sunglasses on.

“Did you do your homework?” she’d ask Lily, looking at me.

“Mamaw helped.”

“Mm,” Brittany would say.

That mm had a lot of furniture in it.

The Phone Call

Lily won her class bee in December. She won the whole fifth grade at Whitesville Road Elementary in January, beating a boy named Carter Osei on the word cinnamon, which he spelled with one N in the middle and I almost felt sorry for him.

That meant the Troup County district bee, on a Thursday morning in February, in the gym at her school. Twenty-two kids from all over the county. The winner went to the regional in Columbus.

“You’ll come, right?” Lily asked. “You have to sit where I can see you. In case I need to look at your face.”

“I’ll be there if I have to crawl.”

On the Monday before the bee, the school secretary called me. Her name is Mrs. Pearson, and she has known me since I used to bring Wade to school in a Buick with a coat hanger for an antenna.

“Wanda, honey, I hate to make this call,” she said. “Brittany came in this morning and updated Lily’s contact sheet. She took you off the approved visitor list.”

I was standing at the sink. I held on to the edge of it.

“Did she say why?”

Mrs. Pearson was quiet a second. “She said it’s a district event and there’ll be people there from the paper. She said—” She stopped. “I’m not going to repeat it.”

“Go on and repeat it. I’m sixty-nine. I can stand it.”

“She said you never finished eighth grade and she didn’t want you there making a scene and embarrassing Lily in front of educated people. I’m so sorry, Wanda. Since she’s the custodial parent, we have to go by the sheet.”

I thanked her. I hung up. I stood at that sink for a long time watching a mockingbird in Roy’s old crepe myrtle.

That evening, when Brittany honked, I walked out to the car. She rolled the window down two inches.

“I heard from the school,” I said.

“Wanda, don’t.” She kept her sunglasses on, though the sun was nearly down. “It’s one morning. It’s not about you. Lily needs to be focused, and you get emotional, and you talk loud, and there’s going to be a man from the LaGrange Daily News there taking pictures. I’m trying to give her a chance to look like she comes from somewhere.”

“She comes from here.”

“That’s my point,” Brittany said, and rolled the window up.

Lily sat in the back seat looking at me through the glass. She didn’t know yet. I could tell by her face that she didn’t know yet.

I waved and smiled until the car turned the corner.

Pinewood Mill

Brittany wasn’t lying. I never finished eighth grade.

My mother worked twenty-two years in the card room at Pinewood Mill, a textile plant on the west side of LaGrange that made towels and terry cloth. In the spring of 1971, when I was thirteen, her lungs gave out. Brown lung, they called it, the cotton dust. She couldn’t climb the steps to the porch without stopping on every one.

My daddy had been gone since I was four. There was my mother, my little brother Dale, who was eight, and me.

I went to the mill office in May of 1971 and told a man named Mr. Coker that I was sixteen. He looked at me over his glasses for a long time. Then he wrote 16 on the form and handed me a hairnet.

I never went back to school. I worked second shift in the spinning room at Pinewood for thirty-one years, from three in the afternoon until eleven at night, until they shut the plant down in 2002.

It isn’t a thing I’m ashamed of. But it isn’t a thing I tell people at parties, either. When you leave school at thirteen, there’s a kind of door in your head that you’re always walking past. You know what’s behind it, and you know you’re not allowed in.

So I made my own door.

In the fall of 1971, I bought a paperback dictionary at the Rexall on Main Street for a dollar and ninety-five cents. It was thick as a sandwich, with a red cover. Every supper break, thirty minutes, I sat on the loading dock or at the picnic table under the water tower with a pimento cheese sandwich and read it. A page a night. Sometimes two.

By 1979 I had read it through twice. The spine was held together with masking tape. I had written my name inside the front cover in ballpoint: Wanda Gail Pruett, Pinewood Mill, Spinning Room 2.

Then I wore that one out, and bought a second one, the same red one, from the same Rexall. That second dictionary is the one that matters.

The Hallway

On the Thursday of the bee, I put on my good church slacks, the navy ones, and a cream sweater Lily had picked out for me at Belk the Christmas before. I put on lipstick. I drove to Whitesville Road Elementary and parked at the far end of the lot, by the dumpsters, where Brittany’s white SUV wouldn’t see my car.

I didn’t go to the front office. I knew what Mrs. Pearson would have to say, and I didn’t want to make her say it.

I went around the side of the building to the door by the cafeteria, where I used to pick Wade up in the 1990s. A man in a gray work uniform was propping it open with a mop bucket. His name tape said Felton.

“Ma’am, you here for the bee?”

“I’m not allowed in the bee,” I said. “I’m just here to listen, if that’s all right. I won’t go past the doors. I promise you.”

Mr. Felton looked at me a while. He was about my age, with a gray mustache.

“My granddaddy couldn’t come to my graduation,” he said. “Different reasons. Hang on.”

He went off down the hall and came back with a metal folding chair, and he set it up beside the double doors of the gym, which were propped open about a foot with rubber wedges. From that chair I could see a long thin slice of the gym: a strip of the shiny wood floor, the end of the stage, a row of folding chairs where the spellers sat with big numbers pinned to their shirts, and one corner of a table with a microphone on it.

“Thank you, Mr. Felton.”

“Lloyd,” he said, and went back to his mop.

I sat down. I folded my hands on my purse. Through the crack in the door I could see the back of Lily’s head, her brown ponytail with the blue scrunchie, and the number 14 pinned to her sweater.

Two rows behind the spellers, in the front row of parents, I could see Brittany’s blonde hair and the edge of her phone, held up and ready.

Palm Writing

At nine o’clock a woman from the county school office tapped the microphone and welcomed everybody. Then she introduced the pronouncer.

“We are very lucky this year. Dr. Daniel Tran taught English literature for twenty-six years at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. He took early retirement last spring and has moved back to his hometown, and he volunteered to be our pronouncer. Dr. Tran?”

A man’s voice came over the speakers. Calm, a little dry, with the smallest bit of something underneath the Georgia in it.

“Good morning, spellers. Take your time. Ask me anything the rules allow. I am not here to trick you. The words are hard enough on their own.”

I couldn’t see him. The table with the microphone was just out of my slice of gym. I could only see his hand, sometimes, when he reached for a new card, a brown hand with a wedding ring.

The first round was easy words. Then they got harder. Kids sat down one at a time, some crying.

When it was Lily’s turn, she stood at the microphone in the middle of the floor where I could see her whole. She was so small. She asked for the definition, and the language of origin, and to have it used in a sentence. Then she did what I taught her.

She held out her left hand. She wrote on her palm with her finger.

“Mortgage. M-O-R-T-G-A-G-E. Mortgage.”

“That is correct.”

She did it every time. Silhouette. Anonymous. Pneumonia. Bureaucracy. Palm out, finger tracing, eyes shut. And every time, right before she spelled, I saw her lips move with the little thing I’d told her a thousand times at the yellow table: Say it slow. Then say it in pieces.

Round six, she had Wednesday, and I heard something over the speakers. A pause, longer than the others. Like the pronouncer had set something down.

“Wednesday,” he said again, more quietly.

Lily spelled it right. She went back to her chair. The pronouncer took a while to read the next word.

The Last Two

By ten-fifteen it was down to two: Lily and a tall girl from Hogansville named Priya with glasses and a long braid. They went back and forth for four rounds. Chauffeur. Liaison. Mischievous. Onomatopoeia. Neither one missed.

Then the lady from the county office announced a five-minute break so the judges could get the championship list.

People stood up and stretched. Through the crack I saw Lily turn around in her chair, scanning the bleachers. Looking for my face. She looked at all of them, top row to bottom, and then back again. Then she looked at her mother. I saw Brittany give her a big thumbs-up. I saw Lily’s face not change.

A shape moved across my slice of the gym. A man in a brown corduroy jacket, gray in his black hair, walked over to the spellers’ chairs and bent down to Lily. I couldn’t hear what he said. I could see her nod. I could see her point at her own palm and then talk for a while. And I saw her say a word I knew the shape of, because she’d been saying it since she could walk. Mamaw.

The man straightened up slowly. He stood there a moment with his hand on the back of her chair. Then he went back to his table and out of my sight.

Footsteps came fast across the gym floor. The door swung open six more inches, and there was Brittany, in a camel-colored coat, looking down at me in my folding chair.

“Are you kidding me, Wanda?” she whispered. “Are you seriously sitting in the hallway like some— I told the school. I told you.”

“I’m not in the room,” I said. “I’m in the hall.”

“If she looks over here and sees you, she’s going to fall apart. Is that what you want? Go home. Please. Just go home.”

I picked up my purse. I was going to go. God help me, I was standing up to go.

Then the microphone squealed, and the pronouncer’s voice came over the speakers, and it wasn’t reading a word.

Is She in the Room

“Before I give the championship word,” Dr. Tran said, “I need to ask the audience something. I apologize. It’s out of order. It won’t take long.”

The gym went quiet. Through the open door I could see the lady from the county office half rising out of her seat, and then sitting back down.

“Is there a Mrs. Wanda Kimbrell in the room? She might have been Wanda Pruett, once. She worked second shift in Spinning Room 2 at Pinewood Mill.”

Brittany turned around in the doorway and stared into the gym. Then she turned back and stared at me.

I don’t remember deciding to do it. I put my purse down on the folding chair. I put my hand on the gym door and pushed it the rest of the way open, and I stepped one foot over the threshold onto that shiny wood floor.

“I’m Wanda,” I said. I didn’t say it loud. In that quiet I didn’t have to.

Two hundred heads turned around in the bleachers.

Now I could see him all the way. Fifty-five years old, maybe, thin, in the brown corduroy jacket, standing behind a folding table with a microphone and a stack of white index cards. He had set the cards down face-down. His reading glasses were pushed up on his head.

He looked at me for a long moment across the whole length of that gym. And then he did something with his left hand. He held it up, palm out, toward me, and with his right pointer finger, he traced four letters on it.

I knew what they were before he finished. I had watched a little boy trace them at a picnic table under a water tower forty-seven years ago.

M-I-N-H.

“Do you remember me, Miss Wanda?” he said into the microphone. “I was eight. You called me Little Bit.”

My hand went over my mouth. Behind me, in the doorway, I heard Brittany say, very softly, “What?”

The Boy at the Picnic Table

He came around the table and walked across the gym to me. Nobody stopped him. He left the microphone on the table, but it didn’t matter, the gym was so quiet you could hear the heating vents tick.

“Everyone, I’m sorry,” he said, turning to the bleachers when he reached me. “Give me one minute. I’ll explain, because I think the children should hear it.”

He told them.

He told them that in the spring of 1979 his mother, Tran Thi Lan, came to LaGrange from a refugee camp in Malaysia with two suitcases and one eight-year-old son. A church on Vernon Street sponsored them. A month later, she got a job on second shift at Pinewood Mill, at the spinning frame next to mine.

She spoke almost no English. She had no one to keep her boy at night. So every evening at seven, when the whistle blew for supper, there was a skinny little boy with a bowl haircut sitting alone at the picnic table under the water tower, waiting for his mother with a sack of rice balls.

“I couldn’t read English,” he told the gym. “I could barely speak it. The other kids at Southwest Elementary called me names I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand most things. My teacher thought I was slow.”

He looked at me.

“And one night this lady sat down across from me at that picnic table with a pimento cheese sandwich and a big red dictionary held together with tape. And she said, ‘Little Bit, you want to learn a word?'”

I was crying by then. I wasn’t making a scene. I was just standing there with the tears going.

“Every night for three years,” he said. *“Thirty minutes. One word, then two, then ten. She taught me to say it slow, then say it in pieces. She taught me to write it on my hand when I didn’t have paper. The first hard word she ever taught me was Wednesday, because I couldn’t understand why it had a D in it, and she said, ‘Baby, nobody does. You just say it the way it’s spelled, Wed-NES-day, until it gives up.'”

A few people in the bleachers laughed, wet laughs.

“When we moved to Atlanta in 1982, she gave me that dictionary. I was eleven. I have carried it to every class I ever taught.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket and took it out.

Red paperback. Spine wrapped in masking tape gone the color of tea. He opened the front cover and turned it around so I could see.

Wanda Gail Pruett, Pinewood Mill, Spinning Room 2. And under that, in a little boy’s careful pencil: and Minh.

“Miss Wanda never finished eighth grade,” Dr. Tran said to the gym. “I have a Ph.D. from Emory University. She is the reason for it.”

He looked past me, at the doorway.

Brittany was standing there in her camel coat with her phone hanging down at her side. She had not taken a single picture.

Conscientious

He walked me to the front row of the bleachers himself. Somebody handed me a Kleenex.

Then Dr. Tran went back to the table and picked up his cards.

“Thank you for indulging me,” he said. “Spellers. Championship round.”

Priya went first. Her word was chrysanthemum. She spelled it with an E where the second A should be, and she put her hand over her mouth, and her mother in the third row said, “Oh, baby.”

Then Lily walked up to the microphone. She looked at the bleachers. This time she found my face right away. I nodded at her. Just one nod.

“Lily,” Dr. Tran said. *“If you spell this word correctly, you are the Troup County champion. Your word is conscientious.”

“Can I have the definition, please?”

“Wishing to do what is right. Doing one’s work carefully and thoroughly.”

“Can I have the language of origin?”

“Latin. From the word for conscience. To know, together.”

Lily shut her eyes. She held out her left hand, palm up. I watched her lips move. Say it slow. Then say it in pieces.

“Conscientious. C-O-N-S-C-I-E-N-T-I-O-U-S. Conscientious.”

The bell on the judge’s table dinged.

“That is correct,” Dr. Tran said, and his voice broke right down the middle.

I did not stay in my seat like a lady. Lily came running across that gym floor in her sock feet, and I came down off that bleacher and met her halfway and picked her up the way I haven’t since she was six.

“You were here,” she said into my sweater. “I looked for you. You were here.”

“I was in the hall, baby. I could hear every letter.”

The Parking Lot

The man from the newspaper took the picture with Lily holding her trophy. Dr. Tran was in it. So was I. Lily wouldn’t take it without me.

When the gym emptied out, I went to the side door to get my purse off Lloyd Felton’s folding chair. Brittany was standing there holding it.

She handed it to me. She didn’t have her sunglasses on. Her mascara was gone.

“Can we go outside?” she said.

We stood in the parking lot by the dumpsters, by my car, in the cold February sun. For a long while she didn’t say anything. She kept pushing her hair behind her ear.

“I was in the fourth-grade bee at Hogansville Elementary,” she said finally. *“I went out in the first round. On separate. I spelled it with an E.” She laughed, a terrible little laugh. “My mother was in the audience. She didn’t say a word to me all the way home. When we got to the trailer, she said, ‘Well, now everybody knows.'”

“Knows what, honey?”

“That’s what I asked her. She said, ‘Where you come from.'” Brittany looked at the side of the school. *“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make it so nobody could tell. The way I talk. The way I dress. Lily’s clothes, Lily’s hair. And then there’s you, and you say fixing to, and you say ain’t, and you never finished school, and Lily loves you, she loves you more than anybody, and I thought—”

She stopped.

“You thought people would look at her and see the trailer,” I said.

She nodded. She was crying now.

“I’m sorry, Wanda. I’m so sorry. You taught her every word in that gym. And I told them you’d embarrass her.”

I put my arms around her. She was stiff for a second, the way she’d been stiff for fourteen years. Then her shoulders came down.

“Baby,” I said into her hair, which smelled like expensive shampoo, “the trailer ain’t the embarrassing part. It never was.”

Mrs. Lan

Dr. Tran, I still can’t help calling him Minh, came to supper at my house that Sunday. He brought his wife, Karen, who teaches piano, and a covered dish of spring rolls that his mother made.

His mother is eighty-four. She lives with them now, in a house off Country Club Road, three miles from where the water tower used to be. But she sent the spring rolls, and she sent a photograph.

It was a square snapshot with rounded corners, the colors gone orange the way they do. Two young women in hairnets and smocks, standing in front of a spinning frame, squinting. One small and dark-haired and serious. One tall and skinny with a big laugh and a pencil behind her ear.

“She’s had it on her dresser for forty-seven years,” Minh said. “She asked me to tell you she still knows the first word you taught her, too.”

“What was it?”

“Break. As in, ‘Lan, it’s break, come eat.'”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

We sat at the yellow table, the four of us and Lily, on the burn-mark side. Brittany came to pick Lily up at six. She didn’t honk. She came up the steps and knocked on the screen door, and when I said come in, she came in, and she sat down and had a spring roll and asked Minh about his mother.

She called Mrs. Pearson on Monday morning. I wasn’t there. Mrs. Pearson told me later that Brittany put my name back on Lily’s contact sheet, at the top, above her own, and under Relationship she wrote Grandmother, Word Coach.

In March, Lily went to the regional in Columbus. She came in third. She went out on sacrilegious, which she spelled with the I and the E in the wrong places, and she came straight off the stage, sat down next to me in the second row, and said, “That word is a liar.”

“Most of them are,” I said. “You just say them the way they’re spelled until they give up.”

Brittany, on my other side, laughed out loud.

The Dictionary

Minh tried to give me back the red dictionary that first Sunday. I wouldn’t take it.

“It’s yours,” I said. “I gave it to you.”

“You gave it to me to borrow,” he said. “I’m a professor. I know the definition.”

We went back and forth like that until Lily settled it. She said it should belong to whoever needed it most, and she said that for right now, since she had regionals, that was her.

So it lives at my house, on the yellow table, next to the napkin holder.

The cover has come off completely now. It’s held on with a rubber band. Lily wants to tape it, and I keep telling her to leave it be, because the masking tape on the spine is the tape I put on it in 1979, and I’m not ready for anybody to touch that yet.

Last Tuesday afternoon, at 3:45, the screen door slapped and she came in and dropped her backpack and sat down on the burn-mark side.

“Give me a mean one, Mamaw.”

But before I could, she slid the rubber band off and opened the front cover.

There it was, in my ballpoint, faded almost to nothing: Wanda Gail Pruett, Pinewood Mill, Spinning Room 2. Under that, in a little boy’s pencil: and Minh.

Lily took the pencil from behind my ear. She bent over the page with her tongue between her teeth, the way she does.

Then she slid the dictionary across the yellow Formica so I could see. Under the other two names, in careful fifth-grade print, it said:

and Lily.

Now Trending:

• My Daughter Gave My Mother-Of-The-Bride Dress To Her Stepmother The Week Of Her Wedding. Then The Seamstress Doing The Alterations Found My Name Stitched Inside The Hem And Called Me
• My Father Left My Brother The House And The Business And Left Me His Broken Pocket Watch. The Old Jeweler I Took It To For Repair Opened The Back, Went Quiet, And Locked The Shop Door
• My Daughter Told The Hospital I Had “No Family” So She Wouldn’t Have To Drive Me Home After My Knee Surgery. The Volunteer Who Wheeled Me To The Curb Read My Wristband And Asked If I Used To Drive The County Bookmobile

Please let us know your thoughts and SHARE this story with your Friends and Family