I think my very first memory is sitting on the back steps of our house in Savannah with my mother. I must have been very little, maybe three or four. She was shelling peas into a bowl, and I remember being fascinated by the little green shells piling up beside her. I can still picture the afternoon sun, and hear the screen door creaking behind us. I don't know if that's truly my first memory, but it's the earliest one that feels real to me.

We were poor, but I didn't know it until I was about eleven, and then I knew it all at once. Daddy worked the docks when there was work. Some weeks there wasn't. Mamma took in sewing and never once called it that. She'd say she was helping out a few ladies, like it was a favor she was doing them. That was the whole family in one sentence. Really we had our pride arranged very carefully like furniture, but I want to be honest with you. Because I think people my age get sentimental, and it does a disservice. It was a happy childhood. We were outside from breakfast until the street lights came on. We had the river and the squares, and about forty children on our block. Nobody watched us. Nobody thought they needed to. I've read that it was a hard time to be a child, and I suppose it was, but nobody told us, so we weren't.

Oh, I could walk through that house right now with my eyes shut. It smelled like coffee, first thing, and under that, always, a little bit of damp. Savannah gets into a house. The wallpaper in the hall came loose at the seams every August, and mamma would press it back with her thumb, like she was smoothing a child's hair. The front room had the good chair, which was daddy's, and a rug that had been red before I was born. There was a radio in a wooden cabinet, and I want you to understand it was furniture. It had a place, and we sat facing it. The sounds, the screen door, of course, that creak is the sound of my whole childhood, and when I hear one now, in a movie or somewhere, my stomach drops about eighty years. The oscillating fan. Mama's sewing machine at night, after we'd gone to bed, that treadle sound, going and going. I'd fall asleep to it. When it stopped, that meant something was wrong, and it was hot. I don't think anyone under sixty understands what hot meant then. We slept with wet sheets over us. In August we slept on the porch, all of us out there like a litter of something. My sister June kicked, the floors were heart pine, and they gave a little when you walked. I have not felt a floor do that in fifty years.

I only really knew my mother's mother, Grandmama Purvis, and she was a piece of work, God lover. She was small, and she was mean in a way that everybody found funny except the person she was being mean to. She had opinions about everything and she delivered them like the weather report. She told my mother at the table at Christmas that her corn bread was coming along. Mamma was 34 years old, but she taught me to play cards, and she did not let me win, ever, not one time, and I've been grateful for that, my whole life, pinnacle and set back. She'd take my nickel, and put it in her apron, and say, well, just that. Well, she'd been widowed at 31 with four children in 1911, and she never remarried, and she never explained. I asked her once about my grandfather, and she said he was tall, that was the entire eulogy. I understand her better now than I did. When you've had that much taken from you that early, sharp is a reasonable thing to become, sharp gets you through. She wasn't cold, she was just done being surprised.

Scorching, that smell when an iron's been sitting too long on cotton, Mamma did ironing for other people, and Saturday mornings, the whole house smelled like hot starch and a little bit of scorch. That smell means safe to me. Isn't that strange? It ought to mean somebody's ruined a shirt. But it means my mother's in the next room, and it's Saturday, and there's nowhere to be. Also, pluff mud at low tide, but everybody from the coast says that one.

Pearl Harbor. I was 10. It was a Sunday, and I remember it, because the grown ups' voices changed, not louder, lower. That's how children know something's happened. The adults go quiet in a particular way, and you feel it in your chest before anybody tells you anything. We didn't have a phone. People came out onto porches. Mr. Dunwoodie, across the street, had his radio up in the window, so the whole street could hear it, and I remember standing in the road, with maybe twenty people, all of us facing a window, and then everything about my life changed for four years. My brother Walt went in at seventeen, lied about a birthday, and daddy signed it, and mamma didn't speak to him for a week. We had the blackout curtains, we had a garden. I collected tinfoil off of chewing gum, and rolled it into a ball the size of a grapefruit, and I was so proud of that ball, you'd have thought I'd sunk a ship with it, and you know what nobody tells you about the war, it was exciting. I was a child, and it was terrible, and it was the most exciting thing that ever happened. Both those things are true, and I've stopped apologizing for it.

I'm going to give you a real answer to this one, and I'd like you to leave it in. I believe that the way things were was just how things were, like weather. There was a woman named Della, who did washing for two or three houses on our street, and she was in and out of our kitchen my whole childhood. I was eight years old, and I called that grown woman by her first name, and she called me Miss Eleanor, eight years old, and I never thought about it not once, not for a very long time. We had our water fountain, and they had theirs, and I never wondered about it any more than I wondered why the sky was up. That's what I mean by weather. It wasn't that I thought it was right. I didn't think about it at all, and I've come to believe that not thinking about it was the whole machinery of the thing. It ran on people like me, not thinking. I was nearly forty before I got properly shamed out of it, and even then it was slow, and even then it was mostly because I was made to. I don't get to tell it as a story where I figured it out. I didn't figure anything out, the world changed, and I changed behind it, dragging. I've heard people my age say, that's just how it was back then, and it makes me want to throw something, because there were people right there in Savannah, the whole time, telling us exactly how it was. We just didn't have to listen. That was the privilege, not the fountains, the not listening. So, what did I believe that wasn't true? I believed I was a good person automatically. Turns out that's not a thing you are. It's a thing you have to keep deciding, and I started late.

Oh, my, my brother Walt, he he he came back from the Pacific in '46, and he was not the same boy, and nobody said one word about it for the rest of his life. That's what that generation did. He'd sit on the porch. He didn't like sudden noises. He was fine, is what everybody said. He's fine. He was the funniest person I have ever known. before, just wickedly funny, and after he came back he was funny about half as often, and it was a little meaner. He was good to me, though. He drove me to Milgeville when I started college. Daddy couldn't take the day off, and he carried my trunk up two flights, and at the door he said, "Don't come home," and I said, "Walt," and he said, "I mean it, don't come home," and then he left. I've thought about that maybe a thousand times. He wanted something better for me, and he didn't have the words for it, so he said it wrong, and it was the most loving thing anybody ever said to me. He died in 2011. He was eighty four. He never told any of us anything.

Your grandfather could not dance. I need that established first. We were at a wedding. This would be 6869, and the band was playing something, and Tom had had exactly one and a half beers, which, for him, was a bender, and he stood up, and he held out his hand to me, and he took me out on that floor, and he danced like a man being electrocuted, in front of everyone. His whole face was red, and I said, Thomas, what has gotten into you? And he said, you looked like you wanted to? That's it, that's the memory. He was not a demonstrative man. He said, I love you maybe six times in sixty six years, and they were all in hospitals, but he watched me. That whole time. He was watching me to see if I wanted something. Sixty six years of a man watching to see if I wanted something. I'd trade every anniversary for that one bad dance.

June of 1952. Not the wedding, two days before it. I graduated a week earlier, and I was home, and there was nothing to do. Everything was arranged, and mamma and June and I sat in the kitchen, and shelled butter beans for about four hours, and talked about absolutely nothing. That's it. That's the happiest day. I've had bigger days, babies, and Tom coming home, and the day they named the reading room after me at the school, which was mortifying and wonderful, but that kitchen was the last day I was somebody's daughter, and not yet somebody's wife, and I've never in my life been so completely at ease. I didn't know I was happy. That's how you know, it was real happiness, you only find it lighter, going through the drawer.

October of '62. The missiles. I had two children. Nancy was a year old, barely, and I remember standing in my own kitchen, listening to the president on the radio, and understanding, really understanding that this could be the last week. I filled the bathtub. That was the advice, you filled the bathtub, and I did it, and I stood there looking at a tub full of water, and thought, "This is what I have, a tub of water, and two children." Tom came home, and he saw the tub, and he didn't say anything about it. He just went and sat with Dustin, and read to him. He read to him for two hours. He was eight, and he'd been reading to himself for years, and he read to him for two hours. We never talked about that week, not once, ever, in fifty six more years of marriage. That's how frightened we were, and I'll tell you the other thing, which I've never set out loud. Some part of me was furious, not scared, furious, that a handful of men I would never meet had put their hands on my children's lives. I have never gotten over the arrogance of it. I still haven't. I'm ninety five years old, and I could spit.

I was accepted to a master's program in Emory in 1959, English literature. I'd applied without telling anybody, which should tell you something, and I got in, and I carried that letter around in my apron pocket for about nine days. Tom would have said yes. That's the part I have to be truthful about, if I had put that letter on the table, he'd have found a way. He was not a man who stood in front of doors. I never put it on the table. I had a five year old and a two year old, and I could not see the shape of how it would work, and I was tired, and one night I lit it off the burner and watched it go. I don't call it a regret, exactly. I got thirty four years in a classroom out of the life I chose, and there are grown men in Savannah who can read because of me, but I do wonder about her, that other Eleanor, she'd be a different old woman, put the letter on the table. Dat's my advice, and it took me sixty seven years to be able to say it.

Ooh, this was a Thursday, sometime around 1966. The kids at school, both of them, Tom at work, and I had one free period on Thursdays, and I'd take my coffee out to the steps behind the school building where the loading door was, and there was nobody there, and I'd sit for 40 minutes. That's all, 40 minutes on a concrete step behind a school, with a cup of coffee going cold. I've been to Paris. I've held four generations of babies, and what I want is that step. I think, when you're old, what you miss is not the peaks. It's the plateau. It's being in the middle of your life, with everybody still in it, and not knowing yet which parts you were supposed to be paying attention to.

These are great questions, I tell you. A woman named Cornelia Boyd, who I taught alongside starting in 1971, are schools integrated properly that year, years after they were told to, and only because they finally ran out of ways not to. A number of the white teachers transferred out. I didn't, and I want to be careful here, because for a long time I let people believe that was principle, it wasn't, it was that I liked my building, and I didn't want to drive across town. That's the truth, and I'll say it plain. Cornelia had been teaching fourteen years at Cuyler, and she came to us, and she was better than I was. That's the whole story, really. She was just better at it, better with the children, better with the parents, better with the ones who couldn't sit still, and I had to sit with the fact that this woman had been three miles away my entire career, with worse books and a worse building, being better than me the whole time, and nobody had thought that was worth mentioning. We taught across the hall from each other for seventeen years, she died in 2004. At her funeral, her daughter told me, Cornelia used to say, I was the only one who asked her questions that first year, and I sat down in the pew, and I cried, because I'd asked her questions since I didn't know what I was doing, and she'd taken it as kindness. She changed my direction because she made me stop believing I'd earned things. Nearly everything I had, I'd been handed and told it was earned, forty years old, and I finally noticed the handing.

Thirty four years, and I never once yelled at a child. Now I want to be accurate. I yelled at plenty of grown people. Ask anyone who sat on that school board in 1979, but not at a child, not one time in thirty four years. And it wasn't sainthood, it was strategy. You yell, you've spent it, and now you've got nothing left, and they know it. But it also came to be a promise I'd made without meaning to, and I kept it. Eight hundred and some children through that room. Not one of them ever heard me raise my voice at them. I'll take that one to the ground with me.

There was a boy in 77, third grade, named, well, I won't say. He's alive, and he's got grandchildren. He came to school hungry, not sometimes, every day, and there was a form you filled out, and a process, and it took weeks, and it would have gone into a file with his mother's name on it, and she was doing everything a person can do. So I just fed him. I put a second sandwich in my bag every morning for a school year, and I'd say I'd made too much, which is a ridiculous thing to say every day for nine months, and he was eight, so he believed me. I never told the office. I never told his mother. I never told Tom. It isn't heroic. It's a sandwich. But I've thought about it more in the last ten years than I've thought about almost anything, and I've worked out why. It's the only good thing I ever did that nobody knew about. Everything else I did, I got something for. Thanks, or a reputation, or the reading room with my name on it. That sandwich is the only clean thing in the file.

I wish I'd asked my father what he did during the day. Seventeen years I lived in that house, and I could not tell you what my father actually did on the docks. He went, and he came back, and his hands were wrecked, and that was the whole of my information. I don't know if he liked it. I don't know if he was good at it. I don't know if there was a man there he ate lunch with, 17 years, and I know more about the mailman, and it wasn't that he wouldn't have told me, nobody asked men things then. You asked a man if he wanted more, and he said yes or no, and that was the conversation. He died in '68, and I have his hands in my memory, and nothing else about eight hours of every day of his life. Ask people what they do all day. That's my answer. It sounds like nothing. It's the whole thing.

I lost a baby the year after Tommy, 1959, a boy, far enough along that I knew him, I want to use that word, I knew him, they didn't let you hold them then. They took him out of the room, and a nurse patted my arm, and said something about how I was young, and I had two at home, and I was home in four days, and that was the last anybody spoke of it. Not Tom, not my mother, nobody was cruel. That's what people don't understand about it now. Nobody was cruel. It just wasn't a thing there were words for, and so there weren't any, and so it hadn't happened. I named him in my head, and I never said the name out loud to a living soul, and I'm not going to now, because it's mine. But he'd be sixty seven. That's the arithmetic I've done every year of my life, quietly, in the middle of something else. I'm telling you because I've come to think the silence was the injury, not the loss, losses happen, the silence. My whole generation of women carrying these small private funerals around, and every one of us thought she was the only one. So there. Now it's told.

She was fun. I mean it, I'd take that over, she was good. I've known some good people who were absolute misery to sit next to, and I have loved every hand of cards, every off key hymn, every glass of beer on a porch I've ever had, and if that's the headline, I'll take it, fun, and she paid attention, that'd be the two, fun, and she was actually listening.

Hmm, well, uh, let's see um, that I changed my mind. That's what I want. Not that I was right. I wasn't about a great many things for a long time. What I want you to know is that I was capable of being wrong out loud, and then being different afterward. I grew up in a place that taught me some things that were false, and I believed them without effort, and it took me until I was middle aged to start putting them down, and I did put them down, slowly, and late, and with help, but I did. So when you're old, and you will be, it happens fast, it is not a rumor, and you find out that something you were certain about was wrong, I want you to remember that your grandmother did that, and it did not kill her. She was ninety five, and still doing it. The other thing. I want you to remember that I liked it here. Ninety five years. I got the depression and the war, and I got to see a man walk on the moon, and I lived to talk into a telephone that could hear me. I buried a husband I loved, and a brother I loved, and a baby nobody knew about, and I would do the entire thing again to morrow, every hour of it, without changing one single day. That's not bravery. I want to be clear, that's just the truth of it. It was a good time. I had a good time. You remember that I had a good time.