Amanda Winship
Amanda was born a Shiflett, which in Butler County is something lower than dirt. Known as white trash sharecroppers, poachers, chicken thieves, moonshine drinkers, snake handling backwoods people, it was a large and embarrassing clan for a little girl who liked to dream about being a princess to belong to. There was the having no shoes at school and the other kids laughing, her brothers and cousins torturing her and terrorizing their non-relatives, the grease and grits for weeks on end, the hand-me-down dresses that never fit and weren’t so nice when they were new. She was always pretty though, and well-behaved in school, and in the fifth grade she fell head over heels for Miss Abernathy who was delicate and refined and tried to teach them to speak properly. Amanda knew better than to talk like that at home in punching distance of her brothers, but would practice Miss Abernathy’s slightly breathless, singing way of speech when she told stories to herself or had imaginary conversations. It only lasted a year, as the sharecropper children- from eight to fourteen years old in the same classroom- pretty much ruined Miss Abernathy’s nerves in just one term. Amanda, though, had had a glimpse of a person she hoped someday to be, and when the others were hollering and thrashing in the aisles at the little storage-shed church her Uncle Bemus ran, she would close her eyes and pray for transformation. But every time she opened then again the room was still full of Shifletts and their even less reputable cousins, the Louvins, rolling their eyes and crying for God’s hard justice.
It was almost a miracle that she came to be in school in Harmony and catch the eye of Floyd Winship. First her brother Del off to jail for the stabbing, then a neighbor poisoning the mules and the landowner deciding they were just too much trouble. Pa got on with the town, cleaning the horse-puckey off the street every evening and twice on market days. Amanda was the first to get that far in school- she was a good reader and polite to the teachers and they would shake their heads and say “Honey, you sure your name is Shiflett?” which hurt and made her proud at the same time. Floyd was very sweet when they started keeping company- he had to keep it discrete of course but that was the way it was back then- and they had been courting nearly a full year before he began to take liberties. It was quite a little scandal when she got pregnant with Emily- her father hinting that the right amount of cash would convince him to pull up stakes and get his wayward daughter out of their lives, Floyd’s father going on about the danger to the old and respected Winship name, but Floyd prevailed, even took her down to the draft board in Montgomery with her little belly showing once they were married to avoid being shipped off to the Great War.
Their early years together were troubled but little Emily was there and just golden- “a real Winship” her grandfather called her- and she favored that side of the family in looks and temperament. Floyd’s mother taught her how to keep house with a maid and how to dress and how to entertain, always that tight smile on her face like it hurt a little when she introduced Amanda to friends. Floyd was away mostly even if it was just on Main Street, doing accounts for his father and studying law. She had thought they would have lots of friends, couples their own age, but Floyd did his socializing with the other men at the Lodge and then the hunting and the trips to New Orleans for whatever business it was you could do down there. At first there was old Aunt Ida who had been with Floyd’s family forever, resentful over having been loaned out to clean for this redneck girl who’d never had a proper house to keep clean before, a heavy, dark woman with a perpetual scowl. Then when Aunt Ida passed there was a series of girls Floyd’s mother found for her, but none caught on till Delilah came to the door one day just before the 2nd war started and Floyd’s mother, may she rest in peace, no longer lived next door. Emily was gone and married to Albert Crimmins in Tampa by then, so long away, and already it seemed too difficult, dangerous even, to leave the house. So many disapproving eyes. Floyd would still bring her to church of course, but there was the proof, every look saying “you don’t really belong here” and by the time the sermon was over her hands would be trembling. But Delilah was sweet and soft-spoken and never scowled at the dirt like it was Amanda’s fault for it being there, plus she brought her little China Doll who would climb up in Amanda’s lap to be read to when she wasn’t playing her secret games under the dining room table. It filled the house up, even on days when they barely talked. Floyd approved because the food Delilah left was so good and because Amanda never felt she had to hide in bed like with some of the others. Now that he’s mayor Floyd is home even less and when he is he barely talks except for his idea that she drinks too much. Even if she did, who is there to see it?
She wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if she’d remained a Shiflett, married somebody who never had a respected name or a linoleum rug on the floor- would she feel so- so embarrassed all the time? Some of them must still be out there alive, Shifletts and Louvins causing trouble, but it seems so far away and so hard to keep track of. If Delilah didn’t insist on pulling all the shades up you’d hardly know if it were day or night.
