Her Own Place Read Free Page A

letter, a postcard, some word from her husband. After the first postcard giving her his address, there was nothing. Her heart always began to race when she saw the mailman’s car, barely visible in a cloud of dust, rounding the curve on the dry dirt road. As he slowed to a stop she closed her eyes against the dust that surrounded her.
    â€œGot some important mail today,” the mailman called out. Her heart leaped. Her eyes registered her happiness.
    â€œIt’s your application for ration book number three,” he said and handed her a brownish yellow envelope.
    Mae Lee’s heart sank. Just another book filled with page after page of ration stamps, printed with pictures of fighter planes, aircraft carriers, army tanks, howitzers, and then pages of numbered and lettered ration stamps. Stamps allowing them to buy foods they couldn’t afford in the first place. To families like hers they didn’t need to say, “Give your whole support to rationing and thereby conserve our vital goods. If you don’t need it, DONT BUY IT.”
    The heat had gotten to her that day, and rushing to the mailboxhadn’t helped. The world swirled around her. Mr. Wesley, the mailman, was only a blur. He reached for the envelope in her hand, and read from it as if she could not read. True, at the time she couldn’t.
    â€œThis application must be mailed between June 1 and June 10, 1943. Applications will not be accepted after August 1. Affix postage before mailing.”
    He turned the form over and read on. “It’s only two cents postage if it’s mailed in Charlotte, North Carolina, but from here it will be three cents. Now remember, Mae Lee, you are not in Charlotte, North Carolina. You are in South Carolina. If y’all need stamps, put your pennies in the mailbox and I’ll put them on.”
    Mae Lee’s daddy saw her slump by the mailbox. He rushed to help her inside the house. He was worried. “I must find somebody to work in your place, Mae Lee. You’ve got to stop working in the hot sun. It’s too hot out there. I’m going to try and get you on at the munitions plant where your mama works. If you are not with child. Are you?”
    Mae Lee wasn’t. She got a job at the plant. She worked her shifts and wrote letters to her husband. It hurt that he didn’t answer, but she wrote him anyway. She wrote about everything from old man Cooper’s bout with lumbago to radio announcer Grady Cole’s new slant on Hadacol, “the cure-all bottled remedy.” Some folks said the true name should have been “alcohol remedy.” And in every letter she sent a folded piece of white paper with blotted kisses of love in the ever-popular blackberry shade of lipstick. Her letters always ended with “Forever yours.” She didn’t scold him for not writing. Ifhe happened not to make it through, she didn’t want him to die angry with her. She never mentioned that she was working or saving to buy a piece of land. Their land. That was going to be the big surprise.
    She stayed on with her mama and daddy, sleeping in the same cramped bedroom she had slept in as a child. When and if her husband came home from the war for good, she wanted them to move into their very own house on their own land.
    The work at the munitions plant was hard. Hardest of all was changing shifts. There were three shifts. The first was from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the second from 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., and the third from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Mae Lee would work one of the day shifts for two weeks then switch to the next shift for two weeks. Sometimes she worked in the paint division, painting shells. She stood on her feet during all her hours of work, but the pay was good.
    Every payday after work she pulled out a small tin bucket with a thin wire handle, pried open the recessed lid, and put her money inside. Her daddy had bought the little bucket for her; he called it her money