Before Pearline, there was Lilly.  She was Pearline’s sister and she used to wash my hair in the kitchen sink.  We took her to Pensacola, Florida the year David almost drowned. Some man on the beach saved him. You’d think with three adults to watch him he wouldn’t have almost drowned. Lilly was afraid to go over the bridge into Pensacola, so she hid herself on the floor board of the car.  Lilly had diabetes and couldn’t take care of us anymore, so her sister Pearline started working for my family.  I was five.  

Pearline knows our secrets.  When I left home, I also left Pearline.  She was collateral damage.  Not to say I never saw her again.  It’s just that we were not close the way most people are with their primary caregiver.

Pearline worked at the county hospital when she wasn’t with us.  She came to our house every weekday from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 o’clock at night.  She was there when we got home from school, she did our laundry, made our dinner, did the dishes.  She also drove us around. Then she went home and got five hours of sleep before getting up for her job at the county hospital. She didn’t have any children of her own, but she took care of her nephew.  She used to be married. We were told that she had killed her husband.  If she did kill her husband, he needed killing.  Pearline continued to work for my family until about eight years ago, way beyond the time she could actually clean the house. She used to go upstairs, leave the vacuum running and take a nap on the floor.  Mom and Dad hired younger maids to come clean the house when Pearline wasn’t there, but they didn’t let her know that. Before my mom died, I asked her if Pearline had really killed her husband. She said, “that’s what they say.”   I think she made it up so that we would mind her.

I was a math whiz in high school.  Mrs. Beaumont was our high school math teacher and she is my inspiration.  I can still see her nicotine stained fingers busily writing algebraic equations across the blackboard, chalk in hand.  I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the formulas.  I have the Sloas math gene.  The solutions and the logic were as clear to me as a  hidden picture in a Highlights magazine.  It was almost like cheating.  But I was mesmerized.  Those arms. Those wobbly, saggy, undulating arms.  I can still see them.

We were active kids from the get go. We would go outside to play after breakfast, stop for lunch at whose ever house we happened to be near and come home at the sound of the dinner bell.  Pearline would ring this big ole cow bell and shout “Shahhhh  nahhhhh, Mahhh leeeee ahhhhh” (thats how she said Melisse). We climbed trees, made forts, played tag, jumped rope, rode bikes.  Then we started swimming on a competitive team and we did that five or six times a week.  I wasn’t all that good, but I was right there in the thick of it.

Me at Swim Meet