Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

7. Sex Education

J < M < E Sex Education My sex education wasn’t any better than my other education. I was about fourteen or fifteen years old when I “became a lady.” I remember getting really angry that day, and my back hurting, and I’m sitting in the school desk, wiggling around even worse than usual. After school I was pitching horseshoes, and I suddenly said, “God, I got to go to the outhouse.” I went to the outhouse and I found something was radically wrong. Oh, Lord, I was dying! So I took off running. I jumped a creek, I jumped over a ditch, hurrying to get to Mommy, who was working in the yard. “Mommy, I’m dying! Oh God, Mommy, I’m dying!” “What is it child? What is it?” “I’m bleeding down there.” And Momma took me in her arms and said, “Poor little thang.” She cried and she said, “You’re not dying, honey, you’re not dying. Let me see what we can do to help you.” Sex Education 48 / pressing on She never told me what it was. That’s how things were then. Usually the mothers didn’t sit you down and tell you. Donna told me. Mommy just said, “Well, we have to fix that up,” and she started making me a little pad from some rags that she pinned in my panties. Then she had Daddy go get me a belt and some Kotex pads. But I didn’t know how to use them, and I kept pulling them . . . ’Scuse me, you men out there, I have to get into some technical details here. You women know how long the tabs on the old Kotex pads used to be? Well, I had pulled those tabs all the way up to the ends. You can imagine how taut it was, and how it hurt. I was miserable. So Momma said, “Well, honey, this means you’re a woman now.” And I thought, I don’t want to be a woman, sew me up! I knew better than to tell her that, but I was thinking if this is being a woman, I don’t like it. I didn’t like being a girl anyway. I had always wanted to have the freedom boys and men had. For instance when I was younger I had wanted to be a hobo. But being a hobo was definitely not in Momma’s plan for me—“Lord have mercy, child, you can’t be a hobo! Girls don’t be hobos.” I got over that. But my period—every month the pain. My back would kill me. Now Momma didn’t drink, but she’d keep whiskey in a medicine bottle. She would say, “You fight fire with fire.” And she would give me a spoonful of whiskey, with sugar in it so I could get it down. Then she’d put a hot water bottle on my tummy. Mommy didn’t tell me much about sex, but she was always sympathetic about female problems. When she did talk about sex, what she told me wasn’t always helpful . Take her explanation of homosexuality. I was up at the house, about eight or nine years old, I guess. The boys had been playing music, and then they started talking about queers. “What’s a queer?” I asked. And they wouldn’t tell me: “Get out of here, Roni. Get out!” So, I see Momma’s down in the yard digging in the ground, making her garden. (She spent a lot of time on that yard.) “Ma, the boys are up at the house talking about queers. What’s a queer?” “Lord God, honey! Well . . . I . . . I couldn’t tell you no such a thing as that. I never will be able to . . . I just can’t tell you.” “You ain’t gonna tell me?” pressing on / 49 “Lord have mercy, honey, I . . .” “Well, I’m going up the hill and ask Sweet William.” Sweet William was an old guy who had been in World War I. He was shellshocked, so every time he heard an airplane, he’d fling his arms around. Daddy told us kids that Sweet William was a hero and he better not ever see us teasing him, and we should help him when we could. He had the prettiest garden, snapdragons, bleeding hearts, but mostly sweet Williams, and he would give Mommy little pinches of flowers. All us kids would go by and talk to him. He was very kind. “You come back here.” Momma grabbed hold of my dress. “Don’t go ask that poor old man about that. Well, I reckon I’ll have to tell you, but don’t you tell a living soul I told you this.” “Oh, I won’t, Ma. I swear I won’t.” “Well, honey, it’s . . . terrible. It’s a man that . . . that’s got balls in his jaws.” That’s all she knew, I guess. Maybe somebody told her that and she was just repeating it. Anyway, I went around thinking it was like golf balls. People would give us things, like a clock, and we’d take them apart. With the clock you could make a whole bunch of spinning things. Well, one time someone gave us golf balls. And I said, “Scott how come they keep on bouncing when they’re so hard?” He said, “I don’t know. Let’s check it out.” So he got the butcher knife and he cut one in half.And there were thousands of rubber bands wrapped around inside, thousands. So golf balls in his jaws. That’s a horrible thing, I thought, but I was satisfied with the explanation. All right, years later, we’re in Nashville, playing a show with someone who had jowls real bad. Daddy was doing “The Little Log Cabin in the Lane.” I remember that song because I remember how easy it was to pick with him. Which meant that I could stare at this jowly guy while I was playing. And I thought, Now that’s a real queer—he’s got balls in his jaws. That was all my mother knew, the best she could come up with. It was confusing anyway, because mountain people like my grandpa would say, “Well, that man’s mighty ’quar.’”And “quar” meant different, a little strange, quirky. So how in the world were we supposed to know that queer wasn’t being queer in just a quirky way? Like going around with balls in his jaws. I really didn’t know the basics about sex until I was married. And 50 / pressing on even then I didn’t know that you got pregnant from semen. In those days you prided yourself on not doing anything before you were married. I kissed a lot, but nobody felt me up and down. Mommy said, “Boys will do naughty things to you if you let them, and you’re not supposed to let them.” But it was Scott who really trained me. One day it was storming out, so we were at Eddie and Katherine’s house. Scott took me over to the kitchen sink and said, “This is what love is to a boy who’s telling you, ‘I love you, I love you, and if you let me do so and so, everything is going to be okay because we’ll get married.’ This is what love is to that boy, Roni.” And he grasped my chin tight in his hand, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I’m telling you the truth, Roni, you listen to me!” Then he reached for the spigot and he turned it on full blast and then turned it off. “That’s what love is to them kind of men!” he said. If it wasn’t for Scott, I would have ended up in a lot of trouble. ...