Jelly Roll: A Black Neighborhood in a Southern Mill Town

12. Low-Profile Mainstream Families

CHAPTER 12 Low-Profile Mainstream Families The lives of more traditional families seem less dramatic and uneventful when compared to the high profile minority of welfare matriarchs, street studs or colorful old timers; for they are the less conspicuous working people of Jelly Roll's citizens. They are a majority of the community's households, butjust barely. As a group they are most likely to include those who have formed stable families , have regular employment, neither ask nor receive welfare in any form and support the local churches with their contributions and their presence. They are also inclined to champion education, sending most of their children through high school and occasionally college without frequent mishap; and they venerate past traditions through a certain degree of emulation and respect for the values of the old folks. Although this majority covers the gamut of individual differences, their problems and traumas, fears of pleasures tend to parallel those in the broader categoryofworking-class America. While retaining some venerated black traditions and identity they have also moved perceptibly into the mass media society of contemporary America. Tommy and Mable Plunkett The Plunketts, both in their mid-forties, married for twenty-six years, are a well-settled, industrious family with five children. 93 Mable is third generation Jelly Roll, and the house in which they live was built by her mother's parents, both of whom lived past their hundredth birthday. Her father and maternal grandfather had lived, worked and retired at the mill. Her husband, Tommy, came from a nearby farming community and worked for a butcher for a brief period in Norphlet before also going to work at the Calion mill. The work ethic is the centerpiece of this family's life and routine . Tommy is a steady worker who stays close to home and job, walks the street for recreation when he is not off squirrel hunting alone, and is prone to a few too many beers on weekends. But the family mainly revolves around the customarily seated figure of Mable Plunkett in the living room near the never-darkened television set. Here chores, mending, hairdressing, homework and snacking busily progress while watching and commenting on TV serials or movies that mark the passage of the hours. Mable's ample frame is cornered on the black vinyl sofa directly opposite the TV set, and it is from here that she directs both traffic and commentary on the life and times of her family. I've worked all my life since I was a little girl helping my mother after my father had back surgery. When I graduated from high school I went to work for Dr. Winslow 's family. He was such a beautiful man! He was so sad when I told him I was gonna quit and get married. 'You're committing suicide,' he said. He tried to change my mind, even offered to help send me to college. But no. I had to go and get married like the young fool. Right there I spilled the milk and I've been mopping every since. I've worked at the hospital, nursing homes, your furniture plant and now I got this graveyard shift as watchman at the refinery. My back won't let me take those heavy lifting jobs.... I'd never get married again. Things change after you're married. Tommy and I don't do things together like we used to. But I put disappointment behind me and go on. Me and my children have to do whatever gets done around here. We split up the burden. Believe me, it's detrimental to a woman not to have a handy man around the house. Mable makes no bones about the fact that she and her husband have drifted apart emotionally through the passing years. But the vitality and viability of this family is undisturbed by real or imagined differences. Quietly and assuredly Mable directs her four children living at home in their various housekeeping tasks. Their oldest, Tommy, Jr., age twenty-five, is a career Army man now stationed in Germany; their oldest daughter, Linda, twenty-two is doing the laundry while Shirley, twenty-one, prepares for her evening classes in 94 Secretarial Business at the EI Dorado vocational school. Fourteenyear -old Elmer is sent off on errands to the store and the post office while youngest daughter Dinah, eleven, sits on the floor at her mother...