Excerpt: Gretchen Wilson's 'Redneck Woman'

Nov. 2, 2006 — -- Country singer Gretchen Wilson, known for songs that flaunt her hardscrabble roots and wild ways, like chewing tobacco and drag racing on back roads, has written a memoir that chronicles her rise to fame and what she considers her defining moment in life: becoming a mother.

Read an excerpt from Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman: Stories From My Life" below.

CHAPTER 1 -- POCAHONTAS PROUD

I'm the biggest thing that ever came from my hometown

And I'll be damned if I'm gonna let'em down

If it's the last thing I do before they lay me in the ground

You know I'm gonna make Pocahontas proud.

"Pocahontas Proud"

I grew up in the southern part of Illinois, a kind of no-man's-land between St. Louis on the west and the Indiana border on the east. The land is flat, as flat as Iowa or western Kansas. The horizon is broken by an occasional silo or water tower but otherwise is endless. There are plenty of cornfields and dairy farms, interrupted by small town after small town with names like Pierron, Dudleyville, Greenville, Edwardsville, Millersburg, and Pocahontas. Some of these towns are so small that their inhabitants just say they're from a particular county, like Bond County or Madison County. Pocahontas doesn't even have a grocery store. Pierron doesn't have a gas station or stoplight. I guess the four hundred people or so who live there don't need to stop that much.

Travelers whiz by on Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Indianapolis and rarely stop and investigate the places or the people who live within a stone's throw of that highway. A common saying is, no one comes to Pocahontas who doesn't already live there. It's part of a rural society that looks inward to the lives of its neighbors and not outward to the life of the world.

Although Illinois fought for the North in the Civil War, the area of Illinois that I'm from feels a lot more like the South. The region is very close in distance to Southern strongholds like Kentucky and Tennessee, much closer than it is to Chicago and the upper Midwest. The speech is Southern-people say "carn" for corn, "fark" for fork, and "arwl" for oil. The name of the Interstate is Highway "Farty," not Forty. More importantly, the outlook is more Southern than Northern.

The people there feel a part of the great traditional Southern culture that has now made huge inroads into every part of America-country music, stock car racing, pickup trucks, and Jack Daniel's whiskey. If you think about it, the South really did rise again, and is still rising, in ways no one could have predicted.

My mom, Christine, gave birth to her only daughter, Gretchen Frances Wilson, when she was sixteen. My father, who I didn't really meet until I was twelve years old, was a local boy she had married at fifteen. Her main reason for marriage, she says, was to get out of her childhood household and escape from a tyrannical father. She dropped out of school in the beginning of the tenth grade and now claims she didn't have much time for school even when she went because of the demands her father put on her-everything from babysitting her younger brother, Vern, to moving rock piles for one of her dad's many landscaping projects. She soon tired of her new husband (my father) because, even as a teenager, she was forced to work two jobs-waitressing and housecleaning- while he was struggling to find one.

She left my biological father after two years and soon met up with her second husband, my stepfather, who to this day she rightly refers to as "the dark one." At the time of their marriage, my mom was eighteen and he was twenty-eight. He was a smooth operator, the kind of charmer who could talk anyone into anything. He talked my beautiful, blond, adventurous teenage mom into marriage and made her life-and much of my life-a living hell for the next sixteen years.

My mom married my stepfather for stability and he was anything but stable. He made his living as an itinerant, selfemployed contractor and builder-anything from bricklaying to deck-building-and he knew a hundred ways to often talk people out of their money. He would bid a job, for instance, take half the money up front for materials, buy half the materials, do half the work, and then just take off with the rest of the money. And he'd often do this to people who didn't have the wherewithal to find him. There were always a lot of angry people looking for him.

In my mom's words, he was a master at "playing the role." One way or another, he was always making money but he could waste it on pursuing the next job as fast as he made it. At the end of the day, he never had anything to show for it.

Soon after her second marriage, my mom had another child, my stepbrother, half-brother, Josh, who I now just call my brother since we've been so close for so long. Because of my stepfather's methods of doing business, we were always moving. My stepfather would be ready to walk away from a job half-done or maybe the rent became due on the trailer or apartment we were living in at the moment, and it would be pack-up-and-get-out time. My mom would pack Josh and me, along with the dog and cat and a few meager belongings, into her beat-up Ford Escort and away we would go. Sometimes we'd only go ten miles, from one little town to another, rent another trailer with nothing more than my stepfather's solemn promise to pay the rent after he got his first paycheck from a job he only claimed to have.

So we were always moving on, always running from debt, never having enough money to stop, plant roots, and live a normal life. I spent a large part of my childhood on the move, never really sure which unfurnished rental unit to call home. Moving was our principal family activity. We moved an average of every three or four months from the time my mom met the dark one until the time I took off on my own at age fifteen.

I'm from Pocahontas, but I have lived in some form of temporary residence in Collinsville, Edwardsville, Belleville, Troy, St. Jacob, Greenville, Millersburg, Pierron, and Glen Carbon, all towns in the same general area. Consequently I kept switching school districts every time we moved. Even within one school year, I might find myself as the new kid in class in three or four different elementary or junior high schools. I probably attended twenty different schools from the time I began kindergarten until I finally quit in the beginning of the ninth grade. For both Josh and me, it was an endlessly crazy existence.

Life in rural Illinois is tough even if you're not moving every five minutes and running scams to stay alive. Everybody there struggles. Outside of farming, which is one of the hardest lives imaginable, there isn't much around there that could pass for a local economy. The best you can hope for, if you don't feel tied to the place and the people, is to latch on to some kind of skill or career that can take you out of there.

If you stay, your options are damn few. You're going to be a pig farmer or a corn farmer, or you're down at a diner or truck stop flipping eggs, or you're an auto mechanic working in a small shop in your backyard, or a hod-carrier, or you're pouring drinks down at Hoosier Daddy's. At least while I was growing up, everyone was pretty much in the same boat-barely making it and trying to deal with all the side effects of barely making it, like alcohol, divorce, and despair.

Like in most people's lives, there were good times and there were bad times. During the good times, when work was plentiful and the cash was flowing, we might move into a nice-sized house and feel almost like the people we'd see in the TV commercials serving Pillsbury biscuits in the kitchen or washing the new car in the driveway. During the bad times, I felt more like the homeless people you see on the six o'clock news. I remember, between houses or trailers, sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, more than once. The truck would have a camper shell on the back and we'd crawl into sleeping bags and call it a night. During those hard times, though, I never felt like a victim. I felt like a survivor. I knew things would change-they always did-and I was just anxious to keep moving and maybe find a place, for whatever length of time, where I could take a deep breath and try to enjoy where I was.

One day when I was about six, my mother's husband decided that he wanted to move to Miami, Florida. He had an uncle down there who could line him up with some prospects and, according to my mom, he saw it as a way to get away from all our in-laws in Southern Illinois so my mother wouldn't have anyone to run to when things got rough. In Miami, we were completely surrounded by strangers, often strangers who couldn't speak English, and completely dependent on my stepfather for guidance and protection. Which is exactly how he liked it.

Even in southern Florida, we never sat still for long. In the five or six times we relocated there, we lived in South Miami, North Miami, and Coral Gables, among other scenic stops. Not only did we impulsively move from Greenville, Illinois, to Dade County, Florida, when things got tough, we'd often live in three different places in Florida in a six-or seven-month period. It was a way of life.

I could see why my mother wanted to live in Miami -- she was still very young and wanted the wild Miami lifestyle of the 1980s. To Josh and me, it was pure culture shock. We didn't move to postcard Miami; we moved to trailer-park Miami, a far different world than the one of the South Beach partygoers celebrated on Entertainment Tonight. We often lived down there among the lowest-income Cuban refugees you could find. At one point, our next-door neighbor was an old Cuban gentleman named Flaco. Flaco and his wife were in their seventies and kind of took Josh and me under their wing, for a little while anyway. They had a pet parrot that spoke Spanish. They were kind of a substitute for the grandparents we had left behind in Illinois.

The trailer park where we and Flaco lived was a big one-maybe four-hundred trailers in one enclosed area. It was way, way out of Miami, almost in the Everglades. It's where civilization ended. Our rent-a-trailer was small- twelve by sixty-and housed four of us. It had a screened-off porch where Josh and I played Nintendo by the hour and even played pool on a pint-sized pool table. The pool cue would always be hitting a wall, making it impossible to really shoot, but we did it anyway.

Flaco made his living by selling roses on the street. His trailer was only a bush line away from a big intersection, so he would simply hop over his fence every day, grab a bucket of roses from his wife, and peddle them to the cars stopped at the red light. Even at his age, he stood out there in that traffic for hours on end. Again, this wasn't fun-loving Miami. Flaco rarely hung out at the beach and neither did I. In the on-and-off four or five years we lived in South Florida, I bet I can count on one hand the number of times I went to the beach.

Miami and Southern Illinois were two completely different worlds, like living on Earth one day and Mars the next. And making the transition back and forth was always weird. I'd go from hanging out with a bunch of Spanish-speaking motorcycle friends at Lowman's Plaza in Miami at twelve or thirteen to sitting under the bleachers at a high school football game in Illinois with some fresh-faced country boy trying to get to first base. The boy in the bleachers had never been anywhere as far as one county over and had a curfew. The guys in Miami were adept at surviving in all kinds of worlds, Cuban and American, and didn't know what a curfew was-they couldn't even pronounce the word. In fact, they couldn't even say my name. They called me "G."

I had no choice but try to fit in as best I could in both worlds. I learned enough Spanish so that I could understand my math teacher; her English was so bad that teaching in Spanish made more sense. Even today, I know enough Spanish that if I'm in a restaurant and some guys are talking trash in the next booth in Spanish, I can understand them and lip off to them in their own language. They always freak out.

Shifting back and forth between these places was always disorienting and often painful. It was very hard trying to grow up and come into your adolescence not knowing where the hell you were, let alone who the hell you were. Looking back, I can now see that the experience of living in Florida may have opened me up in ways that a more grounded existence in rural Illinois wouldn't have. It gave me both a familiarity and a curiosity about the rest of the world, maybe even a taste for the new and exotic.

Many people growing up in small-town Midwestern America have no real sense of the world beyond their immediate surroundings. They are often fearful of the larger world and figure that if they ventured out, they'd be like the proverbial rube in the big city-scared, gullible, and an easy mark. At the very least, they think, they'll get robbed and beaten for just walking down the wrong street. The city, any city, is foreign territory.

I learned early in life that the big city was often strange and different, but no more intimidating than downtown Pocahontas on a Saturday night. Both Josh and I often had to fend for ourselves in the urban environment of Miami while our parents were having a good time or plotting the next move. And as with all the other obstacles that were thrown in our path as kids, we survived just fine.

No matter where we were- -- Illinois or Florida -- our family life was a constant merry-go-round of feast and famine. In Florida, for instance, with my mom working full-time at Tony Roma's and her husband hitting a good streak in the deck- or dock-building business, we'd have a little spending cash. In a gesture of living large and probably stroking his own ego, my stepfather would go out and buy my mom a brand-new used car for her birthday. Two weeks later he'd have to sell the same car to pay the rent or to underwrite our next move out of the area. Perhaps that car would finance our way back to Illinois and another town, another trailer, and another short-term job to keep food on the table.

People often think kids don't see the stress and anxiety in their parents' lives or even if they do see it, can just roll with it and not be affected. In my experience, that is nonsense. Josh and I picked up on everything. We were smart enough to see that our school friends didn't live like this, assuming we made any school friends in the three or four months we spent at any one school. We knew that it was weird to suddenly move into an apartment or trailer on the first of the month and be out of there before the next rent check was due. We knew that when my mom announced that we were off to Miami again and followed it with "we're going to stay in one place and your dad's got a great new job and this time it's going to be different" -- we knew it wasn't going to be a bit different. After a while, of course, we'd pack up and leave with my mom making no such promises of a new life right around the next corner. She realized we weren't buying that line of BS after hearing it a dozen times. We all knew the truth: that life was a damn mess all the time.

And most of all, we could see and feel the abuse. My stepfather was never a big drinker, a drug user, or even a cigarette smoker, but he was often violent and abusive, especially toward my mother. My mom lived in fear from the moment she married the man. The verbal abuse never stopped and the physical abuse was always one sassy comeback away. As she sees it now, my mom describes her whole existence as like being in an embryo position-curled up and cowering. For most of those sixteen years she saw herself as weak and powerless. He had her in a psychological prison.

Mom, only in her early twenties when the abuse became constant, didn't know what to do. As she's said many times, she was too scared to get out of this awful situation. Especially after moving to Miami, she was completely alone in fending off his attacks as well as trying to shield her two children from his wrath. She did call the police a few times when she felt her life was in jeopardy, but then was too scared to press charges or use the incident to get as far away from him as possible. The police themselves would bring him up on assault-and-battery and he would do time in the county jail, but the sentences never lasted that long and when he got out, my mom would be there to take him back in.

This kind of relationship is an ugly, unbroken cycle of intimidation and compromise and only the people who have lived through it can understand it. And of course, ours wasn't the only household in America where this cycle is a simple fact of daily life. All you have to do is tune into Oprah or Dr. Phil to know the widespread reach of domestic abuse in America.

My mom did try to escape this torment five or six times in their long marriage. On occasion, she would put Josh and me in the car in Miami and head back home for the love and support of her family. But he was always one step ahead of her. Before she got back to Pocahontas, he would have taken a flight from Miami and be there to greet her at the door. Then he would use his vast storehouse of charm and BS to lure her back, all the time telling her the same lie she was constantly telling us, i.e., "this time it'll be different."

Or, if that didn't work, he'd resort to pure intimidation. He'd tell her straight out that if she didn't come back, he was going to kill her, her two kids, her mom and dad, and any other jackass who dared to step in and tell him how to treat his wife or live his life. And she believed him. She had no doubt that he had the capacity to eliminate anyone who got in his way.

My mom tried to show us a normal childhood amidst all this craziness and fear. In Illinois, she signed us up for Little League baseball and kept us close to the loving influence of my blood relatives. In Miami, she kept me busy doing kid things. At times I felt like I was off to a different after-school activity every day of the week-Monday, ballet lessons; Tuesday, gymnastics; Wednesday, tap; and so on. I'll never forget this dance studio in Miami run by this Cuban woman named Miss Jerry. My only English-speaking friend there at the time, Amber, and I were all of five years old and scared to death of Miss Jerry. She would never harm us, but she was strong and assertive in a way that I rarely saw other women, especially my mom. She definitely left an impression.

Throughout all the confusion of growing up on the move, my saving grace, then as now, was my family. When we were located anywhere in Southern Illinois, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, my Uncle Vern, only six years older, and my Aunt Vickie. They were my escape from the tension of living with my mom and even though their lives were occasionally pretty nuts, they seemed normal and stable compared to mine. I did things with them that remain some of the fondest memories of my childhood, whether picking wild berries with my grandma in the woods behind her trailer or learning to ride a motorbike with Uncle Vern. It didn't take a village to raise me, but it took the love of my extended family to help me survive and grow.

When I was twelve, for instance, we were living in Miami and my mom thought I was running a little too wild with the urban kids I hung with. She was also having a particularly tough time with her husband and trying to leave him for the third or fourth time. So she packed me up and sent me back to Pocahontas, or Pokey, for the summer to live with my Aunt Vickie and her then husband, Eric Simmonds.

My Aunt Vickie was, and still is, a hard worker. For a lot of her adult life, she was a welder. She welded airplane parts at a sub-factory in St. Louis for use in military planes made by McDonnell Douglas in the same area. She drove to St. Louis every workday for twenty years. Depending on the exact location of her home at the time, it was an hour or so in and an hour or so back. Both she and Eric got up at 4:30 every morning to make the long trek into the city. She spent half her time welding steel and half her timing applying spray paint. She's probably filled her lungs with plenty of noxious fumes.

So I went to live with Aunt Vickie that summer and what a great summer it was! Vickie and Eric lived in a doublewide trailer at the time and had a couple of kids. My job was to watch the kids during the day and have fun the rest of the time. A lot of that fun revolved around Eric's major passion in life-racing stock cars.

Saturday nights in the summertime was racing season around there. There was a quarter-mile, all-dirt track in Highland, a much bigger town than Pokey, and a huge crowd would gather there every Saturday night to drink, fight, drink some more, and watch their local favorites speed around in the dirt. Eric drove street stock-cars called "bombers"-which was the down-and-dirty class at the Highland Racetrack. He had one old Chevy that he raced and a garage bigger than his home to work on it. The car looked like crap but the engine was a masterpiece. When he wasn't working or racing, he was out in that garage working on his car. If half the men in the area on any given night were knocking back a can of Busch in a local tavern, the other half were in some buddy's garage, knocking back a can of Busch and arguing about carburetors and spark plugs.

The races were a trip. You'd drive over to the track at Highland and sit in a great big tin-covered bleacher seat with chicken-wire fencing separating you from the track. For most people, it was like a big outdoor party every Saturday night, an excuse to get sloshed with their friends, cheer on their next-door neighbor, and forget about all the problems waiting back home. The drunk and disorderly would slip and fall into each other's laps or spill beer down the back of each other's shirt. The whole arena was one big mosh pit.

And the fights were worth the price of admission alone. Especially in the bomber class, there was a crash on almost every spin and every crash would foment an argument in the stands. The worst offenders tended to be the wives of the race drivers themselves, women like my Aunt Vickie. Wife #1 would say something about her husband getting rear-ended by someone else's husband -- "Why that dumb-ass SOB just ran into my husband!" -- and wife #2 would leap over fifteen people to beat the crap out of #1. The stock car wives were a breed apart. I always thought there was a great movie about the wild lives of small-town stock car wives-along the lines of that movie about the murdering moms of Texas high school cheerleaders. These ladies of the track were a tough bunch of broads.

One photograph I still have and cherish sums up the sheer fun of going to those races for me. It's a picture of Vickie and Eric's son, Matt, my cousin, who today is still close by as one of the people working on my farm in Tennessee. Vickie, Matt, and I are in the stands at the races, watching Eric race his beat-up Chevy. Matt, all of eighteen months old, is sitting on his mom's lap. He's got on a hippie wig, is wearing earplugs to mute the tremendous noise of the cars, dressed in a diaper, and sporting an unlit cigarette in his mouth. At that moment, we were all in the Southern Illinois version of hillbilly heaven.

Along with watching others race around a track, I first learned to drive a truck that summer in Pocahontas. And an even bigger milestone took place-I drank my first beer.One night Eric took off with his stock car buddies to drink and act up and he left Aunt Vickie home with me. Vickie was mad as hell. As the two of us sat around the kitchen table, cussing out Eric, I decided to light up a cigarette, a habit I had recently picked up from my Cuban pals in Miami. Vickie, at that point a nonsmoker, was shocked.

"A cigarette? You're only twelve!" I told her I'd teach her how to smoke a cigarette if she would let me have a beer. She was just in the right mood to say yes. We then proceeded to go out to Eric's shed, steal his cooler of Busch, drink every last one of them, and stack the empties in a pyramid on the table for him to see. Although I didn't feel too good the next morning from all the beer and cigarettes, the whole experience was a whole lot of fun and something Vickie and I laugh about to this day.

How did my mom handle such a long-term abusive relationship? Unable, like many abused women, to walk away, she tried every way she could to block it out and numb herself from the fear and violence. She started working all night in a bar in Miami while her husband was between jobs. Before long she was hooked on cocaine and drinking heavily, addictions that weakened and tormented her for years. This only aggravated an already desperate situation and made her both more dependent on him and less able to take care of Josh and me. She was unhappy, depressed, and, in her own words, a broken person. And she pretty much remained this way until my stepfather was completely out of her life and she could finally see what a mess she had become.

The effect of all of this on me was pretty apparent: I had to develop a pretty thick skin -- Vern likes to say that I became "bulletproof." What he means by this is that, at least in my dealings with the outside world, I grew a protective shield to ward off an attack, either emotional or physical. Like many women who grew up in circumstances like mine, I developed a wariness about who to trust and who not to trust. I didn't let someone get to know me or tell them anything personal until I was assured that they weren't going to take that information and turn it against me. I was the opposite of a sheltered, pampered child. I was never someone's little princess or "Daddy's little girl." Early on in life, I had what you might call a real hard edge.

Uncle Vern likes to tell stories about how he saw this in me when I was still a tomboy growing up in Pokey. Because we were only a few years apart in age -- he was an afterthought, my grandma used to say -- Vern was often my principal playmate and tormentor. I used to shadow him constantly and he was always looking for ways to tease or test me. One of his favorite memories along this line happened when I was five or six. My grandpa grew hot peppers in the garden he had at the time. They were so hot that all you had to do was smell them and your eyes would start watering. So Vern saw me playing in the garden one day and figured it was time to introduce me to the world of tongue-burning peppers. He broke a pod in half and told me to stick it in my mouth. Which of course I did, because even at five, I was game for damn near anything.

His mom-my grandma-was washing dishes in the trailer and heard my bloodcurdling screams (I already had a strong voice). She came running out of the house with a wooden ladle and whacked Vern on the head for what seemed like forever. Vern claims that was the only time she ever laid a hand on him. All I know is that I never bite into a pepper today without thinking about how Vern introduced me to my first one.

Part of whatever bulletproofing I developed had to do with being raised in the country where kids had a lot of time to just screw around and had few places to do so. Vern's idea of a good time back then was to knock me down, get on top of me, pin me to the ground, work up a giant slimy hocker in his mouth, then get real close to my face, and proceed to shoot it right at me, then pull back at the very last second. Or he'd give me Indian burns until the skin would start to peel off my arm. Or, after he learned to ride a motorbike, he'd find his sweet little game-for-anything niece, stick me in a Radio Flyer wagon attached with a telephone cord to his 175 hp Kawasaki, and take off down a back country road going sixty miles an hour. Vern was a thrill-seeker and tried his best to turn me into one. I'd say he succeeded.

Also, Vern was a star athlete as a teenager. He played football and baseball in school at Greenville and was known by everyone who followed local sports. When he graduated from high school, he was offered a full scholarship from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville to play baseball. His dad said, "Sorry, we ain't got enough money for gas," and that was that. For lack of gas money, Vern was denied a free college education. He got a job in the masonry business and started hauling bricks for a living.

A budding jock myself, I was always bugging him to play catch with me and as he got stronger and stronger, the pitches came faster and faster. By his mid-teens he was whizzing sixtyand seventy-mile fastballs at my head and though it scared the hell out of me, Vern claims I never walked away. I'd put the glove right in front of my face and take whatever he was throwing.

I don't think I would've had any of these experiences with testing my limits if I'd grown up in the suburbs. You can get toughened by economic stress or people around you who abuse or mistreat you, but you also toughen up by taking risks. There is some connection, at least in my head, between taking that hot pepper from Vern and refusing to give up in the face of a lot of rejection when I got to Nashville. In both cases, you learn to take it and keep going.

Given the craziness surrounding me, I had to grow up fast. I had to walk into a new school in a new town every few months and devise a way to fit in and make the most of it. I had to fend off Cuban boys one day and whoop it up with good ol' boys the next. It takes an entirely different set of social skills to order lunch in those two worlds, let alone make friends and avoid enemies.

My first real boyfriend was an Italian man from Miami named Christopher Salvatore Leone. He ran a pool hall with his father on Byrd Road in South Miami. He was a cross between Rocky Balboa and Tony Danza-exotic, fun-loving, and tough. The relationship didn't last that long, but long enough to upset my grandpa. He especially hated Italians for some strange reason, maybe because they were Catholics or seemed to be having too good a time in life. My grandma, on the other hand, loved them all, even the New York mobster types. I, a crazy-ass hillbilly girl of thirteen or fourteen, had to figure it out all by myself. Without the guidance from an often spaced-out mother and a completely uncaring stepfather, I had to figure out how to handle many of the common problems of growing up. I also had to watch out for Josh, my little brother. And, given her state of helplessness and addiction, I often had to be the mother to my own mother.

The final episode in the sixteen-year-long saga of my mama and my hellish stepfather came after I had left home at fifteen and moved back to Illinois from Miami to live on my own. My mother and her husband had moved back soon after that, and my mom, in another fit of common sense, had separated from him again, hopefully for the last time. At the time she and Josh were living in Pocahontas with her parents, my grandma and grandpa, and Mom was tending bar at a tavern nearby. Her now estranged husband was living in a trailer in Collinsville, a few miles down the road.

As my mom tells the story, one afternoon he showed up at the bar where she was working and demanded that she accompany him back to his place in Collinsville. When she refused, he just pulled her into the car and took off. He drove to his trailer, threw her inside, and locked the doors. He had essentially kidnapped her and had no intention of letting her go until he vented his rage.

When I pulled up to the trailer, she came running out, panicked and completely naked for all the neighbors to see. She jumped in my car and we sped away from her irate husband. We immediately drove to the nearest hospital to have her examined. While we were sitting in the emergency room, her husband burst into the hospital and was ready to finish the job he had started in the trailer. Thank God hospital security and the police took over at this point, jumped him, and hauled him off to jail.

My mom went back to her parents' home to stay and my grandpa now had his shotgun cocked and ready in case the jerk decided to drop by and "patch things up" for the four hundredth time. Finally the court handed down a substantial sentence for terrorizing my mom -- thirty-two days in the Madison County jail. It wasn't nearly enough time to justify what he had done over so many years, but it was apparently sufficient for him to finally give up and leave us all alone. He never really bothered my mom again after that.To this day, my brother, Josh, still finds a place in his heart for this man. Maybe Josh is the one person in the family he managed not to hurt.

I feel differently, of course. I feel like a large chunk of my childhood was damaged by that marriage. My mom shares some of the responsibility, of course. I think she did the best she could under some horrible circumstances. But, hey, I'm a redneck woman, remember, and I grew up a redneck girl. I'm "Pocahontas Proud," and as I say in that song, "You know, where I come from, we don't give up easily." I had plenty of strong people to help me keep going and not give up during my strange childhood, and the strongest of them all was my grandma.

Copyright© 2006 by Gretchen Wilson