May We NOT Go Back There

Not until 1974 could women in the U.S. open bank accounts without their husband’s signature. If a woman had no money of her own, she was dependent on the men in her life for everything. In Margaret Atwood’s horrifying dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, when the United States turns into the hateful religious state of Gilead, one of the first rights taken from women is access to money via their ATM cards.    

In 1952, the U.S. was not Gilead, but close to it, when my mother Helen Smith Klarpp went into the First Citizens Bank in our home town of Jacksonville, N. C. to deposit a cashier’s check of a little over a thousand dollars. Not much money today, but a fortune back then.

“Wait right here a moment, Ma’am,” the lady teller said to Mother before going to find the bank manager.

Mother waited, backbone straight, patience dwindling.

Mother was a college graduate, the valedictorian of her high school class, salutatorian of her college class. An educated woman working as an elementary school teacher. She was a wife, a mother, and a Sunday school teacher.  She was always busy.

The bank manager walked toward Mother, dabbing at his damp forehead with a handkerchief. Back then few places were air conditioned. On warm September days, the manager preferred his office, where his rotating fan blew across his desk.

When he stood before Mother, he said, “Hello, Ma’am,” and inspected her check made out to my father from a lumber company.

My parents had been expecting this check. Dad’s family in Alabama, the Lindsay’s, owned a plantation. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. The word plantation conjures awful images to me as well, but by this time, the plantation was a large forest. Certain years a lumber company came, cut the trees, and hauled them away. All the grandchildren like my dad received checks for the timber.

“My husband is a Marine stationed overseas at the time. So, I have this.” Mother showed the manager her power-of-attorney signed by my father and notarized.

The manager folded the power-of attorney and returned it to Mother. He then pushed the check back to her. “Little lady,” he said. “Put this check in a real safe place at home. We’ll be glad to deposit it when your husband returns.”

Mother did not appreciate his little lady. Blood rushed to her face, but she steadied herself enough to put her power-of-attorney back in its envelope. She took the check between index finger and thumb and waved it at him. “Sir, we will never deposit another dime of our money in your bank.”

He was still talking to her when she turned away from him, strode across the bank’s lobby, crossed the shopping center’s busy street, and went into First Bank and Trust, where she and Dad also had an account. There she deposited Dad’s check without any trouble.

What the bank manager did not know: Mother would become one of the first women principals in the military’s dependent school system. And thus, she would end up the highest paid woman on the base at Camp Lejeune. She would earn a master’s degree and work on her doctorate.

By becoming educated, Mother clawed her way into America’s middle class. She was born into a poor family. Her father was a salt miner with a grade school education. Mother was the first in her family to get a high school diploma and struggled financially to get her college degree. She lived at home and took a bus daily to the campus of Emory and Henry College, where she worked two jobs and got a small stipend from the government of $19 a month. Her college degree endowed her with confidence in her abilities and a knowledge of her rights as an American citizen. You didn’t mess with Helen Klarpp.

As her daughters, my sister and I can attest to this for we tried her mightily with our teenage shenanigans. But today, when I look back on Mother’s life and how far she came, I am in awe of her and am reminded of these lines paraphrased from Deuteronomy:

We warm ourselves by fires we did not lay,

We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant

We drink from wells we did not dig

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before.