On Generosity
Jennifer Crossley Howard recounts her journey from the country club to food stamps — and how she found the grace to make a comeback.
Until September 2017, my concept of grace was limited to a girl’s name — Grace — and the most well-known Christian anthem this side of “Just As I Am” and “Jesus Loves Me.” I’d initiated a divorce a month earlier.
Seven years of a fraught marriage had taken its toll on my soul, and I became wary and complacent. I knew if I didn’t act now, I never would. It seemed written that it would end even before I walked smiling and shaking down that aisle in the small white church in Verbena, Alabama. Then, I was too young to really define love, let alone model it in a marriage to the wrong man. I chose not to listen to a conscience that was trying its best to steer me away from the type of decisions and consequences that weigh heavy for years after they are made.
And so ended a summer that for years defined the season for me: stifling, magical and terrifying. I began working for the government at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville that September, making more money than I’d ever made as a writer and probably more than I will ever make as a nurse. My son and I had moved 50 miles south to my parents’ house in Gardendale, three days after my 34th birthday that July. Following a doomed, last-ditch family vacation in Florence — the setting of “where it all began,” as my mother calls the Renaissance City — I called Mama to let her know my son and I would be meeting her and Daddy at their house when they returned from their own vacation in North Carolina.
“Come on down. Let yourself in. We will be there soon,” she said, not a hint of judgment in her voice.
For about a month, I’d been as scared as I ever had. Until I drew my first paycheck, I was penniless. Within three years, I had gone from socializing at the local country club to applying for food stamps. From that transition down the fictional totem pole of society, I learned to reserve judgment.
That summer, we ate my mother’s fried chicken, okra fried green tomatoes, and sliced the last of her summer tomatoes on my parents’ screened-in back porch as the sun set and the plaintive calls of the mourning doves gave way to the cicadas. Those meals broke my panicked thoughts and provided a solace of hope. Whatever is going on in your life or anyone else’s, dinner must be made.
“The copies add up to almost $300. I am not supposed to do this, but I can tell you are going through a divorce. I won’t charge you.”
A few weeks earlier, a friend from Junior League, Emily, texted me while I was pumping gas in Gardendale. She knew I’d been freelance reporting since my son had been born four years earlier. Her company needed a writer for at least six months. I’d been pondering applying to a newspaper or maybe going back to college to start a new career. This opportunity was a godsend. She had no idea I was going through a divorce. This is what we in the South call a God Moment. There could not have been a more divine intervention.
A few weeks later, I dashed to the bank during my lunch hour to get copies of my financial records covering the last three years. This is the part of a contested divorce called a discovery. Apparently, they want to discover everything from where you bought your groceries two summer ago to how much of your newfound paycheck you blew on books (too much). A woman named Yasmin at the front desk explained to me that because this history of documents went so far back, I’d have to pay. I froze, wondering if I had enough to pay. She walked me into a waiting area while she printed a stack of papers tall enough to fill a phone book.
A few minutes later she walked into the room and sat at her desk. She had a slight Middle Eastern accent and warm eyes. She lowered her head and voice and looked at me.
“The copies add up to almost $300,” she said. “I am not supposed to do this, but I can tell you are going through a divorce. I won’t charge you.”
I cried like I’d watched the Wilson Dam break loose one Saturday on the river. I thanked her again and again and really wanted to hug her, and told her so. She laughed and told me to take care. Where I come from, we call Yasmin’s pardon grace. My parents provided a safe place for my son and I to live for six months, and Emily got me a job she didn’t know I needed. Last December, I graduated nursing school. Through grace and, yes, hard work, life got much better, blessed even. But grace ushered me through the doorway to a better life.
