Thursday, August 5, 2010

I Just Wanted to Find Out if I Could Whip Her

My mother was tiny as a grown woman, not quite 5 feet 4 inches, and she was also tiny as a child. You wouldn't expect her to have been much of a fighter.

One day as I was going through a box, I found a list of Jim's gradeschool classmates, so I read the names and asked her what she could remember about each person. I loved going through old records and pictures with Jim because it almost always reminded her of one or two good stories.

I wasn't disappointed this time either. When I got to one girl's name Jim said: "I had a big fight with her." She continued: "When we started fighting the whole class gathered around to watch. Althea was a big girl, and stronger than me. She got me down, and I had to bite her to get loose."

I asked Jim what had started the fight, thinking that she had probably been the victim of some injustice. Jim hesitated for a moment and then said, matter of factly, "I just wanted to find out if I could whip her."

Jim really wanted to be a boy. She told me that she tried hard to kiss her elbow when she was little because someone told her that would turn her into a boy. She had a lot of useful boy skills. She made a slingshot and a pea shooter for me when I was little, and she could whistle really loud through her teeth. She tried to teach me but I could never get it right.

Jim got to practice fighting a lot with her brother Bob, who was about two years younger than she was. She told me, "I could whip him too, until he got bigger and learned to hit me in the stomach." It took a while though for Bob to learn that trick. In the meantime he used whatever was at hand as an equalizer. Jim had a scar over her right eye from one of her fights with Bob. He had beaned her with a soup bone from the kitchen.

Jim said that Bob evaluated other boys he knew by whether or not he could "whup" them, and I don't think Jim's attitude was much different. When I tried to sympathize with her for getting hit with the bone, she replied with pride, "I gave as good as I got."

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