THE JAR OF BUTTONS
“He’d fill the car with fabric swatches, buttons and measuring tapes, then head out, often for weeks at a time, leaving Blanche to manage … on her own.”
On my bookshelf is a jar of buttons that connects me to my grandfather Carlton and my grandmother Blanche. Carlton was a sharply dressed traveling salesman who spent the early 1930s driving a company-owned Buick through Tennessee, selling custom-tailored suits to men who needed them for the day they were married and the day they were buried. He’d fill the car with fabric swatches, buttons and measuring tapes, then head out, often for weeks at a time, leaving Blanche to manage the house and their four small children on her own. That wouldn’t be much of a story except that she was blind.
On one of his trips, Carlton became very sick. So sick that he couldn’t drive. The person he was with couldn’t bring him home because she was his mistress. Instead, she took him to his mother’s house, even farther away. From there he wrote letters, promising to get better and come home soon.
And then came a telegram. The Western Union man told Blanche it was against the rules for him to read it, so she waited until the children arrived from school. My mother and her sister sounded out the words. “Husband died yesterday. STOP. Typhoid. STOP. Burial tomorrow. STOP.” Blanche’s brother borrowed a truck and drove the family east for the funeral.
Afterward, the company car was returned. Blanche kept the buttons in jars and made fabric swatches into quilts. She sewed any distinctly shaped buttons into her children’s clothing and, in this way, could tell the blue dress from the green one, the yellow shirt from the white. So long as the grocery delivery boy took her hand and showed her the flour from the sugar, and the can of beans from the can of soup, she maintained her home in much the same way as her sighted neighbors.
I once undertook a genealogy research trip to the town where Carlton died, searching for a grave that was too far from his family to have been tended. I met a distant cousin, Georgie, who told the story of Carlton’s transgression. Georgie believed that no one but Carlton’s parents and sister ever knew of his lover. Blanche didn’t know. My mother didn’t know. She knew Carlton only as the father who came home after days away to chase his kids through the yard and take them for car rides, who bought her milkshakes at the drugstore and told her she was the bee’s knees.
I keep the jar of buttons as a reminder of the grandfather I never met and the grandmother who, though she didn’t know it, taught me grit. The buttons are tokens of a father and husband who was caring yet flawed. For Blanche, they were a link back to the man she loved, and one of many tools she used to be the mother she aspired to be. They tell the story of freedom abused and freedom realized. As buttons do, they connect and bind.
—Lori Tucker-Sullivan
Lori Tucker-Sullivan's work has appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, The Washington Post and elsewhere. I Can’t Remember if I Cried, her book about the widows of rock stars and what they've taught her about grief, is forthcoming from BMG Books.