We were a pretty unlikely group to become ángeles for Latino prison gangs in Texas; we were just five older Anglo women. We didn’t realize how remarkable it was until later. At the time, what impressed me most about that week was something different altogether: the night my sisters and I broke into the cemetery at the edge of our small West Texas hometown.
It was really pretty funny; Billie was in a wheelchair and Elberta was on a walker and Mary and Sarah and I were helping them, and we were all stumbling around the graves in the dark.
We should have gone earlier in the week to visit Mama and Daddy’s graves, but we kept putting it off. By the time we finally drove out there—around 7:00 on Friday evening—the wrought-iron gate was locked. We sat in disappointed silence until Billie said she knew an old farm road that led into the back of the cemetery.
It was just getting dark as we drove through the cotton field that surrounded the cemetery, laughing and giggling about “getting caught”. Once in the cemetery, we got quiet, listening to the tires crunching on gravel. I turned off the car and without speaking, we helped one another out and walked in silence to Richard Issac Archer and Lucy Mae Stokes Archers final resting place—Daddy’s side dimmed by ten years of death and Mama’s side still shiny.
We sat on the grass around Mama’s grave, looking at the West Texas sun dropping behind the row of tall windbreaker trees. No one spoke as Sarah lay down across the grave, her body shaking with deep, shuddering sobs. We knew it was the first time she had been able to really break down and grieve. The tall windbreaker trees turned black against the orange and gold sun until the stars came out – bright against the black velvet sky.
And then we went home to Mama and Daddy’s house where we’d been sorting through and categorizing their ninety-five years on earth. And we slept without showering and got up the next morning to go to our own homes in various parts of Texas. And it was on that trip back that we became the five angels.
Mama and Daddy’s Old House
Mama had died six months before, and we’d left the house exactly the way she and Daddy had it—because not touching anything made it feel less true that she was gone. But now we had to face it. Mama had lived for 95 years and had kept just about everything: plastic bags, dozens of empty margarine tubs, calendars going back to the 1960s, and clothes. One little closet held eighty-five blouses.
As she got older, she used her social security to do pretty much what she wanted to – like buying pretty pantsuits from Wal-Mart or extra canned goods when they were on sale. The old house was full of Mama’s things – things that were so painful to look at now:
Mama and Daddy’s Old House
Mama had died six months before, and we’d left the house exactly the way she and Daddy had it—because not touching anything made it feel less true that she was gone. But now we had to face it. Mama kept everything: plastic bags, dozens of empty margarine tubs, calendars going back to the 1960s, and clothes—so many clothes. One little closet held eighty-five blouses.
As she got older, she spent her Social Security check on whatever she liked: Wal-Mart pantsuits, pretty scarves, sale-priced canned goods. The old house was full of her things, each one a tiny ache:
the frayed red string tied to the ceiling fan chain in her bedroom,
the old faded corsage hanging from her lampshade with a large safety pin,
and the walls of every room covered with letters, cards, photographs, paintings, and little do-dads.
And us girls had a hard time of it – going through all the things. Mary insisted that we inventory everything. I was irritated – it was just like Mary to make a big deal about doing it the right way. Now I’m glad she did – but that week, I just wanted it to be over.
But we did what Mary said. We each took a room and inventoried
one set of faded pink flowered sheets with only one pillowcase,
a tin soap dish with a bar of brown soap inside,
four hymnals,
a stack of Upper Room devotionals dating back to the 1980’s,
a green plastic garbage bag filled with
pieces of material cut into quilt squares.
We filled page after page after page with the things that had accumulated throughout Mama and Daddy’s life. And then one of us would call to the others,
“Y’all come here and look at this…Here is a newspaper she kept from Kennedy’s killing” or “Look here she still has a shoebox from when I was in second grade filled with little valentines!”
And we’d gather around the object – like archeologists re-constructing a dig. The ‘things” were so solid. They opened the wound of painful incomprehension of the loss of that life, the loss of that soul, the loss of our mother’s spirit. How could these things be here and she was not?
The first day, I cooked healthy meals. The second day, I bought four bags of salad. By Friday, I was driving through McDonald’s buying fifteen hamburgers and six breakfast tacos to get us through the day. When I walked back in, my sisters burst into hysterical laughter. The night before, in an emotional meltdown, we had pasted gold, green, and red gummed stars all over each other’s faces, crowning ourselves queens. I was so tired I had forgotten and gone through the drive-through with my sixty-four-year-old face still covered in stars.
Mama and Daddy had lived steady, decent lives—old-timers, Methodists, farmer, mechanic and a housewife. And here we were, their grown daughters, driving around with glittering faces and breaking into cemeteries. We’d laugh until we hurt, then cry together as a wave of grief doubled us over.
The Circle
Mama had asked me to be executrix of her “will,” though she didn’t have one—she just wanted me to take care of things. I had told her I didn’t want the job. Not because of the responsibility, but because I was afraid of us fighting over sentimental “things”. Money we didn’t have; feelings we had plenty of.
There really wasn’t any money or anything that was worth anything; it was the sentimental value of things. But I knew us pretty well and knew we could go to war over something like a ring – like back in 1950 when Aunt Bertie went into the funeral home and took the wedding ring off of Grandmother Stokes finger – when everybody knew that Grandmother wanted Aunt Leona to have it. That caused a rift between the two sisters for years – with everybody taking sides. (We were on Aunt Leona’s side because Mother was.) Anyhow, they finally made up in later years.
So, I went to Billie not too long after Mama died and told her that I was afraid of us getting into a big fight and asked her if she’d be willing to go to the other girls and ask them if we could take turns saying a prayer every morning and every night. I went to Billie because she was next to oldest and had been really trying to live a Christian life ever since she was about 30 – Church of Christ.
When she first started going to the Church of Christ, she tried to convert everybody and that made Mama and Daddy mad, but we got over that too. And it helped that Billie had kind of calmed down through the years. Anyhow, she had certainly been trying longer than me so I thought it was only right to go to her. I was surprised because she was so relieved and told me that she’d been worried about the same thing and of course, she’d talk to the other girls.
Well everybody agreed and that’s what we did – holding hands in a circle – every morning and every night of that week. Each one of us prayed in her own special way. And we began to be more than the sisters we had always been.
We were fifty, sixty and seventy-year old women who were newly orphaned. Even though we had lived so many years, we hadn’t lived them without that strong spirit in our center. But the years of raising us to love family – re-emerged in the days of that week, and we re-created the family around us five girls.
And two years later when Mary died of cancer, we knew what we had to do, and we gathered and created again a smaller circle of family.
The Five Angels
On the drive home that week, we were exhausted. We switched drivers every hour—Mary had read somewhere that was a safe way to do it, and she was right. We were somewhere between Big Spring and San Angelo – long stretches of gray-brown pasture land with occasional gullies cutting through them and a ranch house surrounded by trees sitting far back from the highway. It was May and the wildflowers were scattered among the mesquite bushes of West Texas. We stopped to change drivers and to take pictures among the Indian blanket and big yellow sunflowers along the bar ditch.
It was 70 or 80 miles down the road in a greener Texas landscape that we stopped to switch drivers again. That’s when I noticed my wallet wasn’t beside me. It wasn’t in the backseat either. We figured I must have left it on the trunk during picture-taking.
So I pulled over and asked Billie to pray. She asked God to let a “good Christian person” find it. It irked me that she limited it to Christians—but I felt peace when she said “amen.”
The next morning, at home, I checked my voicemail. A young man named Juan said he’d found my wallet—and would express-mail it back. He explained that he’d been driving across West Texas when a piece of paper in a pasture caught his eye. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he stopped, walked toward it, and found my wallet. Then, walking back, he spotted Mary’s camera—still in its case. We hadn’t even noticed that it was missing!!
I debated telling him about our week, but before I knew it, I was spilling everything—our prayers, our grief, all of it. There was a pause. Then Juan said he’d been asking God for a sign about whether he should work in the West Texas prison system with Hispanic inmates. He asked if we would pray for him and for the men inside.
And we did.
A couple of months later, he came to our small town and brought five little white ceramic angels for us sisters. The guys inside, he said, called us their Cinco Ángeles.
And somewhere Mama and Daddy smiled.
