We were a pretty unlikely group to become ángeles for Latino prison gangs in Texas; we were just five older Anglo women. And it wasn’t until much later that we realized how amazing it really was. At the time, what impressed me the most about that week was that on Friday night that me and my sisters 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 over graves in the dark.
We should have gone earlier in the week to visit Mama and Daddy’s graves, but we had put it off until the last minute. When we finally got out there around 7:00 on Friday night, the wrought-iron gate was closed. We sat there in a disappointed silence and then Billie said she knew of an old road that would lead 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 sunset behind the row of tall windbreaker trees. Nobody said anything as Sarah lay down on 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 began to turn black against the orange and gold sun until stars emerged – larger and larger – 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 had died six months before and we’d left the house the way she and Daddy had it – like if we didn’t do anything, it made it not true that she was dead. But we knew we had to do something…Mama had lived for 95 years and had kept just about everything that came into her possession – plastic bags, countless empty plastic margarine containers, calendars back to the 1960s – and clothes. One little closet had 85 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:
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 we were there, I cooked healthy food for us in the morning and at night. The second day, I bought four bags of salad. By Friday, I was driving through McDonalds to buy 15 hamburgers and 6 breakfast tacos to last us through the day. On Friday, when I got back from my fast-food run, the sisters began to point at me and laugh hysterically. The night before, we’d found several boxes of gummed stars and in an emotional meltdown began to paste them all over one another’s face while declaring ourselves to be queens and princesses. I was so tired I had gone to sleep with my face plastered and had unconsciously gone through the drive-in with my sixty-four year old face still plastered with gold, red and green stars.
Mother and Daddy had lived decent lives, building a reputation as “old-timers” and members of the Methodist Church – farmer, mechanic and housewife – good solid people. And here we were, driving around with stars on our faces and breaking into cemeteries. It was the kind of thing we would laugh about until we hurt; then cry together as a wave of grief doubled us over.
Mama had made me executrix of their will. I had told her several years before that I really didn’t want to do it because I was afraid that we’d all get into fights over their stuff. There really wasn’t any money or things that were 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 somehow re-created our family – re-created it around us five girls rather than around mother and dad. And that’s how it worked until two years later when Mary died of cancer. By that time, we kind of knew what we had to do and once again, we picked ourselves up and formed the circle of family – a little bit smaller.
But on that trip back home, we were all exhausted. We took turns driving – one hour each. 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 along the road – Indian blanket and the big yellow sunflowers that grow among the mesquite bushes of West Texas. I had been driving, and it was time for Mary to take over. I pulled the car over, and we took some pictures of one another with the flowers in the bar ditch. It was 70 or 80 miles on down the road when we stopped again for me to get back under the wheel. Texas was a little hillier and lot more green with a winding road when I realized that I didn’t have my wallet beside me. Mary checked in the backseat; it wasn’t there either. We figured that I must have laid it on the trunk of the car when we were taking pictures earlier in the trip. So, I pulled over and asked Billie to pray about it. She asked God to let some good Christian person find it. It irked me that she limited God to Christians, but I had a peace when she finished praying.
At home the next morning, I listened to my voice mail as a young man named Juan explained that he had found my billfold and would express-mail it to me. I was astonished as he told about driving through the West Texas countryside and a piece of paper catching his eye in the pasture. He couldn’t explain why he stopped, climbed the fence and noticed my wallet as he was walking toward the paper. Furthermore, he then noticed Mary’s camera – still in its case – as he walked back to the car. We hadn’t even noticed that it was missing!!
I debated about telling him about our week; decided it was silly and then heard myself telling him everything about our praying and the whole week. There was a moment of silence and then he told me that this was the answer to an ongoing prayer of his; he had been asking God to give him a sign about going into the West Texas prison system to work with Hispanic prisoners. He asked me if we would pray for him and his prisoners. I said we would and we did.
A couple of months later, he came to our small town and brought five little white ceramic angels to us sisters. He said the guys Inside called us their “Cinco Angeles”. And somewhere Mama and Daddy smiled.
