She works at a downtown garage. And she studies politics 11 hours a day.
When Joyce Little has something to say, she lets you know it’s coming. “I’m gonna tell you something,” she’ll declare, before launching into whatever’s on her mind. Chances are she’s been ruminating about foreign policy, the income tax, or Head Start. Her thoughts often include Bill Clinton, about whom she can deliver a detailed and caustic report. Evidently the guys who work with Joyce in the parking garage downtown hear what’s on her mind with some regularity.
Curtis Kidd was on his way to get a car when I pulled in asking for Joyce. I hadn’t seen her since we moved offices at Christmas. I used to park in the garage where she works as cashier. I was number 202.
“Where’s Joyce?” I asked. “I want to talk politics with her.”
“Oh, man,” he winced. “She’s always preaching. I thought I was a Democrat. Hell, I thought the Republicans were after all my money. I tease her about old Bush and it makes her mad and she cranks it up and then I see the news and it’s just like she said. Our people in China: Bush got ’em out like she said. She always has that Rush on. Her and Rush. That’s when we start getting out of there.” Curtis pointed to the glass and concrete box where Joyce works. I could see her inside. She was studying something.
“She’ll talk to our customers,” he continued. “I’m like, ’Oh, Miss Joyce, leave those people alone.’” Curtis grinned. I suspect he says no such thing. “Everything she’s saying—hell, it’s right. But we’re not gonna tell her it’s right. It’ll just get her cranked up on it again. She don’t know when to quit.”
Joyce was hunched over a purple radio when I turned into her office, which was tidy but spare. There were two mismatched chairs, a wooden desk, and a revolving metal rack that holds the parking tickets. Joyce wore pressed black jeans, a polo shirt emblazoned “Classified Parking,” and an autumn-colored wig that requires frequent realignment. She reminds me, in many ways, of my grandmother, whom I miss.
“Someone took my regular radio last night,” she said, smoothing down a flip curl. “I’m going crazy.” She ran the dial back and forth, the static growing weaker and weaker with each pass. The batteries were shot. She was looking for Rush Limbaugh. He fills three hours of a day that, for her, includes at least seven more hours of TV news and politics. Her weekends are a marathon of Washington talk shows. Basically, Joyce Little has the schedule of the White House press secretary except that Joyce counts change and calls for Chryslers while the press secretary keeps the president on message.
“George Bush stepped in 35 days late and still did a better job putting his cabinet together than Bill Clinton did,” she said, not quite giving up on the radio. “The first 100 days of George Bush have been the best 100 days the American people have had in a long time. I’d look for his approval rating to be 65 percent or higher—a good approval rating for a president who’s already had a foreign policy crisis. If Clinton had gotten those American servicemen out of China, he’d have been there to meet the plane two days ahead of time. He was all about making himself look good. I cannot understand the American voters electing Clinton. Twice.”
Joyce reluctantly turned off the radio. “Can I get you some batteries?” I asked.
“I guess you could,” she said.
I walked around the corner to a camera store. By the time I got back, it was three o’clock. Rush goes off at four.
“I started listening to Rush nine years ago,” Joyce said, installing two new AAs. “One day I heard this man and thought, ’Oh my goodness, who is this?’ I thought the things he was saying were truthful and were things I believed in. I’ll tell you something about Rush a lot of people don’t know.” Joyce leaned toward me. Outside her office, Curtis was retaking his place on a bench with Dewayne Runnels to wait for customers. “Rush is serious. He has good inside information. I consider myself a Republican and he had a lot to do with it. But I was already leaning that way.”
Joyce turned on the radio. “Let’s go to Grand Rapids, Michigan,” Rush said.
Joyce Little grew up a long way from Grand Rapids and Rush Limbaugh. She grew up on Pine Street in Shreveport, Miss., in a family of seven brothers and sisters, three of whom have, in her words, gone to sleep. Joyce has seven children of her own, and 20 grandchildren. “I was talking with my sister yesterday,” she said. “I asked her, ’Did mother and daddy ever live on another street?’ She said we never lived but two places in our life. You know my father was sick. He’d worked for the United Gas Company. He was what you call a straw boss, a supervisor. We had so much love and attention. My mother sent us—even though we were poor—to Catholic school. My brother was an altar boy so they cut down on our tuition. As we got older, everyone would go to work and bring their paychecks home. That was how we made it.”
Joyce started cashiering at 17 and has been at it ever since. Her specialty is parking garages. For a while she cashiered in the parking garage of St. Paul Hospital. She talked politics with pharmaceutical salesmen. “I’ve always been into politics,” she said. “Not just around me, but around the world. I’ve been like that for so many years. It goes back to Dukakis. No, it goes further, to Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. That was the first campaign I got interested in.”
Joyce’s mother died eight years ago. Joyce thinks her mother forgave her for becoming a Republican, but that didn’t make the last campaign any easier. None of the rest of Joyce’s family has made the switch.
A woman in an indigo dress shirt walked up. “286,” she said. Joyce got up and took the woman’s ticket out of the rack. She passed it through a slot in a window to Curtis and Dewayne. They hadn’t recognized the woman from a distance.
“She’s new,” Joyce whispered. “Some of the people that park here don’t even know their numbers. You know why? Because the fellas know who’s who. They give real good service. There’s no waiting time.” We watched 286 until she got in her car and drove away.
“I’m gonna tell you something,” Joyce said. “I like to listen. I like to read. I like to think. In religion, I read every tract. I listen to people from all religions, then I go to the Bible to see why people feel the way they feel. There’s a reason why. I’m like the people from Missouri. You have to show me. I’ll research it. About 10 years ago, Aretha Franklin was doing a commercial for Target. There was a beautiful little girl in it. Some people said it was Franklin’s granddaughter. I called a bunch of local stores. They said they didn’t know. They gave me the number of the office in Minnesota. So I called it. They said the little girl was a model. I’ll look it up, what people tell me.”
I asked Joyce what she was reading. She handed me a thick paperback, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. “I always read,” she said. “I read a book a week. I’m always curious about things. A lot of things that you don’t know you can find out about.”
Her place was marked at page 97, near a section in the book about Congressman Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee. “I always watched Ford,” Joyce said. “There was something about him that stood out even though he was very liberal.”
Joyce had never voted for a Republican until she voted for George Bush, the father, in 1992. She had bad feelings about Bill Clinton early on. Signs and portents. She thinks that he’s no different from the other Democrats who just want to tax and spend and talk. “For instance,” she said, “education, Social Security, prescription drugs, Medicaid—you’d think that after eight years we’d have some new things. Clinton did nothing about none of those things. George Bush is gonna have to go in and undo. Bush will get blamed for things, like the level of arsenic in water. For eight years Americans have been drinking the same water, and just before Clinton left, he wanted to reduce the level of arsenic.”
I’d been holding back a question that I wanted to ask but didn’t quite know how. It didn’t have anything to do with Clinton or Bush. It had to do with her. The left side of Joyce’s face is scarred from her chin to her forehead. “Joyce,” I said finally. “May I ask you a question? It’s not about politics.”
“Sure,” she said.
“What happened to you?” I said, nodding toward her face.
She hesitated, but not like she was offended. More like she’d forgotten. “I was in a car accident in Houston 24 years ago,” she said. “I was burnt trying to get out. My mouth was gone. My nose was gone away. I had nine different surgeries. I could have these scars removed, but I wouldn’t want to. Why? Because this is me. If I looked in the mirror and didn’t see this scar, I wouldn’t see me. I had a plastic surgeon offer—I was a cashier at Medical Arts—she asked me if she could do some work. She removed a lot of the scar tissue.”
Joyce reached up and touched her face. I was already holding mine. “But to me and my family—this is all they’ve ever known,” she said. “This is just me. You know? God said that we are wonderfully and beautifully made. He knows me. And it doesn’t make a difference with my family. They love me anyway.”
We were quiet for a long while after that. Rush’s brother, David, ranted about the crimes of the Clintons. “They happened right under the noses of the American people,” he said. Eventually, Rush took time out to rant about the quality of sleep he was getting. “Call 800 Get-A-Bed,” he said.
“People come to my house,” Joyce said, turning down the volume. “The air conditioning man came over last week. I started in talking politics. People think I’m a Democrat. So I asked him, ’What do you think about George Bush?’ If I’m slow getting an answer, I’ll say I like Bush. After I said that the air conditioning man had a lot to say. When people were coming up to the window here during the campaign, I’d ask them about Bush. Sometimes I laugh myself when I take somebody by surprise.”
The phone rang. Joyce put her hand on the receiver and waited. She’s a second-ring person. “Classified Parking, Joyce,” she said. She hesitated then hung up. “I don’t like recorded messages,” she said.
“Joyce,” I said. “You’re a second-ring person.”
“Hah,” she said, slapping her leg. “Really. I didn’t know that. Really, I am?”
The phone rang again. It was 196 calling to have her car brought up. She was in an office building nearby, about to walk over. Joyce got up, pulled the ticket out of the rack, and rang the buzzer for the guys; we couldn’t see them on the bench. As she sat back down, Joyce looked at her watch. “Oh,” she said. “I’m losing track of Rush.” And she reached for the purple radio.
