Bettye Kelley Washington was born in Soso, Mississippi, in 1951, one of 15 children of Lavada and Levaster Kelley. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother did housework, was a seamstress, and a baker. As a small child in the Jim Crow South, Bettye had to use drinking fountains and restrooms marked “colored only.” People threw watermelons in her yard, yelled racial slurs at her family, and shot at their house. She remembered when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of a Black church down the road, then burned the church down. When she was 13, her sister invited her to come live with her in Joliet, IL, and Bettye accepted. She knew there was something better out there for her than the racism that surrounded her in Mississippi. She found that better life in Joliet, where she graduated from Joliet Central High School and went to work at the National Bottle Company. In 1972 she met a handsome young Vietnam veteran named Thomas Washington. They married seven months later and built a family and a life together that Bettye cherished. Bettye Washington brought this sad iron with her to Joliet from Mississippi in 1964. She remembered her mother and grandmother heating the iron on a wood-burning stove and wrapping a towel around its handle to press sharp creases into clothes on “iron day” when she was a child. In Joliet, she used an electric iron, but she kept this sad iron as a fond reminder of her family and the life she left behind.