Beautiful Shadow (4 page)

     From where Highsmith was born, two streets south of the Texas and Pacific tracks that slice the city in two along an east-west axis, she would have heard, as she describes in her first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
, the roar and ‘angry, irregular rhythm’ of the trains that tore through the ‘vast, pink-tan blankets’ of the prairies.
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In that novel, Guy on a visit back to his home, the fictional Texan town of Metcalf, hears a locomotive wailing in the distance, a sound which reminds him of his childhood, a noise which is ‘beautiful, pure, lonely. Like a wild horse shaking a white mane.’
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And it was the railroad, with its distinctive tarantula-like network, and the ensuing employment boom, that attracted Highsmith’s family to Fort Worth.

In 1904, Highsmith’s maternal grandparents Daniel and Willie Mae Coates travelled from Alabama to Texas in a bid to capitalise on Fort Worth’s economic buoyancy. Both husband and wife had come from solid, respectable, upwardly mobile backgrounds. Daniel was the son of plantation-owner Gideon Coats (the ‘e’ was added at some point at the end of the nineteenth century), while Willie Mae was the daughter of Dr Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, a surgeon. Highsmith was particularly proud of these two great-grandfathers, men who symbolised the spirit of American adventure and pioneering. She could not understand how her family could have fallen, as she saw it, so far down the social scale and she constantly turned to the past as a way of reassuring herself of her origins.

     Gideon Coats, born in 1812, came from South Carolina and travelled to Alabama to resettle. After exploring the state, looking for a suitable place to build a plantation, the bearded, dark-eyed man found Coats Bend, then nothing more than a mass of dense forests and windswept sagebrush fields. In true pioneer style, he bought 5,000 acres from the Cherokee Indians for an undisclosed sum and in 1842 constructed what became known as the Coats mansion, a ten-room house with twenty-foot rooms and fourteen-foot-high ceilings. The whole house was built without the use of nails; instead it was fixed together using nothing but wooden pegs, an architectural detail that delighted Highsmith. In fact, she was so taken with the plantation house she kept a photograph of it in one of her albums. Later in life she would confess that one of her favourite books was Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War classic,
Gone with the Wind
, ‘because it is a true novel about the South’, before adding, perhaps somewhat naively, that, ‘My great-grandfather in Alabama had something like 110 slaves and they were not unhappy.’
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     Gideon Coats married Sarah Deckered in 1842 and together they had eight children, including Highsmith’s grandfather, Daniel, born on 13 October 1859. The Coats were famous for having large feet and hands, physical characteristics inherited by Highsmith. ‘I think most of us were “bent too soon” in that we have large feet, also large hands,’ wrote one relative to the author, unable to resist making a pun on the name of the family’s birthplace.
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     Willie Mae’s father, Dr Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, was born in 1829, one of the sixteen children of Elizabeth Dechard and William Stewart, a Scot so pious he wore holes in the carpet of his bedroom by his ‘frequent and protracted kneeling in the act of prayer’.
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Oscar grew up to be a physician who served as a Confederate States surgeon in the Civil War, and with his wife, Mary Ann Pope, he raised eight children, including Willie Mae, who was born on 7 September 1866 in Auburn, Alabama. The girl was only seven when her 44-year-old father died of yellow fever, in Memphis, Tennessee, in September 1873.

     The two families were united when, on 25 December 1883, Daniel Coates and Willie Mae Stewart married in Coats Bend, Alabama. Although Daniel was given a grist mill, store and sawmill by his father, during the early years of the new century the couple, with their five children – Edward, Dan, John, Claude, and Mary, all of whom were born between 1884 and 1895 – decided to travel 600 miles west in search of a better life. ‘They packed up everything they had, their china, crystal and silver, and drove west,’ says Don Coates, Willie Mae’s great-grandson. ‘One of the reasons they decided to move was, I suppose, quite a selfish motive: they only wanted to look after their own family, not the extended family back in Alabama.

     ‘My great-grandmother did not go to college but she was self-educated and was a voracious reader. Willie Mae was also amazingly strong-willed, like Pat. I recall once going over there for Sunday dinner and I was slightly taken aback because she was sitting very upright in her rocking chair, not at all in her usual relaxed state. When Daddy asked what was wrong, she finally admitted that she had fallen off the ladder while painting the ceilings. Even though she was that old she was painting the twelve-foot-high ceilings, but that was Grandma, she was going to do what she wanted to do and you weren’t going to tell her otherwise. She was her own woman.’
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     Don’s brother, Dan, also remembers the matriarchal Willie Mae, who died in 1955 at the age of eighty-eight. ‘She was a very small woman – I guess she was five foot one – and kind of wiry, with little metal-framed glasses,’ he says. ‘She used to work hard, had a head of stone and was rather outspoken and opinionated. She was extremely independent and was not afraid of the Devil himself. And she made the best milkshake in America. Pat really identified with her and respected her for her work ethic.’
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Highsmith remembered Willie Mae as an extremely moral woman who taught her the difference between right and wrong: ‘She was a Scot, very practical, though with a great sense of humor, and very lenient with me.’
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     The Southside of Fort Worth, the part of the city in which Highsmith’s family made their home, was already a residential area by the end of the nineteenth century, but during the first decade of the twentieth century the neighbourhood witnessed a massive influx of new residents. Transport links were improved and the area boasted a street railway system, running in a square south down Main Street to Magnolia Avenue, west to Henderson Street, north to Daggett Avenue and east to Jennings.

     Willie Mae and Daniel first settled in Fort Worth at 523 West Daggett Avenue but by 1910 they had moved further along the street, to 603, into a traditional wooden-frame structure that looked like a miniature version of the Coats mansion, where they opened a boarding house. They did this, according to Highsmith, ‘with practically no capital . . . catering at first to young gentlemen of talent and sensibility.’
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Enterprising to the last, the couple also rented out a number of small, wooden, red-painted shacks to black families at the back of their house, an area which came to be known as Red or Negro Alley.

     ‘Behind the house was an alley, a large alley, in which there were little red-painted cottages that Willie Mae would lease out to black families,’ remembers Dan, ‘and that was part of her income. She was a pretty good business-woman and did a good job. One day the people back in the alley had a big party, and they all got drunk. There were about twenty-five blacks back there raising hell and cursing. She grabbed a white robe – I’ll never forget it – and went out to confront the blacks who were all boozed up. She walked straight out and told those who did not live there to get home where they belonged and she meant right this minute. And you know what? They did as they were told – oh gosh, the way they behaved, you’d have thought she was carrying a shotgun.’
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     Sometimes, black children who lived in ‘Red Alley’ would knock on the back door of the Coates’ house and ask if she had any leftovers. ‘She would fix them a dish of what was left from the noon meal and the children would take the food out to the alley,’ remembered Willie Mae’s grandson, Dan – the father of Dan and Don – who came to live with his grandparents in 1913 after the death of his parents.
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‘The house, though plain and ramshackle, showing a hint of poverty even here and there, could always make room for one more, could always provide food for one more mouth, and generously, and love for one more heart,’ Highsmith wrote in her journal.
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     Across the street from the boarding house was a two-storey factory built from brick and occupied by Exline-Reimers Printing Company, whose employers also enjoyed Willie Mae’s hospitality. ‘She had quite a few mail carriers [men who sorted the mail for different towns as they travelled on the railroads] that ate there,’ wrote Dan to Highsmith, his cousin, ‘as well as the folks at X-REIMERS [
sic
] printing across the street.’
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     Willie Mae and Daniel’s only daughter, Mary Coates, was born in Coats Bend, Alabama, on 13 September 1895, the youngest of five children. She was striking-looking, ‘a double for Greta Garbo’.
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     A photograph taken of Mary a couple of years after giving birth to her daughter shows that she was a slim, elegant woman, with a fashionable flapper haircut framing a perfectly made-up face, while her knowing pose – hand placed seductively on the knee, ankles neatly crossed, eyes looking mischievously to one side – betrays a self-confident sexuality. It is obvious from the portrait that Mary took a keen interest in her appearance, not unusual in an age when, according to contemporary advertisements, a woman’s beauty really did make the difference between romantic success and failure. ‘The first duty of woman is to attract . . .’ ran one advertisement. ‘Your masterpiece – yourself,’ another promised its readers.
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In the same photograph, sitting next to Mary on the grass in front of the Coates house, is her daughter, Patricia, but Mary seems uninterested in the boyish-looking girl with her anxious expression, basin haircut and pudgy face.

     Mary confessed that there was a certain distance and frostiness between herself and her own mother. She was doted upon by her father, but Willie Mae never told Mary that she loved her and as a result Mary said that she grew up feeling rejected by the one person she wanted to please, an emotional pattern which Highsmith, too, would inherit.

     ‘You spoke of what your grandmother [Willie Mae] wouldn’t do,’ Mary wrote to her daughter, in an undated letter. ‘She treated you differently than she did me. It was as if she was not the same person. She went to her grave never letting me know that I ever made the grade. But my father wasn’t like that – he told her I was better than all the boys put together.’
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     Mary showed an early talent for drawing and painting and hoped to become a fashion illustrator. ‘She was incredibly creative and a very visual person, skills which Pat inherited from her and there’s no doubt that Willie Mae, Mary and Pat were all extremely strong-willed women,’ says Don. ‘Pat as a child had certain needs and wants which she felt Mary didn’t provide. But because of her success and her hard work, Mary was able to provide her daughter with an education. In many ways she did a lot more for Pat and her future than if she had been right there playing mom and baking cookies.’
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‘Mary was, bless her soul, a very eccentric woman,’ adds his brother, Dan. ‘Oh my God, she was more fun than a barrel of monkeys, just a wonderful lady. She was very outgoing but probably not the best mother in the world. She was a very career-minded person, not a little homemaker at all.’
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     One day, when Mary Coates was in her early twenties, she was walking past a photographer’s window in Fort Worth when she saw the image of a black-haired, dark-eyed man with rather simian features and a slight, wiry body; apparently she was so struck by the picture that she sought him out. That man was Highsmith’s real father – Jay Bernard Plangman.

Jay Bernard Plangman, or Jay B as he would later be called, was born one street south of the Coates family home in Fort Worth, at 508 West Broadway, on 9 December 1887. His parents, Minna Hartman and Herman Plangman, were both from German stock, and, perhaps unusually, it is from this side of the family that Highsmith inherited her dark hair and eyes and her somewhat sallow complexion.

     Highsmith’s physical characteristics intrigued her, but when anyone tried to suggest that she might have had black ancestors she acted swiftly to squash the idea. Five years before she died the writer received a letter from a man in Bradford, England. He enclosed a picture of his paternal grandfather, Henry Highsmith, a black man born in South Carolina, and asked whether she belonged to an offshoot of the same family. Highsmith – who thought herself a liberal but at this point in her life also believed blacks were responsible for the welfare crisis in America – gave the inquiry short shrift. She wrote back a sniffy letter, stressing that Highsmith was not the name of her biological father – Stanley Highsmith was her stepfather – nor did he have any black or Red Indian blood.