The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (18 page)

Before their summons to Atlanta, my mother and her siblings had to endure a few years’ worth of misery as Grandpa Peek lost himself in the deep ecstasy of his street preaching. All during her life, my mother could barely bring herself to talk about her bewildering childhood in the small town of Rome, Georgia. A childless black couple who lived on a sharecropper’s farm down the dirt road from them heard about their frantic situation and began bringing eggs and fruits and vegetables to their house. Occasionally, they would kill a hen and the farmer’s
wife would come up to the house to fry it. Eventually, she would teach my mother and her sisters how to fry the best chicken in the world. My mother told me that this black family had saved the lives of the impoverished white family who lived down the road. It helps explain a great anomaly in my mother’s life: She and Stanny were the only white women I knew who were raised in the cruel-eyed South without a racist bone in their bodies. When I was four years old, I said the word “nigger” and my mother slapped me to the ground. She had never hit me in my life, and the ferocity of the attack shocked me as she started screaming, “I was raised colored. That’s how poor we were. A colored farm family saved my family’s life. They were as poor as we were and saved us for no reason except their kindness. No child of mine is ever going to use that horrible word or I’ll beat their faces clean off their heads. The whole world hates poor people, but I’ll be damned if my kids will.”

My mother was born a cracker, a redneck if you will, poor white trash if you must, and she never believed in that night-riding, lynching South, that apartheid, Jim Crow South. Years later, she would sit in front of our TV set to watch with steely resolve those intrepid black walkers who made such a success out of the Montgomery bus boycott. I would find her weeping at the eloquence of Martin Luther King, and she fell in love with the black children of Birmingham for their indomitable courage and irresistible enthusiasm as they ran out of churches and into the mean streets of Alabama to face dogs, fire hoses, and an out-of-control police force. My mother hated the inglorious, indefensible racism of the South she was born into, and so did Stanny. It makes no sense except for that nameless black sharecropper and his wife, who heard about four white kids abandoned by their mother in the middle of the worst Depression in history and saved these children with the fruit of their labors and the unforgettable kindness of their hearts. Because my mother and Stanny both loathed the apartheid South, I consider myself the luckiest white boy who ever grew up beneath the burning sun of Dixie.

After Stanny’s defection from her family, my pretty aunt Helen took over as a substitute mother at the ripe age of fourteen. She cooked, cleaned, put clothes on the line, and got her three siblings to school each morning. In early-morning darkness, she led them two miles to
where they caught a ride to their school. According to family tradition, Jasper Catlett Peek began his lifelong career traveling the back roads selling Bibles, cutting hair, and trying to convert every stranger he met. For many long weeks, Aunt Helen would be raising her siblings alone, and all four would develop a fear of abandonment that would haunt them until the end of their days. The following year Aunt Helen convinced her father to rent a house on Euclid Street in Rome, near the school they all attended.

When I was five years old, we were living at Stanny’s house on Rosedale Road in Atlanta during the time my father was flying sorties in the Korean War, and my mother and Stanny got into a terrible fight. The sound of their voices awakened me.

My mother shouted, “You abandoned your own children. You placed a gun against your own family’s head and pulled the trigger, Mother.”

“I couldn’t bear to watch my children starve,” Stanny said.

“You didn’t watch your children starve. You deserted us. Daddy deserted us. We were terrified.”

“I did what I thought was best at the time,” Stanny said, “in the long run.”

Tears were running down my face as I entered the living room, and both women rushed to comfort me. Those women knew how to love a crying boy, and Stanny soon walked me back to my bed. Even today I take the most charitable view of Stanny’s flight from bondage, her break from the manacles that had indentured her to the hard traditions of a mountain South she had been born into in 1899. She set forth toward the rumors of a vast world and found it in Atlanta. Her defection enabled her daughters to marry military officers and her son to become a military man himself. All of Stanny’s grandchildren attended college because of her unpraised boldness. That ride in the mule wagon became a trail of tears to her mortified children, and was passed on to their children as some kind of indelible stain on the family honor. I saw her escape into the future as a mythological trek that carried her family out of a cureless poverty that was both her heirloom and destiny. For me, Stanny came to symbolize the irreproachable standard-bearer of voyage in my family pantheon.

Not that she did not make some mistakes along the way. Stanny got a job the first week in Atlanta at Rich’s department store downtown. She ran the notions department, but soon moved into lady’s fashions selling dresses. She ended up selling fur coats to the wealthiest and most well-heeled women in Atlanta. She began to dress with considerable style and flair, and I remember pressing my face into her own full-length fur coat whenever she and Papa Jack, her husband at the time, went out to a party. They were a glittering couple around town and I thought they were rich as pirates when I was living in their Rosedale Road home.

My mother received the beckoning call to Atlanta when she was in the second grade. Of the four children, she was the only one whom Stanny would claim as her own child. Helen, James, and Evelyn were introduced as cousins and had to carry out that scurrilous charade until they left Papa Jack’s house to jump-start their own lives. None of them ever recovered from this injured aggrievement that cut out the heart of their childhoods.

Stanny’s Greek husband, Jack Stanton, was a storytelling wizard who entertained Carol Ann and me for hours with stories out of Greek mythology—war stories about the skirmish among the gods and the envy of goddesses too beautiful to imagine. He was an adding machine salesman who kept his efficient machines neatly arranged in the attic. But it was after his death that Stanny revealed how Papa Jack had run the numbers racket in Atlanta and had left my mountain-born grandmother a large fortune. This information caused much social embarrassment to my mother and she forbade me from sharing this story with anyone. She admitted to me later in life that one morning she woke up to get ready for school, then looked out her window to discover the entire house surrounded by well-dressed men in hats. When she ran upstairs to warn Papa Jack and Stanny, she found Papa Jack eating lots of small paper chits and Stanny in the bathroom flushing the toilet over and over again.

“Why are you eating paper, Papa Jack?” Mother asked.

“A bad habit I got into in the old country,” Papa Jack said. “Greeks believe eating paper helps the digestive system.”

“Is that why Mother’s flushing the toilet so much?”

“Just stomach problems,” he told her.

“Why are all these men around the house?”

“Just old friends,” he said. “It’s nice of them to drop by, don’t you think?”

“They don’t look very friendly to me,” Mother reported saying.

“You just got to get to know them,” Jack answered, chewing faster.

When Papa Jack died, Carol Ann and I did not take his passing with much grace or stoicism. When they lifted Carol Ann up to kiss Papa Jack’s embalmed face, she flipped around in Stanny’s arms like a freshly caught trout. My own grief rushed in on me as I went down to kiss the sweet face of a man I’d come to adore, but when my lips touched his cheek, the coldness was my undoing. That night, Carol Ann crawled into bed with me and we fell asleep talking about how much we missed Papa Jack. Already, I was having intimations that I was growing up beside the most brilliant little girl in the country. That Carol Ann was precocious was already conventional wisdom among the adults in the family. But her use of language, which she used to make butterflies dance in the fragrant blooms of lantana, was an early gift she brought to the dinner table. I first heard about lantanas from her, and when I asked what kind of flower a lantana resembled, she showed no interest at all—it was the sound of the word she loved. About Papa Jack, she added this valedictory note: “Who’s going to tell us stories about Zeus now?”

•   •   •

The wild child in Stanny spread its wings and took to glamorous flight in the years after Papa Jack’s death. Her grandchildren whom I interviewed don’t quite know how many times she embarked on around-the-world cruises, but most think it was five. She would write illegible postcards from Hawaii, Bali, Hong Kong, Capetown, Genoa, Israel, Lebanon, and Tanganyika. Carol Ann and I pounced on that last word, and she thought it was the most romantic, exotic place that she had ever encountered. My mom would decipher Stanny’s preposterous handwriting that looked like a mouse had its tiny feet painted with
blue ink and had run back and forth on a blank page. Stanny would send back news of encountering tigers as she rode on the back of an elephant in a Bengali jungle, and of watching elephants working hard labor for their masters in a Thai village. She made brief notations about the men she met aboard ships, and her family believes she might have married a small colony of them. She told me once, “Men come to me like bees going to a rose.”

After Stanny’s death in 1989, the family photographer, Uncle Joe Gillespie, sent me a film he had made of Stanny and his family at the beach during the seventies. Uncle Joe produced more film than Cecil B. DeMille, and I personally believe that this loving father shot the entire waking life of my cousin Johnny and much of his sleeping life too. But we had just buried Stanny, so I was missing her when I watched the latest documentary in Uncle Joe’s vast oeuvre. Assuming the role of narrator, Uncle Joe opened up with the shot of the infant Johnny waddling down toward the ocean with Aunt Evelyn in hot pursuit. Uncle Joe describes the scene: “Here we are, the entire Gillespie family. Locals in Jacksonville call this ‘the beach.’ In fact, people in the know call it Jacksonville Beach. It’s where people in Jacksonville come to swim.”

Then he shifts to Stanny and a much younger man who are walking toward the waves hand in hand. I screamed, “What?”

Uncle Joe’s narrative continued: “That’s Margaret Stanton, Evelyn’s mother. She lives with us and is quite the character. That’s her husband, Ralph. Yes, there is a big age difference, but they seem to get along pretty well.”

I laughed for a long time and was grateful that I had a grandmother who could delight, amaze, and surprise me even after her death.

Her long cruises left Stanny exhausted, almost broke, and seriously addicted to alcohol. In a last flourish of wealth, she bought the Hotel Monroe, which is now a parking lot in Monroe, Georgia. It was an impressive brick building in great need of a face-lift. We stayed there several times, and Carol Ann and I would roam through the derelict kitchen and disused dining room for hours. Mom would send me up to the attic to throw a baseball at the rats. Stanny’s days as a hotelier were short-lived and she sold the hotel at a loss. During my childhood
I looked upon my grandmother as a rich, sophisticated woman, but she also taught me that life was full of heartbreak and reversals. After she sold the hotel, I looked on her as a very poor and unfortunate woman.

In 1973, after I became a controversial figure when
The Water Is Wide
stirred up racial tensions in the town, I moved Barbara and our family to Atlanta, into a pretty home on Briarcliff Road, less than two miles from Stanny’s old house on Rosedale Road. It was both a homecoming and a betrayal of home, since I would miss Beaufort all the years I lived in Atlanta.

In the month after we moved into our new home, I received a phone call from Stanny, who informed me she was moving to Atlanta to be close to her favorite grandchild.

“Since when did I become your favorite?”

“Since you became famous. I always wanted to be famous. I want to be near you to soak up some of the reflected glory.”

“Do me a favor, Stanny. Don’t tell the other grandkids.”

“I already have,” she said.

Three months later I moved Stanny and her meager possessions into the Lutheran Towers on Juniper Street. The building was a high-rise of undistinguished architecture and that soulless ambience where old Lutherans found themselves stacked up like cords of hickory until they left the building feet-first to endure the embalmer’s art at Patterson’s Funeral Home a couple of blocks away. I had met the annoying manager of the building when I signed Stanny up for what I thought would be her final residence. As soon as the man opened his mouth I knew he hated old people with every cell in his body.

His voice was hostile and acerbic when he asked, “What is your grandmother’s religion?”

“Stanny’s been a devout Lutheran her whole life,” I lied.

“That’s what they all say.” He snorted. “Does your grandmother drink?”

“She’s been a teetotaler her entire life,” I said. “As far as I know liquor never passed between her lips.”

“Is your grandmother sexually active?”

“How in the hell would I know?”

“How many times was she married?”

“Once. She never looked at another man after my grandfather died.”

Stanny really liked the Lutheran Towers, and I thought she would be a member of that gentle community for the rest of her life. But she found herself in the crosshairs of that dyspeptic manager from the beginning of her time there. He began to call me with dozens of complaints concerning Stanny’s behavior.

“Mr. Conroy, I have it from a good source that your grandmother has slept with five members from the Lutheran community.”

“Yeah, she’d probably do the same thing in the Presbyterian community.”

“She is breaking one of our bylaws,” he said.

“I’ll talk to her about it.”