Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (11 page)

The jolt of connection. “Look—the marshes of Glynn. We had a poem about them,” I shout. No one seems impressed. They’re talking about the reek of the paper mills. But I experience a pure surge of joy. After that, I have a new sense, like taste and smell.

We pull into the driveway of a long brick house with a breezeway and a little house out back for Willie Bell. My mother jumps out of the car, holds out her arms wide enough to embrace the summer.

By noon, the island sings with heat. Cicadas hum like high-power wires, and air rising off the road wavers so that what I walk toward is real but looks like a mirage. The tree frogs won’t shut up, either. We love the ocean, all of us. On weekends, Daddy catches the sunrise. Mother takes long walks down the beach, scudding her soles to smooth away callouses. As she swings out her leg to slenderize her thighs, her toes sketch arcs in the sand. My two sisters, home from college for the summer, slather themselves with oil and lie on beach towels for hours. They don’t want straps to show, don’t want red noses; they run splashing and screaming in the ocean to cool off, then baste themselves again. Their burnished gold gleaming bodies radiate the dense smell of coconut and salt and hot sand, the smell of summer. I don’t tan. I burn and freckle like a quail egg. I love the warm powdery sand sifting through my fingers, the drip castles I build at the edge of the water.

In the afternoon heat when there is nothing to do I take pictures. My mother thinks I should rest so I won’t get polio, but I never will. I snap a lizard asleep on a leaf, my dog Tish asleep under a bush, my sandals on the slate steps, my sisters coming in from the beach laughing together. In the lens of my Brownie, I center Barbara and Nancy in hourglass bathing suits. Briefly they pose in fifth position, their bare feet tender on the oyster shell driveway. They squint and smile over my shoulder, impatient.

They are older, with clothes on their minds and boyfriends. What they do not want is me pestering them. In my notboredom but lack of available activity, I eavesdrop from their closet, hunching down among the Capezios and crinolines piled on the floor.

They talk and talk about beach parties, Ralph from Augusta, the local lifeguard, Neil. “Who is that girl visiting the Addisons? She was about to pop out of that corny gypsy blouse. I don’t know what her reputation in Macon is, but …” Whatever the revelation I wait for, it never comes. When I become annoyed with hiding, inevitably I make a noise.

Nancy, ironing a skirt, flings open the door, shouting, “What are you doing? This is the limit!” I race around her, leaping to the twin bed next to the wall. I bounce higher and higher, my fingertips smudging the ceiling, until her shouting reaches a crescendo. Barbara stares into the dressing table mirror. “Just don’t pay any attention to her. She’s just trying to attract attention. Spoiled brat, brat, brat.” Barbara smooths Aquamarine Lotion on her legs.

“Meow, Meow,” I call, louder and louder.

“Would you shut up? Now.”

“Make me. Make me.”

Nancy carefully turns her skirt, spreading the eyelet flounce as flat as she can against the board. “Get off. That’s a new bedspread!”

I keep catcalling louder and louder. “Try and make me!”

Nancy bangs down the iron on the metal holder. She lunges for me as I leap back onto the pillow. Her foot catches in the twisted cord and the hot iron falls, browns into the carpet. She
grabs my ankle, pulls me down. Suddenly we smell the singed animal odor of burning wool. Barbara jerks the iron from the scorched triangle in the pale blue rug and I bounce one more time. “You did it, you did it. Ya ya ya ya Ya ya.”

“You little …”

As I run out I see Nancy giving me the finger and Barbara rubbing a washrag on the rug. Nothing came up. She just streaked old makeup across the burn.

They didn’t bother to tell on me since my parents never listened anyway. Certainly, Willie Bell wouldn’t tell. She got the fingernail scissors and snipped away the tip ends of the rug fibers. In the soft pile, the slightly shorter threads hardly were noticeable. She always knew a solution.

Willie Bell looked like Nefertiti. When our third-grade class did the unit on Egypt, I first saw the famous profile and recognized Willie Bell’s, without her gold-rimmed glasses. She must be a descendant of the distant queen, the genes for that flat sloped forehead and chiseled cheekbones spinning along the DNA of generations of royalty, then slaves, and finally manifesting again with force in Willie Bell Smith. Her grandmother was a slave. I knew her as a child-sized, ancient gray woman with hair tied in colored strips like kite tails. It seemed impossible that she’d once been something as exotic as a slave. I didn’t know when or where Willie Bell was born. We measured her age only in how long she’d been with us, six years, eight, eleven. Out of the many years she worked for us, I remember her most sharply on the island because there I first saw her as separate from us and felt the first inkling that there was something wrong between the races.

The light on the islands is white, reflecting off the white sand dunes and oyster shell roads that can shred your feet. In late evening, after a long twilight, the sky darkens quickly, like a room someone walks out of while holding up a lantern. Even after the fringed tops of pines disappear into the dark, the bright sand holds down the light that suffuses the air with soft silver. Sky and ocean disappear into each other. Twisted coastal oaks draped with Spanish moss make the landscape doleful or romantic, depending on one’s frame of mind. In
The Mind of the South
, W. J. Cash maintained that the blue air, softening all edges, gave us our ambiguous ways of seeing things. And yes, it is as easy to imagine the early settlers vanishing into time as to imagine them raising houses, greeting Chief Tomochichi, and planting pot herbs and fruit trees: debtors—altruistic James Oglethorpe called them “the worthy poor”—hauled out of English jails and sent to paradise to start a silk trade.

Walking with Willie Bell around the tabby remains of Oglethorpe’s settlement, I stood looking at the site of the baker’s house, just an outline of crushed shell, and imagined the oven, women walking under the oaks to get their bread, the fragrant smell as they stood at the door. I thought
I’m walking here just as they walked, just as I walk they walked
. That was my first inkling of how the past pounces: Once they were here so I can be here thinking of the fragrance of their bread.

Minding me, Willie Bell was allowed on the beach but did not wear a bathing suit. She sits in a low chair at the tide line, her feet close enough that the waves run over them. My swirly
blue beach ball looks like a world globe and I like the particular rubbery
ping
when I bounce it to her. She throws it into the waves and I splash out to grab it before the undertow does. She smokes and buries the butts in wet sand.

In the quincunx of family, my parents—never one of the girls—take turns at center position. On the island, I can step out of the thrall of that pattern and it’s Willie Bell who centers my memory.

She lived out back in the brick cottage with a dressing table made from a treadle sewing machine base, a maple sofa printed with American eagles, and bright yellow walls from the same paint can as the kitchen in the main house. Between the twin beds was a night table for the white Philco and a cranberry red lamp made of bumpy glass. Now I see that she left her family to go to the island with us. Did she like that? Her old mother with rheumatism took care of Willie Bell’s adopted daughter, Carol. (Willie Bell asked me and I named her after one of my friends. Was that way of naming a leftover custom from slave times? Later I named Willie Bell’s son Robert Nelson Smith after Lord Horatio Nelson.) Willie Bell’s mother ate big spoonfuls of damp red clay. Did she coax Carol to try some? Willie Bell’s husband kept working for my father at the mill.

Willie Bell takes me crabbing on Saturdays. We buy chunks of rotten meat at the grocery and take crab baskets to a bridge so low it almost touches the black marsh water when an occasional car passes. We lean over the rail for hours pulling in crabs. Mother will be so pleased; she never has enough crabs, shrimp, or flounder at home. Willie Bell picks them up by the
pincers and throws them in a croker sack. Over and over I ask, “How can you eat crabs when they eat rotten meat?” She’d answer, “Just don’t think that way.” Then I’d wonder, how do you have a choice in how to think when the smelly hunk of meat lies in the bottom of the crab box?

Willie Bell met Kitty, the maid who came from Detroit with some people who made Fords up there. Kitty wasn’t crabbing for her employers, only out walking. “They can
buy
, honey,” she explained. I think Willie Bell never had met anyone of her own color from the North. Kitty’s employers had a lot more money than we ever dreamed of, and her world must have sounded impossible to Willie Bell.

I met the Detroit people’s daughter, Alicia, at the Cloister Hotel pool. When I went to her house for lunch we sat in a baronial dining room, and Kitty in white brought out two little tuna sandwiches on Merita toast, and Cokes. I thought it was amazing that someone so rich ate tuna fish, which I was too picky to touch since it smelled bad and came out of a can. When Alicia’s parents invited mine, my father refused to go because they were “nigger-rich” and “How can anyone live in Detroit?” My mother said they lived outside it and they were very nice. She was determined to meet interesting people. The ritual Sunday dinners, bridge games, gossip—the same days repeating endlessly in Fitzgerald—were not what she had in mind. “Not everyone is stuck in the backwaters of Georgia,” she’d remind him.

“Well, why do you think they’d want to meet countrified people from these backwaters?” he argued back. He was always a good defense. In the large argument, the meta-argument of their life together, he knew she had to be defensive. He knew, too, that many people would like to meet my mother. He’d wanted to look at her for the rest of his life when he met her. Aunt Hazel said that when they met, she’d never seen two people so much in love. Though who knew what happened to that.

Out of town, my mother became what she thought of as herself. This self charmed everyone. The clothes she bought in Atlanta or had copied from magazines were gorgeous. She carried herself as if our name meant something, though its radius of influence was about ten miles of backwoods at most. “Anyway,” she’d insist to him, “there are some fascinating people here. I met a newspaper writer from Chicago. His wife had a purple birthmark on her back. Wonder if he saw it before they married? Really dark like raspberry juice. She had on a suit with a low back. She must not care. He smoked those little black cigarettes. And an old woman is studying slave songs and dances, writing them down for the future.” My father drains his drink. That would be his idea of nothing to do and all day to do it. “There’s a writer,” she continues, even though he is not going to discuss it further. “You know that big Spanish house with the red tile roof right down the road? The one with the bent pines and the white stucco wall?”

He rolls his eyes back and shakes his head.

“Eugene O’Neill lives there.” She heard this from the newspaperman who said O’Neill was a famous writer with a strong
sense of family. “His plays have been on Broadway.” (My ears pointed when I overheard that—a writer. I wanted to write books, too, and didn’t know writers lived anywhere except in remote Irish castles.) “They named the house ‘Casa Genotta’—for Gene and Carlotta. Her name’s Carlotta.” My father heads for the gin cabinet. “Don’t you know who Eugene O’Neill is?” she asks.

“No.”

“Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to be the one to tell you.” Soon they’d go out.

I didn’t know the word “racism.” Black/white polarity was the God-given order of things. My fingers are poised over the keyboard: impossible to relive that state of mind, impossible to convey how remote we were from the great movements beginning to grind tectonic plates under our feet. My part of the South was decades off; we were metaphorically in an Irish castle or a hut on windswept moors. When Daddy asked the yardman to dance a jig for us, I felt embarrassed for both, but with no clear idea why. Drew, the yardman, and my father had little exchanges they went through on meeting. One stemmed from the time Drew first asked for employment at the mill, and my father filled out an application. When he asked Drew’s middle name, Drew replied “none,” and my father understood him to say “Nome.” So, on greeting ever after, he always says, “Drew who?” and Drew replies, “Drew NOME Hill, Cap’n, Drew NOME Hill,” and laughs. Drew could lift the proverbial bale of cotton on his shoulder. He was blue eyed, a “high yellow,”
enormously strong. He could have mashed my father into the ground with his fist. I remember him later, crying at my father’s funeral, telling me how good the Cap’n always was to him, how he’d lost the best friend he had. My father, all generosity, all meanness, all enigma. Is it possible that the little name game, so obviously demeaning, did not seem so to them? When I found out Drew was afraid of the evil eye, my ritual with him was to close one eye and stare hard at him with the other. I chased him around the yard, with him begging me not to put the evil eye on him. Was he serious? Or indulging these peculiar white folks? I liked Drew. I teased anyone, black or white. As soon as I started school, I began giving Willie Bell grades on food. At the end of every meal, I pronounced “A,” or “C-.” That these were adults and I was a patronizing, tormenting child I did not then see; it took me a long time to invent the idea of justice.