Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (2 page)

The great white courthouse presides, a promise of justice that so long eluded this handsome square. William Faulkner called the courthouse “musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable.”
Ponderable
, yes, much to ponder. How could only twelve thousand people in this small kingdom need so much legal help? The names on small swaying signs—Chaffin, Clisby, Fondren, Percy, Mason, Hatcher—seem like authors’ striving attempts to brand their characters as memorable. One shingle says Landon Tallesin Calder, a name Faulkner easily could have made up. Where’s that drugstore where he checked out mysteries from the lending library? The department store window looks like pre-WWII families still shop there. Overalls, green jumpers,
undershirts, kneesocks.
Kneesocks
. Inside, I buy a pair of black sneakers because my flats feel like tightened vises around my heels. I’ve pricked both blisters with the needle from a hotel sewing kit I found in my luggage. I run my hand over stacks of coarse plaid wool shirts—hunting season is starting, a thought I’ve not had in decades. Not my father, but someone will be bringing home passels of doves for a luckless woman to pluck and stack in mounds of mauve pink flesh. Those downy feathers rising in the air. Many’s the time I’ve bitten buckshot.

Thinking of dinner, I start to notice how many inviting restaurants enliven the streets. I’ll love the updated hushpuppies with mint and crab and the pork tenderloin with pecan crust. But surely some old place still slings out fried pies heavy enough to sink a rowboat, peppery smothered quail, cheese grits, and smoky barbecue. Ah, that’s what I want. All of that.

Like Cortona, my best beloved Tuscan hill town, Oxford invites you in, makes you a participant in the repetition and variation of its particular themes. As in Piazza Signorelli, you’re a star in the cast as you step into the daily play. Your breathing slows, your shoulders push back. All the proprioceptors agree: This is how a town should be built. But unlike any Italian town, here the green air under massive trees dislodges my senses: world in a jar. You may stroll in this vast terrarium, or so I felt growing up in a one-mile-square town in south Georgia. One reason I felt immediately at home in Tuscany was that certain strong currents of life reminded me of the South. The warmth of people and their astonishing generosity felt so familiar, and I knew well that identical
y’all come
hospitality. “It’s unhealthy to
eat alone,” our neighbor in Italy told us early on. “We’re cooking every night so come on over.” I learned that the attitudes toward food were not an external custom, but, as in the South, a big cultural clue about how people weave together their lives.

A faint church bell sounds and a bright-eyed terrier joins my walk. Although no bells tolled, in Fitzgerald we had the Tuscan sense of
campanilismo
, the bonds among those who live within the sound of their parish church bell’s ringing. Those who hear the five dongs and three dings live at the center of the world; those outside of range live in
terra incognita
. We had no visible gates into Fitzgerald, but still they were there. When Southerners meet, in Mexico, Cleveland, or Sri Lanka, in a way they know each other. “Do I hear a southern accent?” the dental hygienist in San Francisco asks as she gouges. She stops. It is as if we have gone to the same college or survived an earthquake together. “I’m only from Louisville,” she admits, “but my mother is from Chapel Hill.”

The complex interconnections of family and friends, the real caring for one another, the incessant talk, emphasis on ancestors, the raucous humor, the appreciation of the bizarre, the storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting, the grand occasions—in both Tuscany and the South these traits offer an elaborate continuity for solitary individuals. Deeply fatalistic, Southerners, again like Tuscans, can be the most private people on the globe.

Tuscans are at home with the past, and when I was a child, we locals also felt that comfort. “Now, your great-grandmother
Sarah America Gray,” my aunt began. She had only a small cache of stories about this “Mericky,” as she was called. The half-moons of Mericky’s nails repeat in mine, or so my aunt told me.

Science may discover the truth of backward time. Southerners and Tuscans already know it in their bone marrow. I can lie awake at three a.m. and imagine that I am lying awake at three a.m. in all the places I’ve had insomnia. I am still in that camp cabin, still on the sailboat
Primavera
, still in my old house in Somers, still in the upstairs room in Tuscany. I transport myself from bed to bed, year to year, multiply myself simultaneously until I am extant in times and places, wide awake in all of them.

You may thrive, you may never scale the slippery glass terrarium walls and fly away, and this enclosed and greenest-green world is so beautiful that you may never want to.

The dog spots a woman pushing a stroller and patters after her without another glance at me. At Square Books, pilgrimage site for readers and writers, I wander the hallowed sections, pull down
Absalom, Absalom!
, and at random place my finger on a paragraph:

As children, we opened the Bible and stabbed a finger down onto a verse that we read as a personal message from God. And so I take out my notebook and copy Faulkner’s passage. I’m loving all those colons connecting everything so nicely.
Wistaria. Once there was a summer of wistaria
.

Soon Oxford pulls me back outside. I would like to walk for days. I’m pressed to know: why the exuberance and melancholy attacked me, why the abrupt heart flips, why the primal rush of memory, why this physical magnetism that feels dangerous … 
there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for
. He’s nailed that. The intense physicality of being here seems to electrify the synapses in my brain. I’m returned to my hand reaching down into ice water to pull up a Nehi soda, my feet avoiding the cracks that break my mother’s back, my arms feeling the hoist up the knotted rope into the pecan tree, all extensors working, my straight spine a muscle that remembers.

The fall-touched air tastes like home. Not home as I knew it but home behind home. Does this make sense, Mr. Faulkner? Now why
did
you spell
wistaria
like that?

Morning is iffy. Great stony clumps of cloud seem more likely to pour down an avalanche than the spitting rain starting now to sting my face. Let it rain—my raincoat has a hood and I’m taking this free day for a Faulkner quest. Let the backlit
leaves filigree against the sky. Faulkner wasn’t ever a favorite of mine. In high school, I could fall into his sentences that meandered like old rivers curving back and snaking forward. Most of his characters seemed as familiar as the red clay dirt my bare feet learned to walk on, as the flat-out ornery, peculiar, unto-themselves folks I knew as the only possible world—those who might have a fake eyeball monogrammed “RG” (means
real good
, he leers), or who could go on and on about somebody swallowing a fly, or wear aqua chiffon with sneakers. My high school boyfriend lived to catch dreary-faced rockfish with poison spikes on their backs. He hardly ever snagged one, but every blue moon he hauled up an old horror with a dozen rusted hooks dangling algae from the lower jaw. These splotched creatures somehow detoured up brackish creeks from the ocean bottom, rootled the blackest pools for two hundred years, and grew two feet long.

Because when I was young, Faulkner felt so
known
, I often smacked down
Light in August
or
As I Lay Dying
, thinking
I don’t want to
. What did confound me was the transcendence Faulkner could achieve, like a sudden leap of a circus lion onto the higher perch—ah, there’s the magical lion face, impassive, imperial, looking down on the little ringmaster with the puny whip. The South I knew didn’t transcend. I wanted out of there.
No future I imagined took place below the southern fall line. “She took the first thing smoking on the runway out of here,” my family is fond of remembering. But they forget; there was no runway.

Saint Peter’s Cemetery would not be a bad place to lie, if one must. Among the graves rise obelisks, draped urns, broken columns, and languishing, ministering women, the everlasting symbol. The word “obelisk” originally meant
skewer
. Sacrificial bits and pieces were strung on poles for veneration. Well, we’re skewered by death, aren’t we? I pass some Falkners, but not the big guy who changed the spelling of the family name. One of them, his stone says, has been “borne on eagle wings” to the great beyond. Ah, the mythic South, the only swath of America not strangled by the deadly literal mind. Wandering about, I see a grave with an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on it. Here’s where I find William Cuthbert Faulkner.

The wife Estelle’s stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza.

I did cry over
Absalom, Absalom!
Maybe I did like him; maybe I’ve taken a circuitous path to this grave.

His compatriots in death are people he must have known. Near him lies Maggie Sue Lewis. Was she a music teacher who rapped knuckles of haphazard students? Opal Miller Worthy close beside Haley Dewey Worthy, Malcolm Argyle Franklin—did they read
As I Lay Dying
? Thomas Somerville Cully—there’s a Faulknerian name—then a child-sized indentation of a long-lost occupant identified as Baby Alabama.

After lunch, where the waiter tells me “Yes, people often go out to have a drink with their old friend Bill,” I walk out to Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak. On the way, I pass a delectable southern-style home for sale. The sprawling clapboard house and screen porch seem to ride on a raft of azaleas that must be pink in spring. Massive shade of sycamores and oaks casts wavy subaqueous light over white boards and grass blue in shadow. My grandmother’s Rook partner, Mrs. Ricker, might be inside painting camellias on white china. Or, can I see myself cutting out biscuits on the yellow Formica counter? No—writing a novel in the spare room, calmly living out the southern life that would have been mine had I not headed west, yanked by some driving instinct for the tabula rasa. Instead, all these years of my life in California I’ve felt happily balanced on the last crust of the United States, just before the oblivion of the Pacific.

Mrs. Ricker became a recluse. Through eyelet curtains beginning to shred, my friends and I spied on her. We saw her sitting on her oven door to keep warm. Gaunt in a white nightgown, her white hair spiked out around her face as she swiveled toward the window and her owl eyes found our three grinning faces.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ
. We scrambled out of the spirea, screaming and laughing.

The cedar-lined entrance to Rowan Oak looks Italian, though the trees have gone gangly and unkempt. Orange caution tape drapes across the drive. The waiter told me that restoration soon will begin. Since the place looks deserted, I walk in anyway. Add to my résumé: trespasser at the house of Faulkner. A black-tailed deer chewing weeds regards my approach with
mild interest. Rowan Oak, a peeling, modest two-story plantation house, looks anthropomorphically alone. Concentric brickwork marks an old garden. Pick a rose for Emily? Nothing but moss grows in the beds. Of what remains of abandoned places, the garden proves to be less ephemeral than you’d think. The broadest gestures, such as the leaning brick wall, retain tenacity. Even a great camellia, or a burst of yellow irises along a drive, can endure longer than the memory of the inhabitants. From a plane, sometimes a garden’s foundation architecture remains visible for centuries. A sign warns politely
PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB THIS TREE
. But no tree remains.