Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (5 page)

When she was four at a family wedding reception, she asked, “How do you learn to talk without saying anything?”

“It’s an art,” I replied.

I buried my stories; I bought the abandoned Villa Bramasole in Tuscany and made a life there. Out of my new love, I wrote
another kind of memoir,
Under the Tuscan Sun
, and then went on to write other books.

Under that ancient sun, under the native magnolia grandiflora: As in many Renaissance paintings, beneath the Virgin’s spread blue cloak people gather close and life is lived under that providence. I think there’s always a spread cloak.

Now I find the stack of chapters I called
Under Magnolia
. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders?
Dare alla luce
, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.

On several of these brilliant spring evenings, I’ve sat in the garden reading about an instantly familiar girl in Fitzgerald, Georgia. What if she’d seen a flash, at fifteen, of herself years hence, reading on a garden bench, evening rays raking the meadow where coral poppies face the sun? Would she know instinctively that the older self only appears calm, that she still feels the instinct to light out for the next episode? But she would not be interested. She’d rather see herself—how? She has no idea.

As I open a book that I once pulled from the ashes of my grandparents’ house, the dusty, mildewed scent catapults me to their back hallway.

Through the double door, made of tiny mullioned panes, I see the entrance hall waver, a quivering of claret and sunlight from the front door. Wafting from the kitchen, the smell of chicken smothered in cream and pepper until it’s falling off the bone. I’m playing an ancient wind-up record left over from when my father was a boy; “K-K-K-Katy” crackles in my ear. Through my grandmother’s open bedroom door, I glimpse chintz dust ruffles, hatboxes, the slender oval mirror over the dressing table, where she leans, and I see her dab the fluffy puff between her legs.

That’s it: brief cloud of bath powder, grinding consonant K-K-K-Katy (
I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door
), warped light throwing rainbows back through the door. And I wonder,
always, why do such fragments remain forever engraved, when, surely, significant ones are lost? The kitchen fragrance, no mystery. For who, ever, could forget Fanny’s smothered chicken?

An early memory of my father: He opens his buff hunting coat, and in all the small interior pockets, doves’ heads droop. He and his friends Bascom and Royce break out the bourbon. From my room in the back of the house, right off the kitchen, I see through the keyhole (keyholes are a large part of childhood) the doves he’s killed piled on the counter, and someone’s hand cleaning a shotgun barrel with a dishrag. The terrible plop-ploop sound of feathers being plucked makes me bury my face under the pillow. When his friends go, my father stays at the table with his tumbler of bourbon. I’m reading with a flashlight under the covers. My specialty is orphans on islands where houses have trapdoors into secret passageways that lead to the sea. Rowboats, menace, treasure, and no parents in the story. As the water darkens and danger grows, I hear my father talking to himself. When I quietly crack the door, I see his head in his hands, his bloodstained coat hung on a hook. Very late, he hits the wall with his fist, and says over and over, “Beastly, Christly, beastly, Christly.” I put the palm of my hand over the spot where he is pounding with his fist and feel the vibration all the way up my arm. I press my nose to the window screen and look out at the still backyard.

A tea olive tree grows outside my bedroom window, its scent airy, spicy, and I prefer it to the dizzy perfume of the gardenias and magnolias that rule the neighborhood. Tough ovoid leaves scrape the screen; the tiny flower clusters are fit only
for dollhouse bouquets. Then the back door slams and the car screeches out the driveway.

My father’s parents live two blocks away. I like to gaze into the silver globe under the giant oak in their backyard. My face looks distorted and moony, especially when I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue. In the mirrored sphere, the yard curves back, foregrounded with oak branches like enormous claws. On the latticed back porch, my grandmother Mayes washes a bowl of peaches with her maid, Fanny Brown. Mother Mayes’s hair is as silvery as the garden globe, and her crepey skin so white she’s almost blue. She looks as though she might dissolve or disappear—her pale eyes always seem fixed on somewhere just beyond me.

Late in the afternoon, she puts up her bare feet on an ottoman. With the lamp haloing her hair, she’s ethereal, but then I see crude, tough yellow corns on the last two toes of each foot. They’re translucent in the lamp’s glow, as she relaxes with
The Upper Room
, a church book of devotional reading, open on her lap.

Dove heads, tea olive, silver globe, bowl of peaches, church books. Images are the pegs holding down memory’s billowing tent. From them, I try to figure out who my people were and where we lived, what they did and what they could have done.

South Georgia, where I was born, may look to a stranger speeding down I-75 like lonesome country where you can drive for miles without seeing more than a canebrake rattlesnake cross
the road. At the city limits of our town a sign said
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW
. The logic is irrefutable. Thin roads shimmering in the heat lead into Fitzgerald from Ocilla, Mystic, Lulaville, Osierfield, Pinetta, Waterloo, Land’s Crossing, Bowen’s Mill, and Irwinville, where Jefferson Davis was captured by the Yankees. Then, no I-75 existed.

To those whose ribs were formed from red clay, the place is complex, exhilarating, charged, various: mighty brown rivers to float along, horizons drawn with an indigo pen, impossibly tall longleaf pines, virulent racism (then, and not all erased now), the heat that makes your heart beat thickly against your chest, the self-satisfaction of those of us who have always lived there, tornadoes twirling in a purple sky, the word “repent” nailed to trees. A place of continuous contradiction, a box with a false bottom. A black rag doll becomes a white doll when I turn her upside down. I jump onto soft green moss behind the cotton mill and sink into sewage. Daddy in his white suit fishes me out, shouting curses. I’m born knowing that the place itself runs through me like rain soaking into sand.

We are fabric people, as others are the Miwok people, circus people, lost people. In the cotton mill—my father’s business—the light is gray because lint catches in the screened windows. Oily black machines, gigantic strung looms as beautiful as harps, their shuttles pulled by lean women. Bins to climb and then dive from into piled raw cotton. In the tin cup of the scale over the bin I ride, the needle jerking between fifty and fifty-five pounds, then fly out, the landing not as gentle as I expect.
Rayon is softer, and squeaks as I fall in. But to fly, actually, as in dreams. A natural act, as later I would swing out over the spring on vines at night, dropping into cold black water below, crawl up the slippery bank, grabbing roots, then swing out again and again for that moment of falling. Water moccasins, thick as my leg, thirty-pound rockfish with primitive snouts, even crocodiles lived in these deep streams I dove into, pushing my fist into the icy “boils,” that bubbling force at the bottom.

While my father ran the cotton mill and hunted birds, my mother gathered, and created perfect bridge luncheons, with the aid of our cook Willie Bell. The house pulsated with cleanliness. My two sisters were both in college by the time I was eight, but I stayed in my room at the back of the house instead of moving into theirs. Often I riffled through their scrapbooks and high school notebooks in their closet, and tried on their left-behind dresses that had more flounces than mine, and the flowery scent of White Shoulders lingering in the tucks and pleats.

I loved the square brick Carnegie library, the quiet that engulfs you as you gently close the door, the globe to spin and stop, with a finger on Brazil or China, the cold light in the high windows in winter, the way the bookcases jut out to make little rooms, my yellow card with due-date stamps, the brass return slot, the desk where presides the librarian, who looks like a large squirrel. Before kindergarten, my sisters showed me the low bookcase for my age. I moved year by year to a different section of the back room. So much later, I may cross the threshold into the main library where I can check out only two, then four books.

Other literature was mail order. I never had seen a real bookstore.
We had Book of the Month. We subscribed to
Harper’s Bazaar
, for copying dresses,
Reader’s Digest
, required for school, and, for some reason,
Arizona Highways
.

Fitzgerald, where I might have lived forever, was as rigidly hierarchical as England. We had our aristocracy, with dukes, bar sinisters, jokers, local duchesses in black Cadillacs, many earls, and, of course, ladies, ladies, ladies, many of them always in waiting. Everything and everyone had a place and everything and everyone was in it.
It was a cloying, marvelous, mysterious, and obnoxious world, as I later came to know, but fate placed me there and, although the house was not lilting, I was
happy as the grass was green
.

We were not normal. We lived next door to normal people, so I knew what normal was. The father worked for the state agriculture department, the mother gave a perm called a “Toni” to her sisters and friends, and they laughed and had fun as they breathed in ammonia fumes. Their boy sang in the choir, and the daughter, Jeannie, with wild hair, was my playmate. We found house-paint cans in the barn and brushed black and white enamel over each other. Our irate mothers scoured us with kerosene, and Jeannie seemed to be lifted in the jaws of her mother like a kitten and taken home. Her father built a swing set with a pair of rings that we learned to grip, push off into a somersault, vault up on our feet, and hang upside down. On the swings we could pump so high we’d almost flip over the top. He took us to farms in his truck and we sat in back eating
raw peanuts we’d pulled from the ground. They tasted like dirt. Jeannie and I made hideouts in the vacant lot next to her house, elaborate setups of pallets and cardboard boxes, with tin doll dishes and stolen kitchen knives. We sat on a pile of sour grass weed poring over the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
What would you choose if you could choose anything on this page?
After pelting rains, our walls sagged. On Christmas mornings, she and I ran back and forth between our houses, looking at what Santa left, long before anyone awoke. We strung tin cans with string between our bedrooms, but never could hear a thing. Her mother, Matrel, had lively sisters named Pearl, Ruby, and Jewel. Her uncle always called us “Coosaster Jane,” which we thought was German he’d learned in the war. She called her daddy “Pappy.” He was strong, redheaded, and sweet. I wonder why I did not envy them. I think small children may have no imagination for a life that is not their own lot.

Other families were happy, too. “The Greeks” were happy even though their daughter Calliope had polio and had to walk with crutches and go to Warm Springs and lie in an iron lung, that awful water heater turned on its side. The Lanes were happy even though the father drove a potato chip truck for endless hours and the delicate mother had a problem so that their bathroom was stacked to the ceiling with sanitary napkin boxes. I was in awe over how they pampered Rose Ann. My best friend, Edna Lula, was the only child in the perfect family. She was doted on and prettily plump; their house had beds with warm dips in the middle like nests, and French doors that opened onto a long porch with a swing. Happy mother and daddy who
called her by a nickname left over from baby talk. I could not be at her house enough. There, I fell under their bountiful love. They thought I was funny. They called me by my family nickname, Bud. There was no chink. Ribbon candy always filled the same dish on the sideboard. We licked peach ice cream off the wooden beater, loved pouring the rock salt slush out of the churn. They were admiring, told jokes, hugged; their garden fish pool had a statue of a naked boy, clean water coming out of his thing, landing on the old goldfish in the murk. There was a baby grand piano. My friend plunked out “Song of the Volga Boatman,” and “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” Church not only Sunday morning but the evening service, too. (I drew the line at that.)