Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (7 page)

Memory is a swarm. What is stunning is how little remains when the swarm flies away. Henri Bergson is right; if the industrial revolution had not happened, we could find logical ABC reasons to explain whatever happened instead. I could trace the threads leading me as easily to the Peace Corps in Africa as to the country club in Birmingham where, in college, the waiters Country and Becautious served us Cuba libres. I could find my way to an off-Broadway Ibsen rehearsal as well as to radio station WBHB in Fitzgerald, where the Story Lady read every evening to the children in the heart of the heart of Dixie. I would like to have the silent areas of my cortex stimulated so
that I could discover more, follow the canaliculi’s secret paths toward truth.

The mildewed, scarred book I found in the back hall of my grandparents’ house is
The Face of a Nation
, excerpts from the writings of Thomas Wolfe. On page 97, someone from a long time ago—my father?—has marked a sentence from a passage entitled “Destiny”:
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas
.

I think I must tap into ferrous earth and pull out red core samples.

On the frontispiece of this memory book, I’d envisioned a drawing of a white goat pulling a painted cart. A long-haired goat brushed to shine, with a garland of violets around its ears. True red cart with wooden wheels. In a yellow-flowered sundress, I am standing in it: a little charioteer of Delphi, only this is down in Georgia where the flat pine country begins to go swampy. That was my desire, the goat I would name my own secret name,
Nicole
. I liked looking into the eyes of a goat, that black bar for a pupil. Did it see in blocks, like looking through a crack in the wall? Silky hair to comb and braid, marble knobs that slowly turn into curving horns.

But I had no training in getting what was unavailable to the imaginations of parents who thought of dolls as presents, and so I did not obtain my goat to prance me through the streets. With logic of their own, they gave me a green parakeet named Tweedle. They thought my fear of birds was silly and I should
get over it. When my mother put her finger in the cage and said, “Pretty boy, pretty boy,” the bird went crazy, all wings, turning over the water and lid of seed. My request gave Daddy an idea. He gave a goat and cart to the little boy in the mill village who lived next to his office. Robbie Gray. I’ll remember his name.

Daddy asked him, not me, to help hand down the Thanksgiving turkeys. Like me, he was seven. He stood, snaggletoothed and shorn, beside Daddy in the back of a truck piled high with frozen birds as the mill workers stepped forward one by one. “How about a big one for Mattie?” Daddy said. He was careful to say each person’s name. Robbie lifted one to him and Daddy said, “Now you all have a big Thanksgiving.” I was standing by the truck door, not supposed to get dirty, Daddy said, but it was just one more time when I was the third girl and not a boy.

I wanted to be a child, but, instead, I was “Successfully disguised to myself as a child,” as James Agee described himself. I knew from stories and friends the concept of childhood. Magic and fairies and castles and the family going on cozy trips in the car, over the river and through the woods. Picnics at the beach, and all-day sings, and dinner-on-the-grounds reunions, and holding hands around the table for silent prayers, a little electric squeeze traveling around the circle. I wanted to be a read- to child with a bedtime and warm milk and snow days. But the lavish events of reality constantly undercut the power of Oz dreams and animals that talked at midnight in tiny books. Plus, we had no snow.

My parents, powerful, slapdash, weary of children, continued to lead unexamined lives. The brakes simply were gone. Nothing to do except face each other. Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if onlys.

The house was short on closets. Mine was in the hall. My row of shirts and dresses and pile of shoes were squeezed in with the linen, my father’s hunting guns, a shelf of medicines (I loved the deep blue Milk of Magnesia bottle), boxes of Mother’s old love letters up top, and, on a hook, the ragbag sewn from a navy bedspread my uncle brought home from the war he spent docked in San Francisco. I closed the closet door, pulled open the drawstring, and crawled in. I settled in the corner and turned on my flashlight to read while my parents in the kitchen laughed those HA! false laughs, broke glasses, and droned on. At some hour, one of them would weep.

At his worst my father ripped open his white shirt, buttons popping off, and carried his loaded rifle through the house aiming at lamps or windows. “Not a one of you appreciates me,” he shouted. He was getting a sloping belly. His scar, an exploded star from when he was shot, shone on his side, front and back. The bullet, meant for my grandfather, had gone straight through his body and hit the wall, and he’d lived. Even so, he was in the hospital a long time and had to be carried on a stretcher to the trial. I was in the back of the courtroom on the colored side with Willie Bell. He rose up on his elbow and pointed his finger at Willis Barnes. My father was a hero. He’d jumped in front of
my grandfather when a mill worker came to their office waving a pistol and shouting he’d get that bastard. Barnes referred to Daddy Jack—“the Cap’n,” the big boss, my grandfather—whom my father saved. Barnes’s immediate bosses, Joe Peacock and J. H. Clark, were killed outside the office. Everyone left the trial excited, saying Barnes would fry. My father: bullet in the gut from three feet. Later we dug it out of the wall with an ice pick and placed it upright on his desk.

First memory: a man at the back door is saying,
I have real bad news
, sweat is dripping off his face,
Garbert’s shot
, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I’m jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she’s pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief,
Now, he’s all right
, the man says,
they think
, patting her shoulder, I’m jumping higher, I’m not allowed,
They think he saved old man Mayes
, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.

Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes’s electrocution. From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer’s daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she’d spit on me.

After Daddy recovered, if I heard him in the hall or banging the toilet lid in the bathroom, I clicked off my flashlight and crouched still on the worn-out towels and torn sheets in the ragbag until he wandered away. My toes curled against the butt of his smooth, polished gun in the corner.

Restless and bored, my parents drove us at least once a month to the beach at Fernandina. We could stay at the Seaside Inn anytime because my father gave them the drapery material (Tung Shan, which he invented) for the whole hotel. Whatever else they were, my parents would give anyone anything. At Fernandina they behaved better; they smoldered rather than blazed. I heard them as a drone through the wall, while I sat cross-legged on my bed reading and eating oyster crackers softened by sea air.

A hot day. I open their door to say I’m going down to the beach. My parents are sleeping on twin beds. My mother’s gown twists around her legs, the spongy pouf of her stomach rising and falling, the tiny scar on her nose. A soured towel smell, the frosted gin bottles. My father in his boxer shorts is frowning, his eyes roving back and forth under the pale lids veined blue like a film of oil over water. His arm is flung out toward my mother’s and hers is also, but they are not touching. I run down the hall and out. I can’t wait to roll down the dunes, chase sandpipers, run after fluffs of foam.

On the beach I expand. Running fast, I feel bursts of pure energy. If out early, I sometimes find a sea turtle making her way back to the water after laying eggs. I step up on the barnacled back, my arms out for balance. At the edge of the waves, I jump off, give her a push from behind, and watch her slowly move toward deep water, feeling the thrilling, powerful rush through my shoulders and down my back and legs.

I look back at the hotel and see my parents at the window.
Why is she awake so early? I wave but she must be looking farther out to sea; my father must have his eye on the sunrise. They’re vague shapes behind rusting screened windows a long time ago.

Reading on the seawall one afternoon, I see two jets heading for each other over the ocean. They will crash! I drop my book and I’m shouting NO, as they explode into each other. Broken metal falls slowly to the sea and a body flies up in the air, then falls. I run inside. They don’t believe me. “You are reading too many books. Your imagination is running away with you.” At dinner, the TV over the bar announces the crash. The pilots ejected safely. “Well, what are the chances of that?” Daddy brags to Pops, the hotel owner. “My little Bud saw the whole thing. Isn’t she sharp as a tack?”

My mother in sparkling white met my father at a dance at the Lee-Grant Hotel. She was down from Georgia State College for Women, ready to dazzle. Already she had a boyfriend, Max, who flew low over the campus scattering red roses for her. Those are his letters on the closet shelf—he who went out rabbit hunting when he heard she’d married, and shot himself in the heart.

On the night my parents met, my father was recently up from a mysterious year in a wheelchair. He did nothing but raise white doves. When he was expelled from high school for pushing a teacher downstairs, he was sent to Riverside Military Academy. Things didn’t go well there, either. He’d come home sick with rheumatoid arthritis to stare for a year at the sky and to train birds to come back to him. Then, somehow, he’s out of
the wheelchair and well, which makes no sense. But now he drives up to the hotel in a cream-colored convertible with a horn that plays a tune.

Hair black as tarmac and the eyes I’ve seen in the photographs of snow leopards. He’s learning the saxophone. The orchestra is playing “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and he asks Harvey Jay, “Who’s the new girl in white?” They dance, her hand is light on his neck, they walk out on the long porch facing Central Avenue lined with magnolias, and the legend ends there, fades out into the heavy fragrance, darkness, and the future.
I’ve never heard a recording of “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” only one of my parents humming it in odd moments, wearing a deep groove in my memory.
I’ll be down to get you in a taxi honey;
and in such a small town no taxi ever was. From their framed photographs, they stare directly at me. Often, I stare back.
Like that
, I say, I’d like to have met you
like that
.