During the summer months the houses would be filled with my cousins, but the place was deserted at Easter and I would go there to be alone and think things over at the point where winter meets spring in my imagination. Well, not really alone for I would have my children with me. But almost never my husband, as I was usually “separated” from him. I was young and confused during those years and I would run home to my parents every time another child was born.
So it would be Easter and I would be alone on the coast. It is still cold there that time of year and I would lie in the sun covered with Bain de Soleil and goose bumps and read the Four Quartets out loud to myself while my wild redheaded children fought and built fires and collected firewood and drank Cokes and dyed eggs and wrote on themselves with ball-point pens and turned their backs the color of sunsets from bending over on the beach to build castles.
The Four Quartets. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s great paean to the days of Easter. “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding.”
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.
I would look up from my book, too young to know what all that meant. Too easily influenced to know there are other ways to grow old, that it can mean having the world grow simpler, clearer, more beautiful, less complicated. I would look down the beach. The children would be tearing into the sand with their shovels, launching their homemade kites, hauling up crab traps with their long, skinny, amazingly strong arms. They were all good swimmers. I never worried about them near the water. The real danger at Cotton Bayou was from the sun.
“You better get a shirt on,” I would call out. “Or put on some suntan lotion. It won’t be my fault if you get burned. Don’t come crying to me when your skin falls off.”
“As soon as we’re finished,” they would call back. “As soon as we get through.”
“All right,” I’d say. “I warned you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I would return to my book.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction.
“Momma,” someone would cry out. “Marshall spit at me. Marshall and Garth said they’re going to drown me.”
“He got some wood from under the Johnstons’ house,” another voice would yell. “He stole the Johnstons’ firewood.”
“I did not. Besides, he stole my crabs. He let my crabs go”
“I did not!! Besides, the crabs belong to everybody. All the crabs are everyone’s in the world.”
“Momma said if I put out the crab traps the crabs were mind. Didn’t you, Momma. Didn’t you say the crabs were mine!!”
“Why don’t you go in the house and get some Cokes,” I would advise. “Get out the Hershey’s and make some fudge for lunch. And leave me alone a minute, won’t you. Can’t you see I’m studying poetry?”
The concert would subside.
The Coke brigade would file past me up the stairs. I would return to Eliot.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.
Four Quartets. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. The days slipped through my hands like music while the children’s backs grew redder, the supply of Cokes smaller, the piles of wet clothes higher.
Sometimes other divorcées and their children went with us to the coast. The women and I would walk the lonely beaches talking about the men we had married and failed to love and stolen the lovely sunburned children from. We were full of brittle justifications. We could not figure out what had gone wrong. We had been so beautiful and gifted and polite. We had meant so well. There had been so much of everything. How could we be unhappy? How could we be alone?
The coast was a refuge for us during those hard years, a place of healing and reflection. We would walk the beaches together like women whose men have gone to war. Beside us the great pounding heart of the ocean, the sea breeze in our hair, the voices of our children rising and falling in the distance. We would walk the beaches and tell our stories until they assumed the qualities of myths… “Momma,” a child’s voice would call out from behind a sand dune. … “I found a sandpiper’s nest. … I found a cowrie shell. … I found a conch. … I found a red triton and Marshall says it’s his. …”
MY COUSIN Bubba Finley was a genius. He was the first boy in Issaquena County to build a radio that could talk to foreign countries. He talked to England and Australia and France and Mexico and the Caribbean islands.
Picture a two-story frame house beside a lake. There is a huge magnolia tree right in the middle of the front yard and screened-in porches around three sides. There is a parlor as big as a dance hall but no one ever goes into it except Bubba’s twin sister, Laura. She goes in to practice the piano. Many rooms surround the parlor, going out in all directions, bedrooms, kitchens, halls. My aunt Roberta and cousin Nell are out in the yard practicing cheerleading in their heavy white wool sweaters. It is August and hot as the gates of hell but they have to wear them to get used to them for the fall. I want to be them more than anything in the world but I am not. I am ten years old and I’m spending the week at Onnie Maud’s house as a reward for being reasonable about my typhoid shot. Life is good.
It is midmorning, let us say, and Laura is in the parlor playing Clair de lune. Across the road is Lake Washington, the biggest cypress swamp in the world, mysterious and beautiful in the morning sun. It is a lake left behind when the Mississippi River changed its course and went to Greenville.
Onnie Maud’s husband, Doctor Finley, is in his brick office across the street giving shots and showing his skeleton to children and telling ladies when their babies will come and waiting for an emergency. At any moment a mule will step on someone’s foot or someone will break a bone or get bit by a dog and have to have rabies shots or step on a rusty nail and need a tetanus shot. I have seen them drag suffering victims up onto Onnie Maud’s porch right in the middle of Doctor Finley’s Sunday afternoon nap. The atmosphere hushed and dangerous and afraid. He would rise from his bed. It seemed as if he slept in his suit. He would take the victim into his hands. No wonder his son turned into a mechanical genius. Not that the radio was the only way Bubba’s genius manifested itself. He also had an unbelievable tenor voice with a huge range. He would lie out in the backyard sunning his lungs, then rise up and go about the halls, singing at the top of his voice.
I adored him. I adored him more than his piano-playing twin sister, or his wonderful older sister, Nell, or more than Onnie Maud herself, with her unerring ability to make a ten-year-old girl look like a princess by the application of a curling iron and Laura Finley’s beautiful hand-me-down pinafores and dresses. Talk about genius! How those women could sew.
The first time I made one of these broadcasts for National Public Radio I thought of Bubba. I was in New York City with earphones on my ears talking to Bob Edwards in Washington. A wonderful red-haired girl named Manoli Wetherall was in the control booth. There were soft white things on the walls reminiscent of the egg cartons Bubba used to line his room. I was enormously at home in that place. I felt as if I had been there before and I trusted it to be a place that was on a quest for truth, the only journey I am interested in going on. This is a writer’s journal. You must understand how significant these relationships and correspondences seem to me. How I rely on them to tell me what to do next and where to go and who to trust in the world.
I RECEIVED a letter the other day from a woman in England. She loved my stories and sent me word that they made her want a mayonnaise sandwich and a Coke with a hole in the top of the cap. The letter was sent through my agent. It was part of a letter she wrote to him thanking him for sending her my books. She is the
wife of one of his English authors but was raised in the American South.
“A mayonnaise sandwich and a Coke with a hole in the top?” my agent asked. “What is this strange southern meal? I have asked everyone in our office and even our resident Georgian cannot shed light on this menu.”
Here is what I wrote in reply. Dear Michael, I wrote,
A long time ago people lived in houses where there was a constant supply of babies who drank out of baby bottles. I was fortunate to live in such a house and had baby bottles available to me anytime I wanted one so I never had to resort to the common practice of putting a hole in the cap of a Coca-Cola bottle with an icepick and sucking out the Coke.
I have, however, tasted this drink and it is indescribable, a combination of cola and cork and tin, and maybe even lead, dangerous and wild.
Part II. Mayonnaise sandwich. Take a loaf of white bread. Discard the ends. Eat a piece. Take two other pieces. Lay them flat on a plate. Open a jar of mayonnaise or Kraft Miracle Whip. Put as much mayonnaise as possible on each piece. Push the pieces together. Bon appetit.
Of such moments are the rewards of a writer’s life concocted. The unfortunate part is that life imitates art so enthusiastically in my case at least that the minute I write down anything as seductive as the words mayonnaise sandwich I have to go and eat one. I always do it sooner or later — it might be days later — but what I generally do is go on and eat whatever it is right then and get it over with.
This is more than I need to know about the effect of thought upon action.
I FOUND a note to myself on the back of a tablet this morning. Get back to that happy child lying in the yard in front of the house listening to China. That’s what the note said. What it meant was, go back into the self, not the thousand masquerades I am so adept at assuming. Back to that warm fat little girl lying on the grass in front of my grandmother’s house, with the grass scratching my legs and the smell of the earth and its incredible richness.
The bayou was going by not a hundred yards away but I was not listening to the bayou. I was listening to China. Right underneath me were thousands of Chinese people hurrying through the streets of their crowded cities, carrying marvelous paper umbrellas, pulling each other in carts, endlessly polite and smiling.
Meanwhile, right there in Issaquena County, Mississippi, I was in a house full of people who were also being very polite to each other, on the surface, but underneath was China, exciting undercurrents, alliances, power and usurpations of power, statements and allegations and rumors. This was not black against white or anything as mundane as that. No, this was Onnie Maud in Glen Allen having allegedly made the statement that Miss Teddy was grieving too long over her dead husband and visiting his grave too often.
My great-grandmother, Babbie, and Eli Nailor, the cook, were staying in the kitchen trying to keep out of it, but they kept being drawn into the fray. I hung out in the kitchen all I could in those days, as close as possible to the pantry where they kept the pinch cakes, long trays of yellow cake that we were allowed to break pieces off of in between meals, so I was spending a lot of time on a stool by the pantry anyway and got to hear everything that was going on.
There were German prisoners of war working the fields of Hopedale Plantation that summer and there was fighting in Europe and the Pacific and we heard reports of that every day at noon on the radio. But the war that interested me was the one that was raging between the big house and the house on Lake Washington where Onnie Maud lived with her husband, Uncle Robert, who was the only doctor for miles around.
Onnie Maud was supposed to have said that about Teddy and a cousin in Rolling Fork had reported it and Teddy wanted to go up to Glen Allen and confront Onnie Maud and get it over with but my grandmother was against it and thought they should let sleeping dogs lie. The reason Miss Teddy’s husband had died in the first place was because he was trying to save the levee, and she was only twenty-six years old at the time and pregnant and she thought she should get to grieve as long as she wanted to. Who was Onnie Maud to criticize her grief, up there in Glen Allen with her doctor husband in perfect health?
All that summer they would come into the kitchen one at a time and try to get my great-grandmother and Nailor to take sides but they wouldn’t do it. Neither would I. I just kept on getting all the pinch cake I could and Nailor kept sitting on his chair saying this too shall pass away and my great-grandmother kept on making the mayonnaise. She would drop the Wesson Oil one drop at a time into the lemon and the egg, then beat it with the whip.
“What makes it mayonnaise?” I would ask.
“It’s a colloid,” she would answer. “Doctor Finley says it’s a colloid.”
I would stare off into the pantry, filled with the mystery of mayonnaise. Of course, this was a long time ago when people lived in houses where a lot was going on, and China was only the speed of dreams away.
I AM heavily under the influence this morning of a movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy, about a family of African bushmen in Botswana. These bushmen never say a cross word to their children and the children grow up to be the sweetest, gentlest, most lighthearted people in the world. Sir Laurens Van Der Post writes about these people, in books with wonderful names like The Mantis Prayer, and The Lost World of the Kalihari and The Heart of the Hunter.
I’m a sort of bushman. My mother never said a cross word to me. Even when she would pretend to discipline me, when she would knit her brows and screw up her lips and try to bring a little order into my life, I knew she didn’t have her heart in it. I knew she thought it was funny as all get-out that I was wild and crazy. She still thinks it’s funny.
She’d fit right in with those bushmen. She’s got this gift of knowing that life is supposed to be a happy outrageous business. “Let’s go shopping,” that’s her idea of how to discipline an unruly child. “I think you need some new shoes.”
I almost never went to school. That’s why I’m a writer. Anytime I wanted to I could wake up and say I was sick and she’d let me stay home and read books. If she came into my room I’d start turning the pages real slowly as if I was barely able to lift the book, or I’d clutch my stomach or my head. She would bring me cool drinks and bathe my face with a warm cloth and around noon she’d show up with a sickbed tray, chopped steak and mashed potatoes and baked apples dyed green, one of her specialties.
Then, when it was afternoon and too late to get sent back to school, I’d recover and get dressed and go outside and get in my treehouse and finish my book. I was reading about ten or twelve a week at that time. The stars on my reading chart fell off the board and dripped down onto the floor.
I really think this bushman stuff has a lot to do with my being a writer. I’m doing the same thing right this very minute that I did in the third grade. I’m all alone in a bedroom with some cookies and a drink, surrounded by books. When I get through for the day, when I recover, I’ll get dressed and go down to town and see what’s going on.
Why have I been doing this? What have I been trying to find out all these long years of my extended bushman childhood? What am I hoping to learn from all this character and scene and plot? I don’t know. All I know for sure is that by this means, ever since I was a small child, every now and then I’d get a glimpse, like a shiver, of what’s underneath the illusion, and it’s the promise of another look at that that drives me to do this absurd thing for a living. An intimation of something wonderful and light, a chance to see what’s really going on, stars and subatomic particles and so forth.
That’s the thing that wakes me at dawn and keeps me in this room while everyone else is out in the real world making deals and talking on the phone and running the place.
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.
I HAVE BEEN moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedd
ing old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine. This week I am in the middle of moving back to Jackson, Mississippi. Finding my old friends. I am the hunter home from the hills, with stories to tell, news to catch up on, compliments to exchange.
I began my roaming life during the Second World War — every five or six months I moved to a new town and went to a new school. Some children are harmed by this process. I thrived on it. My parents are stable and enthusiastic people. A war had to be won and we were part of winning it. What had to be done would be done. I was raised to believe that people are brave and resourceful and resilient.
Now, here I am, so many years later, sitting in an empty apartment waiting for my furniture to arrive and I am perfectly happy and I have this wild idea that I know exactly what I’m doing and am in charge of my own destiny. I see myself as deliberately playing out an old scenario from my childhood. Tearing up a perfectly nice comfortable life and going off to live somewhere else. Deliberately complicating things.
Well, I am a writer and when life becomes comfortable for an artist the energy stops — nothing in the long history of our species has prepared us to be comfortable. Being comfortable is so boring it makes us drink and take drugs and bet on football games. Anything for a little excitement, so I invented this adventure for myself. My belongings are somewhere on a moving van between Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Jackson, Mississippi. My papers are scattered everywhere. My mind is like a pile of pick-up sticks, seeing new streets, new trees, new faces, learning my new address and phone number.
Falling Through Space Page 2