Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Our friends lived all over the Bay Area. We drove an hour to get together. Many of them didn’t know one another, therefore we never belonged to a tribe. Hardly ever did I run into friends by chance. When cars stalled in traffic on the bridge, I thought of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989; I imagined the cables starting to sway back and forth, my car sailing through the air and into the water below. My list lengthened: reservations weeks in advance to the hot restaurants, long lines for movies, more traffic. I’d lived with those things for years and they didn’t bother me, then suddenly they did. Blame it on Tuscany. Living in a place with an intense sense of community made me want that all the time. Blame it on the bad fairy who prophesied at my birth: You will be restless.

  San Francisco changed from being the place of my best opportunities, the only place I could live in America, the most beautiful city, to being always cold. Soothing cool fog became dreary. (Now I often long for bracing sea air, and the lowing sound of the foghorns, and the flashes of blue-blue views, and that flip your stomach makes when you nosedive over the crest of forty-five-degree hills, and my worldly-wise friends, all of whom knew we’d lost our senses when we left.)

  Ed quit, too. Our time in Tuscany had activated his farming genes, and he wanted land. He mentioned a tractor. My daughter always loved her visits to Georgia and longed for a big change. My conversion moment in Oxford reawakened a longing to breathe southern air. That felt sure and right.

  Pin the tail on the donkey—if you can move anywhere, where will that be? Flying into North Carolina, we saw a sea of green. We lighted in the middle of that vast forested expanse, once again looking for home.

  In the earliest stories, after the quest, the hero finds his way home. I never intended to do that, and even now I won’t say it’s permanent. My philosophy is stare attento, stay attentive, beware. I may spend my last years in a pied-à-terre in Montreal or a pink cottage in New Orleans. The most pitiable spirits in Dante’s hell are those unable to move out of their assigned circle. Stare attento—always look for the next circle to jump to. Mother, may I? Yes, take three butterfly twirls and one leap. I’m back on the land I came from, and moss-draped nostalgia plays (almost) no part; the South I fled was hard to boil, hard to eat.

  By returning, I just wanted to place my hand on the cool clay earth.

  At Chatwood, on a rusted nail, I find a key labeled BANDING ROOM, and wonder how the ornithologist Dr. Watkins who lived here in the 1950s netted the birds, and how he secured a place name on their legs. No one who moved here after him discarded his test tubes, his small bottles of desiccated insects, or his tiny jars of thread. As for Mrs. Watkins, I’m tending her seventy-year-old garden and scouring the Internet to find replacements for her rare French roses as they die off. Many are no-name roses that she found in cemeteries and falling-down farms. From her hand-drawn maps I can see her sense of order and how she wanted to live in garden rooms. If I were inclined, I might look to glimpse her, knocking a copperhead off the brick wall, or leaning down to inhale the perfume of her Louise Odier. The house smells like a Tuscan stone church opened only for Easter. The great walnuts lining the driveway must have preceded her. Why would anyone plant them near a garden? Didn’t they know that the roots seep out a noxious chemical that withers most plants within fifty feet? I don’t have the heart to cut them down, and I’ll guess that Mrs. Watkins didn’t, either. I just hope not to meet my fate with a conk on the head by one of those little bombs.

  Fragrances, wisps, fragments linger in an old place. Ubi sunt; ubi nunc—where are they; where now, those who came before us? Roman tomb inscriptions, and an abiding theme of poets. Under the walnut trees, I dig up the stones of a path that leads nowhere. A fallen springhouse cools no buttermilk. A pen houses no goats. An allée of rusty cedars approaches no house. There’s no water to reflect your face in the bottom of the old well. Faintly visible on the attic door: Wesley’s office. In a closet, a handmade hanger holds no coat. In the woods, my neighbor shows me a tombstone. Malley, age twelve now for fifty years, fell from the gristmill window, landing on rocks near the waterwheel. Daffodils bloom in loud clumps. Beside him, his mother’s grave is unmarked. Did she plant the bulbs? She died of grief, a suicide. The dog leaps into the pond and emerges, shaking off water.

  These discoveries of the memory of the land at Chatwood started to work as memory prompts for my early history, long pushed aside. (Yes, even repressed.) As I walk the path skirting the gristmill, through woods and across the cornfield, an outbreak of quartz, a clutch of blue bachelor’s buttons, a hunter’s hut, a swath of lupine, even a buzzard eating carrion, can arouse a hundred images from my past. Turn the kaleidoscope a quarter inch and shards of memory rearrange and shift, bright as ever.

  Simultaneously, the present merges with the heady rush of memory sensations. I’m worrying about getting a tick. What looks like wild kale sprouts along the edge of the field, and, oh, poison ivy crawling up the pine tree. Daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, pretty yellow weeds—if I’d brought scissors, I could take home a bouquet.

  The stream I step across on mossy stones surges toward the pond that falls toward the mill. Water still rushes where the wheel last turned. Four turtles line up on a log, ready to dive.

  When we moved from California to North Carolina, I found in a box, unopened for many years, a cache of true primary material—childhood diaries, high school scrapbooks, a reading log, letters, and photographs. How solemn I look at thirteen in a white evening dress, dancing with Clifton MacDuffie. Wrist corsages gone to powder smear the brittle pages. A childish handwriting turns into a prim cursive. My father in his chair—so ordinary, just reading the newspaper. In the red diary with a lock, I endlessly obsess on possible romances. I really like Monroe. And Jeff thinks I like him. And often, I’m not sure who to like. Then I come upon My daddy died today. That sounds cold blooded. I don’t know what to say. The words are plain in this little diary. Odd that so much chaotic memory is banked up behind them.

  What was it really like down in the belly of the beast so long ago?

  In another box, I faced a stack of student poems, teaching evaluations, mission statements I once spent weeks writing, and copies of letters to the dean when I was department chair—call the shredder service! Finally I unearthed a folder, also from the 1990s, of autobiographical pieces that I wrote and then stowed away. Not that I could forget them.

  Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you’re going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated—all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote—back behind nowhere—when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? “We’re south of everywhere,” my mother used to lament.

  What I’d aimed for was an homage to the place and people I sprang from. When I first read creation myths in anthropology class, I identified with the story of the deity who slapped into shape humans from local mud.

  Writing those pieces, I’d fallen in love with prose. Each day was like holding on to a horse that bolted the barn. I wanted the southern words I’d missed in California. Teeninny, cussed out, pray tell, cut the light, mash that bug, hired out, greased lightning, yo-ho, dogtrot, snake boots, done did, doodly-squat, belle-hood, fixing to, take ahold, chirrun, barking mad, young’uns, hie, I swan. I wanted to glue on my notebook the silty creeks, the drifts of Queen Anne’s lace, the brackish water in ponds covered with hyacinths, the crape myrtle’s dusty pink flowers tha
t felt like the skin on my grandmother’s neck. Memory—a rebel force, a synesthesia that storms the senses. At age ten, as I’m weaving a hat from palmetto fronds, our cook Willie Bell says, “Flies can fly right through the blue in stained glass,” just as a deer outside the window touched his tongue to the ends of wet pine needles. Memory—like that.

  Names of people came back: Fussie, Son Junior, Hannibal, Buddy Man, Halloween, Cusetta Mix, Dimple Harden, Dynamite, and my all-time favorite, Sugar Marie Jo Harriet. All southern writers have to be drawn to the eccentric language of the South, the rhythmic loops of the narrative, wild metaphors and hyperbole, larger-than-life figures in local legends, the still-alive folktale pattern of telling three incidents in order to illustrate a point. Writing reminded me of archery at camp: the hard pullback on the string, the dead level aim, the propulsion of the release, the thunk of contact with the straw-stuffed target, even the sting on my left inner arm if I had not the proper rotation.

  Back then, when I published a few pieces in literary magazines, no one in the Mayes clan was enthusiastic, to say the very least.

  My good girl training was long and rigorous. I have a small family. Did I want a rift? No. I shoved the essays into a folder; I moved them to “archive” on my computer files. I went back to writing poetry and buried the collection I called Under Magnolia. Anytime I felt the impulse to start my southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant. I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded. I wrote books of poetry, a college textbook. I was busy with my teaching, busy, busy, raising a daughter and squeezing writing into the cracks.

  Did my relatives fear Peyton Place with a drawl and a plateful of grits? I stalled as I internalized their voices. I admired my friend Molly Giles, who, when asked how she could write frankly about her family, quickly replied, “Well, that’s what God gave them to me for.” Parents should be careful, we agreed—they may be raising a writer in the house. Little Sissie mentally takes notes as the father yanks down the draperies and the mother weeps and rolls her hair on orange juice cans.

  My California-bred daughter loved the family stories, and said, “You must write about them.” She always has been fascinated by the South, by the talk, talk, talk, the symphonic movements of conversations that diverge and go back and pick up, reach denouement, and continue to crescendo.

  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.