Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  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.

  Time sputters. And as W. H. Auden’s refrain goes, Time will say nothing but I told you so. I thought, with luck, the gypsies who parked their squalid trailer behind the gas station would steal me and I would disappear without a trace. My parents, those stars, proclaimed a daily misery to the heavens and the rains, a face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat. Border wars. Territorial disputes. Manifest destiny. Why did my mother court trouble? Why did my father carouse? I found the pink pop-apart pearls on the floor of his Oldsmobile. They were tacky. When I answered the telephone, a woman laughed and hung up. She didn’t sound like anyone we would know. I said many things to myself by the age of seven. If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness. When the plate of unhappiness is passed around and more and more is offered, I’ll say no thank you, no. But they wanted seconds, thirds.

  At school I could fall into being a child. Now and then a fact sticks: the capital of Afghanistan, vitamin C prevents scurvy, slavery was “a good idea” at the time, times change. My country was represented in the corner by the mended flag; there is only one way to fold it, like a note you throw across the room, and only one way to raise it and Monroe Fletcher was chosen. For the rest, chalk sounds on the board gave the teacher the creeps, and she crossed her legs in dust-colored support stockings, and told dull stories of her vacation to Vero Beach when she left her bag in the car and came back four hours later and no one had touched it: People are basically decent. The desk with initials cut deep. Cards with holes, and numbers turn to faces when sewn right with yarn. At recess, I love taking out the coil of rope. Double time, red pepper, hot stitches, and: “Mother, Mother, I feel sick, call for the doctor, quick quick quick. Mother, Mother, will I die? Yes, my child but do not cry. How many cars will be at my funeral? One, two, three …”

  Negro houses surround the playground on three sides. Washwomen scrubbing pots of clothes under the pecan trees, spreading towels over bushes to dry, folding sheets on the sloping porches. In one of the leaning houses a fortune-teller lives and big cars pull up and white women go in. Could one be the voice on the telephone? Why don’t Negro children have to go to school every day? Because they don’t need to know. You do. Grade to grade, I worked my way around the playground. Hopscotch, jump rope, red rover, jungle gym: the cardinal points. Outside I was a wholehearted child, under the watchful playground duty of Miss Pope, Miss Hattaway, Mrs. Gurganus, Mrs. Bailey, and Miss McCall, who’d been, once, to Mexico and wore a red felt jacket embroidered with sombreros and cacti for the seven years I was in grammar school. It always caught my eye. Lamentable, my mother said. In third grade, she was wearing it the day Gill C. Tucker said to her: You look like a bulldog, and she said, Would you say that again?, and he didn’t have the sense to shut up. We were all thrilled, and he said straight up, You look like a bulldog, and she told him to get out of her class and she started to cry and said we’d have to excuse her but she wasn’t used to putting up with white trash. She hoped none of us ever would be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable like that. Gill C.—the possibility of open rebellion. Gill C., truth teller, a horse running into fire.

  Because my family was overwhelming, the small self-conscious pains of ordinary childhood never bothered me. I could take the hooked stick and fish for the window shade ring in the hot classroom with everyone staring while I aimed and missed and let the shade fly up and hit the ceiling until everyone laughed and Miss Hattaway got furious. The fury of teachers never impressed me. I envied Jane Floyd’s total blush when she was embarrassed. I rarely was. I felt bad for Joan Appleton’s face while she had a “fainting fit” with her tongue out. The teacher got a spoon out of her desk drawer. I held down Joan’s arms, skinnier than mine, and saw her fascinated face in its privacy and twisting. It seemed she let some anger out—anger I might have, too—then she was limp. She wet her pants, too, but never cried when she woke up—just let herself be led to the nurse’s room. I pretended to be simple. At the fair, picked up, swung by the farmer square dancing, I was not a smiling rag doll, but stiff as wire, face pressed under his arm and him hahooing, moonshine breath. I thought of kicking and did not, rode it out, only made a face when he put me down. My English was only as far as a lisp of bad words said to the mirror.

  In summer, the transfer to Highlands Camp, a two-week interruption to the sound and fury of my house. Camp was tall pines and good girls, willow twig armchairs and wisteria. We bathed in cold water, rubbed archery blisters with balm, learned to post. The girls shared a streak of DNA, a litany of running off at the mouth, screaming giggles. I’m in a skit. I’m a planter with nothing to do for months of winter. “Accompany me to Paris,” I say in fake French.

  I’ve escaped. My new friend from Marietta has a golden retriever at home and her father is a pediatrician and I don’t know what that is. She plays voluntaries on the cello and says the word should have an apostrophe in front of it but people are too ignorant to know that. I’ve never seen a cello, with or without the apostrophe. We have only the baby grand at Daddy Jack’s, with one broken key that I plunk over and over until someone shouts Stop that. She wants an English saddle, will get one. Plump and slow, she farts when she runs. In the woods I hide notes in boxes: If you ever find this please write to me. I’m out of the mess and rattling of home. There are those who care about apostrophes. Then there’s my father turning over the table during a game of penny ante, pulling down the chintz draperies. Some fathers care for babies.

  I see an opening I’ve seen only in books.

  On the final night of camp, with candlelight and the girls all in white with linked arms singing, “Thy sunshine is fairest, my summer-time home,” I’m suddenly homesick for somewhere, not there, but somewhere. “My Highlands calls me wherever I roam.…” Four hundred girls in pressed shirts and shorts, everyone waiting for Mrs. Sykes to give out the achievement awards. Everyone anticipating. I arrange the blank on my face. High Dive. Beauty Queen. Progress. Equitation. Archery. Best Camper.… This is long after I arrived and the counselor jerked me aside after fifteen minutes, said I had the wrong attitude, was cheeky, a troublemaker, and I’d have to clean my plate whether I liked it or not. Now the girls, running up to the podium one after another claiming a bit of glory. Tennis. Crafts. (My beaded moccasins are very nice.) And at the very end my name is called, a special award announced, For Learning to Eat the Crust of Bread.

  Within my family, I could not be a child. But wait, my parents regarded me as smart and adorable. “She’s the cleverest little thing you’ve ever seen,” they’d tell anyone. Praise was for the wrong things, often, but it was plentiful. I was showered with a feeling of immense (if inappropriate) possibilities. You are going to grow up to be Miss America! You have a memory like an elephant! You can have anything in the world you want—just tell me what you want and you can have it! You could float down the Nile covered with flowers! No one was strong on realism; inexplicably, the strong suit was family pride. Never forget you’re a Mayes. Looking around, I could see no possible reason to do anything else but try my best to do exactly that. Sometimes, when my mother was angry, she’d say, “Marry a Hungarian peasant. The blood’s all shot in this line.” I felt bad for my new cousin when he was named the Fourth because his father, the Third, banged on our back door drunk and shouting at least once a week, and his sweet mother, who once was Miss University of Georgia, had sugar diabetes and hands that trembled when she lit a cigarette. Because she knew I loved German chocolate cake, she baked them on Saturdays, while the Third sat by the shortwave Stromberg-Carlson, listening to s
tatic and foreign voices, staring at the cover that flipped up to show a map of the world time zones and frequency bands. He twitched in his leather wing chair and said when I walked by, “Well, you think you’re something don’t you, Miss Priss? Well I am a graduate of Georgia Tech.” Adults could do anything. Anything.

  My ally was Willie Bell. She had worked for us since before I was born. It was not a cozy, member-of-the-family, Aunt Jemima, Gone with the Wind Mammy thing. I was not clasped to her soft bosom for darky lullabies. She was skinny, anyway, and she and I simply knew we were in it together. She for her twenty dollars a week (We pay more than anyone in town.) and I for the duration of childhood. “Just run out and play, try not to pay them any mind, they all crazy,” she’d say, not looking up from the stove.

  She offered me not sympathy, but a steady point of view. One sass at the table and out I had to go to pick my privet switch in the yard. As I stalked through the kitchen, Willie Bell shook her head. “When are you going to learn?” she said quietly. “Just don’t talk back.”

  My mother switched until my legs bled, frowning and working her lips. My father read the paper, looking bored. If I cried he’d say, “Cry and I’ll give you something to cry about,” or “Cry louder! Can’t you cry louder? I can’t even hear you.”

  Usually they were too busy between themselves—jets over the ocean—to notice what I did. I began to drive the car at nine and they never knew. Once, I ran away. I stayed in a culvert all night, just a block from home. When I returned, blank and tired the next morning, I felt grimly triumphant. I expected the state patrol, my mother properly distraught, my father taking vows never to act up again. No one had noticed that I was missing.