Inseparable

by Yunte Huang

  After lingering for a while, I left the twins’ show and went upstairs for the Andy Tour. Unlike the deserted basement, the museum hall was packed with visitors. It turned out that I had arrived on the eve of Mayberry Days, an annual celebration lasting three to five days and featuring the return of actors, reenactment of characters and scenes, pickle contests, bluegrass music, and even Aunt Bee’s bake sale. It all culminates in a parade down Main Street. Unfortunately, the new school year was about to start at my home university, so I needed to return to California the next day, thus having to miss the festival.

  A shrine to the favorite son of Mount Airy, the museum holds the largest collection of Andy Griffith memorabilia in the country, ranging from baby Andy’s well-worn rocking chair to the comically large keys to jail cells used in TAGS, as well as the familiar sheriff’s shirt Andy wore on the show. The walls were plastered with movie bills, TV posters, and publicity photos. In contrast to the basement room where I had been able to poke around a little and take pictures freely, this place was almost sacred. There were signs everywhere warning against touching, photographing, or video recording. In the words of the museum’s founder, the late Emmett Forrest, who used to play “kick the can” with Andy on the street, this museum is an attempt at “fixin’ Andy in time.”

  In a twisted way, however, TAGS may rightly be called a misfit in time. Most revealing is the virtual absence of African Americans in Mayberry, a glaring omission typical of 1950s and 1960s American television. In fact, critics of TAGS and other sixties sitcoms have pointed out the near-invisibility of any racial minority in the shows. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat astutely points out in A Cuban in Mayberry, “During its original run, Mayberry barely registered a tremor of the social and political upheavals that were sweeping the country. Never mind that in February 1960, a few months before TAGS premiered, African American college students staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, a stone’s throw away from the fictional location of Mayberry, an event that set off similar protests in other segregated facilities in North Carolina.”1 In the entire run of 249 episodes, with only one exception, TAGS never featured a speaking role by a black actor. The only blacks were anonymous faces of a few extras in exterior crowd scenes, a remarkable incongruence with the reality that African Americans accounted for about a quarter of North Carolina’s population in the 1960s. Even though for Mount Airy that number was much lower—under 5 percent, according to the 1960 census—the absence of black Mayberrians was so hard to justify that it prompted the NAACP to complain to CBS in 1966 that the show had “never showed a black face.” The seventh season of TAGS was in part a response, however belated and woefully inadequate, to those complaints. In the twenty-sixth episode of the season, “Opie’s Piano Lessons,” the character Flip Conroy, a former NFL star returning to his hometown to work in his father’s business and to coach the school football team, was played by a black actor, Rockne Tarkington.

  Before the first appearance of a black face, however, there were some yellow faces, as well as a spatter of passing references to Asia. There was a newspaper headline, 130,000 CHINESE LIVING IN TREES AS A RESULT OF FLOOD, in the first season of TAGS. In “Barney’s Uniform,” an episode during the fifth season, there was a Mr. Izamoto, a Japanese judo teacher in the next big town, Mount Pilot, who had one Charlie Chanish spoken line: “He no can cut it.” Early in the seventh season, Floyd talked about The Mikado, a nineteenth-century comic opera and a symbol of Anglo-American “Oriental fever.” And then there were a couple of references to the Chinese restaurant in Mount Pilot, where Mayberrians could get a Chinese dinner if they wanted to have a little gastronomical adventure beyond their usual pounded steak at Morelli’s.

  In the 209th episode, “Aunt Bee’s Restaurant,” TAGS finally did something substantial with America’s endless curiosity about Asia, and the insulated world of Mayberry finally opened up and came into contact, however superficially, with China. The plotline is simple and comical, like all TAGS shows: Aunt Bee, whose only knowledge of China consists of a ham-loaf recipe she got out of the paper and a one-line tune she hums whenever she is in a jolly mood (“Chinatown, my Chinatown, when the lights are low”), decides to open a Chinese restaurant. What makes this episode fascinating, however, is not so much Aunt Bee’s entrepreneurial venture as the appearance of the Chinese-born actor Keye Luke, as Charlie the cook. Luke was best known for his role as Lee, Number One Son in Charlie Chan films. His cameo on this episode of TAGS breathed a whiff of “Oriental” air into the American rubecom, bringing some exotic flavors to a lily-white Southern town that seemed to live in blissful oblivion about external affairs and internal tensions.

  SIGN FOR MAYBERRY CAMPGROUND, MOUNT AIRY, NORTH CAROLINA

  My destination that day was Mayberry Campground, which sits on land that used to be part of Chang and Eng’s farm, about five miles from downtown Mount Airy. Like his forefathers with a keen business instinct, Benny East, the twins’ great-great-grandson, had turned his ancestral land into a campground and branded it with a familiar and most alluring name. On my earlier trip to Mount Airy, I had spotted the bucolic resort, sprawling across several hundred acres adjacent to the cemetery and the church I was visiting. This time, I planned to spend the night here, even though I brought no camping gear. Sensitive to the spirit of a place—call it feng shui, if you will—I was curious to know how it would feel to spend a night at the twins’ old haunt.

  Pulling in to the unpaved entrance, I saw a rolling green field bordered by trees. A few zigzagging gravel roads wove together narrow strips of parking spots for RVs. There were about a hundred of these gravel pads, where giant houses-on-wheels, proud symbols of leisure and consumption in postwar America, dotted the bucolic scene. Each one of these boxes of chrome and sheet metal dwarfed my Jeep, and I felt even more embarrassed for my lack of outdoors know-how after I parked and went into the office trailer near the entrance. Doubling as a gift shop, the office was presided over by a young woman in her early twenties, wearing a plain T-shirt and a friendly smile. Sitting behind her neatly ordered desk, she had just finished a phone call when I entered. She gave me a broad smile and introduced herself as Kali. A lovable husky snoozed quietly by her feet. I asked her whether I could camp there for the night.

  “Sure. How big is your rig?”

  Abashed, I told her that I only drove a Jeep. She looked surprised, staring at me as though I were pulling a prank on her. I went on to explain my plan of sleeping in my car, hoping she would just give me one of those parking spots.

  “Those are for trailers,” she said, impressing me with her firmness. Pondering for a minute, like the good manager she was, trying to solve a small problem, she told me that for $30 she could let me park for one night in an empty space right next to the trailer that has the only public restroom on site. I gladly took it, thanking her for being so considerate.

  As she was quickly filling out the paperwork, I looked around the room, where T-shirts, coffee mugs, caps, postcards, and other souvenirs were displayed on shelves and tables. I asked her whether she was related to the twins.

  “Yes, my dad still lives in that house there.”

  Earlier, I had noticed an old farmhouse standing on a corner of the campground, now visible through the office window. After I paid, she gave me a brochure containing a map and information about the facilities and rules: All parking spots, either pull-through or back-in, have hookups to electricity, water, sewer, cable TV, and wi-fi; the campground has picnic shelters, firepits, BBQ grills, playgrounds, two fishing holes, and a walking trail; quiet time is between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m., no firearms or fireworks allowed, and fishing is catch-and-release only, etc. It seemed like a well-managed resort, much in keeping with the way the twins had run their two large families.

  Despite my curiosity, I was reluctant to ask Kali any more questions. Her illustrious ancestors, from the moment they had set foot in America in 1829, had stayed in the limelight of public attention, constantly on display as obj
ects of curiosity. Millions of gawkers worldwide had flocked to exhibition halls, museums, ballrooms, parlors, pitched tents, or county fairgrounds to take a peek at the famous lusus naturae. The twins, even their daughters, as we have seen, had withstood probing gazes by all. After their retirement, local and national newspapers would regularly send reporters to knock on their doors for updates. Privacy was a rarity for the twins and their families. So I decided not to pry but just to get on with my camping plan, however absurdly impractical it seemed.

  After moving my car into the designated space, I took a walk around the grounds. The sun, which dappled the surroundings like a child playing peekaboo, had just sunk behind the nipple-shaped Pilot Knob, a peak that had inspired the name “Mount Pilot” in TAGS. As the twilight waned, a brooding hush descended on the campground, as though some invisible hand had turned a knob on the projector and suddenly slowed the speed of a film. From the front of the office trailer, which sat on the highest ground and had a panoramic view of the tiered site, the gravel road dipped down a green slope and forked into four paths, each bearing a sign: Andy Taylor St., Barney Fife Blvd., Opie Taylor Ave., and, finally, Eng & Chang Way. I realized then that here, in this twenty-first-century RV park, two Mount Airy legends had been put on equal footing—yes, two strands of bona fide Americana woven, as unlikely as it seems, into one story.

  I followed Opie’s path, built of crushed granite and well trodden by big wheels. It took me past a small playground designed as an ancient sailing ship. The miniature masthead, gangway, and portholes reminded me of the Sachem, the Nantucket ship that had brought the twins from Siam. It was during their four-month voyage on that ship, commanded by hard-shelled, Bible-thumping Captain Abel Coffin, that the twins, two green youths then, had first learned the strange language of English, the games of chess and checkers, and the undulations of a bizarrely Western world. Still on route, Captain Coffin, sounding like a character walking out of a Melville novel, shot off a missive, as we have seen, to his wife in Back Bay, Boston, announcing the arrival of “two Chinese boys,” who he hoped would “prove profitable as a curiosity.” That last word branded the twins like a hot iron, leaving a permanent mark and a legacy that still lingered in this park.

  Under the crepuscular sky, whiffs of wood smoke wove their own ephemeral patterns. Some campers were cooking at grills, others walked their dogs on the grass, and others just sat and stared. In the “olden days,” as often portrayed in TAGS, men would have lollygagged or whittled, amusing themselves with pocket knives. A group of elders were huddled inside a picnic shelter, watching a wood fire getting started in a stone pit. Being a stranger, I nodded to them and headed farther down the Opie road, which led me to a pond. Rimmed by wildflowers and weeds like thick eyelashes, the glassy lens of the water captured a megapixel image of the lush trees and the pastel-colored twilight. A fisherman in a red jacket sat on the other side of the pond, hiding behind tall grasses like a Taoist hermit. I had a sudden urge to throw a pebble or skip it across the water, perhaps in honor of Opie, but I was afraid to disturb the fisherman’s dream of catching a silver carp or even a plain bass. These ponds, according to the brochure that Kali had given me, were well stocked with fish.

  Just then, three ducks emerged out of nowhere, quacking, sashaying, and splashing into the water like kids in a backyard pool. They did not look like wild ducks, but on the grass near the water I found four newly laid eggs, soft pink like a baby’s finger. Domesticated ducks do not lay eggs in the wild, so where did they come from? Whatever their provenance, I felt it was somewhat serendipitous that these ducks made an appearance while I was here at Chang and Eng’s old estate. As described earlier, the twins, still in their early teens, had raised ducks and sold eggs to help their mother eke out a living. In fact, it was on a muggy afternoon in August 1824, after wrapping up the day’s duck business and then cooling off in the muddy Meklong, that they were spotted by Robert Hunter, who would change their lives forever. Later, traveling on the open roads of America, the twins would log an entry in their account book for July 26, 1833: “Purchase of 3 wild ducks from Indian boys $0.50.” Were they perhaps feeling nostalgic about their duck-raising days in Siam?

  From the pond, I walked back to my car via Barney Fife Blvd., passing more RVs straggling by the wayside. These chrome-armored road warriors, ranging from twenty to forty-five feet long, were all emblazoned with impressive names: Regal, Winnebago, Airstream, Palazzo, Cheetah, Outback, Sabre, Sun Voyager, Freedom, and so on. No hippie’s VW bus or love van, these recreational vehicles are babies of the American Dream, siblings to shining diners, bowling alleys with neon signs, and neatly organized trailer parks that emerged in the post-WWII era to assist Americans in their quest for the good life, to reach not for the top but for the solid middle. Machines of mobility, they are symbols of comfort and happiness through consumption.2

  While growing up in a small town in China, I, in fact, had a fantasy of living in a house on wheels so that we would never have to change houses when we moved. Years later in America, I saw my childhood fantasy come alive in the shapes of those big rigs clipping down the roads at a brisk pace. But it did not take me long to figure out what trailers mean in American culture, even though I continued to feel fascinated whenever I found them lining up along highways like beached sea creatures, or hidden in the woods like pioneer log cabins, or hunkering down in the desert. As cultural historians have pointed out, even as trailers were initially offered as an entryway into the middle class and touted as a force for inclusion, they were also places where boundaries were drawn, whether over class, racial, ethnic, or generational divides.

  Barney Fife Blvd. turned into Andy Taylor St., where the gravel road climbed to a higher tier and revealed some pull-through spots for even longer trailers. One big rig had just rolled in moments earlier, and the owner, an old man with a commanding belly, got busy setting up for the night. Although the twilight was fast fading, the man immediately pulled out the awning on the side of his trailer, as though to block off the cosmic rays that might descend during the night. In the next spot, another camper had set up his spall like a cozy backyard, a tent festooned with twinkly string lights and two lawn chairs facing a large-screen TV pulled miraculously out of the belly of the leviathan-on-wheels.

  Andy Taylor St. ended near the campground entrance, which was now blocked by a tow truck. On the truck sat a police squad car, a replica of the one used in TAGS and driven around by Sheriff Andy and Deputy Barney. An antique Ford sedan from the 1960s, it sported a Mayberry Sheriff seal on the door and a then-fashionable whip antenna curling forward from the back. A tall and wiry man in his sixties, with a ponytail, was working under the hood of the squad car. Something in his manner, a kind of tenderness a parent would take with a newborn, made me believe that he had to be the proud owner of this cherished relic. A friend of his stood by, stroking his Fu Manchu beard and snickering, while two women watched. I chatted with the women, asking about the car.

  “Yep, it’s the real thang,” one of them told me, pointing at the car with her half-burnt cigarette.

  “What do you mean real?” I was confused.

  “It’s the same car,” she began with a little impatience, but then she went on to explain that her man had gotten lucky finding one of the few remaining 1961 Ford Fairlane Town Sedans. He had painted and fixed it up like the “real” Mayberry Sheriff squad car. They planned to camp here first and then join the parade in the car over the weekend. I again regretted having to miss the parade, where the squad car would roll down Main Street, siren blaring and bluegrass music blasting.

  When I got back to my car, it was dark, with only a half-moon hanging over the eastern hill like an emoji. It was too early to sleep, even though I was tired. I walked over to the deck in front of the office trailer and sat on a wooden bench, to relax a little. Under a clear night sky, the campground was quiet, with only a few shadows ghosting around, mostly campers going about their business in and out of their trailers, and some late
dog walkers. Here and there, electronic glows from TV or computer screens were faintly visible through open windows or half-shut blinds. The Blue Ridge Mountains hulked in the far distance, like a ragged black curtain bejeweled with a few scattered lights. The invisible highway hummed with traffic, its rhythmic pulses occasionally disrupted by the roar of a big truck, like faint thunder. On this last day of summer, the Southern night had lost a bit of its dark opulence, though it was still faintly perfumed by scents of lilacs, pines, and wildflowers.

  As I sat there musing, a white-haired woman emerged from the RV parked next to my car and approached me. After a friendly hello, she introduced herself as the night manager of the campground, having taken over after Kali went home. Well into retirement age, she and her husband, who was walking an old black dog, had been traveling in their RV from Maine since the previous winter. They were, in other words, “snowbirds,” part of a population migrating southward seasonally or permanently to escape the colder climes of the North. This couple had picked up part-time jobs at trailer parks along their migration route in exchange for free camping. They had arrived here before summer, she said, before the heat wave last July hit this mountain area with an almost murderous intent. But they had stayed around because they liked it here. I asked her whether she knew about the history of this place. She said yes, and then she went on to tell me about Kali’s family and the residents in that farmhouse down the road.