by Ward, Sela
And her husband, Joe and Annie Kate’s father, seems to have given her a run for her money for sheer tenaciousness. A sometime carpenter, sometime painter, he never met a job he wouldn’t take. “Daddy was a little old bitty guy,” Joe says. “Didn’t weigh but ninety-one pounds when he was twenty-one years old. But he had arms ’bout twice as big as mine, ’cause he’s hammering all the time. And he could build anything. He’d build a house from scratch—start at the bottom and go clear on up. Real confident, you know. They’d say, ‘Mr. Boswell, can you do this?’ ‘Why, hell yeah, I can do it. What do you mean can I do it?’ He never said he couldn’t do anything. Tough as a nickel steak.”
It was the early 1930s, and like many families the Boswells couldn’t afford their own car. “Didn’t have a truck, nothing. Daddy walked all over the town. He walked from this end of town to that end with a ladder on one shoulder, and a tool bag over the other. I’d be on the job with him in the summer, when I wasn’t in school. He’d be wearing a little worker’s hat, and sometimes we’d have to catch a bus to go ‘cross town. He’d have that ladder on his shoulder, right there on the bus. And you know how you get embarrassed easy when you’re that age. ‘This your daddy?’ people’d ask. And I’d say, ‘No.’ ”
It wasn’t easy for the Boswells to keep their children in food and clothing during those lean years—never mind taking care of them at holiday time. One year, Joe remembers, his parents got him a wonderful Christmas gift: a new pair of roller skates, the old-fashioned, adjustable kind that strapped on to your shoes. He held them in his hands, marveling at how bright and shiny they seemed compared to his old pair. The following year he got a second wonderful gift: another new pair of skates. And then he realized what had happened. Each year, without his knowing it, his mother and father had taken his old skates, cleaned them, oiled them, and put them back under the tree. They could have told the kids that there was no money for anything, and let it go at that. But it would have broken their hearts not to be able to leave each of their children something special under the tree—and so they found a way to do it.
Everybody who knew Miss Annie, as my grandmother was called, saw the reflection of her strong and selfless spirit in my mother, Annie Kate. “She and Annie Kate are so much alike it’s unreal, you know,” Joe remembers. “It was never What can you do for me? It was What can I do for you? I mean, they were just beautiful people, both of them.” Before she was out of high school, Annie Kate was already working in Kress’s, the local department store. And she was also helping her mother keep a sharp eye on her brothers. “All four of us boys coming up, you know—you didn’t go out of the house till Annie Kate approved of you. Didn’t date too much back then, because we didn’t have no way to go ‘less it’s by the city bus. But you go out of that house, you got to look right, you know.”
G. H. Ward and Annie Kate Boswell made quite a handsome couple. Daddy was tall and thin, with a courtly demeanor, a strong jaw that conveyed confidence, and an intelligence that illuminated his blue eyes. Mama was petite, with olive skin, raven-black hair, vivacious eyes, and a beautiful smile she framed all her life with her signature lipstick color, Revlon Love That Red. Mama was shy in public, but privately she had a feisty sense of humor, which surely bewitched my dad when they were dating. She, in turn, must have been drawn to his solidity. They saw each other for a year before they married on May 8, 1954, and settled down to start a family.
Soon Mama was pregnant, and in 1955 she gave birth prematurely to a son they named David. He lived for twenty-seven hours. Had that little boy been born today, he likely would have survived. But this was the mid-1950s, and a small-town Mississippi hospital wasn’t equipped to give premature babies adequate care. Doctors told Mama and Daddy to try to have another baby as soon as possible, to help her get over the loss. They did, and I came into the world on July 11, 1956.
“I was so relieved when you were born,” Daddy told me once. “I was so afraid you were going to die. I would go look in the baby bed all the time to see if you were still breathing.”
Three more children—first Jenna, then Granberry III (“Berry”), and Brock—followed quickly, and Mama found herself with four kids, all under the age of six. I once asked Daddy if he ever considered relocating, moving away to raise his children elsewhere. “Never,” he laughed. “This is home.” It really was as simple as that for Daddy, and for so many Southerners of generations past. It was easier for him to imagine not existing at all than to imagine existing outside his beloved Mississippi home. But when it came to day-to-day family obligations, of course, most of the decisions fell to my mother. “Your mama did all the raising of you kids,” Daddy admits today. “The father was the one who brought the money home.”
While Mama raised us children, Daddy labored in his engineer’s office. The boom in postwar construction made Meridian fertile ground for an electrical engineer, and by the mid-1950s he had his hands full of work. But it wasn’t an easy business to manage; as a subcontractor, he often didn’t get paid till months after a job was completed. “I had to go to the bank and establish a line of credit” when he started, he told me not long ago. “And as I finished a job, I would go and pledge a fee to the bank, and go on to another job. I did that for years—that’s how I raised y’all. It seemed like every Monday morning I was overdrawn.” It wasn’t until the 1970s, when he got into a different business—cable television—that all that changed.
Daddy was an ambitious man, and proud of his vocation; by the 1960s he had one of the top engineering firms in the state. But his work was extremely stressful, and many of his fellow engineers died young. A lot of them, Daddy included, drank too much to cope with the anxiety. A dear friend of his, a man Daddy says was the best engineer he ever knew, died in his early forties from an ulcerated stomach. I don’t think Daddy has ever gotten over it.
Daddy’s office was just a short walk through the woods from our house. I loved going to visit him there, loved the flat chemical smell of his blueprint ink. Even today I can remember standing on the log bridge that crossed the little creek behind the office, staring up at the sight of my father framed by a glass picture window, working away at his drafting board. He had a small printed sign on the wall that said BE REASONABLE: DO IT MY WAY. The Wards have always walked a fine line between conviction and orneriness, and Daddy was no exception.
Daddy was naturally a loner, even a bit of an eccentric, and his difficult ways could get him into trouble. He loved his bourbon at cocktail time, but alcohol wasn’t a friend to Daddy. It made him contrary and angry. If relatives were over to visit, without blinking an eye he’d get up without excusing himself and go to bed, regardless of how anyone else—like my mother—felt about it. And things weren’t necessarily all that much easier if he stayed: he had a tough analytical mind, and if he got it into his head to prove a point, he had a way of pressing and pressing you on it, often to the point of discomfort. He’s always seemed so naturally wintry and introspective that I’ve often thought he would have been better off as a flinty New Englander.
But Daddy’s cranky idiosyncrasies could veer off into more entertaining directions, too. He’s always been obsessed with the weather. If snow was forecast as far away as Tennessee, he’d bundle the whole family into the car and take off for the border, six hours away. When we arrived he’d stop the car, get out in the snow, let it fall in his face, take a good long look, climb back in, then turn around and head home. Autumn is his favorite season; when I moved to New York in my twenties, Daddy would come visit me in the fall and drive out to Connecticut to see the brilliant foliage, which never appears in the South in quite the same way.
It does get cold down there, though, and when the thermometer dipped low enough for the first time each fall, Daddy couldn’t wait to build a roaring fire in our fireplace. The whole family would gather around, and we’d talk, or not talk, and be together there around the hearth. It was a ritual for the Wards. To this day I’m unable to take pleasure in a gas fireplace; I was
spoiled early by the crackle and pop of real logs, the smell of burning oak and pine I still remember so well.
Even more than the fireplace, there was one place where Daddy and I really connected, and that was his porch swing. He had a big Mississippi State weather thermometer on the porch, and used to sit in the swing and talk to me about . . . well, the weather. I’d lean into him, and he would point to clouds in the sky, and tell me how they were formed, and what kind of weather was on the way. It was there, sitting on the swing with Daddy, that I first realized that he was envisioning a future for me, even before I did. He used to brainstorm business ideas for me. When he realized I had artistic inclinations, I remember him suggesting I might start my own architectural rendering firm. All he wanted was to make sure I’d end up my own boss, just as he had.
Daddy was also the first one to sense that I might need work on my self-confidence. During my teenage years, he encouraged me to work on my voice. “You sound so timid,” he’d tell me. “When you pick up the phone and say ‘Hi, this is Sela,’ you sound like you’re apologizing.” To help strengthen my voice, he encouraged me to read aloud as often as possible. “When I was young, one of the jobs I had was to proofread written specifications,” he recalls now. “So I had to read aloud an hour at a time. It gets you where you can talk easily. So I thought it’d be a good thing for you children to do the same.”
What Daddy really taught us, though, was to have the courage of our convictions. In 1947, during a semester at Mississippi State, he was invited to pledge a fraternity. But when he found out that they weren’t going to let a friend in because he was Jewish, he refused to join. “I just liked the fella,” he says. “I couldn’t believe they were treating him that way, and I didn’t want any part of it.” He didn’t make a big to-do over it; he just walked away.
Daddy, then, was the strong and silent type, as they said in the movies. Mama was strong, too, but there was nothing silent about her.
Despite the difficult circumstances of her youth, Mama had an indomitable sense of pride, a regal bearing and steely dignity that made an enormous impression on me. She was incredibly beautiful: she looked in her youth like Ava Gardner, and pictures from her teenage years, when her family was still struggling, show her in stunning dresses hand-sewn for her by her mother. But what was most impressive about Annie Kate was that iron will of hers. Even into her old age, through nine years of sickness, nothing dimmed the fierce light in Mama’s eyes.
There’s an old saying in the South: “Remember who you are.” Contained in those four words is an entire way of life that most Southerners feel in their bones. It says that whatever the external facts of your life, your soul can remain untouchable, your character intact, if you refuse to yield to despair and vulgarity. Mama had firm beliefs about the way the world worked, and strict expectations for her children. Virtue, kindliness, and self-discipline were paramount for her.
From the earliest age, Mama made sure we knew how we were expected to behave. As a schoolgirl, I remember sharing a carpool with other little girls from the neighborhood. One of the girls—whose family, Mama would point out, did not come from the South—got angry one day and called the mom who was driving a shockingly nasty name.
“Sela, you can’t play with that girl anymore,” Mama told me. With tears running down my cheeks, I pleaded with her to reconsider. But Mama’s decision was final, as it always was. She said she knew this was tough on me, but that sort of behavior was intolerable, and she saw to it that her family distanced itself from children who disrespected adults and themselves so much.
Today that may seem like an overreaction to some. But Mama was about nothing if she wasn’t about right and wrong, and she had an uncanny ability to judge character. She was always a tough woman, but that toughness sprang from an unflinching realism about human nature. The hardships she endured in childhood led her, for better and worse, to see things in black and white. She wasn’t about to raise children who behaved like “that element.”
That might sound elitist today, but there’s something deeper at work here. Like all good Southern women, Mama believed in the secret power of manners—that they are the great leveler of social class. Good manners have the power to ennoble a poor man; they enable all who possess them to become, in the Southern writer Florence King’s phrase, “aristocrats of the spirit.” They are the means and proof of grace. And grace my mother had in spades.
William Alexander Percy, a turn-of-the-century Mississippi writer, wrote that “manners are essential and essentially morals”—a neat summation of Mama’s philosophy of life. It would have been nearly impossible for my mother to separate a neighbor’s code of manners from the quality of his character, the state of his soul. To her, crude or indifferent manners were not simply a matter of ignorance; they were a signal to the world that you were dishonorable, uncouth. Good manners, on the other hand, made social discourse pleasant under the best circumstances, and possible under the worst.
As with everything Southern, this devotion to social custom is steeped in history. “Rules of etiquette are not created—they are evolved,” notes the 1890 edition of the Blue Book of New Orleans, a social registry. “The gentleness that marks modern social customs is the outcome of the wildest of passions.” The bloody echoes of the Civil War, in particular, left Southern families grievously wounded in both body and spirit, investing future generations with a heightened sensitivity to feelings of wounded pride or humiliation. “War,” the Blue Book observed, “the cruelest of sentiments, has given us every usage of etiquette which implies tender consideration for others, and makes modern social life more charming.”
My friend Jill Conner Browne, the author of the Sweet Potato Queens books, has a simpler way of putting it: “Manners,” she says, “are just the grease that keeps things running.”
Even children of my generation were made sharply aware of the importance of manners, of their role as a moral compass to guide you through life. From our earliest years we were half-consciously aware of the discipline grown-ups showed around each other, and we knew we were expected to follow suit. Our parents, and the parents of our friends and neighbors, lived within well-defined boundaries of behavior. And as we grew older, and began holding our own in social settings like school and church, we came to recognize the practical value of manners. If you knew how to be courteous and considerate, it became apparent, you could enter into any social situation with confidence—and you were much more likely to get what you wanted. A charming manner, in other words, could often get you that second helping of pie.
In the time and place where we grew up—Mama was fortunate in this, I now realize—the wider community shared her demanding standards. It seemed as though everyone had agreed in advance on the basic rules governing children’s behavior, and there was an unstated bond among adults to enforce those rules wherever a child might be. The South was one big in loco parentis zone. You didn’t dare act up around strangers, because you knew a grown-up wouldn’t hesitate to correct you. And you knew that if this stranger happened to tell your mama what you’d been doing, your mama would not only thank the stranger for caring enough to set you right, but see to it that you were punished when you got home.
I’ve since learned that the South didn’t have a monopoly on this kind of thing. My husband, Howard, who grew up in Los Angeles, remembers in his childhood neighborhood parents calling a community meeting, gathering together to decide what to do about one troublemaking kid who was a bad influence on their children. The parents brought their complaints as one to the bad kid’s parents, who were shamed into taking action to rein in their misfit son.
Try to imagine that happening today, anywhere. The kid’s parents would hire a lawyer in a heartbeat. I wish the South were all that different, but I’m not sure it is, not anymore. A friend of mine who teaches sixth grade in a small Southern town tells me she pines for the days of our youth, when teachers and other adult authority figures were assumed to be in the right unless proven otherwise
. Nowadays, when she calls a student’s parents in to discuss a problem, more often than not they show up indignant, demanding that the teacher prove the case against their innocent angel.
“You see how this younger generation reacts to everything?” Daddy said the other day. “It’s all about me, me, me.” And I hate to sound like an old fogy, but I can’t help thinking he’s right. There was more true freedom for kids when authority was respected, and a just order was in place. Manners are all about creating a society in which people can feel safe. If you grew up in it, you never lose your craving for that feeling of security. To some, Southern manners may seem quaint, even archaic. But I wonder if anyone really prefers the selfishness and crudity we see in so much of life today.
The geography of my childhood is mapped in the streets and yards of a green little enclave called Lakemont. Carved out of a beautiful old 1920s recreational area called Echo Park, Lakemont was a perfect natural habitat for the packs of wild young baby boomers who would soon be prowling its crew-cut lawns. My parents had settled there comfortably in 1954, moving first into a single-story ranch house, and then into a new brick-face split-level next door. The houses were tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac with a few other sparkling new flat-roofed modernist homes—which, to anybody who was looking, might have revealed something about their inhabitants. My father was one of a loose collection of engineers and architects who’d entered the Meridian workforce at about the same time, and in the postwar years a handful of them colonized this little corner of Lakemont, just a stone’s throw away from their offices on the main road.