Homesick

by Ward, Sela

  On the surface it may have seemed like a typical suburban subdivision, but there was something about the connection among these families that gave the place a sense of real community. “We all knew each other,” Daddy remembers. “Had the same background, education, worked on the same jobs.” They all seemed to have so much fun together. I remember the weekly card games my parents and our neighbors took turns hosting: our house would fill with friends and laughter, the men arguing philosophically as the evening grew late. Mama always knew just the right thing to say; I marveled at her natural social graces, and wondered how I would ever learn what she knew.

  There were no mountains in Lakemont, just hills. But there were two small lakes—ponds, really—and in the spring and summer they became weekend gathering places for the entire neighborhood. Like most people, when I recall my childhood what I am usually remembering are the weekends—warm and breezy, they all seemed to be, and spent in a blur of tireless activity and blissfully uninterrupted leisure. So many afternoons I spent sitting on the bank of one of the lakes, with a cane pole in my hand, waiting for a bream to take the worm on the hook. The little red and white plastic cork would disappear under the water, and I’d give the pole a little upward tug, and haul in the fish, as big as Daddy’s hand. You’d see everybody there, Aunt Sara and Uncle Boots and neighbors and friends, with their coolers and lawn chairs and picnic lunches, talking and fishing, fishing and talking. When they drained one of the lakes, everybody—and I mean everybody—came to catch and eat the fish. It was like a communal feast. This was not in the country, mind you, but in the heart of a modern subdivision. Most of the men and women who lived there were Depression kids like my parents, and they weren’t about to let those fish go to waste. Besides, there isn’t a Southerner alive who doesn’t love fried fish fillets.

  Nowadays the neighborhood has aged, and there aren’t many kids around. The levee we played on isn’t often busy anymore, but I like to think that somewhere Mississippi children are still doing some lazy cane-pole fishing on a Sunday afternoon, not wasting their day in the mall or in front of a computer screen.

  Not far from the lakes were a few scattered remnants of Echo Park, which for us children retained the mysterious aura of things long gone. By the time of my childhood they were largely grown over with brush, but you could still see the entrance to the concrete cave that had once been home to a bear named Chubby. chubby bear’s cave, as the faded lettering still reads, was a neighborhood landmark; we’d crawl in, casting flashlight beams into dark corners to make sure no snakes were lurking, and then we’d scare ourselves to death holding miniature séances by candlelight. There was a persimmon tree hanging over the entrance to the cave, and when the fruits were ripe, we’d collect them as they fell. There were blackberry briars along the roadside by the cave, and we’d stain our hands purple picking the ripe ones.

  When we weren’t gathered around the lake with Mama and Daddy, we kids loved playing in the woods behind our house. Jenna, Berry, Brock, and I would build forts, sweeping the ground bare so we’d have soft dirt floors. We’d cut trails through the woods, and Berry would hunt birds with his BB gun. When somebody told him you could catch a bird if you put salt on its tail, he came up with a scheme in which he’d take a fishing pole with a purple plastic worm dangling on the end, dip the worm in salt, and try to touch birds’ tails with the worm. I don’t think the Lakemont birds were ever in danger.

  Our neighborhood had a tennis court, and a swimming pool, where you’d see all your friends every day in the summer. There was an annual Lakemont picnic, with a potluck lunch spread three tables long, and all of those simple, old-fashioned games—sack races, bobbing for apples. When we weren’t in the park itself we’d play flag football and whiffle ball in nearby fields with our pals, ride our bikes up and down the streets, spend the night at each other’s houses, and do all the things neighborhood kids did in the days before the invention of the scheduled play date. The only rule was to be home for supper before dark.

  On a summer night there was no better adventure than to stay over with my grandmother Annie Raye, the only one of my grandparents to survive into my childhood. She didn’t have much money, and until her last years (when she moved in with us), she lived in a small apartment in a housing project in town. She smoked cigarillos, and read magazines like Movie Mirror and True Detective Stories with boundless appetite. I was never allowed to have coffee at home, but Grandma was always glad to sneak me a cup; she and I would sit at her little kitchen table, share a pot of coffee, and start our day together. I’d watch her forever, embroidering doilies and pillowcases, or working away at the old-fashioned, pedal-driven Singer sewing machine in her apartment. (I’m having all the little things she embroidered cut up and reassembled as a keepsake quilt for her namesake, my daughter, Anabella Raye.) I miss the hum of the oscillating fan at the foot of her bed; at night it would fill that quiet apartment and lull me to sleep.

  My grandmother was also a wonderful cook. She made the most delicious fudge, dense and thick and rich. I’ve never had any like it since she died. She wrote the recipe down, but Mama always said she must have left an ingredient out, because it’s never turned out quite the way it should. She also made the best corn-bread dressing for the holidays. The other day my Aunt Nancy and I were remembering her leaning up against the stove on that crutch of hers, her long cigarillo hanging out precariously over the stovetop. “If you’re looking for a missing ingredient,” Nancy says, laughing, “you better think about that cigarette ash.”

  I was by nature a bashful child, and I rarely felt more secure and at home in the world than when I’d go into my grandmother’s backyard, climb up into the mimosa tree, with its fuzzy blossoms the color of pink lemonade, and talk to it. I don’t remember what I said to the tree, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The important thing is that I felt the tree listened and understood me, achingly timid as I was, too fearful to pour out my heart to a living soul.

  But I wasn’t melancholy all the time. Most days I was happy to go look for something exciting to do. And I didn’t usually have to look too far, because my father was always bringing something home that was way too much for us to handle. Once he gave my seven-year-old brother Berry a go-cart that must have gone twenty-five miles an hour; Mama almost had a heart attack watching Berry whipping around the driveway, his little head just barely visible over the steering wheel. On Saturday mornings we’d pile into the car and Daddy would take us chasing trains from intersection to intersection, blowing the horn and waving to the conductor.

  If that sounds a tad dangerous, consider the other harebrained way we passed the time: chasing the bug truck. In the summer, the city would send a truck equipped with an insecticide fogger around town, spraying for mosquitoes. As soon as we heard the “fog machine” coming we’d go chasing it down the street, playing in the sweet-smelling cloud of insecticide smoke it left in its wake. It was probably aerosolized DDT, and it’s a wonder we haven’t all dropped dead of lung cancer. But, I’ll admit it sure was fun at the time.

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  In my memories of childhood, time itself seems to stand still. The very quality of time, and of its passing, felt different in those days. And if it seems now that there was a sacredness to it, a sense that it was something not to be mastered but to relish with honest joy, perhaps it’s no surprise that my mind wanders to my youthful memories of Sunday.

  Christians and Jews alike observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, when men and women of faith step back from their everyday pursuits. It’s a time to enjoy the God-given fruits of those labors, but also a time to rest in honor of something greater than ourselves and our immediate desires. A great rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, put it this way:

  The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath, we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eter
nal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

  Now, we Wards wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, but we would have known what the rabbi meant. This is just how we felt about the Christian Sabbath. There was something special about Sunday—something that included God, certainly, but that also embraced the comforts of food and family.

  Sometimes on those childhood Sundays I would wake up early, and find Daddy reading the paper at daylight; soft swing music wafted in from Mama’s kitchen with the smell of breakfast. Everything was quiet and peaceful, and our house never felt more like home. After breakfast, Mama would dress us for church. Boys wore slacks, and coats and ties if they were older. Girls, like their mothers, would die a thousand deaths before showing up in pants. It was, plain and simple, a matter of respect for God. My sense is that dressing up for church taught us kids how important God was, well before we were able to understand theology. Even today I’m still a little bit scandalized by the thought that people who meet business clients in their nicest clothes will wear any old thing to church.

  It was important for Daddy that we have religious instruction. He had been raised Methodist, but his particular church was fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist. He had been disillusioned at an early age by a hypocritical preacher, and though he never lost his faith, he had a strong dislike for the kind of rigid Christianity Southerners call hard-shell. Still, that was part of his background, and he never could quite shake it. When I was a young child, an adult heard me call one of my brothers a fool, and told Daddy about it. Daddy took me aside and gave me a stern lecture about how the Bible says I could go to hell for that. It was strange hearing something like that coming from a man who disdained that kind of literal-minded religion.

  Because the Bible Belt runs through the South, and Evangelical Protestantism is dominant there, many people assume Southerners are humorless about religion. But in truth, our appreciation for human frailty tends to make us more skeptical of hard-shell preachers and strict religion than we’re given credit for. There’s an old Southern joke that goes like this: If you’re planning a fishing trip with a Southern Baptist, be sure to find another one to come along—one Baptist will drink all your beer, but if you have two to keep an eye on each other, neither one will touch the stuff. Another joke says that Southern Baptists don’t like to fool around in bed, because they’re afraid it could lead to dancing. Of course, the Baptists weren’t above having a little fun themselves—usually at the expense of the worldly, upper-class Episcopalians (Whiskypalians, they called them) or the dour, “respectable” Presbyterians, whom Baptists call the Frozen Chosen.

  My friend Becky tells a story about the last day she and her family were Baptists. One day, her husband dropped her and the children off in front of their church while he went to park the car.

  “Next thing you know, there was Channel 3 News shoving a microphone in my face, asking me what do I think about the fact that our pastor had been caught soliciting for prostitution at some family seafood restaurant!” she says. “Well, I never! I said, ‘You are kidding me!’ And then—haw!—he did the worst thing. Instead of saying, ‘I have sinned, please forgive me,’ he told the congregation he’d been down there trying to bring the Gospel to fallen women. You know, ‘Jesus meets the woman at the well.’

  “My Lord, we were so humiliated,” Becky says, laughing. “At that point, my husband said there must be something in the Baptist coffee that makes ’em crazy. So we finally changed to Presbyterian, so at least now I can have a decent drink if I feel like it.”

  In the South, it isn’t so important which religion you subscribe to, as long as you’re religious in some way. Southern people say grace at meals, and they talk about God more openly, and less self-consciously, than most other Americans. I’ve always felt ambivalent about that. I love how unashamed Southern folks are of their faith, but it can be off-putting if it’s overdone. Proselytizing bothers me, and I don’t like to hear people go on about their religion with pride in their voices. Maybe this is a legacy of Daddy’s mistrust of preachers. Or maybe it’s just that I believe religion is, at its heart, a private thing, and that you can tell those who are really holy by their humility.

  The Ward children attended First Christian Church in downtown Meridian, and we always sat in the balcony (probably so Mama wouldn’t be embarrassed if any of us acted up). I loved that church so much; I’ve spent all my life trying to find a place that makes me feel so warm, and so close to God. The handsome stone building was built in the 1920s by men who drove their Model T’s out south of town to a rocky hillside, loaded the cars with the dark brown fieldstones, and ferried them back to the city for the stonemasons. Its interior was graced by simple but grand wooden Gothic arches, and during my childhood the walls suggested clotted cream; now they’ve been painted a delicate pink, but the carpet remains the color of ripe plums. The bright red doors, we were told, represented the fire of faith, but they seemed closer to the color of an old-style London phone booth. It was an uplifting, memorable space, filled on Easter with lilies and soft, natural light.

  But what made it so captivating to me was the pastor, Dr. William Apperson. He was tall and Cary Grant handsome, and spoke with compassionate authority. He had been educated at Oxford, and his sermons were always filled with the words of men of learning: Shakespeare, Thoreau, Thomas Wolfe, the Romantic poets. Dr. Apperson, who died a few years ago, was a man of formality and dignity. In the 1960s, when ladies’ skirts started creeping up above the knee, he had a short curtain installed above the front wall of the balcony, to prevent anyone from seeing something they shouldn’t. He was a kind and gentle man; Mama always said he added such elegance to the church. I’m sure that the sense I’ve always had of God being a loving father comes from being around him and our church, which held me, a quiet, shy child, in its comforting embrace.

  The gentle faith that was passed on to me at First Christian Church required only a general belief in the authority of the Bible, a conviction that you had direct access to God, and a commitment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. The church wasn’t steeped in liturgy, but going there week after week, and doing the same plain things over and over again, took on the power of ritual in my imagination. Just as vivid are my memories of the pancake breakfasts we’d have once a year, and the taste of the foamy hot chocolate we kids would drink in the rec room before going out for an evening of Christmas caroling. Our church may have been downtown, but in every way that mattered it was an extension of home.

  Despite the security and assurance I took from Sunday morning church, though, I also had a troubling sense that God was a stern, judging deity—that I had disappointed him in some vague, but very real, way, and that someday I might be punished for it. To this day I have no clear idea where that came from. It may well have been bolstered by my father’s quiet authority, but I can’t help feeling I must have absorbed it from the wider Southern culture, dwelling as it does on sin and alienation from God. Mindful of Southerners’ anguished guilt at the vast distance between God and their fallen selves, Flannery O’Connor described the South as “Christ-haunted.” If there is one regrettable legacy of Southern childhood, it may be that: a lingering, unshakable sense of shame.

  After Dr. Apperson sent the congregation forth with his usual blessing, we’d often do what half of Meridian did for dinner, as the noonday meal is called in the South (“supper” is what you eat at night). We’d go to Weidmann’s. Founded five years after the Civil War, Weidmann’s is one of the oldest restaurants in the South. Its half-timbered façade is meant to suggest a Black Forest hunting lodge, but it’s really a simple venue for reliable home cooking, served family style.

  In my childhood, going back to Weidmann’s—like stopping off at Aunt Margaret’s—was literally like stepping back in time. The only sign that you were in the 1960s were the seasonal sports schedules for various Mississippi c
ollege teams posted on the wall. At the center of the restaurant were two cavernous rooms, the front one boasting a long lunch counter with red leather stools, the back one equipped with a horseshoe bar. Ceiling fans turn lazily overhead, not so much circulating the air as bumping it along. Stuffed and mounted heads of whitetail bucks and wild boars stare down from the dark paneled walls with the same cloudy eyes that have observed five generations of townspeople grow up on fried chicken, green beans, and black-bottom pie.

  Whenever somebody who was anybody came through Meridian, they’d eat at Weidmann’s—and if the owners could coax a publicity photograph out of them, it went up on the wall. The boxer Jack Dempsey came through several times in the 1940s, and left behind signed photos. John Stennis, Mississippi’s legendary U.S. senator, is long gone from this world, but his stern glare was a fixture in the Weidmann’s firmament. Hometown boy Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman” and the father of country music, was there; so was baseball great Dizzy Dean, and actor Vincent Price, who ate at Weidmann’s while performing in Meridian in 1973.

  There were countless yellowing photographs of big-haired Mississippi beauty queens and stump-necked Mississippi football players. The Hager Brothers, twins who found country-music fame on Hee Haw in the 1970s, left an autographed photo. Who remembers the Hagers today? Weidmann’s does. A photo of a middle-aged Dale Evans showed her sporting a bouffant so high it must have tickled the noses of the stuffed deer heads in Weidmann’s dining room. And for every recognizable face there were dozens of other photos, each capturing some bathing beauty or glossy-haired swell who passed through, but whose signatures had long since faded to illegibility, their names lost to time and memory.

  To my young imagination, Weidmann’s was like a living museum of Mississippi history, those photographs marking time and endurance like rings on a venerable tree. Behind the lunch counter was a shot of Merrehope, the only antebellum mansion in Meridian to survive Sherman’s fiery march through the Confederate heartland. The state champion 1942 Meridian High School Concert Band was memorialized on another wall. It was the kind of place local folks came to because, well, that’s what people always have done.