by Ward, Sela
One morning not too long ago I stopped by Weidmann’s for lunch with a friend. The first thing our waitress, Dee, said was, “How’s your mama?”
“Hanging in there,” I said.
A moment later Jimmy, one of the young waiters, came over to ask the same thing, and I offered the same response. “Well, that’s about all you can ask for,” he said sweetly. He came back a few minutes later with a sack of cracklin bread. “I know your mama loves her cracklin bread. Take this home to her. And tell her I asked about her.”
That day I ate my fill of corn bread, lima beans, black-eyed peas, and, of course, turnip greens. With the possible exception of grits, there’s no food more Southern than greens, whose bitter smell while cooking down in salty fatback amid the jittery hiss of a pressure cooker is a Proustian madeleine for generations of black and white Southerners alike. The smell and taste of greens resonate particularly with men and women of my parents’ generation, for whom many a Depression-era supper was made of greens, corn bread, and buttermilk. There’s nothing like taking a slab of corn bread and sopping up the pot liquor from a mess of greens—whether turnip or collards, their harsher cousin.
One of the blessings of traditional Southern cuisine is how it has come to serve as a vehicle of communion between blacks and whites when they meet outside the South. It’s something for which the late writer and editor Willie Morris, an expatriate Mississippian living in New York, was grateful. In his memoir North Toward Home, Morris describes bringing his wife up to the Harlem apartment of the jazz writer Albert Murray and his wife for dinner on New Year’s Day 1967. They were joined there by novelist Ralph Ellison and his wife, and together the six Southerners, four black and two white, had what Morris described as “an unusual feast: bourbon, collard greens, black-eyed peas, ham-hocks, and corn bread—a kind of ritual for all of us. Where else in the East but in Harlem could a Southern white boy greet the New Year with the good-luck food he had had as a child, and feel at home as he seldom thought he could in [New York]?”
If the classic Southern comfort food hasn’t changed at Weidmann’s, in recent years something else has: It used to be a lot busier. When I was growing up, Weidmann’s was a destination restaurant. They flew in fresh seafood from the Gulf of Mexico on a regular basis, including oysters straight from New Orleans. It was said to be Alabama football coach Bear Bryant’s favorite place to eat, which itself gave the place semireligious status. Back then, the din of dishes and silverware clanking on tables and pans banging in the kitchen was so loud we children could hardly hear ourselves think. It was so exciting. I remember sitting there in my Sunday dress, thinking Weidmann’s was the center of the social universe—which, in Meridian, it was. Each table had a handmade clay jar of peanut butter in the center, and we kids would smear gobs of it on saltines while waiting for our food to come, causing Mama to fuss that we were ruining our appetites. Of course, she was right. I don’t think any of us ever managed to finish our dinner. Still, I remember eating lots of fried chicken, crabmeat cocktail, shrimp remoulade, and that black-bottom pie, with its creamy chocolate filling and chocolate wafer crust.
While Daddy was settling the bill at the cash register, we kids would go trawling through Jean’s Treasure Chest, a suitcase-sized box of candy set out for children to have a treat before they left. Not long ago, Jenna, Berry, and I were laughing over how puny the Treasure Chest really is. When we were kids, it could have fallen off a Spanish galleon as far as we were concerned.
After dinner, Daddy would often load us into the car and drive down to Enterprise to visit family. We loved hearing Daddy tell stories about his childhood days at Homeward—explaining why the house was built with a breezeway (or “dog trot,” as it was called), how the old wooden stove worked, how they used to sleep in deep featherbeds—things like that. And we’d always come home with a stash of jellies, preserves, pickles, and relishes from Aunt Margaret’s pantry. But we were restless kids, and before long we’d start thinking about heading home, getting back to playing out, as we used to call it, with our neighborhood friends.
And that mix of restlessness and contentment certainly carried through to Christmastime. We had a few of our own twists on the traditional family Christmas—the first being that it always seemed to start at four o’clock in the morning on December 25. Each of us kids was assigned a particular piece of living room furniture, marked by our own personal Christmas stocking—as the oldest, I got the couch—and we would tumble together into the living room at the appointed hour and make a beeline for the stocking and unwrapped presents we knew that Santa had piled there for us to find.
But the real celebration came later that day, at the family Christmas party at Uncle Thomas Ward’s place. All our big family events in those years were held in the dark-paneled living room of the big, stately home he shared with Aunt Carolyn and their three kids, Tom, Robert, and Judy. The whole clan—including Daddy’s two sisters and their families—would gather there around dark on Christmas Day. I can close my eyes now and hear the tinkle of ice cubes at cocktail time, smell the sweet aroma of bourbon melting into the spicy scent of the cedar tree, and slip into a Yuletide reverie.
Though my own home in Los Angeles is decorated in a modern, minimalist style, the rich interior of Uncle Thomas’s house remains my touchstone for what home looks and feels like. His house conveyed a sense of comfort, certainly, but it was a comfort that went beyond simple physical convenience. The furnishings and décor gave it a sense of security and solidity; they stood for tradition, as if the people who lived there must be in touch with an older, more civilized way of life. And the early memory of those warm family gatherings imprinted itself, I realize now, deeply upon my consciousness.
I recently had a eureka! moment while reading Home, a fascinating history of domestic life by the architect Witold Rybczynski. In the opening chapter Rybczynski examines the success of the designer Ralph Lauren, who has made himself the standard-bearer of a romanticized American classicism in style. (I often describe the atmosphere at Uncle Thomas’s house as “like a Ralph Lauren ad,” and most people know exactly what I mean.) Lauren excels at “evoking the atmosphere of traditional hominess and solid domesticity that is associated with the past,” Rybczynski observes. “Is it simply a curious anachronism, this desire for tradition, or is it a reflection of a deeper dissatisfaction with the surroundings that our modern world has created? What are we missing that we look so hard for in the past?”
What, indeed? I can think of a hundred things: a sense of belonging, a sense of rootedness, a sense that our world is enduring and that we ourselves will endure along with it, through generation after generation. That is why, though I’ve never lived there myself, I’m glad that Homeward still stands today, and that my Aunt Celeste still lives there. It’s why I’m glad my siblings and I have always remained close, far-flung though we may be. And maybe it’s why I find my mind wandering back, these days, to those Christmases we spent together as children, in front of a warm fire, when all was right with the world.
Many a night in those preteenage years, Jenna and I sat home with Mama, watching old movies starring beautiful women like Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, with their dark hair and dramatic makeup. That standard of beauty was really taken to heart by our parents’ generation, especially in the South. There was lots of pressure to look perfect, and to be perfect—to live up to the unreachable ideal of womanhood. I remember Mama telling me when Jenna and I were really little that in our next house she wanted a staircase, so that when we were older she could watch us girls descend in our ball gowns as we left for a spring dance. And I think it must have been from those old movies that Mama got her idea that if her daughters were going to become proper Southern ladies, they might need a little help.
When I was three, Mama sent me off to start taking dance lessons. I must have been feeling a need to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd. I remember performing in a revue as one of twenty little girls in a row, all dressed as miniature bride
s. All of a sudden—and much to my parents’ alarm—I stepped out of line, marched front and center, and performed my routine solo. It seems I had the performer’s showboating instinct from the beginning, though it would lie dormant for years.
My dance teacher was a local legend named Miss Mary Alpha Johnson. But dance wasn’t the only thing she taught. Reader, I tell you proudly that I am a graduate of Miss Mary Alpha’s charm school, where we aspiring ladies were instructed in the proper ways to walk, talk, sit, and behave.
We laugh at the idea of a charm school today, but I credit Miss Mary Alpha with teaching me poise and how to carry myself. In fact, it was so important to Mama that Jenna and I grow up to be proper Southern ladies that she enrolled us in a second charm school, a weeklong course at the Sears department store. Sears gave us a little textbook to study, filled with chapter titles like “Good Grooming Is Just a Matter of Organization.”
I paid Miss Mary Alpha a visit on a recent trip home, and she entertained me graciously in her enchanting parlor, which is a little girl’s fantasia of femininity. The walls are blush pink, the white trim looks like icing on a wedding cake, and the porcelain statues of ballerinas resemble spun sugar. A lady to her fingertips, she was wearing heels and jewelry, her white hair brushed up from her fine-boned, still-beautiful face like a swirl of meringue. That day Miss Mary Alpha was opening registration for a new class of dancers, as well as students for her charm school, but she still made time for me. We had pink fruit punch and homemade cheese straws, and talked of old times.
Is charm school dated? Well, I guess so. But if there were one available in Los Angeles, when the time came I would have my daughter, Anabella, enroll in a heartbeat. Social grace will never go out of style.
After leaving elementary school, I briefly attended public junior high before transferring to Lamar, a small, traditional private school. Starting in the ninth grade, the kids of the town were encouraged to join one of the same-sex social service clubs, which were like junior sororities and fraternities. The girls could join the Debs, Mes Amies, or the Dusties. I was a Dusty. The boys had Phi Kappa or DeMolay to choose from. Phi Kappa had chapters statewide. I was a Phi Kappa little sister, so I would get to go to a lot of conventions and chapter meetings in towns all over the state, which were full of eligible boys. Needless to say, it was a blast. All the local social clubs had a dance every year that was known as a “lead-out.” Girls dressed in long gowns to be formally announced; sporting black tie, their dates would escort them to the front of a stage to have their photograph taken, then we’d go home and change into pants for the dance.
These clubs were the center of our high school social life, and if you didn’t belong to one, you were relegated to the margins. The pressure to conform, and the fear of not belonging, was so great that most kids were willing to put up with sadistic hazing during the pledge period, which not for nothing was called Hell Week. For the girls the ordeal was purely emotional, but the boys had to suffer physical abuse, too. It was pretty cruel, actually.
If you were a girl suffering through Hell Week, you weren’t allowed to shave your legs. You weren’t allowed to drive—you had to ride your bicycle everywhere. You couldn’t see a guy. (I got “caught” once when a boy I was friendly with stopped by, for a completely innocent visit; I leapt into bed to pretend sickness, and narrowly escaped censure.) You’d have to deliver small gifts, called “happies,” to older members of the club. If you’d run into a member during that week, you’d have to perform a charming little move called an “air raid,” which involved falling immediately to the ground and reciting something you’d been told to memorize. I remember having to commit to memory, among other things, the lyrics to “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor. And during Hell Night, the culmination of it all, the older girls would scream at you, crack eggs over your head, make you write essays on toilet paper—anything to force their will upon you.
But for me those humiliations were just a start. Two of the girls, Cheri and Sally, decided they would make me wear a sign everywhere that said I’M BEAUTIFUL AND I KNOW IT. I was an extremely self-conscious fourteen-year-old, and have never felt more vulnerable. I’d never given too much thought to how I looked, and I was far too shy and insecure to be conceited. But that’s not how the other girls saw me. They didn’t even know me, but they were determined to take me down a peg.
Walking around with that poster board sign hanging around my neck for a week was perhaps the most scarring experience of my young life. I allowed these girls, whose adolescent envy, self-doubt, and insecurity were at high tide, to humiliate me in order to bolster their own fragile self-image. Worse yet, I allowed them to do it because I so wanted to belong to their club. I let them make me wear a sign that made me seem haughty and arrogant, knowing it was intended to publicly cancel out whatever physical beauty I possessed. They believed that everything came easy to me, and by God, they were going to rob me of that.
At the age of fourteen, it truly felt as if they were murdering my soul. Even now, all these years later, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I remember feeling so confused, convinced I must have deserved that kind of treatment—that I was so worthless it only made sense for the other girls to treat me that way. These girls were troubled, I now see, and they had to cut me down to size to alleviate their own feelings of inadequacy. With the passage of time, of course, we find ways to explain such things away, and even forgive them. But the mark they make on us is indelible.
It took me years to get over the pain and doubt inflicted upon me in that solitary week of humiliation. Every time I would accomplish something that had anything to do with my physical appearance—becoming a cheerleader, being elected Homecoming Queen in college, becoming a model—I would be racked by self-doubt, haunted by the worry that I was a hollow person with nothing to offer but an attractive façade. All because of a culture—a culture especially prized in the South, I realize—that made a contest, and a currency, of adolescent beauty, and in the process turned generations of young women against one another. And I endured it without complaint, just to belong.
Once you were in one of these clubs, of course, it was all peaches and cream. We went to chapter meetings, did community-spirited things such as visiting the elderly at rest homes or helping out at children’s shelters. The lasting legacy for me, though, was the meanness I had to endure to get in. If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is
the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don’t conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life.
Many years later I ran into Sally, one of the girls who had been so mean to me during Hell Week, at a class reunion back home. I decided to talk to her about what she had done to me, hoping it would help me come to terms with my own memories. She was horrified. The next day she sent me an arrangement of flowers, in the colors of the Dusties. The card said, “You’re beautiful, and I know it.” It was such an elegant and gracious thing to have done, and I was so glad I’d taken the risk of approaching her. It made it possible to build a lovely friendship with Sally, rather than continue to mourn that one horrible week when we were teenagers. I think we’re both grateful that we found a way to forgive and be forgiven.
There were only thirty-five kids in my graduating class, so everybody knew everybody else at Lamar. I never went steady in high school, just dated a bunch of different guys. We’d go water-skiing a lot, and to the movies, and ball games, or go tubing down the Chunky River. In the summer we’d have lake-house parties in nearby locales, or go for big weekend jaunts to New Orleans. Music was a big part of our life; we drove to Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Jackson for concer
ts as our favorite bands toured through the South. But our most common pastime was to hang out in the parking lot of the Quik Stop—and that was as much fun as anything.
Sandy Steele was my best friend then, and I did everything with her and three other girls. After I got my license we’d all pile into the red Plymouth Barracuda Daddy bought me, and drive around the houses of boys we had crushes on. We’d slow down, hoping to catch sight of a boy out washing the car in his driveway—then we’d have a shrieking giggle fit, and floor it. That’s small-town courtship for you.
This story would be a lot spicier if I could offer true confessions of a failed Southern lady. The truth is I was a good girl, more Melanie Wilkes than Scarlett O’Hara. I don’t credit it to any particularly strong sense of virtue. Rather, it had to do with my chronic shyness, and the severe pressure to conform to my mother’s and society’s expectations.
I was the perfect young Southern woman: quiet, demure, feminine, seen and rarely heard. Polite. Proper. Never raised my voice, never gave my parents a moment’s trouble. Shied away from unpleasantness. Strove to maintain that teeth-together-lips-apart ideal. And I wouldn’t have had the courage to risk a moment’s presumption. I will never forget this: One day during my teenage years my next-door neighbor’s mother, a sophisticated woman and family friend, took me aside. “Sela,” she told me, “you must never think that you’re beautiful. It’s just not an attractive trait. There’s always someone more attractive than you, and always someone less so.” And I was my mother’s daughter: I never doubted for a moment that she was right.