by Ward, Sela
With all these new stimuli roiling around me, I have to admit I didn’t spend a lot of time missing Meridian. I still called home every day, as always. But Mama was so protective of us kids, so desperate to make sure our lives turned out well, that she couldn’t restrain herself from beckoning us home anytime she heard the slightest note of concern in my voice. Of course, it was wonderful to have that sense of security. But my mother could make the temptation seem overwhelming, and there were times when I just needed to resist the impulse to retreat into the womb of childhood. In those moments, it was my headstrong and fearless father’s example I could always count on to guide me.
It wasn’t homesickness that touched me in those days—it was a kind of wanderlust, a thirst for adventure. It was a feeling I’d first had on a trip to visit my cousins Judy and Tom Ward in Washington, D.C., after high school, years before. Judy took me to a bar in Georgetown, an old pub with lots of dark wood and brass fixtures: with its Old World clubby atmosphere, it reminded me of something out of Brideshead Revisited. It was there that I tasted a Bellini for the first time. Then I had dinner at Tom’s apartment, and his girlfriend, Peggy, (now his wife) prepared fondue for dinner. Fondue! It seemed so Continental. As we sat around dipping our sirloin in the hot oil and our bread in the melted cheese, I remember just beaming like a little girl, inwardly at least. If a plain old pot of melted cheese (and, at long last, not of the Velveeta persuasion!) could turn me into a wide-eyed innocent abroad, a Henry James heroine swooning over the sensual richness of life in among the European swells, you can imagine how far I’d come.
And New York was the answer. For me it was like being a child getting to taste a new delicacy for the first time, every single day. One day I’d be having lunch at Café des Artistes, with an artist who lived in the same building; afterward I was invited up with friends to see his book-lined, painting-filled apartment—an outlander’s perfect fantasy of a Manhattan aesthete’s flat. The next day I’d find myself with other friends in the Upper East Side living room of the Halabys, the family of Jordan’s Queen Noor, sneaking peeks at Her Majesty’s family photographs. And here is the strangest thing: The feeling that draped over me in those early days in New York reminded me of nothing more than the joy I took from my childhood Christmases at Uncle Thomas’s place, in that beautiful house, surrounded by the people I loved most. What could that possibly have to do with being all alone in a little apartment in a big Northern city? This: In both cases, I knew in my heart of hearts that I was standing exactly where I was supposed to be.
Which was enough to keep me happy—that is, until the rent came due. Remember, I was making only $6.50 an hour as a storyboard artist, and that wasn’t enough to live on in the city, not even in the late seventies. Delta had rejected my flight-attendant application, saying they were afraid I couldn’t be forceful enough for the job. (Back then, at least, they were probably right.) Eastern Airlines offered me a job, though, and I was planning to take it. I loved the idea of seeing the world, while always having a base in New York to come home to.
But then something else happened. A friend suggested that I try modeling, which certainly paid better than storyboarding—that is, if you got lucky and got hired. (After all, I wanted to eat at Le Cirque—at least once a year.) I’d tried it before: At the age of fifteen, following a young dream of mine, I’d gone to a local department store and entered a modeling contest held by a girls’ clothing line. The winners would be flown to St. Louis and photographed for an ad in Seventeen magazine. I was one of the four winners from around the country, and off I went to Missouri, but that was as far as it went. Only when I got there did I discover that the ad was for bathing suits. Lord, I was so thin, and still had a boyish adolescent figure—the last thing they were looking for in a bathing-suit model. The creative director let all four of us know, in no uncertain terms, that not one of us had what it took to become a professional model. What a disaster.
But if at first you don’t succeed . . . Jim Lampley was kind enough to offer to walk me around to some of the better modeling agencies, so I got all dressed up in my below-the-knee, pseudo-linen cream-colored skirt, a matching cream polyester blouse, and bone-colored heels, with my hair electric-rollered and ready. We got about two blocks before the heels came off, and I insisted on walking the rest of the way in my stocking feet. Jim was amused, but in a gentlemanly way; after all, he was from North Carolina.
Our first visit was to Eileen Ford’s agency, where they got all excited and sent me to do a test shoot with a photographer. He sent me back with a Polaroid. Now, I ask you, who looks good in Polaroids? To some, I think, I looked like a Latina, but this was the era of Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs, the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl next door. Ms. Ford took one look at the Polaroid, and told the twenty-one-year-old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant standing in front of her, “Your look is too exotic. And your nose might be a bit of a problem.” The next stop was Elite, where John Casablancas looked at me (instead of the Latina Polaroid), and said, “Your nose might be a bit of a problem.”
My nose? I liked my nose. I’d never really thought about my nose. But I refused to take their word for it. I found out about a great fashion photographer, Hank Londoner, who’d got his start through the famous ex-model and modeling agent Wilhelmina. He agreed to shoot me, and the photos turned out spectacularly well, better than any I’ve had since. Wilhelmina looked at them, and even though she thought I was too short for my “exotic” look, bless her, she agreed to take me on.
As a child, I’d always been taught by my daddy to believe in myself. And I’d learned from my mother’s example that the only way to get what you want is to keep at it. Now, with their wisdom running through my mind—and that New York spirit coursing through my veins—I’d finally proven that bathing-suit ad man in St. Louis wrong.
But I still had a lot to learn about New York. And one big eye-opener was right around the corner.
The first thing a professional model needs is a portfolio, a book of test shots to help potential clients see how you look on the page. So the agency sent me off to a photographer who, I’m told, had shot some big ads for high-end clothing lines. In hindsight he was probably a nobody, but I approached his studio as if he were an Avedon or a Scavullo. Big mistake.
This character’s apartment was right down the hall from his studio, so I left my bag in his place and went down to the studio to begin shooting. As he was setting up the first shot, he turned to me, as casually as if he were commenting on the weather, and said, “You know, I’m celibate, and I have a chastity belt, and the key is in a safety deposit box.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, wondering what kind of trouble I’d gotten myself into. But I really need these pictures, I told myself. I can handle this.
Then we started shooting . . . and he started snorting, line after line of cocaine, throughout the entire session. Snap, snap, snort. Snap, snap, snort. When we finished, as I was changing back into my street clothes, he headed back to his apartment, where I’d left my bag. And when I walked in to get it, there he was, lying spread-eagled on the floor, wearing nothing but a leather and metal contraption around his privates. He didn’t say a word, but it was embarrassingly obvious that he was pretty happy to see me.
Without missing a beat, I stepped right over him and picked up my bag. Drawing on some hidden reserve of Southern-girl politesse, I said cheerily, “Well, thank you so much. It was very nice meeting you.” When the elevator doors closed behind me, my knees nearly buckled.
Of course, this was the late 1970s, the peak of the disco era. Studio 54 was New York’s center of gravity, and before long new clubs like Area were gaining on it. You’d go to the top clubs and find guys hanging out in the girls’ bathroom, which at the time was a mark of sophistication. I loved the wildness of those places; even at the time I remember thinking, Sela, you’ve never seen anything like this in your life. And I was no homebody, believe me. I went out all the time, and saw it all. But when it came to
debauchery I was always the observer, never really the participant.
Surveying the human wreckage of those times, especially the lives ruined and even lost due to drugs, I can only thank God I didn’t go down that road. Part of me thinks I was saved because I never really ran in the same circles as most other models (I couldn’t relate to them). But I remember being troubled by the spectacle of so many people giving their lives over to cocaine; it seemed plain to me that they were in a terrible rut, one I would do well to stay out of. And when things started swirling too fast around me, I thought of my father: thought of his strong will, of the way he never, but never, went with the crowd. He wasn’t weak in that way, and his example may have saved my life.
The other Southern legacy that may have kept me sane was a little restaurant in Greenwich Village called the Pink Tea Cup. I’m not much of a cook; whenever I started longing for a little taste of home I’d call my Aunt Sarah or Aunt Nancy—the best cooks of our bunch—and ask them to walk me through one of their favorite recipes. But neither I nor my sister, Jenna, who moved to New York about a year after I did, could boil water without making a hash of it. So at least once a week we’d zip down to the Pink Tea Cup, a wonderful little soul-food joint owned and operated by Mary and Charles Raye, an African American couple from Florida. We’d eat fried pork chops, black-eyed peas, cornbread, turnip greens, and such for supper; if it was brunch we were after, Jenna would have homemade biscuits with maple syrup, and I’d order a big steaming bowl of grits. My sister and I would linger as long as we could there, enraptured by the flavors and aromas of our childhood.
The late Willie Morris was a Mississippian of Daddy’s generation, who moved to New York in the late 1960s to be a magazine editor. In his memoir North Toward Home, Morris writes that people like us come from the country to New York not because we couldn’t have succeeded back home, nor because we wanted to test ourselves. “We had always come, the most ambitious of us,” he writes, “because we had to, because the ineluctable pull of the cultural capital when the wanderlust was high was too compelling to resist.” He continues:
Yet there were always secret dangers for these young people from the provinces in the city. It became dangerously easy to turn one’s back on his own past, on the isolated places that nurtured and shaped him into maturity, for the sake of some convenient or fashionable “sophistication.” There were temptations to be not merely careless, but dishonest, with the most distinctive things about one’s self. . . . Coming to New York for the first time, the sensitive outlander might soon find himself in a subtle interior struggle with himself, over the most fundamental sense and meaning of his own origins. It was this struggle, if fully comprehended, which finally could give New York its own peculiar and wonderful value as a place, for it tested who you are, in the deepest and most contorted way.
I can’t say I ever felt quite the same intense internal conflict that tormented Morris. I don’t recall ever feeling ill at ease because I was from the South, and I had an awful lot of fun in my years in New York. But I do remember being ashamed of one thing about Mississippi, and that had to do with race. Like so many Southerners, I have conflicted emotions about the place I love and call home, because its ugly side is difficult to reconcile with my sweet memories.
When I was just eight years old, in 1964, Meridian became ground zero in an explosion of violence and hatred that swept the state after a group of young civil rights activists launched an effort to register black voters. In the spring and summer of that year, the Ku Klux Klan torched twenty black churches around the state, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Jackson, and three civil rights activists based in Meridian were murdered by Klansmen.
Then, in June of that year, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were apprehended on a country road late at night, on their way to Meridian. Earlier that evening, while driving back from the site of a burned African American church in Neshoba County, they had been arrested by a local sheriff named Cecil Price. The sheriff released them at 10:00 p.m., but alerted local Klansmen to their whereabouts. Chaney, an African American from Meridian, and Goodman and Schwerner, Jews from New York, were killed brutally, their bodies removed from the scene; they would not be found for over a month. Authorities did find the bodies of nine other black men as they swept the nearby swamps and woods looking for the three. Nobody had ever bothered looking for those men before.
When they finally found the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the corpses were stacked on top of one another in an earthen dam. The headline in the Meridian Star the next day: THE NIGGER WAS FOUND ON TOP. The parents of the three dead young men attempted to have them buried together in the same Meridian cemetery, but were prevented from doing so because local laws extended segregation even to the graveyard.
This incident, which occurred roughly an hour’s drive from my home, became the subject of a landmark trial in which nineteen conspirators were indicted and seven convicted; two decades later it was the basis of the film Mississippi Burning.
These terrible events were barely a decade behind us when I came to New York. I knew that, as a white person from Mississippi, I would be considered by many of those I met as a product, a member, of the culture that killed those men and so many others throughout the South, from the time of slavery through the civil rights era. I despised the racism and brutality that had gone on in my state, and I shuddered to think of myself as bearing any association with it.
As a Southerner, as a Meridian native, I was, of course, associated with it—if only by the accident of my hometown. But at the same time, that vile racism was never a part of my direct experience in childhood—it could not be found, that is, in the hearts of the people immediately around me. My parents completely sheltered us from the degradation and terror whites inflicted upon blacks in those days, and our home was not tainted by the venomous racism endemic to our society. Of course I now see that we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and the blacks lived on the other, poorer side of town. It sounds impossible to believe now, but in those days it was possible not to see what you didn’t want to see—or, to be more precise, what others didn’t want you to see. The terrible human toll Jim Crow took on black Americans was something I lived through as a child, but only became fully aware of as an adult.
The wickedness of segregation was so great, and its wounds so long-lasting, that it’s still hard to credit the brotherhood that really did exist between many blacks and whites then. But it did happen. It was only years later that I learned how some white families, including my own, had all along been quietly helping change things for the better—and risking their lives to do it. My Uncle Thomas, for example, and his friend Al Rosenbaum were intimately involved in leading the white resistance to the Ku Klux Klan.
“In the summer of ’68, the synagogue in town had been bombed, and we knew the Klan was beginning to launch a reign of terror,” Al remembers. “Tom and I were part of a big group called the Committee of Conscience, which met at the Episcopal church once a month. We brought in ministers from other white churches, and some of their people, as well as black leaders. Our purpose was to say, We’ve got to educate our children, and we’ve got to do the best we can to get along under integration.
“We put up the money through this Committee of Conscience, and helped the FBI infiltrate the KKK group, and found out when they were going to come next and what they were going to do,” Al continues. “We found out the Klan was planning to kill a Meridian businessman named Meyer Davidson, who was a leader in the community. There was a shootout on a Saturday night between the Klan on one side, and the FBI and the Meridian police on the other. The woman who was the driver for the Klan leader was killed, and the leader was badly mangled. He went to jail.”
Nine years after the bloody shootout, which was sparked by a KKK plot to assassinate a Jewish leader, Meridian elected its first Jewish mayor: Al Rosenbaum. “That was unbelievable,” Al reflects now, and he’s right: Mississippi’s
seemingly intractable legacy of injustice is finally, permanently, becoming part of the past.
My friend Clifton Taulbert is one of the wisest men I know on this subject. Cliff, who is black, grew up in segregated Glen Allan, Mississippi, and his memories of growing up in the Delta form the basis of his extraordinary memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored. I have learned a lot from Eight Habits of the Heart, a short inspirational volume Cliff wrote several years ago. In it he tells stories about the kindness of a Jewish family to him as a child, allowing him to break the social code and come into their kitchen to eat lunch. He tells of a white doctor and her black nurse who worked together to heal sick people of both races, and how two female educators, each of whom oversaw the segregated schools of her own race, worked together for the benefit of all students, in gentle defiance of the prevailing social attitudes.
“Brotherhood is such a powerful habit of the heart that even when only one person reaches out to do right, the impact can be lifelong,” Cliff writes. “If I had not encountered this habit of the heart when I was young, I could have left the South embittered and hurt. Instead I left with purpose and a plan. I could not have done so without the memory of these acts of brotherhood. I needed to see them practiced in front of me to believe that they could happen.”
4
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“Dowwn-towwn,” my teacher said.
“Daywn-taywn,” I repeated.