by Ward, Sela
As I’ve come to see all this about Mama, I think I’ve begun to understand more about my relationship with the land where I was raised. My friend Rina, who was raised in Israel after losing her mother in the Holocaust, gave me an insight into where some of my abiding love for Mississippi might have come from. “Like any child, I needed nurturing. But I didn’t have a mother to give me that,” she said. “I’m very attached to the land—not so much the people, but the land. I love how it looks, how it smells, how the earth feels. So I started to think of my country, Israel, as my mother. That saved me.”
I know what she means. Everything I feel about the South contains echoes of the way I feel about my family: love, pride, protectiveness, that instinct to share and preserve and defend. I want my children to breathe in the Meridian I knew, while they’re still young enough to have it imprinted on their minds. I want them to know what their own mama’s world was like when she was their age, in every way—from its physical contours and pace of life, to the taste of the air, to the ways of the older generation.
Thirty years ago I moved away from Meridian, because things I needed to make me happy couldn’t be found there. Now I come back, because so many of the things I need to make me happy can’t be found anywhere else.
I’m not talking seriously about moving back full-time—not yet, anyway. I’m aware enough to know I still need the excitement and freedom Los Angeles has to offer me. I also love the transporting creative outlet of my work—something Daddy foresaw for me when Mama couldn’t. But if I can find a way to bring the warmth and tradition and rootedness of Meridian back into my life permanently, I will. I’m as tenacious as Mama in some ways; I’ve spent the past ten years working on a solution to this dilemma. In so doing, I have made a collage of my life—a work in progress, its pieces ragged and not always smoothly joined, but whose whole contains some kind of beauty.
And I’ll admit that every so often I have to stop myself and stave off the temptation to think it’ll be easy to reestablish a life in Meridian, to carve out a second hometown for my family. After all, the things I value when I go back home—the natural kindness and respect, the social graces, the web of close friendships among married couples and families—weren’t bought and paid for. These things were built over many years of shared history and well-tended community. For a good long time, I may appear the prodigal daughter to some in this world. But I come bearing respect, and a good heart, and in places where I’m not known as family, I hope I’ll be at least a welcome guest.
10
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My southbound train journey is just about complete. I sit back and watch the desert scroll by through the window, and fall into a grateful sleep. When I wake up I can feel it’s fifteen degrees warmer; the sight of Spanish moss greets my opened eyes, and I know we’re in the South again. My sister, Jenna, will be there to collect me at the train station in New Orleans. And then I’ll truly be headed home.
I think back to yesterday, about halfway through the ride. I’d walked down to the dining car for lunch. The seating for meals on these long-distance trains is communal; if there’s a chair that’s free, you take it. I’m naturally reserved, and it isn’t easy for me to open up with strangers. Whenever I’ve gone to a new church, I have always awaited with dread the moment when you turn to the person next to you, shake hands, and say, “May peace be with you.” I never have gotten used to sharing my solitude that way. But the day before, while boarding, I’d met a charming couple named Penny and Skip, who’d been married for twenty-five years; now here they were at a table for four, and I was glad to sit down with them for a quiet lunch.
A few minutes later, a fourth traveler came along to join us. She was a lovely woman, her hair long and splattered with gray, clipped back at the base of her neck and falling gracefully down below her shoulders. Her face was etched with beautiful lines; they made me wonder whether her life had been a hard one, or simply long.
Her name, she told us, was Jean. She said she was from Pontchatoula, Louisiana, but as she talked I realized her accent was also laced with something else. When I asked, she told us she’d come from London many years before. Our food arrived, and Jean took a moment to bow her head and silently thank God for her meal.
Jean told us this was her first trip without her husband; she’d lost him a few months before, after forty-five years. Together we talked about how hard it is to suffer such a loss. And I remembered something my cousin Tom, the Episcopal minister, told me once: that everyone has a burden that seems just a little too much to bear.
Daddy is selling our childhood home. He doesn’t want to live there anymore, and I guess I can’t blame him. Jenna is taking it hard; whenever she’s come back to Meridian to visit, she has always slept in her old room there, though she knows there’s always space for her at the farm. I thought I would be just as sentimental about the old house, but I find that I’m not. I take my consolation in the fact that we can give Daddy a place out here with us. He’s designing a cabin he’ll soon build on the farm; he’s moved his drafting board into the Rose Cottage, where he’s taken up residence until his new home is ready. After all these years, Daddy has finally stopped drinking and I’m so proud of him; he looks great these days, and to see his face now is to realize what an immense strain he was bearing during the last decade of Mama’s life. Daddy’s at ease now, and I’m grateful for it.
We work a bit at Daddy’s that Saturday, boxing things up, and later on I stop by Hope Village to visit the kids. Then it’s back to the farm. Jenna and her friend Indra have flown in from Florida, and my friend Martee has flown back down from Philadelphia. After a supper of steaks on the grill at the Rose Cottage, we all stretch out in the living room to listen to the frogs on the pond, and enjoy the restorative charm of a cool spring evening.
The loss of Mama is still fresh in our minds, and before long Jenna and I are talking about where we go from here. What happens to your idea of home, Jenna wonders out loud, when one of your parents dies? After relying on your mother or father throughout your life, how do you go about finding what you need within yourself?
“It’s as though my own house has fallen down, and I’m having to build it back up, one brick at a time,” I say. “And I know it’ll be stronger, and the strength Mama gave me will help me rebuild. Still,” I chuckle, “I wish I had an architect.”
“Sela, you’ve been remodeling that house, so to speak, since you got married and had kids,” Martee says. “You say your mama gave you the strength, and even if she didn’t give you all the tools you need, your daddy’s sure handing down a few good ones—confidence, bravery, that sense of self-worth. It’s no wonder you want to reconnect with what you were blessed with here. That’s where all your character comes from.”
But there’s something else I’ve been worried about, I tell them. My mama may not have had much truck with sentimentality, but I’m just the opposite—and I know it. Sometimes I look at Mississippi through lenses as rosy as our little one-room cottage. And I get carried away in the other direction, too: I’m just as prone to convincing myself everyone in Hollywood is soulless as I am to believing that small-town living is a universal cure.
“I know how warm my family and friends in Meridian make me feel,” I say. “But Austin and Anabella are growing up, and making friends, and Howard and I are starting to make friends with their parents. And I don’t know if it’s just wishful thinking, but I keep hoping something more lasting will come of all that, too. After all, these kids’ life stories are going to be blending together for years to come—on football weekends, class trips, prom dates. And most of the parents we’ve been spending time with actually seem able to leave their work behind at the office. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on L.A. The days of me spending more time with my TV family and friends than the ones I have in real life are over. Life is too short to keep letting my career have free rein over my life.”
Jenna goes into the kitchen to put some coffee on. “You know what
I think, Sela?” she says. “I know what this connection with your hometown means to you, and I think you’re right about it. But I also think what you’re looking for is a way to find what you’ve been missing, and bring it into your life in L.A. If you keep reaching out and building those friendships, and putting the time in on the home front to build relationships within your own family—well, chances are, you can. I’m not sure it matters all that much where you’re doing it. All those things you love about the South, those things that feed your soul—the kindness, the consideration, the intimacy of lifelong friendships—they’re yours for the making. You didn’t leave that behind when you left Mississippi. You can carry it all with you, wherever you go.”
“It’s like what they say,” Martee chimes in. “If you want to have faith, start behaving as if you did, and you’ll be surprised how easy it comes.”
That night I lay awake in my bed, staring at the ceiling fan turning in the moonlight and thinking of this conversation in light of all I have learned in the wrenching year that has just passed. What have I been looking for, I wonder? The perfect blend of old and new, of childhood and adulthood, of home and away? Surely by now I must have realized how imperfect life is—a reality that has created fear in me. Fear I’m trying to escape—that old dread of failure, of disappointment, of not fitting in, and of being less than perfect. But fear is only an old and cunning trickster, and that’s all it is.
It is time to realize that I may always feel a little out of place, no matter where I am. Maybe that’s true for all of us, that fitting in is a fantasy, a wish that is sustained by the uncomfortable feeling of not fitting in. My longing for home—to be among the people and places I love—is real and true, but clicking your heels together and saying “There’s no place like home” only works in the movies. The Meridian I long to return to—and the idyllic childhood I remember—is impossible to fully recapture; indeed, it may never have been as perfect as I remember. Maybe the price we pay for moving on in life is this very nostalgic, bittersweet awareness of what we’ve left behind. What I’ve come to realize is that I must work to weave the past and the present into a secure fabric for my future—my own and my family’s. First September 11 and then my mother’s death illuminated a deeper knowledge that we are only given a brief moment in time to embrace the greatest challenge we face: to create an inner home for our true self.
I fell asleep as I always do when I’m far from home, thinking of Howard and my children. My life. My all.
A couple of days later, the rest of the Sherman clan arrived from the big city, and we all set out with my brother Berry’s family and our kids for a trip down the murky Chunky River. The Chunky is the river of my youth; floating down along its waters in an inflatable raft is second nature to me, as exciting as a ski trip and as intensely pleasurable as a warm bath. I had a ball, the way I always do. Howard’s still getting used to it, but Berry and his family love it as much as I do; his kids were in and out of the water the whole way, playing like fish.
My kids were hanging on for dear life.
Austin has always been a cautious child. He’s thoughtful, tentative; he looks before he leaps. And he’s as precociously analytical as his father. Even when he was just a few years old, and we were trying to get him to make the adjustment from using a baby swing to sitting up in a chair, he looked up at me and said matter-of-factly, “Mom, I could fall off and hurt myself.”
But in the last year or two, I think he’s finally coming into his own down here—making sense of the environment, internalizing the rhythms. He’s starting to own the place a little more. That day on the Chunky we pulled off onto the shore for a picnic, into an incredibly beautiful little area. And there on the tree was a spectacle he’d never seen before: catalpa worms. They’re funny little creatures, from the caterpillar family; cut in half and turned inside out, I’m told, they make perfect bait. (I wouldn’t go near one myself, but down in the South ladies are still allowed to be a little squeamish.) Two years ago I don’t think Austin would have had anything to do with a catalpa worm. But now he was fascinated, turning it over and over, letting it crawl up his hand. “Can I keep it?” he said, and I could not have been more thrilled.
When we got back in the boat to finish the run, Austin still looked a little wary of the water. He’s a city kid, after all, and it’s hard to blame him—the Chunky is one of our Mississippi-style muddy-water rivers, and there’s no telling what kind of squishy things a pair of little feet might find on the floor. None of that seemed to bother his cousins, though, and finally I think their fearless adventures got the better of him. At last he made it out of the boat, and into that muddy water. And the look on his face—pride, and terror, and a little edge of giddiness—was all I needed to see.
Austin’s just turning eight, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than watching him. He’s at that point where he’s still very much a little boy, with a teddy bear and a bunch of stuffed animals still keeping him company—but he’s starting to get a little too old for Mom to go kissing him in public the way she used to. Lately I think he’s getting a little more comfortable in his own skin, too, throwing around a football, running around with his shirt off like his uncle Brock. His indoctrination into sports came back home in California, where school keeps him involved every season. But his real love of playing—that stay-out-all-day-for-the-sake-of-it excitement Uncle Joe talks about—is something I notice most down here.
With all that unscheduled time on the farm, too, Austin is discovering another talent: he’s learning how to be a big brother. When he and Anabella were younger, he seemed a little taken aback by his sister’s presence; every so often I’d see a look on his face that read very plainly, A sister? What do you mean, a sister? Can’t you send her back? But in these last few visits he’s been markedly kinder with her, patient and caring. They fill their days with terrific kid stuff—the blow-up pool, the trampoline, a Slip ‘n Slide whose purpose he took great pains to explain to her. The other night, when they were jumping on the bed together, he slowed down for a moment and looked at me quizzically. “You know, I can’t even remember when there was just only me,” he said. “I wonder what that was like.”
What keeps Anabella excited about Mississippi are her cousins Anne Tyler and Savannah. Back in L.A. we’re usually too busy to spend a lot of time talking about Meridian, but not a week goes by without Anabella telling some story about her cousins. These days, though, I think she’s starting to recognize that she’s the youngest of the bunch, which is why I’m glad Austin is around to look after her. Like all the other women in her family, she’s always had an independent streak; where her brother used to grow bored easily, she can lose herself for hours in imaginary games. But if there’s one thing Anabella couldn’t live without, it’s Austin. She dotes on him unconditionally: when he comes home at night after a day out with the other boys, she’s waiting by the door to wrap her arms around him and say, “That’s my brother.”
While we’re down on the farm, then, the kids lead a different life, and the very thought of it makes me grin from ear to ear. They ride horses, tumble on the trampoline, pedal paddleboats around the pond, and go scooting about the farm on golf carts with their parents. And they behave differently, too. In the city they have a backyard, but they seem to need to be entertained all the time. Here there’s no Nintendo—and they don’t miss it.
Howard and I have a little game going these days. With the state of the world as it is, I tell him I’ve decided: I want to move back here for good. I don’t really mean it—not entirely, anyway—and he knows it. He rolls his eyes and makes one of his gentle cracks about Southern ways, about the lazy days and the Waffle House cuisine. You wouldn’t last ten minutes down here, Sela. But he doesn’t really mean it, I tell myself—not entirely.
The other day he turned to me with a glint in his eye. “You know, this afternoon I said to Austin, ‘Your mama’s thinking maybe we should move down here to Mississippi full-time.’ “ He chuckled, winding up fo
r the punch line. “Honey, he looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Like I was crazy.”
I gave him a good hard look, the kind I learned from Mama. “Howard,” I whispered—there were other people around—“don’t you mess with my Mississippi.”
But then later that night, when he didn’t know I was in earshot, I heard him talking to one of our friends after supper. He told the same story—“It was like I just told him the world was flat.” But then he continued. “So, you know, tonight I asked Anabella the same thing. And she just lit up like a candle.”
It is morning at Honeysuckle Farms, and I am standing by myself in the cool, dewy grass atop the hill behind the Rose Cottage. My mother is buried here. Someday we will all gather on this hilltop again, this time to bury Daddy. And then, years later, Berry, Jenna, Brock, and I will find our rest here, along with our husbands, wives, and children. This land, this good red earth, is ours, and we will be here forever.
My wish is that all of us should be gathered here together not just in death, but even more in life. I look out past the lakes and across the rolling fields, and think what a fine thing it will be if, a hundred years from now, little white houses have grown there like toadstools after the rain, and that in every one of them is a descendant of Annie Kate Boswell and Granberry Holland Ward. This is my gift to my family, even those I won’t live to see.
Mama, I cannot give Austin and Anabella the childhood I had. But I can give them a home down South, where the people and the countryside can nurture them as it did me. I can give them grass to run barefoot in, and rowboats, and cane poles, and tomato vines, and horse rides, and lunches under the Picnic Tree. I can give them aunts and uncles and cousins, just over the ridge, to share with them the stories that make this place home. I can work harder to give them a home in Los Angeles, where they’ll be raised to cherish above all else fairness, self-discipline, kindness to others, and devotion to family—the greatest legacy we Ward kids took from the childhood you and Daddy and our hometown gave us. I can also give them refuge here in Mississippi, in a place where somebody will always be there to take them in. And, I hope, I can give them the faith that will keep them coming back, the way their mother did years before, when they were young.