I pondered retirement in deference to self-respect; I might have considered extinction just as well, which contemplation led to the most logical and pleasant transition that morning, down the lovely boulevard in the chill but sunny radiance of a brilliant winter day. I’ve often wondered if the women working the hallowed halls of the Library Society can actually speak, or if a career in the stacks atrophies vocal chords down to whispers. Did they whisper at home? Who knew? I never saw any of those women at a party or anywhere. Maybe they got together after hours for a good, personal whisper. I asked for Annie Gammell’s letters, realizing for the first time the anomaly of a daughter named Anne after the mother, with the mother as the diminutive Annie. Did those who named the child anticipate that the daughter would be mother to the woman? Anne was; had to be.
I’d known for fifteen years those letters were bequeathed by Annie’s estate, or delivered to the Library Society at any rate by her last housemaid. I don’t know what drew me to those letters but the company a person might seek in the attic after a death in the family. The bundle was casehardened by time, conforming to itself and rigor mortis. I cut the binding to spare the pages, brushed off the dust and started through the ruins. I can attest to the warm heart Annie was known for, both in the conventional sense of welcoming strangers to her house as well as keeping an ear open to whatever tale or question needed a sympathetic listener. She was easy to be around, and I often was, with my own mother far busier than Miss Annie was crazy. We didn’t call her crazy back then or think it; nor did the more acceptable profiles, like eccentric, unusual or peculiar stick to her. She was Annie, an original, who chose our town to be born into. Fifteen years after she died I could feel her presence, largely a stage presence, but the curtain rose as it always had, with a warm greeting at the top of the bundle in her undying persona:
I am dying … It is a sad life that I am leaving. Pardon me if I do not write longer, but those who say they are going to cure me wear me out with blood-letting, and my hand refuses to write anymore.
It doesn’t sound warm, unless you knew Annie Gammell. She wrote that farewell in two letters, once to her mother and once to Sarah Bernhardt, thirty years after Sarah died. Alexandre Dumas wrote it first for Camille, and Sarah Bernhardt, the premiere actress of the Western world, played it over three thousand times.
Annie and Sarah Bernhardt, oddly enough, got to be very close friends, not exactly like a mouse and a lion, though the probability seems the same. How they met is conjectural and unlikely, but it happened. I think they were lesbians and Sarah led, Annie followed, but like most intimacy between dead principals, this one engendered more speculation than consequence and in context doesn’t much matter. Annie was peculiar but in the fold; she had such lovely manners. She wound up in the eye of the storm, unable to alter inertia, simply hospitable as her place and time but no longer fitting in, until she made no difference to the surrounding chaos.
She was born in ’78 in the heart of Charleston with an excellent view of the harbor. Under her two farewells was a small, crumbling note in a childish scrawl addressed to Dear Miss Sarah. It briefly thanked the star for coming to Charleston and being so good.
Yours very truly,
Annie Simmons Gammell.
Beneath that note was a newspaper from 1892 folded back to an ad for Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca, two shows, in Charleston. The rest of the paper covered Ben Tillman’s gubernatorial reelection campaign. He personified the South then, having lost an eye as a boy on the farm, unable to reach a cow’s teats without pressing his face to the bovine hindquarter. Infection set in, requiring surgical removal and rendering a permanent wink: the socket stayed empty, squeezed shut with no patch, so it trickled when he ranted, which was often, either at a coastal blueblood exploiting an inland farmer, or a Negro, any Negro doing anything. Defiant to a fault, he filled a collective need, post-Reconstruction; you voted for Pitchfork Ben Tillman so that defiance could represent you and your hardscrabble life up at the statehouse in Columbia. Some said a veterinarian performed the eye-removal, but like so much liberal quip through history, this too was a whisper in a freshet. Ben Tillman was an original pedagogue.
He became Pitchfork Ben from his campaign promise to go to Washington and fork their guts out. His targets were general, though he once threatened President Grover Cleveland. Nobody seemed to mind. He won a second term as governor in ’92 and three terms as U.S. Senator, where he initiated a rare first for South Carolina legislators on the Senate floor, a fistfight. But it was only the other Senator from South Carolina who caught his Sunday punch, so a second Civil War was avoided. Skirmishes did ensue, however, between the Red Hills and the Lowcountry.
Years later in 1947 the Red Hills produced another governor in the same piss-and-vinegar tradition, Strom Thurmond, who seceded from the Democratic Party in ’48 to run for President as a segregationist on a third party ticket, the Dixiecrats. Strom bellowed, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.” Nor can the written record capture his drawling, slurring repudiation of Harry Truman’s position on civil rights. Strom sounded something like: All a de laows o’ Washntn’n de baynets o’de ahmy cain’t foce de Nigra inna ah homes, ah schooz, ah choiches …
Strom carried South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that year, folks who mostly thought and talked like he did. One more electoral vote from Tennessee gave him a total of thirty-nine, which brought the country to the verge of Dewey Beats Truman but in the end couldn’t tip the scales. Strom shook things up but never threw a punch in the literal sense. He made amends with the Democrats, as politicians do, and became U.S. Senator in ’56, urging defiance against desegregation as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court. He filibustered on the Senate floor for more than twenty-four hours, the longest tirade in Senate history. He broke from the Democrats again in ’64 to help Barry Goldwater become the first candidate for President from the party of Lincoln to carry the Deep South.
Strom Thurmond was U.S. Senator for fifty years by virtue of good manners and the fundamental values of the average grit with a pickup, a few good dogs, two TVs, a washer and a dryer, who begrudged the feds dollar one and didn’t want nobody telling him what to do. And don’t forget the door to Strom’s Senate office—open as a back porch to any man or woman from any part of the state, black or white, because Strom understood the critical need to show that it wasn’t personal, those things he represented. He moved on from racism, his new voice stronger than a bleeding-heart liberal’s that hadn’t budged an inch. In ’77 he enrolled his daughter in an integrated public school and was among the first Southern senators to support black candidates for the federal bench. The daughter was six, born when Strom was seventy-five, so they called him Sperm Thurmond in Charleston, as if a man should outgrow certain needs.
But that was a joke. People like a man who sees the light if that light won’t raise taxes. Strom saw it, proving that his former stance was merely political, for the good of the nation at the time. Oh, the South changed on the racial issue, way too slow to please the NAACP, but then the pace would have been inadequate to them at any rate.
The Democrats took Senator Thurmond back into the fold because of his bedrock constituent base, and then the Republicans welcomed him with open arms, further demonstrating his adaptability, though most political parties would welcome anyone without a rap sheet. Strom was the original Southern Republican, and when he signed off to me: With kindest regards and best wishes, I felt his political skill deftly applied, even as I imagined his nasal rendition.
Strom mended fences between the dirt farmers and the la de dahs, who were us over in Charleston with our worldly airs and so-called culture looking down our noses for decades, when everyone knew we were too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash. I heard him criticized for failure to initiate anything. But you see an original fire-breather put his child in an integrated school and then endorse a few black judge nominations with
nobody’s pond showing a ripple, and I’ll show you some initiative. Strom Thurmond single-handedly took the red hot baton handed down several generations from Pitchfork Ben Tillman and stuck it right in the pond, where it sizzled a bit and then cooled off. Since most events of consequence rise to the surface sooner or later, we came to learn what else Strom stuck where for a little sizzle, but given the nature of things we weren’t surprised. Strom Thurmond was not a man to pass up sexual opportunity, and so another daughter came to be. The end. Maybe way back then we’d have spurned such a distinguished patron sending his nappy-headed yard child to college, but by the time that news bubbled up, we were all more intimate as well with the hard fact of life: it’s full of changes for some of us, and we best not stare impolitely lest we be gawked right back at.
Sarah Bernhardt’s arrival was second section, entertainment. A reporter rode the train all the way to Conway for no good reason other than the ride back to Charleston with the great actress. He revolutionized journalism in South Carolina, where many reporters to this day ride trains in search of exclusives, or “scoops” as they’re still called here. Miss Bernhardt wore a silk robe in Nile green, flowered in Parisian Gray, with a feather boa around her neck. With her nose pressed to the window through the hungry outback of Charleston she said, “Voila, Negre!” Her insight was keen; more blacks than whites lived in South Carolina then, underscoring our difficulty. The black problem was one more unavoidable niggle of our charmed life, like death and taxes. Sarah’s first reply to young Annie Gammell was torn in half with the bottom half gone. It greeted:
Mon Petit Choue, (my little cabbage)
I am promising teach you Français …
That was all that remained. The rejoinder was prompt:
Merci, Madame, Ça me Plaisait bien,
and so on, down through the pile. They corresponded two years, until Annie left Charleston at fourteen for Miss Peck’s School in Philadelphia. Sarah sent her a train ticket from Philadelphia to Washington that year, ’94, where they finally met. A sweet exchange preceded their first rendezvous, in which Annie expressed anxiety over her appearance; she’d been “out” socially so little in Charleston, and social intercourse wasn’t allowed at Miss Peck’s. She looked so plain, she said. And Miss Peck hinted at canceling the trip in spite of its fabulous opportunity, or maybe because of it. Such were the times, in which a young woman of uncommon spirit was thought best constrained. I found no evidence of Annie’s social debut and wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t come out. Just as Lucille LePrince was non-viable in the matrimonial field, because her family’s considerable wealth could not override her physical shortfall and neurosis, so too did Annie seem bound for the singular with her disjunctive outlook and matching curiosity. She was past thirty when she married Waites, damn near over the hill then, though now it seems the age of just warming things up. At any rate, she wasn’t rebellious; she simply didn’t conform. Of Miss Peck, she wrote:
She has grave reservations. Very grave. She commonly says grave. Very grave. She worries I’ll change. I would think that would Please her.
Sarah responded:
Non, non, non, non, non! You must change nothing, glamour, it is like the snowftake falling on you, it melts. But spirit, it is a diamond that will last forever. You are my little Miss Peck
I think no one loved Annie Gammell like Sarah Bernhardt did, and it began long before they met. Next came a tattered greeting signed by all the girls and Miss Peck, wishing the World Famous Sarah Bernhardt the best of luck in breaking her legs. Playbills from Magda and La Princesse Lointaine lie crumpled randomly through the bundle.
They wrote over the next ten years and planned to meet again in ’04. Sarah sent another ticket that remains uncancelled. They were to meet in New York, but Sarah contracted influenza; the tour was cancelled, and she went home to Paris. Annie made overtures of coming to nurse her but was forbidden.
Two years later another ticket came. Annie wrote that she was a woman now and could pay her own way. Sarah responded with her longest letter in the collection; her heart would break if Annie were ever else than her petite choue. So take the ticket, because she, Sarah, was wealthy, not in money; she had so little on hand she didn’t know what to do, but she would make much more, as you will see. She and money were occasional lovers who kept the passion fresh, because money is cavalier, but an actress who is wise with money will be blind to the truth between her lines. She was wealthy but would have no money when her time came, because she wanted none. So come, help me live.
Money? Money is nothing.
Ça ne fait rien!
So Annie accepted the ticket, and they met again in New York. Annie wrote home that Sarah proved her point by pulling a hundred dollar bill from her bosom and burning it. Annie cried; Sarah laughed. Voila! It was stage money.
Sarah told me that an actress who is foolish with money will starve to death. I don’t know what to make of her, honestly.
They dined on canapés et Champagne. Sarah paid in hundreds and told the maitre d’ not to worry; all the world is a stage. Had he not heard? He had not, so Sarah sat him down and introduced herself to the little (but high) café as Marguerite Gauthier, the lead in Camille. The maitre d’ was delighted, the patrons cheered, Sarah died:
I am dying … It is a sad life I am leaving …
On a champagne label’s crumbling arabesque, Annie wrote:
Dear, dear. How shall I ever be normal again?
Sarah played New York for a week with Annie as valet and companion. Angelo, Esther and Pelleas Mellisande were played again in Philadelphia, across Pennsylvania and into Ohio. The last letter of the trip was gone except for the bottom half of a single page. Annie complained of reporters ruining everything. Sarah said she loved them and cured them of being boring by releasing her pet ocelot, Etienne. Near the end of the tour, Sarah bought a poodle pup named Genevieve that she gave to Annie.
Annie reported the next few years on life in Charleston from her house on Meeting Street. She spent time with Genevieve and described the dog’s moods, as people alone with pets will do.
Genevieve had her muzzle trimmed and looks so pretty when she blushes.
The poor girl was in need. The dog too; it whined on hot nights, so Annie read to her, Henry James. Annie turned thirty in 1908, when her letters first reflected insight to Charleston Society. She took to the little world bounded by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, those letters revealing her emergent humor, warmth and tolerance. Never priggish or stuffy, she remained unimposing, friendly, well matched and revered. Still a recluse with sparse and polite social contact, she learned etiquette as a way of life, as our substitute for all else. Passion, whether unguided, misguided or absent, was compensated by cordiality, in service to our small-town need. Worldly was as worldly did, and frankly, we didn’t travel much, on the whole.
I remember Annie’s classic features and flawless skin, a woman who lived with a dog and books till she pulled her head from her burrow and stepped into our sidewalk society. She wrote of self-awareness, conscious of her family’s image as peculiar. Stephen Crane might have written a different tale from the Battery, The Peculiar Badge of Courage. Oh, we love our oddballs, maybe in compensation for dispassion. Annie compared our society to a self-tending abattoir, gossiping itself into sausage. She described Miss Edmunds as
Queen of the meat grinders,
recalling the day Miss Edmunds visited Annie’s mother to say:
The Gammells are different, my dear, because you were a Simmons and not a Simons, don’t you know. It’s common understanding that a Simons is somebody, and a Simmons ain’t. She said we had no genealogy at the Library Society, nor at the Genealogical Society under the “proper” spelling. She’d looked us up and dropped by to make sure we knew who we were, or I should say, who we weren’t. You’d think no genealogy was pert near no lineage, but then we wouldn’t exist, which we obviously do, because we think some of us.
Trouble was, Miss Edmunds only presumed the
nee Simmons, deduced from Annie’s middle name, Simmons, which must be the mother’s maiden name. Musn’t it?
Of course Mother said, ‘Now aren’t you sweet to pay us a visit when you have so much to do. But I’m not a Simmons. I’m an Ancrum. One m. Mother’s father’s mother was an Ancrum, too. We have but one Simmons in the entire family, and that’s Annie’s middle name. I feel terrible, giving in to a lark and misleading you like that. Isn’t it lovely, though? I felt it would keep the common touch. Look us up again, Dear. Ancrum.’
Miss Edmunds was mortified She said, “Oh!” and was on her way, though we invited her to stay and visit a white.
Annie told this story in hindsight as backdrop to a development some years after Miss Edmunds nosy house call. The development was a new friendship—with Miss Edmunds. They became close, two single women with days to fill. Miss Edmunds was old and withered, still sorting the affairs of others. They passed on the street. Miss Edmunds said hello. Annie was curt, replying that she was living with Genevieve Bernhardt, first generation landed, Paris extraction, possibly Huguenot.
Genevieve scurried about tike a little mouse.
Or a rat. Those yappers outlive you, you give them a chance. They watched the dog find the right spot to relieve itself. Then
all of a sudden, I thought something was about.
Miss Edmunds touched my arm and smiled.
Annie took it for instability, but Miss Edmunds said,
‘It’s time for tea! Won’t you?’
It was quite unexpected.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 10